Originally Posted by
Check Airman
A previous poster mentioned that BA doesn't allow the AT to be disconnected. Can anyone confirm that?
The AAIB report into the 320 that lost its cowls made clear that this was fleet policy. Neither pilot had flown manual thrust outside the sim for several years.
I understand from conversations that the FBW Boeing types have the same policy but the 747/767 do not.
I joined a loco with around 300h. Manual flight raw data was encouraged during line training (all landings were done without FDs until proficient) and it my first permanent base in Italy. Several crusty old captains took time to invest in keen FOs and teach them to explore the envelope, meet the performance assumptions on every landing and so on.
I then moved to a large UK base, where a lot of line training takes place, and the line captains were less keen on manual flight, and were in general too fed up with constantly flying with 500h FOs to invest in mentoring as much. However, raw data flying was still available with the right captain. The command course also includes a lot of raw data manual flight to increase the capacity of the candidates.
The airline in general however discourages manual flight on the line, and has forbidden switching off FDs except where required by normal procedures. The good old boys talk about the days before OFDM where on ferry flights they would practice V1 cuts in the aircraft by one pilot closing a thrust lever after V1, conduct quiet approaches, tight visual approaches &c &c
"Visuals" are flown in LNAV/VNAV following the magenta line to a minimum of a 4 mile final and nothing disconnected until established on path on final.