A survey of pilot attitudes to manual flying skills.

[Centaurus]

Received this from a colleague. Seems a worthwhile cause. Took only a few minutes to complete and there is a box for general comments, too. Cent.


I am doing a survey as part of my Thesis for my university course at Cranfield. It is looking at pilot attitudes towards manual flying skills. Could I ask you to complete it when you have time please? It should only take about 10-20 minutes hopefully.

Here is the link to the survey:

https://cranfielduniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1Tf2GY6mkpyR8Il

It is totally anonymous, feel free to pass the link on to anyone else, I am trying to get as large varied background of airline/bizjet pilots as possible to do it.
Thank you.

[Mach E Avelli]

Quite a good survey, but lacking a couple of vital considerations such as:


Age brackets don't allow for pilots over the age of 65
Does not determine how recently respondents have been flying commercially
Does not ask if the respondent's first language is English, and if not, what language.

The last is important because it would give some insight into the likely culture of the respondent. My unscientific observation is that certain cultures are more inclined to disregard instructions that counter common sense. E.g. my employer does not discourage manual flying, but even if they did, I would still do what I considered necessary to maintain a skill. I imagine that your average 30,000 hour pilot in the USA would take the same view.
Another culture could take such an instruction absolutely literally and never attempt to fly manually. Or maybe never accept a visual approach for fear of becoming unstable, or holding themselves open to 'loss of face' if they screwed it up.

[Trim Stab]

I started the survey but then gave up when I got to the question "what type of operations do you currently fly". All the potential answers apply uniquely to A to B transport operations - as if that is the only type of civil aviation!

[Superpilot]

Completed the survey, thanks for sharing the link Centaurus (if you recall a while back you came to my aid when I was questioning why so many captains respond in the negative to my requests to fly an approach manually :ok:). I agree with Mach's unscientific observation concerning cultures and languages in the flight deck. I gave up on Asia and now fly in Europe and noticed a major change in attitude on the fligth deck. We do visual approaches, circling approaches and half the airfields only have NPAs. In my last airline, the first two types of approaches would've been handled by the captain as a rule, and the latter, well most captains would take control due to their belief the junior could never pull it off. However, collecting such data would almost certainly result in some very un-PC conclusions, so I understand why your colleague hasn't done so!