By continually eroding the skills of pilots, which is exactly what this is an example of, the authorities are reducing pilots available capacity to cope with emergencies and unusual situations. By creating the situation where pilots believe it requires special abilities to land by looking at the runway, the wind, the close in terrain etc, you make it impossible for pilots to have the skill set to cope when things go wrong. The Gimli glider becomes a crash, U.S.1549 crashes short of Teterborough, Speedbird 038 piles into the bypass close to Heathrow. The reason so many pilots struggle to hand fly now is because they aren't allowed to. I'm lucky, I use the autopilot when I want, I choose whether I fancy a visual, I use any mode I feel like to climb or descend, nobody bitches at me if I hand fly an ILS (which I regularly do, IMC or VMC because I like it) and as a result I know I have a decent toolkit should things go wrong.
Make no mistake, the bull**** going on in our industry directly caused asiana airlines 214. It, and other incidents like it, need to be attributed directly to the rules and regulations put in place by authorities and airlines. The improved reliability of the machinery we operate is what is mainly responsible for generally improving safety in aviation, not the application of more and more restrictive operating practices.
Good luck down there with your blinkered regulators. Must be tough to fly an approach at all when you're upside down to start with..
Out
Last edited by GlenQuagmire; 29th Jun 2015 at 06:56.
Reason: bloody iPad fiddling with my spelling