The safety-fication of everything, even better - referenced in the OOS-HEV article. Could not agree more. These days, one cannot move either physically on our roads or socially where landminds which will give "offence" are everywhere, without running into a set of physical or social barriers accompanied by a real or imaginary person with a hat, whistle, safety-vest, clipboard and, above all,
authority. O, deliver us...
Re,
… and what range of skills is required to ‘avoid’ vs skills to ‘recover’, and to avoid or recover from what?
There seems to be greater opportunity for improving safety by reconsidering the role of the human, not as an item to be controlled (a hazard to be improved by training), but as a resource to be used before the event, not after when the skills demands are greater.
It’s better to stay within a relatively well defined operating area than attempt to train for a much wider range of scenarios outside of the norm, often unknown or predictable.
Thus which skills are required to keep within the normal envelope?
Allow me to start with the assumption,
If one can do the basics...ie., fly the airplane and keep it in or return it to, stable flight while navigating (meaning keeping it out of hazards, not doing airways work!), then one has sufficient skills under high demand to handle "events".
The example here is that of the thirty-one other crews who flew their A330 during a UAS event. I think that would as good a "metric" as any for such events.
In this, it is clear that I believe basic flying skills as described above may no longer be something that can be taken for granted.
I accept that the examples when handling skills are required are few these days. I accept that transports these days require systems-management skills and do not require manual skills,
until they do.
On the rare occasions when such capability is required I think the data supports the view that there is a high degree of correlation between the capacity to fly an airplane and the successful resolution of abnormalities or emergencies.
Aside from their relationship to cognitive clarities and the practice of "muscle memory", (I play piano and it works as well there), the reason I chose to focus on manual handling skills in the original post is because such exercises are "tells" in terms of cognitive capacity and the capacity of "autonomic" learning, (muscle memory, as in playing the piano, etc.) I am not trained as a pyschologist, but I know from experience that when flying an aircraft is "in the muscles", the mind has less to distract it, so to speak.
You likely know this but in the spirit of "the exchange" I would like to establish these notions.
It's a way of saying that "average skills" are what aeronautical engineers and all members of the engineering/design team know they must design towards. The machine and/or system must be useable by those of average ability and capacity, "average" being defined as someone who has been trained to competency as measured by examination and as assumed by some level of experience with the machine/system in question, or who would be recognized by another pilot with experience, as "competent", (Johnston's Substitution Test - the notion applied here to "normal flying skills). The "tells" emerge as signs of competency levels, (clearly, some judgement of the presence of "competency" is involved as one cannot always measure experimentally in controlled circumstances).
Approached this way, I wonder if the notions being expressed as OOS-HEV become sidebars?...(that is not my intent, - I haven't thought it over enough yet! - I'm just positing that while legitimate, the relevance of OOS-HEV in the context of LOC accidents may not be high in the determination of needs, and I do take seriously your comments regarding hindsight & learning).
I would say at a minimum, that if one can handle aircraft with a high level of intuitiveness borne of thorough training, practise, reasonable exposure, (experience, in other words), in short...one can "fly", then one already has sufficient skill to handle all except perhaps rare, extreme encounters.
To make the connection between this response and the original long-ish post regarding 45-deg bank turns and "lazy eights" then - having some experience with these - I considered that one way to measure such skill in a pilot candidate (in initial or recurrent training/checking), was to do these exercises first to see if further training/practise was needed, and as a way of practising one's craft, which, first, is to fly the airplane.