Pilot handling skills under threat, says Airbus

[PEI_3721]

Microburst, et al, my interpretation would not exclude the cognitive / physical skills loop, but in preference considers the wider spread of cognitive skills used in ‘flying’.
I am intrigued by the degradation of physical skills vs the loss of cognitive skills; e.g. you don’t loose the physical skill of flying – you know ‘automatically’ how to use the stick and rudder, but perhaps are not able to ‘finesse’ quite as well (high gain situations). Yet how we think about situations, the abilities to assess, plan and choose ‘automatically’ might have disappeared.

A skill is a process which with practice has become an ‘unconscious’ activity – automatic. Why do the physical skills only degrade, but the wider cognitive aspects disappear – a question for the researchers?

I don’t think that ‘lost’ in this sense means you cannot asses, decide, etc, but the automaticity – the skill and thus ease of conducting these thinking activities has changed.
Perhaps this is similar to the transition from a novice to an expert, but in this instance having to revert back to novice thinking – we have to follow DECIDE instead of being able to choose naturally. This suggests a ‘loss of expertise’, which requires more thinking effort – higher workload, lack of attentional resource.

I agree with much of what JW411 says – we come from the same era, and have a similar background and training. Thus, I wonder if age / experience are factors.
The more senior pilots probably cite rigorous training and situation exposure during military / in depth civil training. Perhaps the majority of these people have managed the transition to ‘automation’ because their cognitive expertise was well formed and had been developed throughout their careers (there was a good foundation and a lot to loose); also because they have developed the skills of thinking, particularly of thinking about their thinking (metacogniton or mindfulness).
Alternatively those pilots trained with the advent of automation may not have had the advantages of deep training; not because of automation, but because of the commercial cut back from the perceived benefits of automation – “you don’t need in depth training”.
With time, this has evolved with the students of the era becoming trainers today – a self generating decline. In addition, there is less time to train or opportunity to gain experience, exposure to unusual situations, etc, etc. Finally, there is a culture driven by commercial pressure of hurry-up, rush, no time to think.
How often do crews debrief in depth, learn the lessons – good or bad from each flight? Thus, modern aviation may have inadvertently reduced training of how to think, and how to turn this thinking into a skill with practice and refreshing.

Used correctly, automation provides opportunity to think about the situation, but to use that opportunity requires will power and knowledge of thinking; how to think, what about, when, and why.

The cognitive capabilities of humans. (http://www.humanfactors.uiuc.edu/Reports&PapersPDFs/chapters/Wickens_Durso%20Aviation.PDF)

“Humans and Automation: Use, Misuse, Disuse, Abuse.” (http://hfes.publisher.ingentaconnect.com/content/hfes/hf/2008/00000050/00000003/art00012)

Training for Advanced Cockpit Technology. (http://asrs.arc.nasa.gov/docs/rs/38_Training_for_Advanced_Cockpit_Technology.pdf)

[bubbers44]

I think JW411 means the pilot should be able to do the single engine, missed approach and return to landing with no autopilot. Those were our standards when we were flying. Why can,t we expect those standards now? People forgot how to fly?

[Oakape]

Yes bubbers44, some people have forgotten how to fly.

But even more worrying, is that some people on airliner flight decks today haven't forgotten anything - they simply don't know how to fly! This is because they have never been taught how to fly.

They have been taught to recite standard calls by rote, without really understanding why the calls are made; they have been taught to follow SOP's mechanically & blindly, without due consideration of the situation to hand; & they have been taught to use the autopilot from the instant the aircraft limitations allow them to, to a moment before those same limitations require them to disconnect it.

They are half trained systems operators, not pilots. And systems operators usually don't know what to do when the system breaks down or can't deal with an unusual situation. They generally push their chair back, put their feet up & call for the technician. Unfortunately that doesn't work too well when you are at the pointy end of a metal tube travelling at 800kph & you need to get it safely back on the ground.

There are many weaknesses in aviation & a poorly trained pilot is just one of them. A poorly trained pilot with a low aptitude for the job is an even greater weakness. However I do not agree with the philosophy in many areas of the industry, that the pilot is the weakest link in modern aviation. A well trained, motivated pilot, with a high level of aptitude, knowledge & professional discipline is far more of an asset than a liability, and always will be.

[framer]

I would not expect to sit as a passenger in the back of an aircraft behind anyone who could not hand fly the thing using raw data down to minimas with one engine out and then complete a circling approach procedure and land safely.
JW411.....I agree that that is what should be the case. Just for your info though.....you should not expect that now days in many countries/airlines. I would guess that about 80% of the people I fly with could do that no problem. The rest.....doubt it. And that is with a carrier with a good reputation. A friend of mine recently took LWOP and flew in India, he said he had F/O's who could not hand fly straight and level on vectors in IMC. He was not joking, he described teaching as many as possible the basics while there were 200 people in the back. These F/o's will be Captains within the next 3-10 years.
It is not going to be pretty.

[Andu]

I did a sim - it must be 10 years ago at least - where we were given a double ADIRU failure, which left us with a basic aeroplane to fly - no AP, no FD, no speed tapes, nothing but the basic instruments - but a full panel, with AI, ND available.

It's always been my habit to let the FO fly during non-normals (after the initial actions) and I handle the emergency procedures, talk to the cabin crew etc. However, in this case, my FO, (an ex cadet who went straight from his initial training to the 777), was totally unable to hand fly the aircraft.

I had to take over - from what was approaching an unusual attitude - and have the FO handle the checklist while I flew the aeroplane.

I'd be guessing that today, there are an ever increasing number of newer pilots who fly the line today who'd be in a similar situation to my ex-cadet FO. And not just new ones. The Adam Air captain 'lost it', putting the aircraft into a spiral dive in less than 30 seconds when trying to fly on the standby instruments.

[RAT 5]

It's cost, pure & simple. I heard that one major player discourages visual approaches, and if they are contemplated, then they are flown using VNAV/LNAV and perhaps the automatics. The visual approach is there to same time/fuel/money, but there have been so many cock-ups that the subsequent G/A cost much more than it might have saved. Solution is to let the VNAV guide you to the threshold and correct height & speed. In the past the solution was training. It was the common thing on the line, especially the Greek islands, to use Mk.1 eyeball and hand fly. The VNAV was in your brain. This was on the job training. Now, the cost of such training in the sim, and then taking it to the line is too expensive. not enough crews anyway. The cost of on the job experience is too many G/A's or incidents. Solution is the lowest cost one (and some would say safest), avoid the scenario alltogether.
Then comes the scenarios that JW411 and others talk off. The manure has hit the air-con and it's left to smarty pants to sort it out. The first part is to understand that it's going to worms, perhaps understand why, and then chose a good option. After that, some hand flying skills might be useful. Often, with less total experience up front than was required just for command, and a career of robotic zombie trained monkey stuff, I have my doubts of the outcome of such an event. In a couple of generations the captains will not have the ability to demonstrate on the job training and the circle of decline will be complete. RIP piloting. Space Cowboys should be compulsory viewing for all CAA's and HOT's. (If anyone has a link to Tommy Lee Jones polling the shuttle down to land, please send it to this thread.)
If the airlines satisfy the minimum training requirement laid down by CAA's they will. We all know it is always a mixture of minimums & maximums. Any improvement has to come from the top down. Don't hold your breath.

[Speedwinner]

Hmm. Im flying for a large european carrier and i never saw such poor abilities which were described in this post. If i was asked, i´d say that 80% of my approaches are flown raw data by hand with automatics off in about F100. Moreover I try to fly nonprecision as much as i can. Well, as i said, there are guys next to me but they are all good. never had a captain with poor flying skills.

But i must say that im doing a lot of simulator work at home. Flying raw data flying different approaches. I think practise is good. It´s weird because i fly as a business and enjoy the microsoft flight simulator in my free time:ugh::ok:

Howdy

[Gulfstreamaviator]

Discuss:

Does MPL help the cause of improving pilot skill, or is it the start of the slippy downhill path to UAVAir.

glf

[MOON65]

I HOPE WE HAD SUFFICIENT MANUAL FLYING THROUGH OUR FLYING CARRIERS THANKS TO AIRBUS PHILOSOPHY OF AUTOMATION,RELAX AND ENJOY FLYING:ok:

[Microburst2002]

PEI 3721

thank you very much for the clarification and the links

RAT 5

I don't know how the hell cut a movie and do a link or upload it to youtube.

But If a movie had to be mandarory to be seen by student pilots, that is "The Right Stuff". There is a moment I like, when all the astronauts begin to argue and then one of them says that they should stop arguing and realise that "we are the monkey!". After that, they unite and make Von Braun change a lot of things in the capsule, renaming it spacecraft, to begin with, and including some means of manual control.
great movie!

[Phantom Driver]

JW411:

I would not expect to sit as a passenger in the back of an aircraft behind anyone who could not hand fly the thing using raw data down to minimas with one engine out and then complete a circling approach procedure and land safely.


Neither would I, because I would steer clear of any operator that encourages any such enterprise. Circling approaches with one engine out, at minima do not belong in the realms of todays heavy jet line operations; simply because the "average joe" (a category to which I believe most of us belong), simply do not do it often enough in normal ops to maintain any reasonable degree of proficiency, (and I'm speaking of airline ops, not "bush flying", no offence to Ryanair crew; they are probably good at it because they are doing it all the time, just as I used to do at one time in old 737 classic days. Autothrottle? Flight Director? What was that? Who needs 'em?! Didn't have them in the Phantom either!).

Nowadays, I'll do a circling approach once in a while on a sim recurrency and that's it. But to do it for real? Fortunately, it has been rarely needed at the places I fly to, but if the case arose, I'm afraid that I would be heading off to more favourable pastures to await an improvement in conditions, and I'm sure my pax would apprecate that, rather than some white knuckle ride round a circling pattern at low level in poor vis with terrain around. Now, if I was boxed in and had no choice, of course I would do it, but throw in some fatigue, pucker factor and the lousy weather that caused one to end up in that situation, then it would most likely not be pretty. Many accidents in the past attest to these simple facts.

You mention the NDB 13 at old Kai Tak; great for the HKG regulars, but for the occasional visitor, with no "local knowledge", it was asking for trouble. Did it once; ATC offered it instead of the full IGS (good wheeze maybe, to see what happened to this newcomer in supposedly CAVOK, except it wasn't, in the summer haze) and I swore never to do it again, simply because my "databank" of visual cues was nonexistent, and the turn onto finals was a little later than planned, (didn't a 747 end up flying down the harbour off this approach? Turned at the wrong island!).

Similarly with JFK 13 Carnarsie; no big deal for the HomeTown boys, but another matter for those that come across it once in a blue moon; at least we have a good look at it in the sim these days, but in a heavy 744 with marginal wx, it's a handful in the real life situation; miss the hotel and your bank angle has triggered an alert. FDAP has a field day here with unstabilised approaches; indeed, exceptions have to be made from the normal limiting parameters where you get a letter from the office to "please explain this approach.....".

The reality is: the "good old days" of "intrepid ace aviator" are over (and the present, much reduced, accident rate bears witness to that). Like it or not, the age of automation is here to stay, together with the era of FDAP, RNP, RVSM and whatever else the lawyers and engineers and beancounters want to come up with. No point kidding ourselves. My company has a great policy; vis below 2000 metres? Autoland recommended; and why not? What are we trying to prove?


My advice; when the weather is sh*t, ALWAYS use the automatics and exercise your LVP skills. For example, if the weather is close to CAT 1 limits, set up for a CAT 2/3 approach and then you will never be surprised.

If the weather is reasonable then use EVERY opportunity to hand fly and use raw data as OFTEN as you can - don't get lazy - you can't afford it.


Agree absolutely, however,..

AirRabbit


Also, I whole-heartedly agree with those here who make it a point to jump on those who want to “play” or “have fun” experimenting with the airplane with passengers on board. That is a supreme NO NO. While simulators are not airplanes … we have to admit that they are a very good approximation of airplanes – and they’re getting better at doing so, every day. My position is to use the training equipment to practice, play, and learn. Yes, it can be fun – and it should be. But because all of us are capable of making mistakes – let’s make sure that we use every opportunity to minimize the mistakes we make with passengers on board. Let’s make sure that we practice and experiment in the simulated environment. Once we have developed the skills to operate the airplane using the systems available – then we can operate the airplane using what we've learned and practiced.


Say no more.......

[bubbers44]

15 years from now will tell the story on how depending on automation to fly the airplane and not being required to have basic hand flying skills will work out. I think I know the answer. The old pilots will be gone then and just the new pilots will be in control.

[PJ2]

bubbers44;
15 years from now will tell the story on how depending on automation to fly the airplane and not being required to have basic hand flying skills will work out. I think I know the answer. The old pilots will be gone then and just the new pilots will be in control.
Yes, I think so; - We may even know before then, depending upon how the accident reports go. A simple example comes to mind right away - fatigue. Twenty years ago there was no such thing as fatigue, all accidents were "pilot error", if an organization made its pilots do things that were unsafe, that was totally the pilots' fault; Thirty to fourty years ago, initial courses required one to be able to comprehend systems, sometimes draw them and otherwise know the nuts and bolts. I know one organization that required their crews to be able to send and receive morse code at 5wpm, and before an entry into Kennedy or O'Hare was permitted, to draw the entire terminal area from memory including all the nav-aid frequencies, airways and their tracks.

So, competency and automation accidents, which are essentially invisible to the flight safety and accident investigation process today, may, like the issue of fatigue, begin to gather sufficient legitimacy to actually make it into primary causes.

When that happens, maybe we'll see a turnaround in the present approach which puts MCPL amateurs in seasoned professionals' shoes and return the cockpit to the left and right seats instead of desk-ridden MBA's and other beancounters in windowless offices facing a computer screen who know nothing of the front line. Sorry - I know that sounds unkind and it is NOT personal or focussed on "who". It is the "what" that will bite this industry every time.

[Pugilistic Animus]

I know one organization that required their crews to be able to send and receive morse code at 5wpm, and before an entry into Kennedy or O'Hare was permitted, to draw the entire terminal area from memory including all the nav-aid frequencies, airways and their tracks.



JAL they are legendary for their pedantry???

[PJ2]

Some of my colleagues left to fly for JAL so I know a bit about that legend, (it ain't legend!!), but no, so there's another..., and this was in 1973 - not sure if it's still a requirement. To me it spoke of discipline as much as actual skill. ;-)

[RAT 5]

As automation and back-ups and reliability improve to new levels, the 1 pilot and his dog (automated of course) is coming ever closer. In 1980 the B767 could be plugged in at 400' on departure and land itself at the other end. It couldn't takeoff by itself, nor stop itself, but how difficult would that be to engineer? However, would any pax get on board? How many would get on a 1 pilot a/c? How many, boarding via a finger, even know what a/c they are on, know how many pilots there are or even care about any of it? There is blind faith in the CAA's not licencing anything unsafe. If it is EU approved it must be OK. They look only at the price and comfort. The engineers and trainers also look at risk management. If there have been no significant incidents in Xzillion flying hours of type XYZ why train pilots to deal with them. What is needed is automated zombie button pushers who do not let the levels of boredom lead them to thinking "I wonder what will happen if I push this one...". We already have an attitude of don't think, do, with many aspects of our profession. It starts with recruitment. They advertise for multi-tasking, team orientated, clear thinking, well educated, methodical, customer friendly pilots trainees with good leadership qualities. Then, when they've got you, and you are wearing the shiny uniform, you are told to shut up and do as you are told; don't think too much, just do your job. Talk about a mis-match. If they can dumb down the starting requirements to what is really required in the future automated world, and have aeroplane operators who are more practical and have manual skills rather than intellectual qualifications, then the T'c & C's will have really fallen, and so will the ticket price. As it is a customer, bums on seats, driven industry, who's to say they'll be wrong. I'm sure the Hotol would have been fully automated with a crew of button pushers. I doubt V1 cuts would have featured in the training; or perhaps yes, as the CAA's still looked backwards.

But then I could also take the B767 into Calvi for a circle within the mountains. Pax wanted to there, so the pilots had to have the skills. Is there a case for various types of pilot qualifications? The LHR-any major airport pilot, and the Greek islands on a thunderous night type pilot? There are float-plane licences, crop spray licences, aerobatic licences, N.Atlantic MNPS ratings, CAT C airfield ratings, so why not major route- big aeroplane only ratings, and the rest of us. Trouble with that is the unions will cream off the most bucks for the glamorous easiest jobs, and the real hands-on pilots will get the crumbs. However, if the above becomes true, and the big aeroplane only drivers have very basic licences and annual tests on their excellent button pushing skills with their eyes closed, perhaps the pie will be cut differently. The last 40 years may help foretell the next 40. Jets, autolands, higher speeds, longer ranges, no F.E's., beds on board for the lucky ones, FDR's & CVR's, ETOPS, etc. etc.

This is all very tongue in cheek, and it's getting harder to make predictions, especially about the future.

[Microburst2002]

Regarding the future
If we see a graph showing deck crew members versus time, it is like a countdown: 5, 4, 3, 2....

I seems as if they are planning a soft transition to 0:
It is 1.5, then 0.5, then 0. The trick is in the 1.5 to 0.5 step.

Regarding flying skills
In 320s there had been only a few catastrophic crashes. A great part of them occurred while handflying. I guess they think: No more hand flying, no more accidents. They probably accept the possibility of an accident due to lack of hand flying skills after a failure rendering automation useless as a good price.

[DERG]

Had a hell of fast descent spiral into Vienna last time I was in an Air Berlin liner. No shortage of skills here. Real airmanship. I don't want to fly with a company who values MBAs above the rest of the staff. Nor do I want to fly with a company who has brainwashed the flight deck staff into following "company policy" in direct contravention of a given situation.

Airbus had a motive behind this statement and I don't believe it was without a good reason. Maybe we will discover some research, privvy to Airbus, that may suggest that airman may be too reliant on the machine.

[Pugilistic Animus]

and when circling requires a mayday call:hmm:

The FAA ATPL stipulates in the PTS's that the pilot seeking a certificate under examination must be the obvious master of the airplane....:ugh:












{Loofth Hahnsah}:}???

really it's killing me:{

[p51guy]

Posts saying 15 years from now automatic airplanes will make basic flying skills required in the wave of the future are the old school pilots not used to total automation. The new pilots are taught automation and how to master it. Soon an aircraft will takeoff and land with a pilot monitoring the automation. No need for pilot skills.

[mrdeux]

Which works well unless the automation is part of the problem (QF72), or fails due to another problem (QF30).......

[A37575]

For more on the automation versus hand flying skills in modern airliners have a look at the Australian forum D&G Reporting Points under the thread called "Stick to the automatics, son - pure flying skills are for the birds".

[loofah]

Does anyone else recall the TV Eye programme which looked at the Airbus track record, many years ago. I will never forget the quotation by Roger Beteille, Airbus Industrie General Manager at the time. He said, " We don't tell pilots how to fly aeroplanes and we don't expect them to tell us how to design them." He retired in 1984 so I doubt that he is following this thread! My view as an ex 777 pilot and others is that as systems evolve so to do the pilots. You can't 'blame' anyone for being unable to hand fly if they are designed out of the system. The safety record since the introduction of late generation airliners is really exceptional.

[Pugilistic Animus]

yeqah we all know of kinks in honeywelll AW@st had how many articles so fsr ,...raytheon too:hmm:

[Busserday]

Came off the big bus last year to fly the 777 and have now bid a pay cut to the 320 to go flying again. My situational awareness has never been so poor ( I did 25 years on the 737-200. From my perspective, as limited as it is, my flying skills are at the bottom right now. I like to fly. I watched a 320 FO while I was jumpseating home make that little bus dance using both automation and intervention (is that a Boeing term), a thing of beauty.
Joe

[Apollo30]

And what is the reason why you say that your SA and flying skills are very poor at the moment?

[p51guy]

He said he came off the B777. He wanted to fly again. I wish he could have gone back to the 737 to really fly again. The Airbus is a computer operated airplane.

[p51guy]

At 29 you probably don't know what is happening. It will be apparent soon.

[Microburst2002]

737, 320... if you are always flying with AP ON, they are equally flown by computers.

If you fly them by hand, in the 737 you have to pull to raise the nose. So you have in the 320. In both you have to push to lower de nose. And so on. The only difference is in the autotrim (which makes it easier) and the lack of feel. You still have to decide if you need to pitch up or down.

[latetonite]

And being able to manage that all by yourself makes you a good pilot:cool:

[benmac]

Reading this thread I'm reminded of the adage which defines a superior pilot as one who uses his superior airmanship knowledge to avoid situations where he will be called upon to demonstrate his superior flying skills.

[sleeper]

Quote: "If you fly them by hand, in the 737 you have to pull to raise the nose. So you have in the 320. In both you have to push to lower de nose. And so on. The only difference is in the autotrim (which makes it easier) and the lack of feel. You still have to decide if you need to pitch up or down." unquote


You think it is any different in the larger B777?
The only difference is the lack of stretches in longhaul operations.
However, I find that doing manual climbouts and approaches at every opportunity keeps my flying skill up to date, even in long haul.

[blue up]

This week I did my first flight in 61 days. I am rather fortunate that quite a lot of our flights end with visuals or V/S + HDG SEL flown NDB-DME or VOR-DME approaches that require you to think. If I was only doing big cities instead of small islands in a 757 then I'd be reeeeeally worried.

Maybe a few hours per year in a light aircraft would be a good thing to introduce as part of a commercial licence revalidation?

"You might need a little more rudder, sir"
"What?"
"More rudder, sir. Look at the slip ball."
"The who?"
"Slip ball, sir, down there, showing you that we're yawing."
"Hey! We have those on the 'Bus. I think so, anyway, maybe somewhere down over on the F/O's side. Oh! You're trying to tell me that the autorudder has failed?"
"No sir, you need to put rudder in yourself."
"Manual rudder? Are you telling me that all 4 systems have failed???"
"You have 4 on the Airbus, then?"
"Naw, just 3 and an F/O. Hey, these PA28-140s run out of airspeed real quick, don't they."
"Maybe you might want to take your shoes off the instrument panel and start peddling, sir"


"I have control, sir."

:E

[pool]

If you fly them by hand, in the 737 you have to pull to raise the nose. So you have in the 320. In both you have to push to lower de nose. And so on. The only difference is in the autotrim (which makes it easier) and the lack of feel. You still have to decide if you need to pitch up or down.

... and then the bus decides to ignore your pull to avoid a unsafe but automatically induced descent ...

Brave new world, and on top of that it seems by reading some contributions, a much venerated brave new world! :ugh:

[Microburst2002]

pool

it's true that the bus has had a few problems, like the 320 in LEBB that did not flare well because of a badly designed software in the computers. And who knows what else is hidden in those code lines...

Sometimes those computers can be such bastards... But the required skill to hand fly it is not much different from a conventional airplane. Autotrim makes it a little bit more boring, and you have less aerodynamical direct to the brain-information (no feel). the bus is not like a CWS. And it is does not maintain flight path like an ILS without inputs. Believe me, i did the test one day (normal conditions) and it goes away and away. A properly trimmed 73 probably will stay better on the glidepath.

I hate those :ugh: smileys. They are used without reason most of the times.

[Jim Croche]

Barbie

"had to slide his seat forward and got to work." I hope this is not literally true cos he should have had it right where it was needed if he was PF! However, I've seen lots of it from auto-complacent pilots - many of them experienced Captains. A sudden failure of the automatics (in the sim in a climbing turn) usually brings a healthy does of reality after the first WTHIT!

You're all correct guys. In short, know your aeroplane - autoflight and manual and keep your skills up on both. Use automation when it's sensible and handfly also when the weather and circumsances are suitable.

[Tee Emm]

and handfly also when the weather and circumsances are suitable.Well that conveniently scratches all light aircraft IFR charters where either an autopilot is not installed (save servicing costs) or unserviceable (saves servicing costs).

How does one define when "weather and circumstances are unsuitable? After all, before the advent of super-cool automatics it was normal procedure for airline crews to fly Cat One ILS by hand. Now anything less than 1000 ft cloud base is considered auto-coupled material with flight directors and autothrottle and don't forget the autobrakes! As some wit observed on a previous forum, pilots have become data input processors, rather than airmen. A modicum of truth in that..

[p51guy]

That is why I spent my last seven years flying to TGU, Honduras. At 2700 ft. AGL autopilot and autothrottle were off and the circle to land was hand flown. Along with EGPWS off. It really is nice to fly with no automation to enjoy the old way of doing things. It is very satisfying to know you are really flying the airplane. It is quite easy actually. Just fly like a pilot, not a computer operator. I had a couple of flights in a P51 Mustang with one of my students when I was instructing in Chino Ca. He was my best student ever and I believe the best pilot I have ever flown with, including myself. His name is Steve Hinton, he starts the unlimited air race at Reno every year. I see him every year at Reno and treasure the time we flew together. He quit the airlines to go back to warbirds because he loved to fly back in the 70's. Those flights with him and our dogfight rolling around each other with another P51 with a picture with my roomate pilot always will be on my wall behind my computer. I got my thrills mostly in a B757 but he did it all.

[saeedkhan]

Ihave been flying all my life the conventional ac but then the transition was not easy in my company the kids would always want to fly raw data for practice and we have various problems let the technology do for what it is designed fo

[Razoray]

As some wit observed on a previous forum, pilots have become data input processors, rather than airmen. A modicum of truth in that..

Maybe at this time that is the natural progression. The pilot should be in command of his ship, and not actually flying it. The modern pilot should be a master of the automation, not beholden to it. With new "giant" aircraft, flying thousands of miles, aircraft must graduate to a new level of sophistication. And so should there commanders.

[Microburst2002]

In sea ships, Captains do not steer since many centuries ago. And they were masters or their ships, commanding them by the means of their voice.

Aiplanes are not ships, however, and move very fast, and in 3D. That is why pilots should be perfectly able to steer them by hand just as well as by handling the automation.

[stator vane]

--when the company that pays my check, states that any ceiling below 1000 -we must use the auto landing?

i think it is stupid, but there you go--two stupids won't make a right. (ignoring the company ops specs)

they also tell us to put 10 degree bank when above 30,000 feet because some idiots couldn't tell when they could and couldn't bank twenty five degrees without getting into the stick shaker at altitude, so they 'dumb it down' to the lowest possible denominator. the horror they must feel when cleared to FL300!!!!????

also, 250 knots below 10,000 when descending, (allowed climbing) because some idiots can't manage their aircraft energy.

we are forced into becoming less proficient.

we do what we can--but i can still see the degradation of my own skills-i am such a slut--to keep a good paying job.

[Razoray]

They should hire back some of you old geezers from Pprune to teach the young pilots how to handfly.

[sleeper]

Quote:
--when the company that pays my check, states that any ceiling below 1000 -we must use the auto landing?


Yes you must adhere to company rules.
Isn't it strange though that you have to make an autoland with a ceiling of 900 feet, but have no option on a nonprecision approach with a ceiling of 600 feet. In the latter case , by your company rules, you cannot land?!

Offcourse you will bring it in. But again strange that in the best of circumstances you have to make an autoland, while in the worst case (circling?) you can only do it manually!

[Centaurus]

And so should there commanders.

Perhaps because of the awesome responsibility weighing heavily upon the epauletted broad shoulders of the data input processor in the left seat of a mega-jumbo, the rank of "Commander" does not do justice to the position of authority he/she holds. After all, there are four bar commanders flogging light singles around the skies as CFI's. .

Suggest the rank should be upgraded to "General" and his chum in the RH seat a "Co-General". That would distinguish them quite rightly from the lower classes of airline pilots.

Of course we could also go back to original ranks of just Pilot and Second Pilot. Nothing flash - but just a plain statement of our job.

[Sciolistes]

As some wit observed on a previous forum, pilots have become data input processors, rather than airmen. A modicum of truth in that..
Well that's true. Constant data input and processing. Pilots concurrently utilise various data processing strategies to define desirable outcomes, much in real time with a fair amount of mental simulation modelling for prediction analysis. Pattern matching, constraint based reasoning, goal seeking logic, raw number crunching, statistical analysis, it is all required. Regardless of the automatics being on, off or simply not present.

[RAT 5]

"--when the company that pays my check, states that any ceiling below 1000 -we must use the auto landing?"

Where does this come from ands why? Not all ILS's are CAT2/3 approved. At 1000' the ILS will not be protected. Thus you'd be making a practice CAT2/3. Are you sure this is an SOP limitation. It does seem OTT.

[stator vane]

if the airport has the capability--auto land if not-'monitored' approach-- which currently means first officer flies the approach-single autopilot and then the captain manually lands-in my estimation-a silly transfer of pilot flying at a moment that might not be the best-and since the autopilot has been flying the approach-the captain must disconnect and suddenly become one with the aircraft and take it the rest of the way in. where, in my humble opinion and experience, i find that i am more in tune with the control pressures needed to keep the beast lined up with the localizer after hand flying a bit-rather than 'come in' at the finale with no warm up on your 'guitar'--

perhaps experience can become an obstacle at times---

when tired and on the last of four back into where the weather comes down unexpectly, another factor that complicates what otherwise should be a simple matter--is the tendency to 'remember' and the need to 'forget' all the different ways that monitored approaches have been defined and flown over the years.

after 6 airlines, all on the 737, my head must swim through all the different procedures, which each airline thought was the gospel at the time-and try to remember the ways things are to be done 'tonight.'

to be totally honest, at times, i have to turn to the right and ask--'what is the procedure this month?'

funny how in the QRH where they state the requirements for certain approaches and the weather conditions that trigger such requirements-yet they omit the very simple yet critical thing of the actual minimums of those specific approaches. and funny how we still do heights in feet but visibilities and everything else in metres.

any old dinosaur will think things were better in the past---

and i will close with a gentle reminder to all the new and young pilots coming up in the right seat--you will be a dinosaur before long and make some of the same complaints that you hear us older pilots make. and we should both be 'gentle' with each other and admit that we have much to learn from each other and we can if we keep talking rather than judging.

[Pugilistic Animus]

YouTube - BAC-111 Cockpit (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kVJNTO-Jrlc) :zzz:

and the FO is a master on that CDI, his bracketing is impeccable,...I can't tell if he's LOC/SDF or VOR:ok:


like two professionals just dickin' around the practice grounds on Sunday,...so dangerous:rolleyes:

[SiriusTheDogStar]

AIRBUS ...

They make airplanes that need machine minders, then they turn round and say they need pilot skills!

OK heres a good deal: with every Airbus airplane they sell give out 10 sail planes free.

[A37575]

Flight International 9-15 Feb 2010. Page 20.

"The US Airline Pilots Association top safety official has echoed the view of US FAA administrator Rany Babbitt that airline pilots may need to spend more time hand flying aircraft to stave off the impacts of automation....United Airlines has had such guidelines in place for years, according to Captain Roy Kay the executive chairman of ALPA. ....Kay says that United actively encourages pilots to hand-fly whenever possible through verbiage in the flight operations manual. They understand that basic skills are eroding. The practice varies by carrier, with some recommending pilots to engage or disengage the autopilot systems as low as 1000 ft. Kay says he typically hand-flies below 18,000 ft.

So, United Airlines which is one of the world's largest airlines actively encourages pilots to hand-fly as much as possible. Obviously the airline is doing something positive about erosion of flying skills by pilots of automated aircraft. While in other parts of the world it remains automatics engaged asap after lift off and don't disengage until forced to on short final. Little wonder that pure flying skills are a thing of the past. And the world's regulators just look the other way while Loss of Control becomes the major cause of airline aircraft accidents.

[flyhigh85]

To Wiley and others who still are saying that going the old way through instructor then turbo prop before going to the big jets:

It is not because we do not want to go that way, for me that sounds pritty interesting and will be good experience to have on my shoulders BUT it is about economy and a little about time management since you have to pay back your training costs one day.

Why go through instructing and spend alot of money to get thr CFI? when you have 1000 plus hrs you still have to pay the ******* rating anyway and you are not very much closer to seal a job because all the airlines require hours on type NOT total hrs in a cessna.

Right now I am flying in an airline doing alot of visual approaches and non precision, handling skills are not to bad I think, and i can also finaly start to pay back my loan. I have a friend who have 1200 hrs of instructing hrs, he can not find a job so he is considering buying a rating of A320 or B737 but he dont have the cash. He is regreting he did not do that when he finished his commercial. I dont blame him.

DO NOT blame the pilots, blame the aviation Industry and the low cost airlines.

[opherben]

flyhigh85 (http://www.pprune.org/members/279069-flyhigh85)
as flight instructor your ability increases and deepens like no flight time can.
You are responsible for your performance, not the industry, and if it isn't affordable, you risk yourself and fulfilling your pilot responsibility. There are other occupations.

[DiscusPilot]

flyhigh85 said it just as I see it too.

I am now in the middle of ATPL and really demotivated by unclear situation. True, nobody cares of SEP/MEP time. I also would be happy to handfly, start with sth smaller and grow to be proficient. But one of the representatives of our major carrier told me that they always prefer pilots from integrated training rather than those with 1000plus hours on small airplanes. He explained that many former PPL istructors or agricultural pilots have bad habits and will never be really professionals with airlines. And gliders which I fly on competition level are good just for kids.
That man was a chief of hiring pilot department.

What is the way??

[opherben]

A37575
The growing terminal area navigation accuracy requirements will practically prevent hand flying, which should be of concern to us all.

[Microburst2002]

Opherben

You are totally right. The only way to cram twice as much airplanes in the same airspace is making it all via FMS with AP ON, and probably enhanced surveillance and TCAS systems.

[nishant chander]

I hope they don't replace the joy stick with the conventional yoke, I believe there is no much a diffrence, its been 4 and a half years since flying the bus, not once did i feel, that she is complacent to my response, as a matter of fact.......she is better than the yoke.:O

[Microburst2002]

Yes

But it is not a joystick, please. It is a side stick.

Let's hope that in the future, they don't put a back stick, on the pilot seat... That would really be flying by the seat of the pants, while being fu**ed by the managment :}

Some would love it and call it the joystick, then. (not an homophobic joke, just a masochist one)

I wonder to what extent will this post be moderated...

[Wiley]

flyhigh85, re your post #317, I don't recall ever extolling the virtues of new pilots becoming instructors before moving on to jets, but I certainly believe that, unlike the product of airline cadet schemes or approved courses, a young pilot who has gained significant experience as a single pilot in light singles and twins - (what's commonly known as General Aviation in Australia, and I know is almost non-existent in Europe) - gains a far better breadth of aviation experience, (including a few scares and quite possibly having to make a few quite literally life and death decisions him (or her) self) at a young age. (That "him or herself" is the important phrase in that last sentence.)

The average ex-cadet is usually very good at flying an airliner, but the moment circumstances demand that he/she operate their aircraft outside that well defined path, (something that if it ever occurs, might not occur until he or she is in the left seat of an A320 or possibly a widebody), he or she is encountering whatever is confronting him or her for the very first time. (As an example, perhaps not a great one, I know a fellow in my last airline who made it to the left hand seat of a B777 and who proudly boasted that he'd never done a diversion - ever - in his career, [let alone, as the captain, have to deal with something a bit frightening].)

I honestly think the "GA pilots learn bad habits they can't be trained out of" argument is spurious. There's a lot of money to be made by flying schools conducting approved courses - and a lot of money to be saved by airlines - by insisting that new hires into airlines go through an approved course.

I accept that it's a different world today to the one I cut my aviation teeth in, and I accept the GA route is no longer as widely available (and never really was for most European pilots). I'm just saying "more's the pity".

The whole point of this thread is the fact that most of us (at least us Old Farts, but now we've been joined by Airbus Industries) are decrying the falling standards in piloting skills, and pilots who did 1500 hours or so in lighties before "making it" into an airline job, I think, were a better all round product than someone (the average today) who steps into the right hand seat of an airliner with 200 odd hours in an approved training school, (or with MPL, maybe 60 hours!!!) where the employer often as not insists on maximum use of automation.

[alexban]

nishant :
the difference is not in the yoke or side-stick, it's in the way the machine flies. And I think,from experience, that the main problme with erodated handling skills is when a bus pilot goes to a classic plane, like a 737.
I've known a pilot who almost did a CFIT due to , being so used with the point and go bus type of flying , tried that on a 737 while flying manually, by instinct. Scary output, I may say.

[Loose rivets]

the difference is not in the yoke or side-stick, it's in the way the machine fly.

I think this is true, but the average pilot has to be allowed to experience his aircraft at the edges of the envelope to simply know how it will fly.

[boofhead]

Mandating auto approaches when weather is below a certain point is a management method of handling a threat. Since most management types have forgotten what it is like to fly or never knew, this seems reasonable to them.
But what is the pilot to do, when he has probably never flown a full approach, if the hydraulics are degraded, or an engine is shut down, or the crosswind is at 30 knots and the Flight Manual says an auto land is not allowed? having never done it when things are benign, he/she now has to perform like a hero in difficult conditions?
OK he has done it in the sim, but when it is for real it is a different type of pressure and not easy without the familiarity of practice.

[HEALY]

Boofhead

I agree with your comments in many ways, the fact that basic raw data handling skills are not implemented in more benign weather for the possible occurance of someday requiring those skills is an issue. My gerneral thoughts on it come down to a law of averages that "management" deem as a suitable risk. The term "affordable safety" springs to mind.

The chances of numerous factors accumulating to the point which will stretch the capacity of the crew has probably been determined to be so remote and infrequent that its better to take that chance rather than expose the airline, pax and acft to a more "manual" way of currency. Does this sound stupid? King oath it does! however with the high threat environments we now fly in with RVSM, higher fatigue, poor ATC (not generalised), high traffic environments means automation "is" and "will" continue to be the governing trait in airline operation.

There are many scenarios such as EGPWS and TCAS manouevres, RTO's and depressurisations that cant be practised in real life in the aircraft either and they will certainly be a different experience to the sim as well. The interesting case of AF447 is a good example. It wasnt until the initial findings about the loss of primary instrumentation that our airline and many others started implementing training sessions directed at such an occurance. What may have occured if more adequate training was provided on how to deal with that issue in the aircraft type?? we wont ever know. The guys could have had 10000 hours flying IFR raw data in a C172 but that probably wouldnt have helped them very much because...well....its just different.

The buzz sorrounding TEM is like CRM when it was first introduced....its a great way to implement changes for the sake of changes and also. But with everything, decreasing one risk by identifying it as a threat will also in some way create a more benign threat that will sit there for weeks, months or even years until one day an accident will occur and in true management style will make another change to counter that threat as well.

[latetonite]

I cannot help it, but I see a lot of people in the sim, and sometimes, when things go haywire, they tend not to be able to handle basics. Many of my old friends flying senecas on a private licence would do a better job.
And I train Airline Pilots.
Your part A and your S.O.P.s are only guidelines. They do not teach you flying, or even the basics.
I prefer real pilots, even if they forget once to set 1013.2 exactly at Transition ALt
But maybe I am outdated.
My two pennies..

[Wiley]

lateonite, quite a few of the old but not bold here would agree with you completely. Your comments made me re-read my last post and conclude that where I said: "The average ex-cadet is usually very good at flying an airliner",

I probably would have been more accurate to have said: "The average ex-cadet is usually very good at operating an airliner".

A subtle, but in this particular debate, perhaps quite important differentiation.

[PJ2]

latetonight, Wiley;
"The average ex-cadet is usually very good at flying an airliner",

I probably would have been more accurate to have said: "The average ex-cadet is usually very good at operating an airliner".
9/11 taught us that flying an airliner can be quickly and easily trained but no operations people have taken that lesson to it's logical concluson wherein flying an aircraft is, or should be, a very small part of the job.

Those who think that manipulating the controls and pushing the buttons in the right order is "airline flying" don't know what they don't know.

It's the same as thinking and believing that holding a scalpel is being a doctor.

Come to think of it, why don't medical schools adopt the airlines' and the Regulators' lead, do away with long and expensive Intern programs and start graduating "doctor cadets" who will be given 240hrs simulation and then issued MDML's...- Multi-Doctor Medical Licences, so they can be part of the team in the O.R. for real but only with another doctor around?

[Dysag]

Does anyone know whether your local GP / MD has to undergo regular proficiency checks?

Is there an enforced retirement age for medics? If not maybe I'll give it a go.

[SDFlyer]

Very clever and very droll PJ2 - thanks for that. Point well taken .

There's an excellent article in today's WSJ by an M.D. who expresses annoyance at the frequent comparisons being made these days between commercial pilot training/ops and medical doctor training/ops. His message was basically (and I paraphrase freely), [I]OK then, let me have a separate support team (FO-equivalent, FAs-equivalent, etc) for every single patient I attend in the hospital. After all, every patient is as big of a problem/challenge for me as is a flight for a commercial pilot .... [:p].

That would make about 30 teams in all for this doc at any one time, or so he suggested. Writ large, we'd be spending about 75% of GDP on medicine in that case.
:eek:

He also pointed out that every patient is the equivalent of an aircraft doomed to crash at some time or other - without fail.

hmmmm, that wouldn't look so good on a commercial pilot's record tho' would it?
:)

[PJ2]

SDFlyer - glad you caught the tongue-in-cheek intent; both satire and satire's poor cousin sarcasm have some basis in truth and motivation to alter circumstances.

That said, the MD who's message was as you paraphrased observing the kind of teamwork and support which exists in the cockpit perhaps cites a much larger issue regarding resources than he intends, given the comparison of fatality rates in both professions.

If he is tired of the comparison with aviation perhaps an examination of why the comparison is being embraced by more and more medical professionals in terms of examining why fatality rates remain stubbornly high.

I hasten to add, as I have offered in other posts, that medicine is nowhere near the exacting and definitive enterprise that flying airplanes safely is and a team approach works generally more smoothly where the mix of human factors and mechanical responses is shifted further towards human factors in medicine. (Though the more I read what I write, the more I disagree with what I've written...)

Although time-compression is common between the two, one is dealing with the notion/concept/phenomenon of "diagnosis" which is in most cases either available but unrequited through lack of training, ability or perception, or in rare cases obscure until it is too late, while in the far more human enterprise of medicine I suspect the complexity and not the inability to assess/troubleshoot may mask original causes.

Agree with you on the cost relative to the GDP even at a possible prevention of perhaps 100,000 deaths per year in the U.S. for medicine. I'm bearing in mind that aviation isn't dealing with health issues either where some fatilities are inevitable due to disease and age - aviation's "patients" are almost 100% healthy.

This is a factor in aviation I know but if nothing else, "House" has at least made such a phenomenon more understandable...

BTW, in the early years I and I suspect many of us here flew with guys like House. I'll take CRM team work with a leadership component any day.

The automobile industry, which kills a B747-planeload of people about every 3 days in the U.S., is a different story and comparisons are difficult.

Big topics, all.

[Microburst2002]

The difference between a doctor and a pilot after screwing it up:

Dr: "oops! ****... Dead. What a shame. Well, next one will survive, I'm sure"

Pilot: "(whoop whoop pull...UP) ****... what the...?"[end of Voice Recorder]

[TDK mk2]

I know quite a few First Officers who have never experienced an actual go around (in a public transport catagory aircraft) let alone a diversion. I do dread the day I have to use an alternate that I know nothing about on the minimum fuel we are 'encouraged' to fly with these days.

[John Farley]

I have posted this elsewhere without response so I thought I would stick my neck out here because a huge number of words have been written recently regarding airline accidents that have involved pilot handling issues.

Many have blamed reduced crew experience and poor training standards driven by cost saving measures as the cause of these errors. Earlier generations of pilots have found some recent failures to control speed and attitude unbelievable, given the presence of two or more licensed pilots on the flight deck. Others have highlighted the loss of handling skills caused by the extensive use of automatics.

Both viewpoints predict a deteriorating future for safety unless we require better pilot training and experience levels and use automatics less.

May I suggest it helps to stand back and look at the full picture that is today’s airline scene and not argue from the particular towards the general, which I was brought up to believe shows lousy logic.

I do have suggestions to improve the situation for both standpoints but first may I explain where I come from, the better for you to understand my thoughts.

Logically every single airliner accident to date has been caused by human error.

There are no exceptions to this because only humans design, build, test, certificate, maintain and operate aircraft and airfields. Human errors or poor performance can clearly be involved in any of these areas. Some may ask what about lightning and birds? My reply is that we know the sky contains those and we choose to fly regardless. Thus aviation safety is about mitigating the effects of inevitable human errors or choices.

Human error can occur in the air and on the ground. The solution to mitigating the effects of errors made on the ground is to involve more people and time in checking and testing processes until the system is effectively free of the results of errors. Note, not free of errors but free of bad results that flow from the errors.

At this point some will doubtless be thinking I am ignoring costs and not in the real world because we will never have enough people and time on the ground. Please bear with me if you feel that because I first wish to establish the ideal system. Costs are a factor that cause us to compromise the design of our system for safe aviation but we should first establish the ideal.

The situation in the air is very different to that on the ground. The number of people that can be involved in detecting and countering human errors is small and limited, plus time available can be very short. Piloting an aircraft involves two very different functions - handling and operating. Handling is about controlling speed, height, attitude and direction of flight. Operating is about everything else from making decisions about ATC, weather, diversions, emergencies, what your company wants or expects, criminal behaviour and so on. The list is literally endless.

Handling errors (where I started at the beginning) tend to be the critical ones but are actually the easiest to eliminate in the long term. Therefore my first conclusion is that in the end all handling should be automatic because automatics do not make mistakes. They sometimes fail but the rate at which such failures occur (and matter) is purely a design spec issue involving redundancy levels. Please note I am not making a case for eliminating pilots only for automatic handing. Pilots are vital for the operation of aircraft but not for handling.

I formed this view back in the mid 1960s when as a safety pilot watching a BLEU trials Comet doing perfect automatic landings in a very strong crosswind, I had to say to the boffin crew that if the system dumped I did not have the skill to do that and would need to choose a different runway for landing.

Since that day I have been convinced that automatics could handle an aircraft better than me and the only issue was whether they could be made reliable enough for certification. As we know BEA was certificated to autoland its Trident passengers back in the 1970s. After 30 plus years of autolands with operators all over the world, has anybody ever heard of an accident during an autoland? What about manual landings over the same period?

In the long term I also believe that as automatics degrade in flight due to, say, loss of air-data input, they should not disengage and give control of handling back to the pilot. Rather they should keep themselves engaged and do what pilots are taught to do in that situation - hold attitude and power setting in this case - while telling the pilots what has happened.

In the short term we are stuck with what we have so what should happen now? Personally I do not think any of the accidents that have given rise to the current debate would have happened to airline pilots if those pilots were also current on small GA types and they routinely practised stalling and unusual positions.

Now costs. In the end the extent to which we deliberately compromise safety by driving down costs is properly down to the likes of the FAA and EASA. It is their job to provide an adequate level of protection for the fare-paying passengers. If they choose to allow two tired technicians to work on their own in the hangar at 0400 then that is their decision and we cannot expect all MROs to determine themselves that such standards are unacceptable.

Similarly if they choose to approve the licensing of pilots of limited meaningful handling currency then that is their shout. My own view is that while there are still aircraft out there that need pilots to handle them, either routinely or in emergency, then recent history shows we have cut costs just a little too far. However despite this an airliner seat is an amazingly safe place to be.

In the end extra safety costs exta money. However do we really believe that (all) current ticket prices could not stand a 10% hike providing that the money did go towards safety? This would be far from impossible to arrange – but that is another topic.

[alf5071h]

John, excellent. Another benefit of being able to hover – opportunity to view the situation, as you state, from the general, not the particular.
Basic training – yes, it's ‘general’; whereas FAA and EASA are becoming too particular, legalistic, and distant from the realities of modern operations and training requirements.

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

John

Trouble is, if computers do all the handling, whose going to pay to learn to fly only to sit there bored while admiring the aircafts' autoflight?

You?

Not me!

Also, when it does roll over, how are you going to catch it if you never fly?

Especially as it will probably do so at the very moment you wish it wouldn't!

I think it would be better to do LESS autoflight and try to formalise some sort of hand flying recency. That way we could continue with the kit we have at the moment but with 'better' pilots!

Might have saved the THY and Colgan for starters.

[mercurydancer]

PJ2

You might understand that any post looking at medical situations and airline incidents makes my ears prick up.

Firstly diagnosis is a little different in medicine from that in an aircraft. Much medical effort is spent in getting to a diagnosis (and often many co-morbidities) but this does not interrupt the treatment of symptoms.

The concept of "preventable death" interests me deeply and I spend much of my working life probing this issue. I have certainly not found any definition of that term which stands up to scrutiny.

Preventable for how long? None of us live forever so there is going to be a spectrum of situations from a death which could have been postponed until other factors took over and resulted in death, to an incident where the situation was so hopeless that a small error which if avoided may have led to a few more minutes of life, with all the quality of life issues which accompany such events.

In theory, all air accidents are preventable, whereas all medical deaths are not. I'm not being flippant. Would a suicide be classed as a preventable death? Largely it is, but the motives of a potential suicide can be incredibly powerful and evasive to detection.

If an aircraft is given the necessary forces to stay airborne it will, whereas people sometimes just want to die, and will do so even if the biological processes are not sufficient to result in death.

I would like to categorically lay to rest (pun fully intended) the myth that doctors do not have any scrutiny over each and every case they deal with. They certainly do. If they did not, I would be out of work, and believe me my desk is piled high.

Certainly CRM is giving us in healthcare some very valuable lessons and I want to know more how it works, but there are some concepts which simply do not exist in even such a controlled envinronment as an operating room. The cohesive team cannot be fully defined in an OR as there are several teams involved, each with differing priorities which often clash. This may be a concept which captains may not appreciate as in an aircraft they are the final say whereas in an OR the surgeon certainly is not the captain of the OR.

MD

[Pedro]

Interesting thread but I think blaming others (management, systems designers, FDM geeks) does us pilots no good. Competency is in our Realm; we are in the cockpit; no one else, and we owe it to ourselves, our passengers and our profession to ensure we are well practised and skilled in all aspects of the operation including hand flying. I think it is a question of what is appropriate at the time. Clearly, high workload approaches in busy terminals are not the best place to blow away the cobwebs on our handling skills but surely most of us can find suitable opportunities in quieter moments. Or perhaps it is easy to become a little lazy and put off a raw data approach until some other time...

[Wiley]

we are in the cockpit; no one else, and we owe it to ourselves, our passengers and our profession to ensure we are well practised and skilled in all aspects of the operation including hand flying.Read the whole thread, pedro. Some airlines today have SOPs expressly forbidding pilots from doing what you suggest. In these days of QARs* monitoring every aspect of our professional lives (*quick access recorders to the uninitiated), a captain who has hand flown an approach, even if he stays within every performance and accuracy parameter set down by the person who wrote the QAR trigger programme, will be called in for tea and bikkies to explain why he was hand flying the aircraft when he should have been using the highest level of automation available at all times as demanded by the company SOPs.

I have a friend who was called in to explain why he was hand flying on departure above 15,000' after that sin triggered the company QAR.

[John Farley]

Barbie'sBoyFriend

I quite understand your points and naturally Turkeys don't like Christmas.

However I am not talking about how you and I might like airliners to be operated to suit us, but the safest way to operate them.

I am afraid the manually flown accident stats do not support letting pilots handle aircraft IF/PROVIDED/WHEN sufficiently reliable automatics can be engineered.

When the UK seriously set about developing autoland in the 60s the CAA said that for the system to be certificated (BTW nobody knew quite what sort of system it would turn out to be in those days) then it had to be an order of magnitude safer as a cause of fatal accidents than pilots at that time. This meant it was only allowed 1 fatal landing in every 10 million landings because pilots were scoring 1 in a million.

As I said in my post I have never heard of a fatal autoland since they started in the 70s but over that period of years there have been far too many manual landing accidents.

JF

[protectthehornet]

Let the autos do their thing. But you must provide training, in REAL airplanes/airliners of the type that the pilot is assigned to when the plane is empty of paying passengers (properly weighted with sand bags).

Pilots must retain manual skills and if we can't ''practice'' with passengers aboard, then we must practice at other times.

but of course this would cost money and might even be the cause of accidents,but we must be ready when the automatic stuff doesn't work or won't work right in the situation.

[Microburst2002]

John F

I see your point.
However, according to you, not only hand flying should be banned, but also manual landings.
Did they perform 10 million autolands to certify the system?
I don't trust the way safety assessment is done, regarding those "extremely unlikely" figures. How do they know? There is always something not taken into account that makes those probabilities more likely than they would like.
When so many variables tend to infinite, comparison is not very meaningful.

As for manual flight in general, you also have to take into account the probabilities of a catastrophic incident following a failure that leaves automation u/s. How much have they increased due to the lack of skill generated by overdependance in automation?
I guess you would defend NO GO any automation unserviceability in every MEL. But it can happen in flight, in a rainy and turbulent day.

I think that, given the magnitude of the probability figures that they are handling, autoflight is extremely safe, but overall safety will be increased if crews remain skilled by practising hand flying when conditions are OK.
What is the danger in hand flying for a while after take off? Do you think it is dangerous? Or that it is dangerous to disconnect AP FD from time to time to go down the ILS manually?
Isn't it dangerous that an airplane crashes because the total lack of handflying skils makes the crew unaware of an automation malfunctions?
Automation is better understood by pilots with good handflying skills. These will detect incorrect AP behaviour at the onset, instead of too late.

Honbestly I don't think that 10^-9 figures (calculated) should make us ban hand flying.
I also think that the AP makes better aproaches in bad weather that I can do myself.

[Gretchenfrage]

As I said in my post I have never heard of a fatal autoland since they started in the 70s but over that period of years there have been far too many manual landing accidents.

Think logically.

Any autoland that went wrong, at any phase, had the pilot who intevened to rectify. Thank god, because there must have been many, myself having interrupted three of them.

It's almost like the protections covering me at times, happened once as well, I have to admit.

We're a good complement, but no one ever drew a statistic about that fact.

To me your claims about "automatics forever" are somewhat preposterous.
We need the good pilots more than ever.

[latetonite]

Correct. I am teaching catll/lll autoland on the line. And I am occupying the left or right seat, not the jumpseat. And there is a reason for this.

[John Farley]

Chaps

In defence of my case I did say (I was shouting as well!) IF/WHEN/PROVIDED sufficiently reliable automatics are available.

I did not say they were there already.

Wings used to fall off, flutter used to happen to airliners in the cruise (Electra - twice) but we gradually improved things so that those things (and others) were beaten. In my view the LONG term future is that we will be able to make automatics that are more reliable than us.

When people consider what good human performance achieves (as pilots in this case) there is a natural tendency to forget the bad results from similar humans when they make mistakes.

Fifty years ago airline passengers wanted to try any aircraft that offered faster and higher now they want cheaper and no departure delays (most passengers take safety as a given).

Meanwhile as I suggested in my first post it does seem cost reduction has dragged down (handling) training a little too far and it does seem that various authorities have realised this may be the case.

JF

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

John

I see what you mean. The autos that WILL be invented etc. etc.

What about 'at the moment'. Now?

I'm sure your well thought through thoughts are correct but we have a 'handling' problem NOW!

The latest copy of Flight is citing 'pilot handling' as opposed to pilot error in a large (was it 31%) fraction of recent fatal accidents.

What do you think?

Practice more at hand flying or use the autos more?

Personally, I keep my hand flying skills as sharp as I can although I'm in no way obsessive about it (prolly 5-10 mins each sector).

I find it very easy and if I can get a shot at a visual I'll usually go for it.

Maybe I'm a hazard to Flight Safety!:ooh:

[John Farley]

BBf

You a hazard to flight safety? I very much doubt that. You are one of those who think about what is going on around them which in my view is what safety is about.

Re the term Pilot Error that you mention it is a simple notion that is often literally true - the trouble is the term ignores what caused or contributed to the error. Which is why its use properly gets up so many people's noses.

Sometimes, in handling cases, the pilot error takes the form of insufficient skill for that day's task which we know is not at all the same thing as forgetting to set the flaps before takeoff. Skill issues take us straight back to training and qualifications to obtain and maintain a licence. Which I believe is what the current debate is all about.

JF

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

John

Hand fly more or .....Autos more..............or something else?

Whats your view, please?:ok:

[John Farley]

BBf

I don't know because I suspect the answer is not a 'one size fits all' and must depend on the individual pilot, their aircraft type, their employer and the other pilot in the cockpit.

I'm just glad that I reached retirement without one of my many handling errors/problems being irrecoverable or resulting in a prang.

JF

[PJ2]

MD;
I would like to categorically lay to rest (pun fully intended) the myth that doctors do not have any scrutiny over each and every case they deal with. They certainly do. If they did not, I would be out of work, and believe me my desk is piled high.
Thanks for your again-thoughtful comments MD. A lot has been written on how aviation's CRM process "should" assist medicine and as I was writing I was considering and perhaps recognizing the differences and where the model might break down given their vastly different tasks, responsibilities and processes. Down in the details of design and execution of effective approaches, CRM is not be a panacea nor is an OR QAR!

What drove CRM in the very beginning was the unpleasant-at-the-time recognition brought about by several prescient observers whose names we know causing shifting of points of view that contrary to the socially-accepted views of the time", (called myths when we no longer believe such points of view), the captain didn't know everything and actually made "the occasional mistake" and that if others didn't speak up, the captain could (and did) kill everyone.

While such authority-figures "occured" in a society where top-down "command and control" was a characteristic of a post-war economic and social structure much was learned about how this structure and an unquestioned allegiance to authority alone could threaten end-goals such as preserving life, property, wealth and even 'a way of life', etc.

"What, not Who" slowly became the focus of change, that being the first signs of what was later recognized and labeled as "human factors".

Such development was neither natural nor easy for as late as the late 20th century, man (and his works) was still viewed philosophically as "perfect" or the "pinnacle of perfection", even in the face of major events showing quite the contrary. Philosophically, man's encounter with himself and the encounter with such events which showed not all was within man's control, expressed itself in the notions of existentialism.

I will stop there before those remaining drift off to sleep, but there are clear and definitive connections between what most would reasonably consider esoteric and largely irrelevant philosophical world views and such practical and seemingly "obvious" safety processes as we are discussing. In truth, it's philosophy all the way down...

To complete the point, the authority of the captain, though never undermined or denied, began to be viewed differently. I can recall my first CRM course very well because there were a lot of older captains made angry by the thought that "speaking up" was in fact challenging the captain's ultimate authority. Of course, nothing of the sort was intended and that view gradually "retired".

CRM is neither a way of "being polite or respectful" nor is CRM a challenge to the authority of the commander who is always legally responsible, but is instead a way of raising concerns or handling an abnormality (but not necessarily an emergency, which has its own procedures). Everyone has the authority and responsibility to speak up; sometimes the final outcome is a group decision and sometimes the captain makes the decision which may even be contrary to the results of CRM discussion. The key understanding in CRM is in expressing concerns, not flying the aircraft by committee.

It is impossible to state how many lives such an altered view has saved but the accident rate, which plummeted from the mid-60's on, is partial evidence that it worked. Of course, technical, mechanical and computerized solutions to aviation's primary accident causes of the time contributed heavily to the trend.

It is my impression that this view (changing authority gradients and the legitimacy of intervention) is extending itself into the OR and that's partially why, along with other observations, I made the comments I did.

I sense too that patients are embracing such a view. For my parents in the 40's, 50's and even 60's, the medical profession could do no wrong, "the Doctor" was never questioned, and one never sought second opinions for fear of offending or undermining confidence. Part of this is living in small communities of course. That is no longer the case, interestingly I think, because such a response is largely informal as society's views of authority changed, as described.

These are very black-and-white statements I know and I would expect that they offer only metaphorical "grains of truth" rather than definitive prescriptions for "the way things are/should be". I think that is the nature of John Farley's excellent contributions, which suggest and point rather than prescribe, as I read him anyway.

Your reassurance in your comments accomplish their purpose, thanks. - PJ2

[Phantom Driver]

Hand fly more or .....Autos more..............or something else?
I wonder why we're still rehashing these same old issues? For the n'th time, it is time to put egos/machoism to one side and accept the hard fact that todays air transport operational environment (RNP/RVSM/MNPS etc etc, you name it, and not to forget Big Brother FDAP-aka- tea and biscuits in the Chief Pilot's office) is predicated on automation.

Engineers have done a fantastic job with todays machines, which is why we are at such historical lows in accident rates (the famous "10 to the minus 9"). Our job now as pilots is to understand and apply to the fullest extent the benefits of automation. A luddite mentality will get us nowhere, and I speak as one who grew up in military flying where manual flying was the order of the day, be it at night doing 500 knots at low level over the sea , or at Mach 2 at 50,000 ft. We thought nothing of it, because that was the way it was.

You want to practice manual flying now? Your company should have you doing it on recurrent sim training (raw data approaches; repeated if necessary till proficient to acceptable standards; Can't hack it in the sim? then maybe time to retire, or go down to the local flying club and rent some time on a C172 or better still, a Pitts Special).

But to subject your paying customers to extended periods of maybe not-quite-up-to-par manual flying practice in the typical airspace that we operate in these days while at the same time perhaps overloading the PM and degrading his monitoring activities? I don't think so somehow.


I have said it many times before- if you or your family were riding down the back, what would you want the guys up front to be doing? I would suggest you would be looking for the smoothest, safest ride possible, not some chap trying to prove he is still up to the" manual fly at all cost"job; ( it would be great if we could always own up to the old adage-"the older I get, the better I was".). We often criticise the youngsters coming into the profession, but I have found that they generally do a pretty good job, given their inexperience; it all depends on standard of training received. As for we old timers, I always tell them that we need watching as well!

Automation will generally guarantee to perform as advertised (if properly instructed and monitored by our good selves) 100% of the time; Unfortunately we humans cannot provide any such guarantee.

[mercurydancer]

PJ2

As always a valuable post from you. I value the posts and posters on this site as it has been extremely beneficial to my professional development.

I have been thinking about much of your post today and done a little research.

Both the airline industry and healthcare share a mutual background in the military. Many doctors and nurses have military backgrounds ( as I do myself) so the concept of decisive action and command and control was innate. Some of the military concepts were beneficial, some detrimental, but as we in the UK remain at war the relationship to the military remains strong. The wild card in healthcare is the religious background with nursing. Hardly a week goes by without the Nursing Times commenting on the vocation (or calling) versus the professional attitude.

With reference to lives saved, In the last 5 years the most important development in both cancer care and other life threatening conditions has not been a new drug or scanner but the low key development of a MDT - a MultiDisciplinary Team. Its a clinical review of a case where everyone with an interest in that case has an equal input. This means that specialist nurses, radiologists, pathologists and surgeons meet to discuss and mutually agree the best path for the patient. Inititally this was viewed with much suspicion and was expected to degenerate into an argument with the surgeon taking the final say as he wields the knife. It depended on the focus as the patient first, ego second, as I imagine that a safe landing is more important than a captain's ego. As the teams matured, they produced coherent and pragmatic treatment plans, with magnificent results. We cannot match the French in cancer survival rates but part of that is the way we keep statistics and partly because the French have a far superior screening programme.

Ive used much of the terminology from aviation in improvement programmes for healthcare. MEL is one. Having the staff define what they absolutely need prior to an OR case was a very big step forward. Go\no go decisions was also very important. I can cite many examples of where a junior and inexperienced member of staff halted a procedure early (ie before it went pear shaped) because the go\no go decisions had been outlined.

Your comment about questioning medical opinion made me smile. It is largely a welcome development as it involves the patient in their own decisions for treatment. The thorn in the side is the media. They get so much wrong its astounding. Take MRSA - the superbug. Its widely described in the media as a hospital acquired infection (HAI). The facts are that if you swabbed the nostrils of every passenger on a 100 seat aircraft 20-30 would have MRSA bacteria positive. The reasons why we all dont get ill are complex but some facts about HAI is that a person turns up at hospital not well and we do tests and detect MRSA infection. They most probably acquired the infection in the community but as we discovered the cause, the hospital gets the statistic for MRSA infection.

I had an entertaining discussion with a surgeon today and the subject of airline\healthcare parallels came up. The discussion involved a very insightful comment from her - an aircraft takes off in a definable condition. A patient may turn up at hospital in a desperate state, and requires definitive and urgent attention. The surgeon described this situation in aviation terms as a pilot materialising in the captain's seat with an aircraft in severe difficulty and on its way to crash unless interventions were made. The surgeon has a PPL by the way.

PJ2 and others.. thanks for the posts. We have much to share.

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

Phantom

I understand where you're coming from but I couldn't agree less.;)

Auto flight is great 'til it stops. And stop it does!

If you rarely hand fly then you could find yourself poorly equipped for what you're holding in your hands.

I think excessive use of autos breeds:

Laziness.

Complacency.

[Sick Squid]

I had an entertaining discussion with a surgeon today and the subject of airline\healthcare parallels came up. The discussion involved a very insightful comment from her - an aircraft takes off in a definable condition. A patient may turn up at hospital in a desperate state, and requires definitive and urgent attention. The surgeon described this situation in aviation terms as a pilot materialising in the captain's seat with an aircraft in severe difficulty and on its way to crash unless interventions were made. The surgeon has a PPL by the way.

Mercurydancer, what an excellent analogy, and a very pertinent input to a thread that has developed along natural lines into a mature and reasonable discussion, with minimal input from behind the scenes (unlike certain other threads on this site, I have to say.)

I'm certainly thinking now, particularly following John Farley's post earlier, about the relative merits of "handling" versus "operating," and the interface between the two. I can't help but feel that they are not mutually exclusive, regardless of the corporate or legislative environment we work within. My view, having watched pilot handling skills degrade within my own company following a decision to ban manual thrust handling on Airbus (a previous type) is that it is a necessary function of risk management to allow practice under controlled conditions; example, I as Captain would neither perform nor permit a fully hand flown approach into the London TMA at rush hour to minimums, as the workload for the non-handler would be detrimental to flight safety. But I would certainly allow same on a quiet day as long as I felt comfortable with it and felt it was within either the capability of the P2 flying or my own capability to monitor, given rest, awareness, workload issues. After all, part of my remit is development of P2's, and I also include personal maintenance of skill within that remit; part of the trust placed in me by the award of command is that I have the necessary judgement to know when to say no.

I feel that is the thrust of the debate, with a strong nod of respect to the well-considered and experienced views of John F. Indeed, knowledge of your own situation is perhaps the ultimate expression of situational awareness.

One of the best calls I have ever seen in my career was with a young copilot flying a fully manual approach into LHR, a few years back. We were vectored tight, a little hot, little high, and he asked for the gear. Just as I was thinking "yep, we need the gear." Everything was working out fine, I'm quite comfortable. After a short while, he asks for the flight directors back, so I give them to him, then he re-engages the autopilot. Without me asking, he then says, "With the gear down, the attitudes were all wrong, I was getting maxed out."

Once we were on the ground, I congratulated him for what I still consider the single best call I have seen from the other seat; he was struggling, though not apparent to me, and elected for the safest route. The definition of workload management. So despite my comfort in the simple fact he was doing a good job, he felt empowered enough to call a halt to it without having some form of ego/machismo called into question. THAT, in my opinion, is what we should perhaps be struggling toward, as to me it indicates the ideal level of awareness that we, as pilots, should not just possess but foster.

Thank you to all the contributors for providing a thread and debate that reinforces my decision to devote my spare time to moderating this forum. A thread that also reminds me why this forum is the number one aviation site on the web.

Squid (moderator hat off, for a few minutes.)

[safetypee]

It is very difficult to compare the safety aspects of automation with manual flight. An aircraft is designed, built, and tested against known and tried standards, often hard learnt from experience - (FAR / CS 25); the human design and operation has no such reference book.

Both technology (automation) and humans have their positive attributes, each able to excel in certain situations, but whereas technology alone might provide a known standard of reliability, the human is subject to error (so too is technology, as discussed previously via the human in design – so triplicate, etc).

Automation has been used where either the human physical and/or mental capability is limiting, e.g. autoland in low visibility; the activity is driven by the situation.
Humans are good at solving problems, etc, the unknowns, although still subject to error.
As the general operating situation (the state of the industry) puts more pressure on the human, the apparent error rate increases; this is often interpreted as declining skill, but actually it is a sign of reduced safety margins. Thus, looking at the situations in which automation and humans work and their respective safety margins might provide a more meaningful comparison.

If the industry continues to demand economic efficiencies which constrain human flexibility and approach the limits of physical and mental capability, then automation, with an appropriate level of reliability for the situation has to be considered, e.g. Auto flight, RNAV, RVSM.

Alternatively, if the industry still needs the human flexibility, then the situation in which the human operates must be constrained to accommodate the limits of human performance, and the susceptibility to error.
Unlike automation, human reliability cannot be specified, thus the situation has to change to take account of the human.

I suspect that the practical solution lies somewhere inbetween these alternatives – technology and the human working together.
In current operations, we have automation and we have an industry ‘situation’; perhaps the problem is that we haven’t fully understood where the limits of each are and how to adjust reliability and situations to maintain a high standard of safety. We need to improve our understanding of both ourselves and the ‘situation’ (and equipment) in which we work.

A significant human attribute is that we can ‘create’ safety by manipulating situations, choosing where and when to use automation, but only if the background situation (crew selection, training, organization) provides sufficient margin from the limits of human performance.
If the reliability of automation is such that failure requires human intervention, then the residual system, indications, and operating environment must enable realistic human performance, this includes the level of training, e.g. Cat 3B autoland degrades - land - as the system is reliable; Cat 3A autoland fails – GA (perhaps the alternative of a manual landing has a reduced safety margin – pushing the boundary of human limits).

[despegue]

Any pilot who does not routinely handfly the aircraft WITHOUT the F/D has no place on the flightdeck. And I surely do not want myself or my family subjected to his/hers flying "skills" should the need arise to prove them.
Any Airline that forbids raw-data flying should have its AOC revoked for serious breaches in training and safety and the idiots making these rules should be fired on the spot.
Voila, again a very stern view by me to counter some of these computer geeks wanting the aura of being a pilot but being in reality a willing slave of automation without any spine, gut or responsability towards its proficiency and as a result a danger in the air.
You MUST be able to fly a raw-date approach on-speed, on-glide and SMOOTHLY or what are you doing in the cockpit anyhow?! It is the BASIC of being a pilot, the thing they taught you the very first flying lesson.

[Mac the Knife]

Here - The Law of Leaky Abstractions - Joel on Software (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/LeakyAbstractions.html)

...is an interesting article about the perils of writing computer software using tools designed to make it quicker and easier. But making it quicker and easier abstracts away what is really going on under the hood so that when the abstraction is wrong/leaky the coder who has never written code to the "bare-metal" (as older coders have) is often completely lost.

It seems to me that cockpit automation tends to "abstract away" the actual task of flying the aircraft, with not always happy results when the abstraction breaks down.

Quite an interesting parallel I thought....

Mac

[RAT 5]

I think it is a taken that the autos are much better to be used in certain circumstances. This is both for pax comfort, the exercising of good airmanship and flight management, and safety. However, what I often see is the autopilot taking the low experienced F/O for a ride. plug it in and off we go; yes, but to where? This is what I told it to do so I expect it to do it. Wait until you get married and try that philosophy. Why are aeroplanes female? (awaiting incoming: head down)
They need nurturing, watching and a helping hand now and then. If you don't what they should be doing, how & when, then it's difficult to intervene in time with a careful nudge. (aeroplanes that is)
Understanding the performance envelope is more possible with good hands on experience. Achieving this in the 80's on needles & dials a/c around the Greek islands was the norm and very enjoyable. I can't remember too many prangs in that enviroment and era.
I still thnik the pax expect us to be able to save the day when windows 69 takes a dislike to events and wants a day off. We should expect a major uproar if an accident report says 'george' crashed the a/c because the pilots let it. Ah, but then that has already happened, hasn't it, and where is the lasting uproar not only from pax but from CAA's? Decayed very quickly after every event.
How to achieve the level of handling skills from the past?...I don't know. It wasn't only the handling skills that were better, it was the ability to assimilate a lolt of information AND fly the a/c manually. You had only a DME, a needle and an altimeter to execute a CDA; and sometimes not even a DME. The ability to create a mental picture of where you were in 4 dimensions was necessary. It is not any longer. The MAP and VNAV makes it so easy, but still situational awareness is not as good as it should be. Take away the VNAV bug and look out of the window to fly a visual would be a No No for some pilots. It is considered almost dangerous to fly an approach with no G.P guidance, and sometimes not allowed at night. What ever happened to basic Mk.1 eyeball flying? Handling skills is one thing, but assessing a correct G.P should be as natural as knowing where the wind is coming from to a sailor. I see too many F/O's flying the F.D down to minima and beyond on a clear day. They have not been instilled with, 'set a sensible power, set a correct attitude, trim it, and then guide it gently, with fine corrections down to the TDZ by looking at the crash point and keeping that in the same place of the window. With so much head-in flying, assessing a correct G.P. is difficult to learn in the first place.
1 hour sim per year is not enough to learn these skills. Real life is the only way, but I understand fully why C.P's are reluctant to encourage daily piloting. They are answerable to the safety and financial people, and ulitmately so are we.
Difficult to find a solution to all our frustrations. Imagine you are in the C.P's shoes. What would you, exactly? Would you 'take the risk', or take the path of least risk as your bosses see it? I'm told that the arrival of bright sunny days also brings the increase in high energy approaches and gate busts. It is very sad, but the C.P's have an obligation to find a short-term solution. Automatics to full approaches or not too much of a short cut for a visual. The longterm solution to piloting skills will take a long time to find and enact. All C.P's have their own opinion. A coordinated response will only come via coordinated CAA's demanding some requirements, and I doubt that will happen.
I've never been to any 'training conferences', but I wonder what topics are discussed there and what conclusions were drawn and philosophies adopted. Can anyone help us with some insight?

Keep the blue side up.

[A37575]

and it does seem that various authorities have realised this may be the case.

Various Western world regulators may have read that handling skills are on the wane but very few think the subject is of sufficient flight safety importance to demand action from operators. In fact, it is a reasonable bet that nothing will change even if there are continued loss of control accidents.

The occasional crash here and there (even with the usual short lived media interest) killing a few hundred passengers a year, is probably statistically insignificant when compared to the number of aircraft flying at any one time of day around the world.

The Turkish Airlines B737 crash at Amsterdam made zero news among the aviation fraternity in Australia. The Bournemouth 737 close shave was read by Pprune readers but I doubt if operators learned from that shemozzle. Other typical loss of control crashes such as Flash Air, Adam Air and a host of "overseas" crashes over the past ten years stirred no interest at all with the Australian regulator nor probably the Taiwanese, Malaysian, New Zealand Indonesian or Chinese either -to name but a few

Regulators (bureaucrats, which may include long retired former pilots) may well have legislative authority to change engineering type issues of airworthiness interest, but very rarely do they venture into the sharp end of flying competency with any vigour. There is a plethora of articles on the doom and gloom attached to pure flying skills v automation complacency. But are regulators looking at these with serious interest? The answer is not really.

[latetonite]

I completely agree. And the problem is willingly not understood by the young generation of pilots. Their upgrade is measured in years in the seat or seniority. Many would should in their own foot if they made good flying skills a mandatory requirement for captaincy in any commercial aircraft.

[Phantom Driver]

BB-


I think excessive use of autos breeds:

Laziness.

Complacency


Agree entirely; Complacency-The biggest Killer. Which is why we are supposed to fight like crazy against it. As for laziness, one would hope that, in our profession, this would be stamped on pretty sharpish by the "system". If not, then there would be something seriously wrong with the safety culture of that particular organisation.

With regard to "hand flying", what exactly are we talking about here? Fly straight and level if necessary; max of 30 degrees bank turn to intercept the localiser, fly down the glideslope (ILS or PAPI) and land. Not exactly difficult, (it's not night ground attack!), and with regard to final approach and landing, we all do this (I hope) manually day in day out when conditions allow, which is 99% of the time. We leave Mr Autopilot to take care of the really hard stuff, such as Cat 3 business. In the sim, we practice what to do if he doesn't perform as advertised,(rarely), and we have to do it right, or else we don't get signed off. So what is the problem?

despegue:


Any pilot who does not routinely handfly the aircraft WITHOUT the F/D has no place on the flightdeck. And I surely do not want myself or my family subjected to his/hers flying "skills" should the need arise to prove them.
Any Airline that forbids raw-data flying should have its AOC revoked for serious breaches in training and safety and the idiots making these rules should be fired on the spot.
Voila, again a very stern view by me to counter some of these computer geeks wanting the aura of being a pilot but being in reality a willing slave of automation without any spine, gut or responsability towards its proficiency and as a result a danger in the air.
You MUST be able to fly a raw-date approach on-speed, on-glide and SMOOTHLY or what are you doing in the cockpit anyhow?! It is the BASIC of being a pilot, the thing they taught you the very first flying lesson.


"Routinely" handfly the a/c without the FD? "MUST" be able to fly a raw data approach? An admirable wish list, and in my earlier comments, I did state that this should be an essential part of simulator training. Indeed, we all obtained our instrument ratings in the first place by proving we were up to this particular task.

But the question is-put your hand on your heart and tell me-are you up to this particular task day in, day out, not just on the nice sunny days but also at the end of a long night slog. The answer is -obviously not. Nobody is advocating being a "willing slave to automation", just the exercise of a little common sense. Lets stop trying to reinvent the wheel and go back to the bad old days of autocratic Captains, non-existent CRM and high accident rates. Automation is here to stay. We should be grateful to our engineering colleagues and to other enlightened members of the aviation profession.

"To thine own self be true".

[RAT 5]

And don't forget, the automatics have limitations. The aeroplane has greater wind limts than an autoland. When it's nasty; cross wind, tailwind, possible windshear or very turbulent, then the trusty pilot will have to earn their crust. Will they all be able to long into the future? It will be a sorry state where pilot handling limits are limited to the same as autolands due to lack of practice and safety scares, but it could happen. It will be a sad day when diversions due to crosswinds outside pilot limits happens.
How do the charter pilots feel about their new recruit standards? Airlines still fly into Calvi, Samos, Kos, Corfu, Heraklion, and numerous other worldwide testing non-ILS runways. Some maybe captain only landings, but the future captains are today's F/O's. Sounds obvious, but the extra stipe doesn't turn you instantly into a better handler.

[mercurydancer]

Squid

I hear ya.

Some threads are very insightful and this is one. The essences of such threads do transcend professions or disciplines. To distil this one
into a single question is - At what point does automation cease to be a benefit and actually detracts from human performance? Kipling wrote a suitable and very accurate poem about such a dilemma.

As for other posts, I must say, I have no problem with it being pulled. In retrospect it could have been much better phrased. But call me old fashioned because rudeness I will not tolerate.

[Microburst2002]

I fully respect the benefits of automation. I also respect the benefits of technology. I advocate what I call Human Performance Augmentation, as opposed to human substitution. Give me GPWS, so I have an "aracnid sense" of ground dangerously close. Give me TCAS, so I can "see" airplanes miles away and know their relative position, altitude and rate, and how to avoid crashing into one. Give me an ND and RNAV capability so I know my position and the relative positions of runways, navaids, routes, etc... with just a glance. Give me a stall warning (or FBW envelope protections) so I won't stal nor exceed any limitations.

Give me anything thant makes me better, more capable, more powerful. Enhance me, don't substitute me. Because I am valuable piece of biological technology (which took millions of years to be designed ) that makes all the others twice as much powerful.

Give me automation to be able to maintain a perfect situational awareness even in the most demanding circumstances. But don't make me unable to cope safely enough with the same situation should the need arise. Don't degrade my brain (the "hand" part of hand flying is in fact brain). Keep it fit.

If hand flying skills are allowed to be degraded (and they are, if all you practice is one hand flown approach in the sim every six months) for the sake of supposed better safety by means of AP only flight, then MAY DAY should be transmitted in case of an automation failure in flight.
Same as in case of a crewmember incapacitation.
And MEL should say NO GO for any autoflight item u/s.

Throwing away handling skills and relying exclusively in automation is an error. Automation is one of the greatest inventions in aviation, but must be used by a skilled hand flyer to be totally safe. Otherwise a large part of that potential high safety is lost.
It is not so difficult. Just a few approaches every month, and a few take offs too, when circumstances are good. Hand flying when it doesn't compromise safety improves overall safety.
CAT III ops are very complex landings. So we have to practice in sims. But manually flown approaches can also be needed, so why shouldn't they be practiced as well? however, a monitoring skill needs less practice than an acting skill. In CAT III all you need to do, is monitor that everything is OK and intervene only if something is wrong. But you have to carry out a manual approach yourself. It requires much more practice, and more recurrently.

[A37575]

But the question is-put your hand on your heart and tell me-are you up to this particular task day in, day out, not just on the nice sunny days but also at the end of a long night slog. The answer is -obviously not.

No one is advocating hours of hand flying to keep in practice. Some years ago when flying for a German 737 operator, I kept my hand in by hand flying SIDS and STARS with FD off - in other words where Rnav wasn't necessary for the task. It was merely a case of watching VOR/ADF needles doing their job to indicate crossing fixes. It was basic instrument flying that single pilot IFR pilots do as routine flying tasks.

A few weeks later an invitation to tea and bikkies arrived from the chief pilot of the airline. A pleasant kindly chap he asked me to desist from hand flying unless necessary, because the first officers of his airline were not trained to monitor raw data navigation aid flying - only automatics.

Clearly hands on flying is inappropriate at certain times - maybe because of weather or a complex terminal area. But here we had relatively straight forward departure and arrival procedures which obviously scared the automation bred first officers who lacked basic instrument flying skills.

And these 500 hour wonders were second in command of 150 passenger airliners. Aft of the flight deck door, the cabin crew and passengers would have been totally convinced that the two blokes up front were two highly experienced pilots able to save their lives from any imaginable emergency. Where ignorance is bliss, 'tis folly to be wise..

[protectthehornet]

So, someday soon, whenever the automatics are off, one must declare an emergency...perhaps even be escorted by air force fighters?

Bravo to all of you who ''keep your hand in". My process was to hand fly to cruise...trim up and then engage the autopilot...the test was if the autopilot had to retrim!

Also hand flew the descent from TOD to touchdown. Mind you, hand flying for hours in level flight can be fatiguing (God Bless you Charles Lindbergh)but my ''runs'' were all of the up and down along the ''shuttle'' routes of the US East coast.

I never cared for the flight director, but as required by regulation for approaches and takeoff (for cues for engine out pitch)...but I always felt that turning it off would be just fine.

And quite frankly, I don't feel the airbus is ever flown by hand...even with the sidestick.

[PJ2]

PTH;
I never cared for the flight director
Interesting. I never really liked the flight director either. Not that they weren't good but I preferred to "look through" the FD to the raw data on the ADI/PFD etc to make my own adjustments when hand-flying. Sometimes the FD would lead what I was flying and sometimes it would lag, (always in short-term situations, bear in mind); the key is not in slavish adherence to what the FD was commanding but flying the airplane first. The two always caught up with one another! The other method was to simply turn the FD off which is what Airbus recommends if you're not going to "follow the FD". I expect to be taken to task by some for espousing the notion of "ignoring the FD" but that's not what the "cognition" was - it was permitting the FD to "ride on top of awareness while looking behind it to the raw data" at what the airplane was actually doing, maintaining a keen SA and flying the machine. It can't be taught nor should it be; it comes from time in.

[protectthehornet]

PJ2

glad to see we agree on the flight director business.

One thing I did like to do, when I was the PNF, I would set the FD to pitch for level flight cruise. That way, if the fecal matter hit the oscillating ventilator, I would have something to aim for.

The FD was required by company procedure for takeoff and by FAR for low vis landing...so I used it...the single cue is much better than the two cue/cross hair in my mind.

But if they threw it all out of the plane, I was still good to go in my mind. I looked "through" it too ...especially the two cue cross hair.

atb

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

Re 'Flight Director'.

I'm really used to the FD these days. It's a valuable tool in a lot of ways. One of which is that as it showsthe ideal flightpath, if you're handflying, it shows your deviation from same.

When I started (on Loganair Shorts SD-360) most of our a/c had no FD or autopilot , or nothing.

Yet we still had to hack a CAT 1 ILS to mins and did so all the time..

My handflying then was **** hot.

Recently, going into Nice, the autos and FD both went off. Took me a few swerves to get the ILS going properly.

I was a bit ashamed of myself when we'd landed off the same 'raw data' ILS that I used to do 'day in and out' on the shed.

Use it, or lose it.:uhoh:

[iceman50]

BB

What do you fly and what was the cause of the AP and FD failure?

Just want to get a full picture of your example and that you are not using it as a way of trying to "back up" your argument.

protectthehornet

What do you fly these days? The airbus does hand-fly nicely by the way, don't be biased. I agree you have to look through the FD to learn the attitudes, however you tend to blow your arguments when you add your "own: way of doing things.One thing I did like to do, when I was the PNF, I would set the FD to pitch for level flight cruise. Separate FD's on different modes?

Guys this is not a willie waving contest!

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

PTH / Iceman

I fly the BAe RJ 100. Its a 112 seat British, 4 jet marvel.:)

The reason for the failure was that Nice were using their ILS on 04L(normally they use their elegant 'Riviera' proc, but thats another story).

The GS failed. So the AP and FD went off. (the G/S at NCE does this a lot and they went to VOR/DME apps after us).

As we were humming along in full auto mode, on our last vector to intercept the ILS, and as it happened at that critical moment, one had to grab the plane, pick a heading etc etc.


It just reminded me of how my skills have been wasted by years of FD and A/P flight.

And I'M one of guys who hand flys a lot.

What are the others like?:ooh:

[iceman50]

BB

Thanks for the info, obvious design differences between what we both Fly / Operate!

[Microburst2002]

Airbus can be manualy flown. I swear everytime I push the sidestick, the nose goes down. Every time I pull, it goes up. Also, everytime I advance the thrust levers, N1 increases. It always decreases when I retard them.

What else do I need to fly an airplane?

[protectthehornet]

you may think you are hand flying the airbus...but

I am reminded of a FAA designated examiner who was asked to give an instrument check ride/instrument rating ride in a brand new Mooney

The mooney has a full time ''wing leveler'' and you have to press a button on the yoke to allow disengagement for a turn.

He called up the FAA and said: you can't give an instrument rating to a guy who takes a checkride with the autopilot on all the time.

The FAA said: give him the ticket.

But do you really think that guy is a good instrument pilot in any plane but a mooney?????

And this was some 30 years ago.

[PJ2]

PTH;
you may think you are hand flying the airbus...but
LOL...a good friend with whom I enjoyed flying the A320 a great deal and who loves the B767, (who wouldn't?), always snapped on the autopilot soon after takeoff with the exclamation, "it'd be different if I were really flying it..."

I always enjoyed the back and forth with my buddy who loved Boeings, (as I do, and for the same reasons) because it was always good-natured and never driven by ideologies! So with a bit of fun in mind,...

The basis for the opinion is of course "fbw", ...that somehow who's flying has no "real" connection with the airplane's controls, can't "feel" the airplane because of auto-trim and doesn't know what the engines are doing because the thrust levers don't move, and, when one needed it most, "the software engineers took away the ability to get the most out of the airplane!"

But, with a bow in DC-ATE's direction, that's the case with every airliner since the DC8 which was the last real cable and pulley jet airliner. Since then it's been hydraulics, electrics and artificial load feel all the way down. Heck, the DC8 and B707 both had "non-moving" throttles and we never had a problem knowing what the engines were doing. One was constantly adjusting them however, as fuel was burnt and sometimes the throttle-stagger, was....um, staggering, (sorry...(I'm Canadian)).

So what's the big deal about non-moving thrust levers, hydraulically-powered, electrically-controlled flight controls?

I believe that, as with any airliner, a matter of understanding combined with habit is all that separates an enthusiastic response to the A320/A330 series from the sense that there is a veil between you and the airplane, (which is how I felt the first time I stepped into the cockpit..."where is everything?"...I asked myself).

Every airliner is a compromise, this airplane being no different; the compromises are exponential to the advancements in an industry unaccustomed to large, all-at-once changes, and Airbus took the industry to places it hadn't been except for military aircraft. Boeing followed suit with the B777 which is indeed fbw but with a few differences, (I know about by-passing the main flight control computers, but it's still fbw after the disconnect) and the brilliant B787, which I sincerely regret that I'll never fly, is entirely based upon carbon, one of the most stable elements in the universe, so it has to be a good'un, eh?

Anyway - in fun, PTH. I wish I still had the chance to hand-fly or even have the choice to engage an autopilot...

PJ2

[protectthehornet]

`PJ2

yes, all in fun.

but you forget the DC9...cables and pulleys too...considered the last, "PILOT'S Airliner". We didn't even have any sort of auththrottles and honestly, we really didn't need them.

one become one with the plane the more one is involved in the flying...we become the auto if you will.

and we are our own backup.

one learns to fly without auto and is ready

one learns to fly with auto and must also learn to fly manual...twice the effort if you ask me

[BarbiesBoyfriend]

Use it.

Or.............

Lose it.

[Loose rivets]

A few weeks later an invitation to tea and bikkies arrived from the chief pilot of the airline. A pleasant kindly chap he asked me to desist from hand flying unless necessary, because the first officers of his airline were not trained to monitor raw data navigation aid flying - only automatics.

Nice as he may be, he is so, so wrong.

Any pilot should be able to maintain height and course very accurately while flying c 250 kts. In the cruise is a different matter, there, passengers really feel the slight control inputs...and they don't like it. Below cruise speeds, well they need to put up with it, while the world's crews maintain basic skills. After all, it's in their interest that standards are kept to reasonable levels.

[cactusbusdrvr]

I just came back to the Airbus after 6 years of flying the 757. I would amuse the F/Os by hand flying the short PHX to SAN and PHX to LAS legs (all below RVSM airspace due to ATC restrictions). 45 minute or so sectors and it helped to keep the skills sharp. I always hand fly approaches unless it is CAT II or worse, I live for cloudy days!

The Airbus is better to fly off the automation when you are doing short approaches or anytime you are asked to push the limit a little by ATC. The Airbus was designed to be flown in steady, stable patterns, something that does not always happen in real life.

Most of the F/Os I fly with turn on the autopilot at 500 feet and turn it off at 500 feet. They never get a feel for the aircraft and when it comes time to go into the sim they fly like sh#t. The Boeing guys were better at doing more hand flying, mainly I think because the 75 is such a great plane to fly. The Airbus guys are brainwashed into believing that the automation has to be on all the time. When I turn the autothrottles off and fly it like a real airplane it gives them the confidence to see that it is, after all, just another jet.

[silverstrata]

and with regard to final approach and landing, we all do this (I hope) manually day in day out when conditions allow, which is 99% of the time. .... So what is the problem?

The problem is Mr New Management will not allow it.

Mr New Management is so petrified of an incident, and so convinced that automatics are safer, that they will not let us hand fly. So the hand flying is rusty if it is ever needed, and no extra sim-time is allocated to brush up.

The problem is management.

[angelorange]

From

http://www.caa.co.uk/docs/33/2004_10.PDF

"Knowledge of Manual Flying vs Automatic Control
3.7.1 From the initial stages of flying training pilots develop skills to manually control the
flight path in a feed-forward type of behaviour. This means that when recognising an
error in the flight path performance the pilot makes a control input in anticipation of a
desired response – they think ahead in a pro-active manner. However, studies have
shown that pilots operating modern automation for flight path control do not have the
knowledge or understanding to predict the behaviour of the automation based on
detection of an error and selection of a control input. They cannot always predict the
behaviour or feedback cues of the systems modes; as a result it may be said that they
behave in a feedback or reactive manner - they are behind the aircraft.
3.7.2 As illustrated above there is a recognisable difference in the way humans (pilots)
handle certain types of knowledge. The basic skills associated with 'manually flying'
an aircraft are predominantly based on procedural knowledge i.e. how to achieve the
task. However, the use of automation to control the flight path of an aircraft is taught
as declarative knowledge. Pilots are required to manage systems based on a
knowledge that the autoflight system works in a particular fashion. So, the pilot is
faced with the same operational task of controlling the flight path but employs two
different strategies of cognitive behaviour depending upon whether the task is
manually or automatically executed. As discussed above the current requirements for
licence and type rating issue prescribe standards and experience in the procedural
knowledge of manual control of the flight path; however, there are no similar
requirements to ensure appropriate standards and experience for the procedural
knowledge of control of the flight path using automation.
December 2004
CAA Paper 2004/10 Flight Crew Reliance on Automation
Chapter 3 Page 7
3.7.3 It may be concluded that pilots lack the right type of knowledge to deal with control
of the flight path using automation in normal and non-normal situations. This may be
due to incorrect interpretation of existing requirements or lack of a comprehensive
training curriculum that encompasses all aspects of the published requirements. It
suggested that there should be a shift in emphasis in the way automation for flight
path control is taught and trained. Further research is required to identify the cause
and provide a solution."

[Microburst2002]

Why are they surprised?

Does anyone remember in which subject of the ATPL manual flying techinque is studied?

.... None?

I remember Trevor Thom book, of course but I don't remember any institution telling me to study it or having to pass written tests on how to fly. The subject of how to fly does not exist as such. Isn't it amazing? Pilots learning depends on each instructor, good or bad, with correct or incorrect technique.

I had to argue many times with FIs that "power is for rate and pitch for speed" is a wrong law, many times. They thought I was crazy. It is on the books, but books that nobody has prescribed as necessary.

And in which subjet is automated flying technique studied ?


... None?

I don't even know of any book on that.

They should be glad that pilots know how to hand fly. Thanks to their flight instructors, only.

[Ladusvala]

"power is for rate and pitch for speed" is a wrong law, many times

Microburst2002, please explain a little more about your comment above, please.

[angelorange]

From Avweb 17 Mar 2010:

Copilots for commercial flights carrying passengers would be required to have at least 800 hours of flight time under a measure passed by the Senate Tuesday. Current rules require only 250 hours. The 800 hours must include experience working in multiple-pilot environments and training in handling adverse weather and icing conditions. If the legislation becomes law, the FAA would have until the end of 2011 to issue new rules. The measure is just one part of the FAA reauthorization bill, which has been laden with dozens of controversial amendments, some of which have little or nothing to do with aviation, on its way through Congress. It's expected that the FAA will be given another 90-day funding extension on Thursday, moving the deadline back to June 30 for the reauthorization bill to pass.

Relatives of the victims of Colgan Air Flight 3407 have been actively lobbying Congress to include in the bill changes in the training standards for pilots on commercial passenger flights. The House version of the FAA reauthorization bill has already been passed, and it includes a 1,500-hour minimum requirement for right-seaters on commuter airlines. Whatever the Senate passes will have to be merged with the House bill by a House-Senate conference committee that will then vote on whatever compromises they reach. The long-awaited funding bill is expected to provide support for the development of NextGen.

[Microburst2002]

Thanks for info.

It is to be seen if this will bring more problems that it solves.
At first sight it sounds good, of course. But murphy law is unavoidable.
Every solution brings new problems.

In the USA, pilots can find ways to build time and get paid for it, or so it used to be years ago. If airline needs are supplied by these kind of pilots, the bill is a good one. Otherwise they have to allow for an alternate path to the RHS (not based on pay, pay and pay again, please!).

In Europe, if they did that there would be a lot of pilots spending a lot of money to build that time (good bussiness for FLA schools!) because general aviation there is a joke, almost non-existent. Still, if the "alternate path" that the americans should include in the bill, imho, was reasonable, then Europe could follow.

Let's see what happens

[A310Capt]

:confused: Amazing how "polarized" this sort of debate can still be. After 20 years flying, I then worked along 6.5 years - and had 6,500+ hrs logged as TC Instructor / TC Evaluator inside Level "D" FFS's in 3 distinct types of acft -, instructing & checking in a major (FAR 142 certified) Training Center in Asia (plus a few years as TRI/TRE with different operators), so my point of view is: although automation (obviously) came to stay, it is never too much to emphasize engineers should stick to their desks, same way we pilots should stick to our flight decks. "To each monkey its own branch", as we say in my country. We cannot teach them how to build acft and/or their systems (though some manufacturers wisely like to use pilots impressions in their projects, while others arrogantly see pilots as minor players or even as a "necessary evil", whose autonomy should be restrained, even inside the flight deck), nor should the engineers have the pretension to teach us how to do our jobs. Automation and its understanding / management is a vital part of modern flying, that goes without saying. However, I will never buy the idea of accepting complacency and/or "automation worshipping" / "automation-brain-wash" to take over the flight deck, be it inside a simulator, be it inside a real airplane, simply because it kills people. Automation fails exactly when it should not (it seldom does on VMC with clear-blue sky; more likely the Deep S:mad:t happens approaching the ITCZ at night, as sadly happened to a widebody almost 01 yr ago, over the Atlantic, flying from GIG to CDG), specially on old & badly maintained acft, and then - if you are not ready to take over - then who's the acft's backup? Airbus Rule # 6 says: "When things don't go as expected - TAKE OVER". Very nice, in theory. My question is: how can you be ready to take over, if you never practice the takeover? Are you able to fly the automation, or - in a daily basis - the automation has been flying you??? I respectfully disagree with colleagues who think hand-flying can be practiced in the simulator recurrent only. It can, for the sake of exercising non-normals and being signed-off, but - no matter how high the fidelity index of a given simulator is - it is never the same as the real aircraft. "The box" is "the box", the only "master" inside it is the guy sitting on the I.O.S. (and I talk out of personal experience, as I am used to be in the I.O.S. as much as in the pilot's seats). So, while never advocating hand-flying within congested airspace and/or during high workload phases, it is my opinion hand-flying should indeed be practiced, at some point of the line routine. Any acft can be flown manually (Airbus' Rule # 1: "The aircraft can be flown like any other aircraft", though I believe that little blue card has been made when my kind of Airbus was the standard, not the current ones;)).

I had the opportunity to train a large group of young pilots in Asia, and that has been an extremely rich experience, for many reasons. 1st, the cultural differences (as I am from South America and most of my students/trainees were asians), 2nd because I had a completely different formation than the one they had. I started flying on Piper J3's, Piper Cub's and other basic tail-draggers (later on flew as a crop-duster, then corporate acft before reaching my 1st airline job in the mid-'80s), while those guys had never flown any basics. Most of them were either trained by the local armed forces or underwent their initial training in highly-equipped glass-cockpit acft on the local flight academy. So - as these people basic acft is a much better aircraft, their basic training should necessarily be different. It was common to have a student turning into an upset condition upon loosing an FD, or else two guys with heads-down on a visual short final approach (one flying through the approach by instruments only, even though runway had been in sight after a while, the other still making "drawings" & calculations on the FMC keyboard). The name of that disease is "automation-worshipping". So we must "use the proper level automation for the task" (Airbus' rule # 7), but we do not blindly rely on it, because it is dangerous & unrational. My question to the trainee was always: "Mr X, what's the purpose of the automation?" Answer: "To reduce workload, Captain"...my 2nd question: "Good. And why are you using automation to increase your workload, instead???" :E

Another personal word about simulator training: simulators should not be the "horror chambers" that may cause nightmares in many pilots. Instead they should be like a "laboratory" with a motion, where each of us can practice what we cannot in the real acft. Obviously, however - and mostly due to economic-financial reasons -, most airlines do not allow it. Given the way many operators provide recurrent training, nowadays, in the format of "box-ticking-policy" sessions, it does not seem likely to me that there would be much room for "free-plays". The C.A. Authority demands an absurd amount of maneuvers & non-normals to be performed in a 4-hour session which, in many cases, has to serve both as a training & checking (OPC/LPC etc). That neither trains nor checks anyone. That is frustrating, it is a massacre perpetrated every 6-months agains pilots, just for the sake of complying with the regulations, checking boxes, filling-up paperwork and nicely signing & stamping logbooks, and then everyone goes back into line-flying (one side pretending the syllabus has been tought, the other pretending the syllabus has been learnt), and life goes on. It is a fact many pilots (if not the vast majority) feel very uncomfortable, once they complete their recurrents.

Nice & Safe flights to everyone, keep yr hand-flying skills honed!!!:ok::ok::ok:

[Centaurus]

Well put A310. But I am afraid things will never change from what we are seeing now. Your Asian experience is not new - it happens all the time. The fact is many pilots are so brain-washed into automatics that they are now afraid to let go of their mother's (automatics) hand. They count on that one in a thousand chance of ever losing control of the aircraft as the rationale for thinking it will never happen to them.

[p51guy]

Great post A310. All so very true.

[PJ2]

Yes, very well and clearly stated, A310.

I recall very well these issues being predicted, mainly by pilots and pilots' associations when the A320 was introduced in the late 80's, early 90's.

Such observations were no surprise to pilots, but airline bean counters, perhaps dealing with the effects of de-regulation and other economic crises, slowly became intoxicated with the cost-savings of the new, two-man cockpits, and holding on to the notion, engendered by the manufacturer, that automation would "fly the airplane" and reduce training and qualification needs. I think that very few if any pilots ever thought this or believed it.

This serious failing of fundamental understanding of aviation not only reduced the number of pilots in the cockpit, (and now some are talking about "one-man cockpits!?"), but over the following two decades would reduce training footprints and enable hiring "less - experienced pilots." The response to such obvious trends which were seen and commented upon back then has been glacial.

These chickens are now coming home to roost. The Flight Safety Foundation is speaking out clearly on the issue. While primarily intended to focus on systems failures and handling, the comment from the Flight Safety Foundation is precisely what this thread is about.

While I think that supporting the automation innovations designed mainly by Airbus is legitimate I think first, that a clear marketing strategy was to leave the impression that the airplane was going to be easy to fly for anyone, that the automated cockpit would be safer than steam-types and that cockpit commonality would reduce qualification and training costs. This has perhaps been true but what was not taken into account was the nature of the airline industry (vice the nature of aviation itself).

Pilots used to know that appropriate use of automation as a supplement to aircraft handling, supported with thorough training, was always the understanding had of such advances, first seen in the B-767, (which was initially to be a three-man cockpit). Through no fault of their own, we are seeing the beginnings of a generation raised on "FS in a comfortable if not naive environment", who don't know what they don't know about aviation.

Automation is not, and has never been the problem; the expectation that automation can replace thinking has been the mistake all along.

In other words, this is neither an Airbus nor a Boeing problem alone. It is a structural problem within the airline transportation system itself which probably went too far in early assumptions regarding automation and the reasons used for cost-reductions.

In more than one way it is the same portentous outcome that we are seeing in response to SMS especially in the US where some airlines have taken advantage of reduced oversight under the program. SMS is not intended as the de-regulation/self-monitoring of flight safety but that is what it became; it was naive and money-driven to think otherwise. On this, I think both the US and finally the Canadian regulator have hearkened to the problem and are acting.

Here is the FSF article:


Reaction to systems failure faces scrutiny

THE way pilots respond to the failure of computer-controlled systems on advanced aircraft is likely to be the next big area to come under scrutiny by safety authorities, a leading US expert believes.

Flight Safety Foundation global chief executive Bill Voss said there was increasing concern about the interface between pilots and aircraft automation, as well as how this should be incorporated into aviation training.

Mr Voss said during a visit to Sydney that he had seen a preliminary analysis of Line Operation Safety Audit (LOSA) reports designed to gauge the prevalence of problems with automation and how well they were managed.

"And the answer keeps coming out to extremely prevalent and very badly managed," he said.

"It's actually a significant threat."

Questions about automation in planes received increased attention after the crash of an Air France Airbus A330 over the Atlantic Ocean last year.

Australians also saw a graphic example of what could go wrong when an Emirates crew in Melbourne mistyped the Airbus A340's take-off weight and struggled to get airborne after a tail-strike.

Investigators have still to reveal what caused an air data inertial reference unit to malfunction and send a Qantas A330 to go on a wild ride through West Australian skies in 2008. Mr Voss also cited a radar altimeter failure to which a crew failed to react prior to a Turkish Airlines crash at Amsterdam; a 2007 TAM A320 runway overrun in Brazil's Sao Paolo where one engine deployed thrust reversers while the other accelerated; and a crash the same year of an Adamair 737 off Indonesia.

"Even if you go back to fairly primitive aircraft like the Adamair accident, they were changing their modes in the weather and actually blanked out their flight display," he said. The internationally renowned air safety expert said there was a common thread through many of the accidents and it was time to train for a new type of emergency that looked at the failure modes in highly automated aircraft. This included talking explicitly about how automation fails, how pilots should cope with it and if they had the "gut skill" to get through the failures.

"These systems are amazing -- they will usually recover themselves, but you've got maybe 30 seconds where you've got to gut through things like the pitot tube (part of the air speed measuring devices) failures we've seen," he said. "That's all it takes -- attitude and power for about a minute and you're out the other side of the problem. But if you don't, you die."

He said pilots needed snappy new phrases for automation failures that were similar to "dead foot, dead engine" slogans that helped them identify which engine had quit.

"The (US Federal Aviation Administration) is probably going to push it and you're seeing some speeches from (FAA administrator) Randy Babbitt, who's very tuned into this stuff," he said.

Reaction to systems failure faces scrutiny | The Australian (http://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/aviation/reaction-to-systems-failure-faces-scrutiny/story-e6frg95x-1225845453799)

[Wiley]

Do you think, in Aviation, we're going through a metamorphosis today similar to what occurred when steam gave way to sail with sea transport?

I don't think there'd be one person reading this thread who wouldn't be willing to bet a year's salary that back then, old captains brought up on sail sat around in harbour bars decrying the lack of skills/knowledge etc of the new breed of 'stink boat' sailor.

It's a fact. Things change, and sometimes irrevocvably.

However, for Aviation, I don't think the sail to steam analogy holds too much water (sorry if some see that as a dreadful pun to some). Where a 'new breed' ship's officer on one of them thar new-fangled coal burners would have lost the ability and the knowledge to rig a jury sail (that's if the new-fangled steamer had a mast that would take one!), at worst, he might have - eventually - drifted onto a shoal if he lost his engines, and in many cases, he should have had quite some time to summon some help before actually hitting those rocks.

In Aviation, it really is different. We're not steaming at 12 knots, we're doing 480 knots, or at best, maybe 120K, and those 'rocks' (or at 480 knots, something equally as hard), are ALWAYS just minutes, sometime only seconds, away.

I've seen quite a few posts here from people decrying the (us!) Old Farts and our predictions of gloom and doom with the loss - and lack of maintenance - of hand flying skills. At the risk of sounding like one of those old sailing captains in a seaside tavern 150 years ago, I think I'll close by repeating PJ2's (I think) very wise comment from his post above, with my own emphasis added.

Through no fault of their own, we are seeing the beginnings of a generation raised on "FS in a comfortable if not naive environment", who don't know what they don't know about aviation.

Edited to add: "...and thanks to patently silly airline SOPs demanding the use of the highest level of automation available at all times on the line, this new generation will never be given the chance to develop vital skills and to learn that - maybe on just one awful day in their otherwise uneventful careers - those skills really can be the difference between life or death."

[protectthehornet]

sail vs. steam...one thing...even the best modern sailors often get some hands on experience on a sailing ship. USS Eagle? if memory serves.

[PJ2]

Wiley;

Yes, I think we are metamorphizing but I don't think it is such changes which result in accidents.

I think separating technique (know-how) from intelligence, (knowing) is one way to answer your question.

By know-how I mean the way an enterprise is carried out. By oar, by sail, by propeller by stream of turbine-driven water, with bulbous-nosed hulls to catamaran designs.

By "intelligence" I don't mean high brain power, I mean comprehension through experience.

The ocean requires experienced knowledge of how hulls, propulsion, long tracts of water and large weather systems, tides, fresh and salt water all interact.

The "character of physical law" as Feynman put it, doesn't change so failure means failure to take into account physical law.

Success, even uninterrupted, long success with fancy powerpoints trying to convince others that the right thing is being done, is still descriptive, not predictive.

We can imagine something similar for airplanes. The stuff of "how", changes, as we obviously understand. The stuff of "what", doesn't change.

Most of us are familiar with the old saying attributed to Captain Lamplugh:
"Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect."

I think a far, far better view, again by Richard Feynman may add something to the conversation. He stated the following in his contribution to the investigation into the Challenger accident:

"For a successful technology, reality must take precedence over public relations, for Nature cannot be fooled."

Automation uses natural laws but is wholly unanticipatory. Like all algorithms, software and computers are totally blind and can be wrong billions of times per second. So far, the only intervention is the "tuned-receivers" in the cockpit seats who know the real difference between know-how and knowing.

I doubt if a single airline manager can say the same thing, not because I think less of them but because they are so narrowly focussed on staying alive in this industry that they can't stop to really manage and instead can only see the cost equations until nature catches up.

But none of this filosophickal stuff makes money, right?

PJ2

[SpannerInTheWerks]

I was in discussion with some flying buddies the other day and the conversation drifted on to reminiscences of the 'good old days' when we used to fly manually, before the advent of automated flight decks.

The comment was made by my two friends (one CFI and one former airline training captain) that the pilots coming through training today - and ending up in the airlines - don't know the 'basics' regarding aircraft handling and airmanship, let alone the 'trade' of the commercial pilot.

I have never been an advocate of the 'learn to drive in a week' philosophy and, it seems, the 'learn to fly in a year' is, in some respects, no better.

It takes time to absorb not just the theory and practice, but the environment in which you operate (whether driving or flying).

Although we're all trained for simulated emergencies (and in most sim checks know what to expect - V1 cut, emergency descent and the like) I wonder what would happen if completely random emergencies were thrown in to the mix?

I know this won't happen because the airlines would not want to risk failing pilots by making recurrency training too difficult, so we all get the same standard (regulatory) tests - predicable or pre-briefed.

As an instructor, flying light aircraft, when I have thrown an un-briefed emergency on to a student or PPL (briefed there would be an 'emergency' but not what it would be) the results have generally created the 'panic' of the real world as people are not primed.

How about simulating some 'real' un-briefed emergencies with the inexperienced pilots - such as the BA BAC1-11 incident - pilot incapacitation, emergency descent, diversion etc. NO WAY the airlines would say - too expensive, too time consuming and pilots might fail ...

The airline industry has settled into a 'comfortable' routine of training and testing - a production line of pilots all tested to the same standard in the same way. Not a bad system, just predictable and routine - something aviation, by its very nature, certainly is not.

Maybe, with the reliability of modern aircraft, engines and systems, that's all that's required?

Maybe it might also mean that when things go badly wrong it's almost certain to be a lottery whether the crew as a whole has that 'wealth of experience' to pull one out of the bag?

SITW :)

[bereboot]

Well , this has always been the story : the 20000hr/ 30 yr flying experience pilot complaining to the world about the old days.
No , in my company there are certainly less experienced pilots , however all the guys i fly with are competent for the job.
Regularly I get questions to confirm if ''I would do the same'' , giving me a strong impression that the younger guys are really thinking about possible ( combination ) of failure's
No , no-one can have the overall experience of having seen it all , but I am truly happy to fly with as well the youngsters as the older guys

[cpt777]

Well , this has always been the story : the 20000hr/ 30 yr flying experience pilot complaining to the world about the old days.

Well put berefoot, it has always been. Seeing how the older chaps can hardly be satisfied with the young ones. Though I sensed some real sincerity and pointers highlighted by 310, whom I'm sure would be the lot of SIM instructors that the young blokes would be lucky to have.
We on the left seats must learn to adapt with times, to highlight according to the way that will work with the new generation. No point just lamenting about it while letting them "heads down" and never help to give them a slight pull. Like it or not, from this part of the world (Asia), the young guys are coming through this way, straight from prop equipment to most aviators' dream jets.
Interesting to note, through some feedback, a lot of times the older guys (be it local or expat) are the ones that are not so keen on allowing the disconnection of automation for fear of workload (or at least that's the general excuse given). To which I will always encourage the FOs not to give up just because of couple of rejections. If all the conditions are manageable, we should all make it a point to practice manual flying with the real thing; as much as we can, it's never enough when these days we have to manage automation 95% of the time.

[mercurydancer]

PJ2

Richard Feynman, now theres a man who had both an intellect which could work out both theoretical physics (Particles actually going back in time! How preposterous!) and also had the insight as to not only why Challenger blew up but the underlying causes.

I recall Prof Feynman reviewing the diameters of the solid fuel boosters of the shuttle. Management inisisted that three rods of equal length should be inserted into the booster to determine if the circumference of the booster was a complete circle. If the three rods were inserted into the booster casing and the total error was less than specified by management specifications then that section of the booster was to be passed. Feynman pointed out that the test could mean that the rods could be inserted and the result be totally accurate but the circumference be anything but a precise circle. Feynman had the insight to ask specific questions of the staff who performed the test and they knew that the test was invalid but until Feynman pointed it out to senior NASA officals the view was not taken seriously.

Feynman illustrated much more in the review of the Challenger accident but most impressively, he did it in a manner which was not antagonistic. ( He may have learnt a little from the numerous security incidents he caused by unlocking the Manhattan project documents at Alamagordo and leaving a note saying " Guess who")

All in all the man was an inspiration for me.

[PJ2]

drummer and safecracker; All in all the man was an inspiration for me.And to me and hopefully many others. His two books are really worth reading. His almost-earthy talking manner belies the brilliance of ideas streaming forth and the constant mirth underneath the serious stuff.

His use of a small clamp and a short piece of O-ring he 'found' at Morton-Thiokol is the stuff of legends, focussing in one tiny glass of ice-water the millions of words and thousands of pages of engineering work, policy-and-procedures manuals, emails and testimony and pointing directly at the cause of the accident. It was for others, especially people like sociologist Diane Vaughan, to put into words why in an organization dedicated to flight safety that, through the normalization of deviance, nobody "saw" and therefore never considered what untested cold temperatures would do to a mission-critical rubber seal. "I'll see it when I believe it" implies a cognitive connection between belief and apprehension by the senses. Part of Feynman's genius was in making such connections visible to those who didn't believe in the first place and that is inspiring.

[Microburst2002]

I remember his "bricks of energy", and also his memoirs about the Manhattan project and that couple who were spying for the soviets. I wonder, by the way, if that was bad or good for the world.

So he is still alive?

[PLovett]

Microburst,

So he is still alive?

No, he died in 1988 but I wouldn't have known that except that this thread prompted me to read his Wiki reference.

[BritishMidlandMan]

As a bus driver I would agree but that's because doing LHR arrivals all day is not that challenging. The charter boys doing daily visual circuits into the Greek islands etc have more hands on time and that's vital.

[Microburst2002]

Take offs, climb outs, descents and approaches in busy terminal areas are about achieving and maintaining a good situational awareness, and automation is a great tool for that.

A good sit awareness during those phases in non busy airspaces require much less "brain megas and megahertzs". Hand flying cannot reduce your situational awareness. It can even improve it, actually.

If you have to handfly in the busy terminal area (automation u/s) you will either do it fine without losing any of your situational awareness or do it with less. It depends on how much you have practiced.

Besides, it is the crew situational awareness that matters. Not only yours when you are flying (hand or automated). So we should be used to practice both handflying and assisting a hand flying PNF.

How can this be dangerous?

[Centaurus]

and assisting a hand flying PNF

How do you "assist" a pilot who is hand flying? Does he really need assistance -eg do you operate his throttles for him? Who "assists" a single pilot IFR?

Surely a competent pilot does not need "assistance" to hand fly his aircraft unless of course he is lacking situational awareness and hasn't a clue about basic flying skills. Then he may need coaching but he should never be in that situation in the first place.

[Mr Optimistic]

Yes, he died of stomach cancer many years ago. My one claim to fame is that he once smiled at me in the street. I must have looked even more miserable than usual. I believe he did have some second thoughts about Challenger though: think he though he had been manipulated.

[protectthehornet]

In airline flying, there can be specific functions and duties for both pilots. If one pilot is ''hand flying'' the other pilot may set heading bugs, run the radio, copy clearances and a myriad of things.

AS for single pilot IFR...I've done it and without an autopilot to boot...You are busy and you either get good or die.

Jets are harder to hand fly at high altitude...and a little help isn't out of order.

[Low Flier]

No ****!

How 'bout a captain with 180 hours total time on type and doing only 10 hours a month to keep "current"?

We're not talking cruisin' & snoozin' here. We're talkin' front line hotshot fighter pilot in Betty's flying club.

Read this report (http://www.mod.uk/NR/rdonlyres/CA40ED65-F79E-4769-A522-254445C771C5/0/Tornado_ZE_982_Service_Inquiry_part_1_3.pdf) to see what I'm talking about.

[angelorange]

Today it is the automation takes you to the stall and then lets go. If you're training is narrowly based on set Simulator senarios, your SA degraded and your basic aerodynamic knowledge lacking, heaven help you.

TOM 737:
http://www.**********/forum/viewtopic.php?t=10068&sid=e7816fb1b27fcd1a7749842503deebc6


Turkish 1951:

Turkish Airlines Flight 1951 - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_Airlines_Flight_1951)

AF447:

AF447 crew not trained for high-altitude stall: investigators (http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/07/29/360146/af447-crew-not-trained-for-high-altitude-stall-investigators.html)

BEA releases chilling transcript of AF447 crew fight to save aircraft (http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2011/08/02/360282/bea-releases-chilling-transcript-of-af447-crew-fight-to-save.html)

[beamer]

'Do you mind if I fly the aircraft manually today, I've got a sim coming up....?'

The mind boggles.....not only a generation of pilots without raw handling skills but also a generation of trainers who have also been taught to fly by numbers !

[4Greens]

The simulator does not produce the physiological disorientation that a real aeroplane does. Until this can be simulated accurately, instrument flying and unusual attitude recovery exercises in a simulator are a waste of time.

[JJFFC]

At this point, it seems that it would be more interesting for the industry to have a fully automated flight (no hand flight at all) and only one human supervisor very well trained in a very accurate sim.

I"m sure it will be the case.

After : no more pilot in the plane but a plane fully monitored from the ground like a drone.

[stepwilk]

Funny, I've been saying this for years: that the air-transport aircraft of the foreseeable future will have a single relatively low-paid systems monitor, like a subway motorman, in the cockpit. Once in every billion miles, he or she will have to get on the PA and say, "Folks, I'm sorry to say this, but we're all gonna die. I haven't the faintest idea how to actually fly this thing, and all of our computers have gone mammaries-up. Oh, and by the way, are there any Cessna pilots among our passengers--anybody who actually knows how to hand-fly an airplane? Just askin'..."

[stepwilk]

Agree, but then I'm 75...

[Microburst2002]

Drappier, the Airbus representative, added, Airbus does not recommend encouraging airline pilots dto fly the airline manually (during line operations) because the airline passengers have paid to get the maximum level of safety. Most of the time, the autopilot is the best route. That makes FSTDs the most appropriate practice environment, he said
(asw june 201)1
Airbus is cleary against hand flying. Even after all the loss of control events, they think it is better not to hand fly.

Passengers pay to get the maximum level of safety: safe airplanes with safe pilots who are proficient in automation and hand flying. But he forgets the last part, the madafaka.

Why do they hate us so much?

[CONF iture]

After : no more pilot in the plane but a plane fully monitored from the ground like a drone.
NEVER it will happen ... keep at least one guy up you can blame the crash on ...

[Wiley]

The day some latter day Michael O'Leary clone can get a pilotless commercial passenger aircraft approved for service - and then, most importantly, offer seats $10 or more cheaper than a piloted aircraft - the punters will flock to fill the seats.

[Kingfisher]

There will always be pilots. If a pilotless Airbus crashes Airbus Industre will never blame their system. What to do?
How about a qualified person on site to take the blame for any unforseen oversights in the design phase? Brilliant Pierre Trebles all round!

[Gretchenfrage]

Brilliant. They could therefore send in retired Grannies.

Wasn't Airbus the company who boasted that their aircaft were so safe and easy to fly, even Grannies could do it?

I know it sounds stupidly sarcastic. But it is such arrogance that leads to where we are today.

You reap what you saw.

[Centaurus]

The simulator does not produce the physiological disorientation that a real aeroplane does. Until this can be simulated accurately, instrument flying and unusual attitude recovery exercises in a simulator are a waste of time.

It is the lack of instrument pure flying skill in IMC that has caused the vast majority of loss of control from unusual attitudes. Physiological disorientation has nothing to do with it. If it were, there would hundreds of crashes every month from aircraft carriers on catapulted take off's.

[angelorange]

Airbus has recommended that upset recovery training should not be conducted in a flight simulation training device because simulator motion does not accurately represent aircraft motions in unusual attitudes and there is a lack of validated flight envelope model data at extreme conditions.
In addition, most simulator upset recovery training is conducted with the motion on, which may not increase the value of the training. Current devices can only simulate 1g flight, a fleeting condition in the early stages of an upset recovery.
Simulation may even provide strong negative training, as was the case in the crash of American Airlines flight 587 in New York in 2001. Inappropriate aggressive rudder usage to counter wake turbulence-generated rolling motions caused the Airbus A300's vertical stabiliser to snap off. At the time American Airlines had been teaching the use of rudder to help in upset recovery. While the A300 simulator may have accurately represented aircraft response to rudder inputs, it was not an engineering loads simulator and the crews would not have be alerted to the excessive structural loads their inputs were generating.


from flight global:

Getting back in the envelope with CAE/APS upset training (http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2010/10/11/348255/getting-back-in-the-envelope-with-caeaps-upset-training.html)

[sheppey]

At the time American Airlines had been teaching the use of rudder to help in upset recovery.

That had nothing to do with simulator fidelity pe se. It was faulty training by the company instructors. The main factor in unusual attitude recovery training in simulators is interpretation of the flight instrument indications. The recovery action from an unusual attitude is basically the same for all aeroplanes. It is taught during initial instrument rating training on single and twin engine trainers .

It is when that recovery is in IMC where instrument interpretion is the vital factor. Whether or not in the simulator it is with or without motion doesn't matter. The flight instrument indications are the same.

In USA there are specialised flying schools that teach unusual attitude training on dual seat single engine jet trainers or turbo-props. That training has excellent value even though these aircraft do not handle like a big jet. Does that mean this training is therefore negative because the feel does not accurately reproduce a 737 or Airbus? Of course not. Because the accent is always on instrument scan and interpretation - not control forces.

[RAT 5]

Some guys seem to think the '1 pilot and a dog' cockpit is just around the corner. Doubt it. I'm sure the pax would not feel comfortable. However, MOL said C/A's could fly a plane. So there you have it; any problems during the drinks service and hostie Annie will instantly become Superwoman and save the day. Now what would they do about the lock cockpit door policy? No-one in there; all pilots in the cabin. Hm?
(For younger viewers the dog is to bite the pilot if he touches anything, and the pilot is to feed the dog.)

[wingstwo]

The more you automate, the more idiots you produce!

[grimmrad]

"This is not just an Airbus problem but a problem related to all new aircraft types (B777, B787, A380 etc, etc). Increasingly we as pilots are becoming systems managers - and it is absolutely vital we have a full grasp of those systems. "

Wouldn't it almost make sense to put two people together up front, one that is better at hand flying than at systems management and the other vice versa. If the **** hits the fan the appropriate person can take over, the other assist. Of course, if one gets incapacitated...

Edit: Best would be of course to have TWO people up front good at both, hand flying and systems mana... - oh well, I'll take my had:E

[RAT 5]

If anyone can find the scene, and link it to here, from Space Cowboys where Tommy Lee Jones switches off all the computers and lands the Shuttle raw data, it would be fun to watch again. When asked by his nervous colleagues, Clint E, James G, Donald S. etc "WHY the hell are you not letting the gizmos do it all as SOP?" he replied that one day those gizmos would fry up and he didn't want to die for want of having lost piloting skills.
The techno answer is to add more and more backups and fail safes. OK, that's all fine, but when they do fry up, or some mouse has chewed the wiring, or ice gets where it ain't supposed to get, (nature always has a way of fighting back), even real bugs get where they ain't supposed to, the the fare paying pax expect us to sort it out and get them home safe. They don't expect a frenzied guessing game at what has gone wrong and more guessing about what to do about it. There have been so many incidents, that became accidents, which were not in the QRH. Flying a/c hit the deck. Perhaps that's why they deteriorated into accidents. The subtle slow failures. Just think of the Air Trans A330. Great flying after, perhaps, not too much thinking and monitoring had caused the problem in the first place. (OK, the root cause was an engineering screw up).
Sadly, I don't think we'll see a reversal in policy for a long time. I hope this topic only applies to the big jet jockies. I hope the regional turbo/piston guys can still pole it around like a good'n. I was amazed to hear that none of my recently qualified F/O's, from integrated courses, had been upside down in their training. There is the time to learn spacial dis-orientation, in the flying school. I did U.P's before aero training. Close your eyes and the QFI would lurch the a/c into who knows what attitude, and you had to open eyes and recover. It was fun, and then onto some real aeros. All that has gone. All training is now not to go anywhere near those places. But what a lost opportunity in those early days of training.
The skillful pilot is one who uses his skill to avoid situations where he needs to be ace of the base; BUT is also able to handle it when put there by forces not under his control.
It's been a long, much repeated, circular discussion over many threads. It will re-appear again, and continue on its circular path. I do not see where the motivation and driving force will come from to change anything.

[chase888]

Hope I am not getting int repetition, but in manila have not been able to get into pprune for a couple of weeks, just error messages.
To my point if I may.
Going back to the famous or infamous Emirates event in Melbourne, one glaring point came out in my opinion.
At one stage it was stated that an Emirates crew would do two out and return flights per month.
That equates to four take-offs and landings to be shared (undoubtedly not equally) between four cockpit crew.
That produces a total of 8-10 hours of hands on flying at whatever share per pilot.
Its hardly enough to keep ones PPL current.
I believe that where airlines have long haul and short haul operations, it would not be such a bad idea to have monthly changeovers, as short haul do much more "flying".
May cost more in training etc. but after AF447, a change in training methods appears inevitable.

[CWO4]

A lot of what you say is spot on. With just a bit of elaborations with regard to the "Systems Manager" approach to moving an aircraft from point A to point B, one can see that being a pilot in a modern aircraft is not so much about flying as managing.

The problem is when the excerement impinges upon the rotating members of the air handling unit, a pilot is needed to put the aircraft on the ground with the least possible damage and loss of life. It is more than actuarial tables and probabilities.

Imagine an Airbus pilot of today "managing" UA232. I shudder at the thought.

I learned in a Cessna 140 and worked to a Beech 18 and various RW types. I have flown in glass cockpits and although they are reliable, I still like my "steam gauges." I understand the principles and reasons an aircraft flies (or beats the air into submission), although I don't think I am a Systems Manager.....

I guess that what it has come to...but I will buy another old one and fly for fun anyway.

[ReverseFlight]

Airbus Golden Rule #1: The aircraft can be flown like any other aircraft.
Except no one remembers how to fly an aircraft any more.

[fergineer]

Or maybe put two pilots who could fly the machine and one bod who knows the systems and could find a way around malfunctions with his knowledge of the aircraft systems...... They could call him a Flight Engineer..... Oh thats right the two winged master race didnt want us any more!!!!!

[westhawk]

Oh thats right the two winged master race didnt want us any more!!!! (my bold)

I assume you mean airline management? It's my impression that pilots of that day were more than happy to have FEs aboard, they just didn't want to have to BE one in order get a pilot seat. PFEs were greatly respected. As they should be.

[Centaurus]

That produces a total of 8-10 hours of hands on flying at whatever share per pilot.

But it is not hands-on flying at all. It is automatic pilot flying. The actual hands-on would be less than five minutes per sector.

Those that advocate more accent on automation skills to keep pilots out of trouble are like someone saying I won't teach you how to swim but I will teach you how not to go near the water - and then you will be safe...

[nitpicker330]

Sorry but I laughed when I saw this topic, Airbus concerned!!

Ah funny considering you NEVER HAND FLY A FBW AIRBUS.

You move the Sidestick and it decides what it's going to do.

So it's basically always on A/P, with you making commands via a stick instead of the FCU.

[Meikleour]

nitpicker330: What a fatuous comment! You could happily say the same about every single FBW controlled aircraft around, of which very many are military.

[AirbusPhp]

Having some decent experience on 737 and A320 on the LHS I don't quite understand the point of this discussion about hand-flying vs. safety. Accidents happen because some stupid pilots ignore world-wide SOPs, don't practice CRM and come in High&Hot with a deep landing on a short wet runway.
Nothing to do with hand-flying.
And Re: the previous post, captaincy is exactly that: if it's the water that poses a danger to you it is your job as Captain to stay away from it. However great a swimmer you are...
Outofhere :ugh:

[silverstrata]

Airbus php
Having some decent experience on 737 and A320 on the LHS I don't quite understand the point of this discussion about hand-flying vs. safety. Accidents happen because some stupid pilots ignore world-wide SOPs, don't practice CRM and come in High&Hot with a deep landing on a short wet runway.
Nothing to do with hand-flying.




I would respectfully suggest that in your complacency, you are but one step away from a serious incident/accident. There are many situations where skillful hand-flying is necessary. And they always come just when you don't expect it.

As an observation (hint to trainers), very little sim-work is done at high altitude, and pilots are often surprised at how different the aircraft feels at altitude. It can be very twitchy to hand fly. For example, this f/o completely lost control in the cruise, and the situation was only restored when the captain reappeared from the toilet, with trousers still around ankles.
Air India co-pilot caused passenger jet to plummet 7,000ft by accident | Mail Online (http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1335060/Air-India-pilot-caused-passenger-jet-plummet-7-000ft-accident.html)

And this is not an isolated incident. I have flown with several f/os who were capable of the same, and the technique was to only go to the toilet when there was no turbulence and no waypoints ahead.


Regards the Air France crew, their actions were unforgivable, as any competent Cessna pilot would have had more immediate reactions to a stall. However, if no training had been given for high altitude stalls, the crew may have been surprised by the aircraft's reactions. With a high altitude, slow speed, partially stalled tail surfaces and underslung engines at full power, a jet can need considerable force to lower the nose. Rather than the nose dropping in the stall, it wants to pitch up, while the aircraft mushes downwards at a high rate of descent. (Not sure how this translates into sidestick pressures, with direct law engaged.) It can be easier to reduce power, to recover from the stall, as the nose will more readily lower.

Clearly, the air France pilots did not understand the symptoms of a high altitude stall, and thus the situation they were in.



.

[nitpicker330]

This comment was from Airbus and as such I was commenting about Airbus FBW.

Airbus FBW flies the a/c for you with reference to G, ie it will keep whatever Attitude you set it at without your assistance . You don't really fly the a/c. The sidestick is just a quicker way of telling the automatics what you want.

Boeing FBW only tries to stop you from envelope excursions ( yes it has auto trim, compensates for Flap operation and back pressure in turns etc ) But you still need to fly the a/c just like a B17…

If you'd flown both Airbus and Boeing FBW like me then you'd already know that. :ok:

[Microburst2002]

true

but you still fly the airbus. Pull the stick, aibus pitches up. Push it, airbus pitches down. the more you push or pull, the more it pitches down or up.

That is flying an airplane, isn't it?

It only prevents you from flying if you go out of the envelope (2,5 gs, etc..) but who the hell wants do that?

[nitpicker330]

Nope, close but no Cigar :p

Try flying downwind in a Boeing at 1500' 210 kts and letting go of the pole for 1 minute and see what happens.

Now try that in an Airbus, hey look it's still where I left it 1 minute ago EVEN after that Turbulence!! Wow.

Nope, it's not flying, its a Computer game:ok:

Don't get me wrong, I quite like Airbus, it makes "hand flying" (sic ) quite a lot easier and more accurate.

[Shore Guy]

Perhaps in preparation for next recurrent?

Stick and Rudder - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stick_and_Rudder)

[morphmorph]

Try flying downwind in a Boeing at 1500' 210 kts and letting go of the pole for 1 minute and see what happens.

If you'd trimmed it correctly then I assume exactly the same thing would happen - it would carry on as it was. Admittedly it would be different in turns because you wouldn't have re-trimmed.

[Togodumnus]

Airbus has done the most in the whole industry to make pilot flying skills the least relevant skill required to fly an aircraft and then have the sheer brass balls to come out with this sound bite?

Mind boggling.

[Slasher]

"Pilot handling skills under threat, says Airbus"

What a brilliant deduction. I for one could have told them that years ago!

Ditto!.....

[silverstrata]

"Pilot handling skills under threat, says Airbus"

What a brilliant deduction. I for one could have told them that years ago!


I did tell ********* that, some years ago, and was told to wind my neck in.



.

[RAT 5]

There is a book written by a US journalist - I'm sorry but forget the name of both - which tells the story of the Hudson airbus. There were many interviews with senior Airbus development pilots and designers. One of the comments is that the a/c did what it was designed to do, more than the piloting skills. A lesser a/c would have needed much more skill to achieve what this one did. Perhaps true, I don't know. I've always thought that the real skill in that scenario was to make the ditching decision in the first place. I suspect many lesser experienced captains, of which there are a great many, would have followed their homing instinct and tried to make it to a runway with most likely horrific consequences. The point in the book is that Airbus seem to think it was the a/c that saved the day. Hm!?
Moving on to handling skills, and my thoughts that we are the final insurance policy. Let's take a B737. Could have a 30min or 60min battery. Classics & NG might have either, I think; and with total AC failure might have EADI or PFD display on Capt's side for the life of the battery. Let's take the best case and say 60mins and full display. Now, you have total AC failure at cruise FL. and plunge into QRH's and discuss and descend and divert, but you are on the edge of the 1hr circle to an airfield. So, the battery, with no guarantee of 60mins, dies at 45mins. You are left with 2 good engines, normal gear & flaps etc. but only the tiny SBY instruments. You have radar and an airfield ILS, or perhaps only an SRA, with 5km's & 500' ceiling; would the pax expect you to be able to land safely? I think so. How many think they could do it? In one command upgrade conversion I did, from B732 - B757, it was a requirement to do a basic SBY insytrument ILS. In my present enviroment, of 10years, I do not know of any training having been done using the basic SBY's. This is because the battery gives full PFD: yes, but for how long? I even wonder some of them flying a HDG SEL V/S NDB approach. There is no training. SOP's for normal ops is follow the magenta line: Oh yes, but if the approach is not in the FMC then use basic modes, but they still fly the magenta line.
I once trained an OCC for an captain who had been a B727 captain and was now B738 HOT. He was joining us on B733. This is not a GPS a/c and NPA's have to be flown in HDG SEL and fly the needles. He just flew the magenta line, which had map shift, and never looked at the needles. He was nowhere near the centre line; way out of limits. Descending on finals outside centreline. Had no clue. Common type rating. Frightening.

[EW73]

I would have thought that, in the NG at least, with the 150 minutes of internal battery for the standby attitude instrument (ISFD), that one would turn the airplane battery off to save it for when it's really needed, like at the start of the descent, when the PFD, VOR, DME, ILS and VHF1 are really handy!

[Caygill]

From post #5.
simply because they do not have a basic handling skill backgroundThere is a huge difference between maintaining skills and actually learning the elementary to a degree of instinct and reaction.

I believe we have a big numbers of pilots that are excellent professionals, but have been forced nor had the opportunity to do the amount of repetition to actually truly learn certain basic (yet demanding) skills of flying.

We see the same pattern on our roads as we now start to see in the air. Modern cars safes you 99% of even severe handling errors, making it both unpractical and unnecessary (and many time impossible) to learn basic handling skills.

The original "flying finn" and pioneer in driver training Mr Rauno Aaltonen is quoted saying, "modern drivers need help from their cars, the typical drivers handling skills are totally sub-par".

Rauno: Rauno Aaltonen's driving lessons. - YouTube (http://youtu.be/zXnIhccddVg) :8

[nilcostoptionmyass]

AAAhhhh airbus, brilliant,

The bus course should include a degree in maths in order to calculate the landing distances / speeds required in non normal configs...



Elec DC Emer config
........
........
MAX BRK PR.........1000 PSI
Brake pressure must be limited to approximately 1000psi, since antiskid lost.

note: DC ESS BUS is lost at landing gear extension. Consequently, all means of communications are lost since all ACP's are lost.

DC ESS BUS checklist...............

Other inoperative systems (not displayed to the crew)

BRK PRESS indicator

:D

[bubbers44]

There is a book written by a US journalist - I'm sorry but forget the name of both - which tells the story of the Hudson airbus. There were many interviews with senior Airbus development pilots and designers. One of the comments is that the a/c did what it was designed to do, more than the piloting skills. A lesser a/c would have needed much more skill to achieve what this one did. Perhaps true, I don't know. I've always thought that the real skill in that scenario was to make the ditching decision in the first place. I suspect many lesser experienced captains, of which there are a great many, would have followed their homing instinct and tried to make it to a runway with most likely horrific consequences.

Seems like quite a biased interview with the Airbus guys. Sully could have landed a B737 or 757 just as easily. He flared properly making sure he didn't stall and touched down at the right attitude wings level. That is about all you can do in that situation. Read his book, he never once said the systems helped him and they didn't. The Airbus not stalling in normal law was about the only thing that would help a bad pilot ditch.

[MrBenip]

QUOTE ;The Airbus not stalling in normal law was about the only thing that would help a bad pilot ditch. mmmm... Don't think that would have helped Sully, even the Airbus will stall with two knackered donkeys!

[bubbers44]

I'm not sure what you are trying to say but a bad pilot getting too slow and approaching a stall above the water would set up a significant sink rate impacting the Hudson, Sully knew how to control the energy and zero out his sink rate at touch down. Had nothing to do with Airbus engineering.

[AvMed.IN]

Instead of seeing it as a diktat from Airbus, as well as Boeing versus Airbus debate, probably there is wisdom in learning from the AF 447 accident and the initial impressions from the BEA's third interim report. This report does point towards the probable lacuna in training (http://www.avmed.in/2011/07/orientation-pilot-training-–-the-lacuna/) in recovery from stall at high altitude. Thus there is a need to focus on maintaining Situational Awareness (http://www.avmed.in/2011/03/lost-it-situational-awareness/) through all phases of flight as well as being proficient in basic/manual flying skills. It may be added here that this may include decision making skills (http://www.avmed.in/2011/03/decision-making-in-aviation-–-the-twain-shall-meet/) as well.

It is a different question though, as to whether the pilots should practice those basic skills in flight or depend upon their simulator training (http://www.avmed.in/2011/06/do-flight-simulators-help-in-transfer-of-learning/)!

[Centaurus]

Clearly there has always been a strong aversion by airline managements to encourage hand flying and this will only get worse as automation increases in sophistication (as if it can get much better than it is now).

Until this head in the sand mindset, encouraged by aircraft manufacturers, is changed, then automation dependency will steadily increase. It is further exacerbated by the widespread policy of hiring of cadet first officers who will have known nothing but blind reliance on automation since they left flying school.

In Australia back in the late Fifties 200 hour first officers without instrument ratings occasionally got jobs flying DC3's. The autopilot on the DC3 was primitive by today's standards and used mainly for straight and level flight. So pilots hand flew the climb and descent as this was easier than twiddling the knobs of the Sperry autopilot. That way inexperienced first officers gained manipulative skills in all weathers. Captains did not complain of being overloaded in watching the first officer hand flying. Nor did the first officers complain of being overwhelmed from basic cockpit duties from watching the captain hand fly. Of course automation dependency nowadays makes the thought of watching the captain or first officer hand fly, a scary experience:E

Even allowing for regulatory and airspace restrictions, an airline policy that encourages hand flying practice - especially in IMC - would go a long way to improving situational awareness and pure flying skills of inexperienced first officers. There has been much hand wringing by media flight safety journalists on the issue of the Air France A330 accident and other similar tragedies. And rightly so. But until regulatory authorities bite the bullet and push for effective solutions to the modern problem of automation dependency, there are certain to be occasional repeats of loss of control in IMC.

Low hour first officers are not necessarily the cause of these accidents but one day they will be captains like those involved in many loss of control accidents. It is not too late to give these first officers the chance to keep current on hand flying within the framework of company SOP's.

[CONF iture]

even the Airbus will stall with two knackered donkeys!
Not supposed to, what makes you think so ?

[safetypee]

Centaurus, re # 447 (a mis / fortunate post number)

Alas, I agree with your concerns and their origins; however, I do not believe that a practical solution can be found either within the manufacturers’ use of technology or necessarily with ‘more training’ in hand flying skills.

History tells us that it is very difficult to turn the clock back; the world always moves on - changing entropy. The changes in the aviation and social systems are now so great that reversion, short of a devastating rebuild, is impractical.
If we conclude at a higher level, that the problem lies in complexity, including automation problems, training, etc, then a solution may be in the manner in which we handle that complexity. Remember that it is a complexity of our making. We certainly don’t need more complexity as part of a solution – not more SOPs, but perhaps rational SOPs, which free the human to operate where they are best placed to ‘create’ safety.

We should not seek raw simplicity as a solution, but instead consider that the current complexity is failed simplicity, i.e. the problem lies with the way in which we design, train, and use current technology.
We should be able to unpick some of ‘failures’, not by redesign, but by limiting its use, or adjusting the operational environment. Do we actually need all of the ‘bells and whistles’ of some systems, thus don’t train for them, inhibit their use and spend more time on the essential basics of flying and operating.

We should try to ease the pressures in the operational environment and thus reduce some of the human factors demand in operations; would an additional 5nm miss distance on Cbs really hurt the industry, we could ease the traffic spacing on the approach, or give regional operators more turn-round time for debriefing/briefing.
We must try to alleviate the tendency rush, to cut corners, to enable time and opportunity for greater awareness.
We have to restore the imbalance that we perceive to have grown with the use of technology between safety and operational effectiveness – subconscious economic pressure.

These solutions are to address operational problems, which appear at the operating level as a reduction of skills. Skills have changed, but it is a response to the world in which they are required and used. Thus we require a balanced focus on skills training and changes in the operational environment.
Solutions as ever will be a compromise, a trade off. We may have made a mess of the initial technological trade off; we cannot afford to mess up the next action – either for safety or commerce.

Why Things That Go Right, Sometimes Go Wrong. (www.abdn.ac.uk/~wmm069/uploads/files/Aberdeen_ETTO.pdf)

[Microburst2002]

nitpicker

the airbus does not fly as you might expect from reading the manuals. According to these, it seems that is like CWS, or even like ALT HOLD or even that if you are in glide and loc and just keep stick neutral the airplane will make a perfect ILS, even in turbulence. pure bull****.

It is easy to fly, that's for sure, but the only difference is that you don't feel anything in the stick, you don't have to trim and it is very stable in bank durign turns. You still have to adjust pitch and bank and thrust to obtain the desired performance, and do this continuously. And thrust still affects pitch, and gusts will still affect bank angle. The fact that they are meant to be flight path stable rather than speed stable has pros and cons, and I think it is a necessity when you have no feeling in the stick.

conventional airplanes are easy to manoeuvre when you get used to trim properly. If you are fighting against stick forces you are not using the correct technique. there is no need for this technique in the bus, that's true. Nor there is need for an artificial stick force system. the bus is flown very easily, but you stil have to fly it.

[Centaurus]

however, I do not believe that a practical solution can be found either within the manufacturers’ use of technology or necessarily with ‘more training’ in hand flying skills.
Safetypee. Excellent reply and thanks for going to the trouble of writing. Would it be true to say that all pilots should be equally competent at automation skills and pure flying skills? After all, you would think that is a given. But loss of control accidents have proved otherwise - and that is the present day problem.

[Microburst2002]

Very interesting presentation

I'm afraid that the ETTO in aviation is the norm (or is it the TETO?), from the point of view of flight deck crews, at least. Efficiency always wins the battle, but lack of thoroughness will be always blamed when things go wrong.

And things going well are very seldom studied. Aviation learns from crashes, and rarely from successful flights.

In my opinion, the problem underlying here is liability. He who dares to encourage hand flying is taking a risk, should one day happen an accident where the pilot was hand flying. However, it is accepted that airplanes are normally flown on AP, besides if they crash you can still blame the pilot (maybe for not taking over manually, or doing it catastrophycally).

If I had to do Resilient Management for air safety I would make sure that pilots are skillful hand flyers first and then skillful automation flyers. Because in this manner they would be much better automation flyers (they would understand automation and its limitations and shortcommings better) and they would be much safer in case of AP disconnection or malfunction (either apparent or subtle). Focusing in only one thing is dangerous.

A pilot who will not feel confident if he has to hand fly is a swisscheese slice with too big a hole in it. A symptom of this is reluctance to use manual thrust after A/THR (during a simulator) disconnects on its own or is not functioning properly (occasionally in real flights). Another one is the use of AP for visual approaches.

[AvMed.IN]

So, we are back to the basics of Human Error (http://www.avmed.in/2011/01/blame-it-on-the-pilot/) and Human Factors (http://www.avmed.in/2011/08/loss-of-control-human-factors-in-air-france-flight-477/)!

[EIDWSkypilot]

Can we see the evolution towards the flight deck of the future, crew of one with dog. Handler to feed dog, dog trained to keep Handler from touching controls. Both there to take the blame when anything goes wrong. SLFs reassured that dog has security training.:E

[safetypee]

Centaurus,
Would it be true to say that all pilots should be equally competent at automation skills and pure flying skills? Mmm … a challenging thought.

This depends on what is meant by competency – “A collection of related abilities, commitments, knowledge and skills that enable a person (or an organisation) to act effectively in a job or situation.” This is a vague definition, like saying ‘how long is a piece of string’.

Competency, like string, depends where the ends are – the initial training and the final objectives, and where the competency is to be used. What are the abilities, knowledge and skills; these depend on the context, the situation.
Furthermore, I would hesitate to compare automation skills with flying skills. Removing the physical coordination aspects, then cognitive skills predominate. Superficially, these would not differ between old (manual) and new (auto) aircraft, however the sensed information and display media may be different, changes in tactile feedback, information content, and computer aided decision making.

If these changes are significant for cognition, I think they are, then pilots require a different set of skills and competencies for automatic flight, but then you still need back-up for the occasions when automation is not providing assistance. In these circumstances, the manual flight skills in auto aircraft are similar to older aircraft, but the level of competency may not have to be the same, only enough to cope with the foreseeable situations. As is realized with AF 447 not all situations are foreseeable.

In other LOC accidents, foreseeable circumstances were encountered but were not recognized or they were handled incorrectly (also factors in AF 447).
IMHO this suggests weaknesses in situation assessment and decision making skills. Thus the issue is whether these skills are absent or need to be tailored for automated aircraft operation, including failures; probably some of each.
These would not have to be specific skills, but generic abilities to assess and think about situations, using different / novel information sources, act without undue rush, and keep an open mind as situations develop. These stem from experience; so another conclusion may be that the industry is not providing an appropriate level of experience for automated flight, but not necessarily the same as for manual flight, i.e. we have been using the wrong training context.

Thus at this time I would conclude that it is not necessary to have equal competencies for manual and automatic flight, but it is necessary to have an appropriate set of competencies; and some accidents suggest that the existence of these is questionable.

[safetypee]

Microburst2002, “but lack of thoroughness will be always blamed when things go wrong”, possibly, but as with ‘Human Error’ (AvMed.IN) it need not be.
The industry has to move away from error based assessment in order to learn about accidents.
We have to understand what happens in daily operation, why pilots don’t hand fly when they could, why they apparently see and act on aspects which with hindsight appear obvious. We must look at every day operations for this understanding and for the precursors to accidents; this is not entirely FOQA or even LOSA, it is something which every pilot can do independently – a self line check – ‘why did I do that’, ‘what did I see’, ‘what do I understand and why’. And of course we require time and some ability (competency as above) to do that.

“If I had to do Resilient Management for air safety …”, why not use self initiated Resilient Management.
We could use How resilient is your organization (www.ipac.ca/documents/RAG%20discussion_APR05.pdf) for guidance. The essential items can be applied to individuals:-
The ability to Respond. – Knowing what to do and being capable of doing it.
The ability to Monitor. – Knowing what to look for.
The ability to Anticipate. – Finding out and knowing what to expect.
The ability to Learn. – Knowing what has happened.
These too are flying skills, we must take care not confuse the apparent lack of ‘hands-on’ (physical hand / eye co-ordination) flying skills as an indicator of the problem.

For guidance other than FOQA / LOSA, consider Day-2-Day Safety Survey (www.eurocontrol.int/system/files/sites/default/files/content/documents/official-documents/brochures/safety-white-paper-2011.pdf) (page 10).
What would be the key aspects to observe in the flight deck?
Would these help tie the ends of the string together – normal operations // accident contributions?

[mm43]

Originally posted by bubbers44 - post #444 ...

I'm not sure what you are trying to say but a bad pilot getting too slow and approaching a stall above the water would set up a significant sink rate impacting the Hudson, Sully knew how to control the energy and zero out his sink rate at touch down. Had nothing to do with Airbus engineering.No one is saying that Sully didn't do a great job, and the alpha protections that the A320 has in Normal Law also aided him by attenuating his final NU commands during the flare as RoD was over 3 times higher than desired due to the aircraft having descended at VLS or less. The VLS warning was over-ridden by the GPWS, and any further NU would most likely have resulted in structural failure at impact.

So, Sully and Airbus had a good compromise, though I doubt Sully at the time recognized that alpha protections were assisting.

[stepwilk]

There is a book written by a US journalist - I'm sorry but forget the name of both - which tells the story of the Hudson airbus.

That writer is William Langewiesche, whose father, Wolfgang Langewiesche, wrote "Stick and Rudder." The title of his book is "Fly by Wire." William and I, and my wife, spent many hours flying together, back when all three of us were baby pilots.

[CONF iture]

and any further NU would most likely have resulted in structural failure at impact.
mm43,
To the contrary, a further NU, as requested by the pilot, would have allowed the aircraft to reach the 11 degrees of positive attitude as recommended by Airbus for ditching, and would most likely have resulted in a better touchdown and no or less structural failure at the aft underside part of the fuselage.
The potential was there in the AoA value, but the aircraft refused to deliver up to alpha max ...

[Centaurus]

This depends on what is meant by competency –

The answer is easy. If an airline pilot (Boeing/Airbus) was told to undertake his instrument rating sequences solely on raw data, and no automatics, then at an educated guess he would probably fail to remain within regulatory tolerances in most areas. In other words he has failed the skills test and by definition is incompetent.

Currently, instrument rating tests in sophisticated airline simulators are 90 percent flown on full automatics with an occasional nibble at hand flying. That does not necessarily add up to manual flying competency. At an Asia Pacific Flight Safety Forum in recent times, a senior management speaker made the point that practicing a manually flown ILS once a month on line does not ensure currency at manual flying.

[safetypee]

Centaurus, thanks, your post (#459) puts ‘competency’ in context; in this instance it relates to modern operations using highly automated aircraft.
There appears to be an assumption (big assumption, but by who) that normal operations will be flown using the automatics and thus appropriate skills (competency) for these are required. What these are, or how are they checked requires further explanation.

This ‘big assumption’ also appears to restrict manual flying skills to non-normal or abnormal conditions, - when the autos are unavailable or unable to cope with conditions. If the assumption, as is likely, considers the frequency of encountering these conditions is low, then risk management might allow for a lower skill level; but even so, the skill (a subset of manual flying) and the level of competency have to be defined. Who does this, how is it achieved?

An important aspect of safety is to write down all of the assumptions, particularly the situations in which they apply. Also state the justification for the assumption including action to be taken by operators.
A glaring omission might be the prohibition of manual flight in normal operations on the basis that the skills are not checked, or if checked they are of a lower standard, thus involve higher risk.
If this is so, then it appears contrary to current thoughts on cognitive skills training / currency required for automatic flight.

What assumptions are published on this issue?

[vaneyck]

I enjoy William Langewiesche's reportage very much. I used to subscribe to the Atlantic, and now I subscribe to Vanity Fair, largely due to his presence as a staff writer. That said, bubbers44 points up something I've noticed frequently in Langewiesche's writing: He tends to identify with the point of view of his main sources. The latest example of this is a Vanity Fair article in which he makes a hero of an extreme surfer whom most other surfers would probably go miles to avoid.

So I wasn't surprised that he bought the Airbus line to a possibly excessive degree. He admired Bernard Ziegler (rightly), and fell in love with his way of looking at matters, resulting in a lack of balance in his article and book on the Hudson River incident.

[mm43]

The potential was there in the AoA value, but the aircraft refused to deliver up to alpha max ... CONF iture,
Why did the aircraft fail to deliver up to alpha max ??

It didn't because it would have stalled!

That's the NTSB's take on it in their Final Report (http://libraryonline.erau.edu/online-full-text/ntsb/aircraft-accident-reports/AAR10-03.pdf) page 97, 2.7.2 High-AOA Envelope Limitations;The airplane’s airspeed in the last 150 feet of the descent was low enough to activate the alpha-protection mode of the airplane’s fly-by-wire envelope protection features. The captain progressively pulled aft on the sidestick as the airplane descended below 100 feet, and he pulled the sidestick to its aft stop in the last 50 feet, indicating that he was attempting to raise the airplane nose to flare and soften the touchdown on the water. The A320 alpha-protection mode incorporates features that can attenuate pilot sidestick pitch inputs. Because of these features, the airplane could not reach the maximum AOA attainable in pitch normal law for the airplane weight and configuration; however, the airplane did provide maximum performance for the weight and configuration at that time.

.... The flight envelope protections allowed the captain to pull full aft on the sidestick without the risk of stalling the airplane.They say that the alpha protections prevented any further NU.

[Morden]

Just read the NTSB report on Flight 1549, very interesting, thanks for the link!


mm43:
There is a AoA threshold from the activation of the alpha protection to the maximum flyable AoA (p. 11). So in a sense, the aircraft did failed to attain the maximum alpha.

Here is one point (p. 96) from the difficulties mentioned by the NTSB report on ditching the Bus:

• Deliberately or inadvertently slowing the airplane into the alpha-protection mode may result in an attenuation of pilot nose-up stick inputs, making it more difficult to flare the airplane, even if AOA margin to alpha maximum exist

!

"They say that the alpha protections prevented any further NU."

Exactly. And it is NOT necessarily a good thing in this case.

And I firmly believe that the Captain (even if he didn't kept up the airspeed quite correctly), would have not pulled the stick like a mindless monkey if there weren't any protection.

I believe he would have stalled the airplane just a few inches above the water :)

[PEI_3721]

The soon to be published Congressional report on airline pilot training is reported to call for commercial pilots needing enhanced manual flying skills, improved leadership abilities, and greater access to advanced simulators.
Airlines and regulators should rethink how U.S. flight crews are chosen, trained and checked and recommends changes in initial and recurrent training for airline pilots.

WSJ UPDATE: Industry Study Urges Big Shifts In Airline Pilot Training (http://www.morningstar.co.uk/uk/markets/newsfeeditem.aspx?id=155144956414837)

[DozyWannabe]

@mm43, CONF iture

Indeed - Alpha Max was attained, but the AoA that represented Alpha Max was a shallower angle than usual because of the low-energy configuration due to double engine failure (in mathematical/software/engineering terms, Alpha Max is a function of several constantly changing parameters, not a hard-coded value or constant). It looks like Sullenberger used his knowledge of the systems as a backstop while he attempted the optimal AoA possible. Ultimately in Normal Law the FCS will do it's best to prevent the aircraft from stalling with the tools at it's disposal. If it doesn't have thrust as part of its toolset (in the case of A/THR disable, low altitude inhibition or, indeed, engine failure), it will use the flight controls until either the thrust is increased to compensate, or in the case of complete dual engine failure, you run out of enough forward motion to keep you in the air. This behaviour has been seen before, but unfortunately it was not as well-understood at the time, and that story did not have a happy ending. However in that case the aircraft was new, and by the time of the Hudson incident it had been in service for around 21 years and was well understood by crews.

[CONF iture]

It didn't because it would have stalled!
No it would have not.
Do you remember what is alpha max mm43 ?

The System behaved as designed.
That design is not described in the manual.
That system thinks it knows better than an experienced pilot.


Alpha Max was attained
No it was not on the Hudson.
As it was already not in 1988 ... but :oh: keep Habsheim for the PM, no one needs to know how the BEA was already in damage control mode.

[silverstrata]

Please correct me if I am wrong, but I understand that the system will deliberately limit body angle below 50ft (ie, not achieve alpha max), to prevent a tail strike on landing.


.

[hetfield]

Engineering skills under trheat, say Pilots.

e.g. AF447

[CONF iture]

Nothing in that direction in the manuals but why not conceive that Airbus may have been tempted as well to design such protection ...

The BEA + Airbus have been silent on a flight control characteristic, which was revealed only 20 years later through the NTSB report on the Hudson event.

[silverstrata]

>(Limiting body angle below 50 ft)
>>Nothing in that direction in the manuals but why not
>>conceive that Airbus may have been tempted as well
>>to design such protection ...

It was mentioned in the investigation into the Paris airshow A320 crash.

One of the many reasons for this A320 ploughing into the trees was that when they got to 70 or 50 ft, the aircraft pitched down by a couple of degrees to prevent a tail-strike on 'landing'. Good idea if the aircraft was over a runway at the time, but this actually had the effect of pitching the aircraft ever closer to the trees.


.

[stepwilk]

It was mentioned in the investigation into the Paris airshow A320 crash.

Now wait, you're expertising about a crash and you don't even know where it actually happened? Definitely not Paris, but I'll let you guess..

[CONF iture]

It was mentioned in the investigation into the Paris airshow A320 crash.
I'm afraid you clearly need to read the entire report one more time ...

[DozyWannabe]

One of the many reasons for this A320 ploughing into the trees was that when they got to 70 or 50 ft, the aircraft pitched down by a couple of degrees to prevent a tail-strike on 'landing'. Good idea if the aircraft was over a runway at the time, but this actually had the effect of pitching the aircraft ever closer to the trees.

Rubbish. Sorry.

(Landing mode was never triggered, protections that would have kicked in were deliberately disabled to compensate for the poor preparation that AF provided the pilots and allow them to shuffle the aircraft into position on the first pass, they ended up too low and slow, the engines spooled down and it was impossible to recover enough thrust to climb out once the mistake was noticed. The only time the computers ever counteracted the pilot's inputs was when those inputs would have caused a stall, because the pilot had taken thrust control away from the computers regardless of the altitude limit - and that's all I'm going to say.)

[CONF iture]

and that's all I'm going to say
So don't say anything Dozy, or assume your writing, show your knowledge on the system and/or the report, not the opposite.

[DozyWannabe]

CONF, I dug out the relevant section of the report last time - but seeing as I'm in a good mood and for once the question is more-or-less legitimate, here's your chance - tell us what *you* think happened.

[silverstrata]

Dozy
Landing mode was never triggered, protections that would have kicked in were deliberately disabled to compensate for the poor preparation that AF provided the pilots and allow them to shuffle the aircraft into position on the first pass, they ended up too low and slow, the engines spooled down and it was impossible to recover enough thrust to climb out once the mistake was noticed. The only time the computers ever counteracted the pilot's inputs was when those inputs would have caused a stall, because the pilot had taken thrust control away from the computers regardless of the altitude limit - and that's all I'm going to say.


I don't want to get off topic here, but as you well know that was disputed by Captain Asseline and his team of lawyers. What they said, is that there WERE computer inputs and overrides to the pitch demand, which were unexpected and not explained.



Quote:
The EFCS responded to "stick-back'' with "nose-down''. This is clear from the DFDR listings appended to the final report. Asseline suggests three hypotheses to explain this:--

i) On descending through 50ft, the EFCS had (unknown to the crew, who thought they were at 100ft), entered "landing mode''. At 30ft, the EFCS would then have begun its "derotation'' as for a normal landing. This hypothesis is rejected by the final report, on the grounds that, by the time the radio altitude was below 30ft, alpha was 14.5 degrees, and high AOA protection would be in force and would take priority. This statement in turn is disputed by Sandall [SANC91A], since, assuming that the official timings are 4s in error, descent below 30ft first occurred at least 8 seconds before impact, when alpha was well below 14.5 degrees.

ii) There was a supplementary limitation on angle of attack in landing mode, not published in the FCOM, intended to prevent a tail-strike during landing (which would require a 14 degree limit).

iii) EFCS software failure.
Unquote.


Extracted from:- Mellor P.: "CAD: Computer-Aided Disaster'', High Integrity Systems Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2, 1994.


.

[DozyWannabe]

Extracted from:- Mellor P.: "CAD: Computer-Aided Disaster'', High Integrity Systems Journal, Vol. 1, Iss. 2, 1994.

I'm very pleased that you quoted that particular paper. I'll leave the reasons for being glad for last, but first, let's address a few common-sense items.

Firstly, any half-decent lawyer will be selective about the information they present, particularly with regard to that showing their client in the best possible light. This is why the Continental legal system in the case of air accidents, and it's uneasy relationship between investigators and the judiciary, has always been problematic to deal with.

What Asseline and his lawyers present there is a falsely limited spread of possible explanations, so let's have a look at them. The first two are intriguing, in that they present a possible design fault - however they both hinge on the assumption that the aircraft entered landing mode. The third is more nebulous and assumes a major software failure.

The BEA went back to the FDR traces and found that in the aspect of a back-stick being applied and the elevators commanded down, Asseline was in fact telling the truth - but the FDR was not capable of tracking the mode the computer was in at the time, so Capt. Bechet (the investigator in charge) came up with a novel test. On the longest runway available at the Toulouse testing centre he set up a flight path with obstacles as near to the conditions encountered at Habsheim as possible and flew the A320 over it at 30ft (naturally with plenty of remaining runway should the "landing mode" theory be correct!), and what he found was that by duplicating Asseline's inputs, nose down *was* commanded with backstick applied, but it did not enter landing mode.

What was triggered, however, was Alpha (Stall) Protection, and a fourth explanation that Asseline and his legal team either did not consider, or deliberately left out of contention as it would do his legal position no favours. So we have:

iv: By disconnecting/disabling autothrust (depending on who you believe), the manual thrust settings allowed the engines to spool down completely. The EFCS did not have control of the thrust at the time, so it was unable to command TOGA thrust as it would have done when engaged, but it was monitoring the thrust and airspeed - it knew it didn't have enough to climb. The only thing it could do to prevent the aircraft stalling was keep the AoA such that the aircraft continued flying, and as such all it could do was stop the nose from going up any further (hence commanding elevator down).

[EDIT - CONF iture, is this the mode that you say was "kept silent" until the NTSB Hudson report? And if so, are you saying that Capt. Bechet is lying about performing the test that proved it, that he left this information out of the report - but went on to mention it on a television series two decades later? I'm confused... ]

Had the aircraft done as Asseline commanded it would have stalled just before the trees, fallen from the sky out of control and the death toll would likely have been much higher. Had Asseline and his crew realised their predicament earlier and crammed on full power as they crossed the threshold, the EFCS would have detected enough thrust and airspeed to follow Asseline's nose-up command and allow the aircraft to climb out. Had the trees been just a few metres further from the end of the grass strip, the thrust would have been enough to climb out.

That's the technical aspect of the accident and I don't want to go further than that here, but expect a PM to come your way.

Now - the reason I'm glad you picked that article. It was published in 1994, but as I recall it was written a few years earlier (and had to go through a lengthy peer review process), along with a pretty pointed critique of the use of software in such safety-critical situations.

So, if Airbus were as dismissive and arrogant as their detractors suggest, you'd think they would have rebutted Prof. Mellor's paper and the software reliability critique and called his abilities and reputation into question.

What they actually did was invite him to Toulouse to look at their processes and to assist in identifying any problems based on his track record in the field of Software Reliability. Here's a brief summary of his visit (which happened in 1993):

Prof. Mellor's visit to Toulouse (http://www.kls2.com/cgi-bin/arcfetch?db=sci.aeronautics.airliners&id=%[email protected]%3E)

While due to his nature as a human being and an academic, he never bought into it 100%, he was mollified to some degree and the tone of that report indicates that he was pleasantly surprised by what he found.

How do I know this? Because the late Professor Peter Mellor was my lecturer and professor in the Software Engineering and Software Reliability modules of my degree at City University, and I spent hours in the lecture halls with him (many of his lectures used the case of the Airbus FBW and the frankly incredible attempts to reduce errors and provide redundancy as examples) and doing his coursework. Over and above that though, I collared him a few times during his cigarette breaks (most frequently in the lee of the student union building), identified myself as a fellow aviation nerd and discussed this case to with him on more than a few occasions, and *that's* why I'm glad you chose that paper. Like I said, he remained to be convinced for the entire time I knew him, but his final position on the matter seemed to be that he was completely neutral on the matter of Asseline vs. BEA and Airbus.

As an aside, the relevant Mayday/Air Crash Investigation episode is kicking around on YouTube if you search for it, obviously it's not an exhaustive account and the dramatisation is a bit over-the-top, but both (the real) Capt. Asseline and Capt. Bechet have equal screen time and it also includes the last televised appearance of my old Prof., who sadly passed away sometime between his segments being filmed and the episode being aired. His phrase "The pilot flies the computer and the computer flies the 'plane" was the standard opening of every lecture where the subject was touched upon.

[silverstrata]

What Asseline and his lawyers present there is a falsely limited spread of possible explanations, so let's have a look at them. The first two are intriguing, in that they present a possible design fault - however they both hinge on the assumption that the aircraft entered landing mode. The third is more nebulous and assumes a major software failure.



Why would a function that prevents a tail-strike on landing be considered to be a 'design fault'? Its perfectly obvious that if there is a flyable pitch attitude on landing that will result in a tail strike (alpha-max greater than alpha-strike), then the aircraft should automatically limit its pitch.


What you did not answer therefore, is:

a. Does the A320 have a tail-strike pitch limiter?
b. If so, at what rad-alt does it operate?
c. And if so, please explain why it would NOT have operated during the Habsheim crash?



P.S. I am not criticising the A320 here, as I know that a 737 would probably have cartwheeled in the same scenario. The possibility of a pilot wanting to land on a forest was probably not anticipated by Airbus, and nor should it be, in my opinion.


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[DozyWannabe]

Why would a function that prevents a tail-strike on landing be considered to be a 'design fault'? Its perfectly obvious that if there is a flyable pitch attitude on landing that will result in a tail strike (alpha-max greater than alpha-strike), then the aircraft should automatically limit its pitch.

Well, I'd consider the operation of a "landing mode" that is capable of triggering when the pilot is not intending to land a pretty major design fault, so it's just as well that landing mode was never triggered.


a. Does the A320 have a tail-strike pitch limiter?

I can't say 100%, but I'm pretty sure that it doesn't - certainly her newer sibling the A340-600 does not, given that she suffered quite a few tail scrapes while line pilots got used to her. But it doesn't matter in the end because even if it did have one, landing mode was never triggered.

b. If so, at what rad-alt does it operate?

It doesn't, because it doesn't exist (although some features are inhibited below 30ft), and even if it did, landing mode was never triggered.

c. And if so, please explain why it would NOT have operated during the Habsheim crash?

I'm hoping the previous answers will make this question redundant.

P.S. Landing mode was never triggered

The possibility of a pilot wanting to land on a forest was probably not anticipated by Airbus, and nor should it be, in my opinion.

He didn't want to land on a forest, he wanted to perform the high-alpha flypast that he'd done many times before - unfortunately due to a combination of administrative errors on the part of Air France and, in all probability, a little overconfidence in his own abilities (a well-respected poster on here said that his captain once told him that the Habsheim incident captain was "the most arrogant man [he'd] ever met"), he misjudged his altitude, speed, thrust setting and position.

N.B. The levity of this post is supposed to be humour, so please don't take it the wrong way - happy Friday everyone!