Preventing the loss of pure flying skills in jet transport aircraft.
During an informal discussion in the simulator crew room the subject arose on how to regain lost pure flying skills caused by years of automation dependency. Clearly, such are everyday ATC restrictions and company mandated procedures, it is a lost cause during line flying where full use of all automatics is invariably enforced and any transgressions quickly picked up by the QAR and the pilot carpeted and risks losing his job.
That leaves only the simulator. Again, time and costs limits its use for other than regulatory requirements unless the operator takes the enlightened view that there is a cost benefit to scheduling regular pure flying practice because there is a flight safety spin-off in the long run.
But what pure flying sequences give most handling benefits is open to individual opinion. Recently this contributor received a private request from a current airline pilot to hire a company jet transport simulator at own expense for an hour of personal handling practice in the hope of increasing his own self confidence in his ability to hand fly in IMC without having to fall back on the automatics.
Despite considerable experience on jet transports he was quietly concerned that he had lost the skill and ability to seamlessly switch from full automatic flying to basic pure flying skills should it be needed quickly.
Talking to other pilots over the years, this loss of confidence in one's own ability to get out of trouble by switching back to flying without flight directors and auto-throttles, is a lot more common than people might think. This often stems from initial simulator type rating training on todays jets where automatics are introduced from the first session and no time allotted to get the feel of flying the aircraft.
Horses for courses, but in another era the first thing we did before simulators were the go, was lots of circuits and touch and go landings. There were so many things to think about during circuits. Fast scanning of instruments, awareness of the runway environment in terms of circuit width, speed and altitude control, flap and gear selections and judgement of base and final inside the circuit area.
It could be argued that touch and go landings are unnecessary as they never happen in real life. That misses the whole point of the manoeuvre as a training aid. One FCTM states the primary objective of touch and go landings is approach and landing practice. It is not intended for landing roll and takeoff procedure training.
The object of circuit training in the simulator is to increase pilot skill and therefore his confidence in handling his aircraft in a quickly changing environment (the circuit). Half-an hour of circuits in the simulator has worked wonders for many pilots that I have seen.
Perhaps Pprune readers would like to chance their arm and add to the list of pure flying sequences that, given the opportunity, they would like to practice in order to be at one with their aircraft rather than being at one with the automatic pilot?