Originally Posted by
Capn Bloggs
Written, of course, by the greatest advocate of automation because humans are not good enough
Have you asked yourself why I have this opinion though?
I went to an airline from a military and corporate background. What I found there concerns me greatly.
From the quotes during training "this is good as you are ever going to be at handling the aircraft" that I laughed off at the time, but realised was true, to the "minimum standards are acceptable" attitude during 6monthly sims.
I flew in the sim with captains whose patter was awesome, great CRM etc etc, but who simply did not have the handling skills or capacity to fly the aircraft effectively once the toys were broken.
I have no idea how they could continue to operate on the line knowing that an autopilot failure could doom them unless the FO was competent.
I simmed with one who quite simply could not fly a raw data ILS to minimums in bad weather. 3 attempts. He still had autothrust.
I simmed with another who in 5 attempts could not keep it on the runway at vmcg with an engine fail.
These were good guys. The airline had the freedom to pick from the best, yet flying in reliable aircraft which require no skill to operate in day to day usage killed their skill to a level which in my opinion was inadequate to deal with a serious malfunction.
I did not fancy that degradation or skills so I left.
It is worth noting, that the pilots who joined from "crappy" airlines that flew into dodgy little airfields on non precision approaches all the time had far superior skills when they joined our airline, and when jumpseating on one of the old mandraulic fleets my airline had, it was easy to see that their basic skills were still good also.
I now fly a crappy bucket that no decent State would ever allow in their airspace. Raw data manual thrust no flight director every day and my skills are back to a level I am happy with. Ironically, I am paid far more than I was at a legacy airline because there are not many around who can do what used to be called "being a pilot" anymore.
I don't delude myself that I am safer than I was in my Airbus.
Modern airliners are incredibly safe, but that is despite the pilot, rather than because of the pilot. It's the fact that the engineering is so brilliant that piloting is so rarely needed.
At least I know I will never be surprised by the loss of systems that I don't use. I am currently always operating at the lowest level of automation.
I love it!
I think aviation is currently in the difficult final stage where the man machine interface is getting the worst aspects of both.
Humans are monitoring, which is something we are awful at.
Machines are doing all the practise, which is something they don't ever need.