What it should hasten is more sim time for exploring/practising weirdo stuff so we can better cope with a out-of-left-field event such as this.
What I've seen over 35 years causes me some discomfort regarding pilot training & pilot performance. Ian W makes some excellent points commenting on what is becoming an all too common and perhaps unwelcome culture. After Air Taxis, Biz-jets and even crop spraying I found myself in a B732. Very basic nav sets and some very basic destinations. Piloting skills trained & encouraged, strict but reasonably brief SOP's, daily demonstration of those manual skills. VOR nav, DME descent planning and CDA being the norm. SA was always a priority in 4 dimensions.
This culture was carried forward onto EFIS/EICAS a/c. We didn't throw airmanship & piloting skills out of the window, we used the automatics as aids to reduce the workload, improve SA, make our management of the flight more accurate, efficient & safer. In other words the basic skill foundations were maintained & strengthened, not diluted. Management was pilot orientated, but also with attention to a budget. The new kit, all the bells & whistles were fun to use. We already had the basic piloting foundation, we were now taught about the automatics in depth and how to use them as a tool. The philosophy was NOT to transfer command to them, but use them to make our life easier. The pilot was still the boss.
I then moved on to young growing airlines who had entry pilots direct onto EFIS/EICAS a/c. The TR course was very much automatics orientated. Fortunately, the destinations were very varied from full blown auto land to cloud-break NDB's. Thus manual flying was encouraged and developed on the line. IMHO there was still too much magenta line following, both lateral & vertical. The monitoring of profile & SA was not good enough; it had not been stressed nor taught, but at least the guys could manoeuvre the a/c manually when the tarmac was in sight.
I then moved on to airlines that had also transferred from basic technology to new bells and whistles at the same time as rapid expansion. During the TR course 90% of attention was automatics, rigid SOP's profiles. They were taught only one way to do anything; rather than learn what the systems were capable of, i.e. in depth knowledge. They had no idea what options there were; there was only one way to do it. Thus if the world threw a googly at you you had an armoury of knowledge to choose the correct weapon to win the battle. Added to that, manual flying was not encouraged. Thus the basic piloting foundation we had, before learning the new technology, is missing. You don't fly a Boeing like a Cessna. On a normal day the SOP worked fine, you could be in your comfort zone; but the pax expect us to have a broad comfort zone, not a narrow one. They expect us to be able to bat away googlies. So did the old pilot orientated FLT OPs management. It seems nowadays, as Ian W surmises, there is an attitude that things will not go so wrong and thus the depth of skill & knowledge & training does not need to be so comprehensive.
That is a very dangerous slippery slope, especially as the command upgrade, and cadet entry, threshold has been lowered so much. IMHO there house is built on sand. The basic foundations are not a strong and durable as they used to be, and should be. A strong stormy day stresses those foundations close to their limits.
I was always astonished at some F/O's reaction to a new scenario. Occasionally there was not a rigid SOP, just a 'normal way of doing it'. Circumstances changed and I might utilise a technique from the FCTM. It worked fine, of course; or it was just good old basic piloting. The F/O would comment afterwards, "are we allowed to do that?" They saw the good common sense, understood the following explanation and wondered why they felt it was not allowed. They were so used to being told every minutiae and thus didn't recognise when some liberal thinking was necessary & possible.
Earlier in this ever circular discussion that has been aired for years on Prune, someone made a very valid point.
"The autopilot is not there to control the a/c because you can't. The automatics are there as a tool & aid, not to be in command."
Last edited by RAT 5; 21st Aug 2017 at 13:56.