FDMII; references,
automation,
SMS,
SOPs,
As much as we should support the use of excellent references in aviation, the practicality of modern operations (life the universe, and everything), is that they are unlikely to be read; or SMS application after risk assessment, or ill-conceived SOPs applied correctly, – horses to water etc.
We have to accept that ‘aviation’ has changed; it has evolved and continues to evolve as influenced by society and the operational environment, which includes the availability (need) and use of automation.
We require automation, mainly to take over tedious manual tasks, routine calculations, or for high accuracy path following, but that should not mean that we depend on automation for all the process of flying, particularly thinking. The latter requires that we must pay greater attention to the overall flight regime, management of the flight, management of the aircraft and of automation, management of ourselves.
Thus the safety issue is not that pilots are weak (manual flight), but that we are poor managers in modern day situations including the rarer and particularly surprising situations.
Most pilot training is sufficient for the overwhelming majority of operations; we are a safe industry, pilots can takeoff, land, – fly in the every day situations as required, in which they have been trained for. However, human performance will suffer in those rare unforeseen situations which we only identify with hindsight; if we could see these with foresight then we might be able to train for them.
In a similar manner the qualities of airmanship have changed, the drive for knowledge and expertise, the need to practice both the skills of flight and of managing – the aircraft and our thoughts; these have been reduced by society’s norms. We are no longer the people who we think we were.
Opposed to considering more of the ‘old way’ of flight training we should first consider what has changed, and why; then we might better understand the problems of modern operation (and there are many of them), and thus consider improvements.
Modern aviation is intractable; we are not able to fully understand the working of our aircraft, nor the operational situations; thus start with the problem of how we might manage these with less than a complete understanding.