PPRuNe Forums - View Single Post - Flight International "Pilots must go back to basics>"
Old 25th Apr 2014, 10:10
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roulishollandais
 
Join Date: Jun 2011
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A.N.C. & MECANIC

Return to topics.

Let us compare that SOP's context :
"Aviate-Navigate-Communicate"
to the old cockpit work repartition in four tasks ( I write it in French, as I learned it) :
"Pilotage, Navigation, Communication, Mecanique".

The latter disapeired with the flight engineer in the airliners' cockpit.
Pilot Unions were unable to explain during the 80's why a new threat came in the cockpit.

That threat was not "electric" or electronic but "mecanic", but that happened totaly only with FBW, when systems were supposed to replace the flight engineer.

PIO (Pilot Induced Oscillation) are showing us how the mecanic function may be connected to piloting.
The April 2014, 1500 pages, USAF investigation report, after the KC-135 crash in Kyrgyz Republic (May 3. 2013) emphasises how the Duch Roll - the lowest level PIO- induced by pilots, autopilot, SOPs and training, destroyed the plane.

Modern black boxes let us show all the significative parameters of that KC-135 Dutch Roll as it could never be done earlier, and USAF did a large study showing how the pilots signed their death, after everybody forgot the "Mecanique" Crew function in the cockpit, during the flight.

FBW, systems, let us forget that the fourth term : "Mecanique", belongs to human cockpit BASICS, knowing if limits of flight domain are respected, if phase planes don't show instability, and avoiding to put the aircraft in a wrong state, and correct it when it is still possible.

With algorithms hiden to pilots for supposed commercial reason, FBW expedites the possible beginning unstability of the flight.
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