Originally Posted by
glendalegoon
BASIC AIRMANSHIP can and should be practiced on every flight and every simulator session.
IF you can't "CLICK" off the autopilot and fly the takeoff, climbout and trim for cruise (autopilot if a long flight in cruise is ok, but click it off once in awhile and see if you can hand fly at altitude)and then click off the autopilot and hand fly the descent , approach, landing and rollout, then IT IS YOUR OWN FAULT.
AND if your company says you can't turn the autopilot OFF, then speak up and demand more proficiency training.
Gliders may offer something, but it is probably because I can't think of one that has an autopilot.
Bubbers is right, we always did a dead stick landing in the sim, maybe from different KEY positions and we did them way before sully splashed
I have nothing against crews getting hands on manual flying and 'glider' flying training. But that is to miss the point of this incident and the AMS 737 incident. In both cases the crew
thought that the automatics were looking after the speed
so did not bother to maintain scan of the speed.
The FAA and Boeing response is to add yet another alert that speed is low but there right in the middle of the panel is an ASI showing that which the crew do not bother to monitor. When a human is in cognitive overload the first sense to be switched out is hearing, then vision tunnels onto what is deemed to be most important (it is called 'cognitive tunneling') and once in that state only haptic input (touch) has any effect - hence stick shakers.
But the
real problem is failing to scan the instruments leading to lack of situational awareness. So perhaps sim runs ought not to drop you into 'dead stick' - more slowly decrease a value during a difficult approach to see when it is picked up, or even freeze and the instruments blank out and the instructor asks 'what was your speed? What was the altitude? what was the descent rate? etc. Simple checks that you were actually understanding what these values were rather than glancing and not taking in what the instruments were indicating.