… ‘zero experience autopilots’.
One view of the problems being discussed is that the level of human experience is decreasing and the opportunities for gaining experience have significantly reduced.
Many accidents suggest ‘zero experience pilots’ in the specific conditions.
More manual flight might aid the physical skills, but without encountering demanding, rare situations, little or no cognitive experience is gained – that which helps understand a situation before acting.
A more beneficial approach to safety might be to consider the precursor situations to ‘those which have never been experienced’, where appropriate awareness and action might avoid the upsets.
Are the recent accidents also an indication that pilots’ experience levels of the precursor situations are also weak?
“What is the pilot reacting to that causes the "pull back" reflex?”
‘It’ would be based on whatever the pilot perceives, which with the experiences from memory, provide an awareness of the situation. Thus the actions would be ‘normal’ for what was perceived – doing what is always done or what is believed to be required in a situation which has never been encountered before
Many people present arguments for changing 'the aircraft', but these are based on probable and inconclusive evidence; the result is a weak argument particularly as it is impossible to determine what the pilots perceived.
The alternative argument – no change – based on what happens in every day operations, might be similarly hampered by not knowing. However, it is strengthened by the overwhelming numerical success of safe operation and some ability to enquire what pilots perceive. This should not be seen as a winning argument – complacency, but an opportunity to consider what is not known in both normal and accident scenarios.
We should not conclude that if every flight ends safely we are safe, but equally we should not label all accidents as being ‘unsafe’ because of … , because we just don’t know.
‘Unsafe’ is our judgement of the outcome; for the accident crews it’s quite possible that they believed what they were doing was ‘safe’, but … we don’t know.
The various arguments are presented on the basis of not knowing which is immensely frustrating both for debaters and audience.