The lure of automation
I am a VFR pilot, with lots of long expired IFR flying skills - it's been about 30 years since I flew hard IFR, but back then I did quite a bit, and all by hand. In those days, it was ADF, and ILS. DME was a luxury, and LORAN and GPS had yet to come. None of the planes I flew had RNav, so I never got to know that. I'm happy being a good, current VFR pilot, with a resource of skills for poor conditions, but the desire to avoid them.
Automation, even in GA aircraft seems like a nice warm blanket of security of capability and situational awareness - and in some cases a trap! The magenta line is not always the best route!
Lat month, I was flying the ultimately well equipped C 182, with full Garmin glass cockpit. The owner and I were flying south through Finland, in VFR conditions which were not great. I had elected left seat for that flight, knowing that in more poor conditions, I wanted everything going for me. We knew we would encounter low weather, but it was uncertain if it would be before our intended destination, so we set out, with an alternate along the way, just in case.
The weather went down to the low limits of VFR just short of our destination - Olou. No problem, I would back track to Kemi, my alternate. But Kemi just closed. Olou accepted my request for special VFR, so I continued on to Olou. With all this glass cockpit at my disposal, how could it not go well?
Most of the Garmin was still set to the factory settings, as we're still "getting used to it", and customizing to our needs. Placing a magenta line from my present position to Olou was not a problem. Flying that line would not be a problem. But flying it at 700 feet made me nervous. I could climb, but that would violate the spirit of special VFR, and really amount to continued VFR into IFR conditions. I'm too old for that silliness...
What I could not figure our how to do was to reset the Garmin to have the magenta line extend out the runway centerline so I could intercept it over the Baltic Sea, where I knew I was safe at 700 feet. So, I reverted to what I knew from instinct, the localizer on NavCom 2. I was much more certain that there would not be windmills on the extended centerline of the runway. The Magenta line became not much more that a distraction, as I established on the localizer, when waited to intercept the glideslope from below. Once on the localizer, I did reset the GPS, but by then, it was nothing more than situational awareness.
So far, all that glass cockpit, situational awareness had not provided meaningful obstacle awareness, and I could not understand why. Once I was within five miles of the airport, and I zoomed in, it did - windmills on both sides of me! I happily saw the runway lights two miles back, at about 500 feet, so no problem, and could have easily flown a lower approach than that if needed. The next morning, I took off the reciprocal, and was quite aware of many windmills on either side of the approach path. They did not reach to my 700 feet of the previous evening, but I sure was happy I had not ducked down to see where I was going!
After some menu searching while right seat, I found that the factory setting to of the GPS did not provide obstacle display if the zoom was more than 5 miles. I reset that to 50 miles, and a whole vista of hazards presented itself!
I learned to ignore the automation when things get tense, revert to the simple things which you know. It's a sad commentary that the aircraft possessed immense capability, and I could not use it, but trying to learn it in the difficult conditions would be even more dangerous!
This aircraft, though highly automated, is probably still a "basic" plane, compared to the automation found in other aircraft. But the theme is the same, there comes a point where all that automation can change from being an asset to a lure and hazard - you must maintain the basic skills to safely fly without it, and then the additional skill to prevent that automation luring you farther than your basic skills can handle.
I learned needle, ball and airspeed, with a map, and looking at the ground. Everything since then has been new learning for me, but the old skills reside in my instinct. I worry for newer pilots, learning in an environment, where there is so much more technology, but seemingly little more training time allocated to training that on top of the basic skills. Are both sets of skills being mastered during training? 'Cause they're not the same skills!