Originally Posted by
Fareastdriver
If a captain, not a co-pilot, cannot fly an AP out trip offshore without the passengers noticing, then he shouldn't be a captain. When I first flew for Mr Bristow we were paid to fly the aircraft, not the autopilot. Should the single channel AP go u/s that was tough, you went without it.
HC, you bleat on about how much safer the North Sea is since everybody is slavishly pushing buttons instead of flying it. Can you back that up with all the accidents in the North Sea that would have been avoided if a Flight Management System had been in operation instead.?
Did you live in a paper bag in the middle of the road too?
Anyway, it depends on the type. The S61 is quite docile AP out, the EC225 at 150kts much less so. Why would it be a prerequisite to be able to fly AP out without the passengers noticing when you have a quadruplexed AP with triplexed sensors and duplexed actuators? Whereas if you fly a single channel AP aircraft powered by coal it is obviously reasonable to expect you to be pretty good at flying AP out. And the handling traits of the aircraft may well also match the level of AP redundancy to some extent.
Regarding you second point, obviously the ETAP springs to mind but most of the N Sea accidents occurred before advanced automation existed. I suspect if the Cormorant Alpha aircraft had been a 225 using the automation as we now do, that wouldn't have happened but it is pretty pointless trying to relate accidents from yesteryears technology and SOPs, to modern ones. The Sumburgh L2 accident wouldn't have happened in a 225. So yes I believe that, just as in fixed wing, modern highly automated aircraft are much safer. Mostly because the weakest link is often the pilot. It's just the old and bold tend to block out human failings (that being a human failing of course!). But of course that said, competence in the use of that automation is just as important as the importance of being able to fly a trip AP out used to be when you were a lad sometime in the middle of last century.