Originally Posted by
Tipsy Barossa
Bubbers is just stating the bloody obvious minus the self aggrandizing anecdotes at Toncontin! Sure had they remember to fly blah blah blah...but they didn't because they were fools or fooled into thinking the automation will take care of the shop. With newer generations of planes and manufacturers taking the road to greater autoomation, new pilots have to cope with automation traps because their SOPs predicated full use of automation.
We will never be going to have new generation of planes behaving like the DC3sc, F-27s or B747 classics that we enjoyed years ago. Present airline SOPs, airport architecture and system, ATC, TRACON, PRNAV, arrivals and departures are full of automatics with their inherent concomitant traps. If pilots are not made aware of such traps and only taught to click off everything automatic, we will only have a short term solution. Fine by me as a pilot, but what about future progress.
I don't want to be an old fart reliving and regurgitating my glory days telling everyone to use quill pens and parchment everytime the wireless keyboard runs out of battery ( of course some are not battery powered ). Sigh...........
One correction here - traps is not plural - it is singular.
And I think that this is what Bubbers was trying to say. The single trap is - believing that total trust can be placed in automation, leading the pilot to ignore what the aircraft is doing.
Automation should only be trusted as much as the PNF trusts the PF - PNF should continually monitor the safety fundamentals.
This may upset those who believe that automation is to be fully trusted
but that is the trap. If automation could be fully trusted there would be no need to have a flight crew there in the first place.