Hi Meikleour,
Thank you for the kind words about my past activities - it seems likely that we are acquainted, so just for my own information can I ask you to identify yourself to me - by PM will be fine.
You raise the point of my own experience which is OK by me, and yes, the vast bulk of my line operating experience has been with PMA as the approach SOP - plus some visual circling etc of course. So probably about 8000+ total, of which 5000 are LHS. You are correctly just pointing out that I don't have much experience of traditional SOP operations, but what I think you are implying is that this must reduce the validity of any arguments I make in favour of MA as having safety benefits over traditional. Apologies if no such implication intended, but of course it would also apply to any counter-arguments from those with only conventional experience.
Can I just make one thing clear - I do not see these arguments as being like politics, where proponents of one party want to achieve dominance over another to achieve some benefit for themselves and those they represent. My concern is simply that ordinary line pilots today are still being held individually responsible for the tragic outcome of events which could easily have been avoided if they had been given better procedural "tools" to do their job. The only benefit for me personally now is I want to minimise my risk as a passenger!
As far as relevant experience in "limits" transitions is concerned, I was lucky in that my experience includes not only those in normal line operations, and routine line pilot training exercises, but also being a subject pilot in simulator and some flight trials at for example BLEU Bedford, NASA AMES, the FAA test centre at Oklahoma City, the Dutch NLR facility, and with HUDS in France and with Flight Dynamics at Boeing.
Such trials were mostly aimed at finding out what a human pilot can reliably actually achieve, and especially what visual cues are necessary to make the decision actually needed at DH. Of necessity such trials were "single pilot" approach and landing (or go-around) transitions, just as in "conventional" ops, and often included deliberate offsets to see if the pilot actually could detect them, which would not be usual I think for normal pilot training.
The basic point that comes out of all the research is that even if the aircraft is in the right place at DH - on G/S and on centreline - it is extremely hard to detect vertical path errors in limited visibility. 200ft DH and 200ft cloud-base - no problem. 200ft DH and 550M RVR you just cannot see enough, as illustrated above.
I agree with you that most ops which are IMC to minima today are planned to be done using the autopilot, which usually reduces the PF workload and increases approach accuracy significantly. Unfortunately, that hasn't stopped them being a problem. Of the accidents in the study, 67% started out using the autopilot for the approach. In the Turkish Kathmandu accident it appears that both pilots were head-up as the autopilot took them through DH, accurately on the RNAV path but going to the wrong point on the ground, with nothing visible outside. My analysis of this is at
2015 A333 landed off runway Kathmandu Nepal | PicMA .
Steve