Originally Posted by
alf5071h
Tourist, your earlier view appears to be based on a narrow range of experiences – observations, and the gross assumption that the reduced skill is due to automation.
Well, that is all I have, to be fair, and that is what normal opinions are based upon.
I would disagree that it is a gross assumption. More a strong correlation with a limited data set.
I admire your ambition in attempting to portray my suggestion that lack of practice will impact flying skills as somehow contentious and unscientific.
Automation reduces practise in manual flying.
This is an uncontested fact as far as I'm aware. It is, after all, the whole point.
Reduced practise reduces skill levels in all areas of human activity.
This is also an uncontested fact.
Thus, automation reduces skill levels.
Please point out the logical fallacy in any of that.
Originally Posted by
alf5071h
The retention of high skill level requires practice, but even without practice not all skills will be lost (e.g. riding a bike).
Agreed, not the entire skill will be lost, however vestigial skills are demonstrably insufficient as demonstrated by many recent accidents and now accepted by Boeing, Airbus and various regulatory authorities.
A vague remembering of how to hand fly your aircraft is not enough when you need it. Remember that generally the loss of automation tends to be associated with other non-normal events requiring a large part of the capacity of the pilot.
Originally Posted by
alf5071h
The vast majority of pilots, including those you observed appear to have sufficient skills to fly safely – undertake the tasks expected in operational situations.
This is the problem.
Due to the amazing engineering standards of today, and the rarity of actually having to do something, people have started to believe that what we do whilst waiting for an emergency is "being a pilot"
It is not.
When everything is working properly, even the people on this forum who believe that we need humans on board would admit that the aircraft can do it itself. They contend that humans are better at dealing with problems than computers, and they may be right at the moment.
If you are arguing that the majority of pilots are adequate to "undertake the tasks expected in an operational environment", all you are saying is that they are good enough to do an entirely unnecessary job. When it is all going well, nobody needs them!
When it isn't, many are inadequate.
Originally Posted by
alf5071h
It would be better to consider why those few pilots flew as they did. Perhaps the problem is not with what you observed, but the process of training; why didn’t the trainer/checker intervene, what did the operator know, the interpretation of regulations, what was the organisation’s attitude, and did the regulator have oversight of this. None of which involves automation or dependency.
Whilst there is always the possibility that they deliberately failed to achieve a suitable standard for fun, I'm going to go ahead and make another assumption that they flew as they did because they were unable to do any better at the time. The trainer did intervene, and made them retry repeatedly and get me to re-demo repeatedly.
Regulations and operator attitude are further down the line and another question, but don't affect the actual inability of pilots to fly.
Originally Posted by
alf5071h
It might be better to teach pilots how to identify and avoid those situations requiring flight with ‘a limited panel raw data non precision approach in a limiting crosswind when the toys fail’ than expect them to retain a rarely used skill.
Umm, ok.
You never know when the toys are going to fail. That is kind of he point, thus the only way to achieve this would be to never fly non precision approaches in limiting crosswinds.
If you are suggesting that pilots should just say no, then good luck with that.
Originally Posted by
alf5071h
Thus the safety task is to review our expectations of pilots in today’s operations and not in those which we remember.
Everything about this statement horrifies me.
Not only is it turgid management speak, but are you saying that we should manage our expectations rather than attempt to improve events?!?
Or are you coming to the same conclusion as me that we cannot expect pilots to do any better so remove them.........