Old fart talking here, so listen up:ok:

In the good old days, circling was fun, easily doable with fairly experienced skippers and f/os and nice cockpit gauges which allowed good crosschecks as both pilots alternated looking in and out. Even with the PM straining to look out monitoring the visual cues, obstacles, etc the layout of those old steam gauges allowed his peripheral vision to monitor engine/flight instrumentations with relative ease. Try doing that in today's CRT/LED displays...not that easy.

In times past, pilots get a real feel of the performance of the aircraft through good " endorsement training " with many takeoffs/landings, touch n gos in a real physical environment; now with this ZFT sim training thingy, endorsement training is a joke.

The circling involves full hands on flying for the PF with full concentration on the flight path, profile and performance management by feel, good eyeballing and of course, experience. The PM monitors both visually and through the instruments, helping to navigate if need to without being distracted with all the manipulating of dials, heading updates, etc as they now practise in the sim.

Different world out there today; so maybe circling may be done away with in the not too distant future!:{

Gleneagles,

Right, we need to now make sure that as we roll out on final on visual approach that the heading bug on the EFIS is set to runway heading! Miss that and you fail your command course!

That's why one is inclined to cheat a bit with help from the instruments on a PC because in a visual circuit you can't see final when you're on base ...

Video
 

Great Video Polydras.
I've seen it before, but it always is a good reminder.

Education ?
 

You mean AA teaches their pilots stuff ?

What a concept !

FG

they may as well just show this on the AEP day....beats the hell out of the pitiful efforts made towards fatigue, crm etc.

Edit: Sorry, wrong guy, I was thinking of a different video. This video is actually quite good and could certainly benefit the Cathay training culture. Our way of fixing all the problems with visual approaches was ...

... increase the automation and increase your tasks, like messing around with stop watches and building a visual approach in the FMC.

:ugh::ugh::ugh:

Circling at Kemayoran, Djakarta.
 

gleneagles is correct about round instruments making it easier to circle in IFR-VFR conditions. Back in the late 1970s Cathay operated a night arrival into Kemayoran which was the main airport for Djakarta. If a north wind was blowing it required running down RW18 ILS to 1000 feet and then breaking 45 degrees left, glancing at the second hand of the clock and heading out into the pitch black darkness of rural Indonesia. Sighting the dimly lit airport terminal building when half way around the turnback was the time to start breathing again and if the VARSI came up with the correct colours then all was well. Great sense of satisfaction from this one, sadly never to be experienced by todays operators.

Oval3Holer;
There are times when messing about with heading bugs and other so called aids is akin to puting legs on a snake.

O.P.

Next week it'll be the ILS that's not allowed !

No wonder T&C's are spiraling downward. The skill set and level of competency that I had to demonstrate 20 years ago is being dumbed down, so that an airline pilot can be trained easily and without any need for solid experience.

What is with Cathay? I have seen your SOPS by proxy, and thankfully, many of them have been binned at KA. No raw data flying, no high speed descent, Cat D circling at a 1000 feet ( which you are now getting rid of ) and I get told to put extra fuel on by ACARS.

Even worse than having the job dumbed down, is the above empowers an ordinary operator to huff and puff in the LHS, within the boundaries of some pretty numbing SOPS.

Bring back the well managed high speed descent below the MSA; and a glide slope intercept from above isn't sporty if well handled. And who took away the dive from Sierra? Ask me to do a raw data ILS on a line check. And for licensing renewal, have me demonstrate a 500ft single engine circling approach in the simulator. Don't start me on Visual Approaches. Can't do one it should be bye-bye Charlie.

All of these were core competencies just a few years ago! Now that they are not, will make pilot training simple, cheaper and the abandonment of a need for good experience. Hence pay is not going up.

This is a reflection on what Boeing has always subscribed to: hence the term for their aircraft as being designed to be flown by N and A's.... (i'll leave the translation to others). :ugh:

Gnad,

You know you're just another airline pilot, right? The fact that cadets can eventually do it, while never having any actual flying experience, is the whole point: If you want to do some challenging flying that requires skill and experience to avoid hitting the ground, where talent and brainpower mean something, go do some soaring or aerobatics or join the air force (but don't fly jet transports) or fly helicopters.

If you want to work in a difficult industry where discipline, knowledge and a bit of experience and training will get a valuable and therefore high-paying job done, and where a single accident can break a company while taking 300-400 people down at the same time, stick with jet transports that come with all the fancy auto-systems for you to monitor, all the dispatch/load control/engineering/operations support, and pat yourself on the back for pulling off yet another easy manual landings at the end....unless the weather is a bit dodgy, then, as per policy, let the autoland take care of that too.

Don't worry, you're still an important (though easily replaceable) employee, but you're not that special, and if a 23-yr-old, 200-hr SO can do it, so can you. Before you argue about all that amazing "commanding" you do, pick up any book on leadership to find out just how little leading and commanding you do, unless you're one of the 10% that actually knows the difference between leadership/commanding and pretending to lead/command while simply being good at quoting manuals.

Have a nice day!

Iron Skillet

Of course a high percentage of cadets will be able to do it and that's the crux of my argument. The job has been made inefficient and is being continually dumbed down. From my observations, there are two streams of training too. We are not quite there with your suggestion that cadet pilots are anywhere near the same level of proficiency as experienced pilots.Yes, they are coming up to the mark quickly, because they don't have the same set of core skills as yesteryear.

You seem to infer I have concerns about my own professional importance. No, I don't. Frankly, the situation is nicely balanced. Sure, I don't have worry about demonstrating the skills I did 20 years ago which makes proficiency and professional standards riddled with complacency. The other side of the scale being my easy replacement and lack of wage growth due the supply and demand being met with cadets.

Your belittling descriptors of the airline pilot are a few years away yet. No circling bringing it a few years closer. Just cross off visual approaches and that will help. Raw data proficiency has long gone by accounts. Dragging your ass in seems common too- I thought you add three thousand to that FMGC profile. :O

No Bucks, no Buck Rogers......

The days of CX being a smallish Airline with highly experienced drivers that fly like Chuck Yeager has long gone. We are scraping the bottom of the barrell now days and CX is forced to dumb it down in order to compensate.

The reasons are obvious and you don't need to be a Rocket Scientist ( or Buck Rogers!! ) to see it.

As for no NDB approaches and no Circling?? Good riddance, much safer RNAV's available.

However I do think we should maintain the ability to fly raw data and visual circuits. Aren't the 'N' sim sessions designed to address such areas?

So..... a quick aside....

Anyone else noted that the subset of guys who bitch about the VNAV being rubbish, the On Approach logic being wrong, the procedures always changing and generally derisive about anything with the letters PRNAVGNASSANP (etc) in, almost always exclude the subset of hardworking junior guys (esp' Cadets) and almost completely belong inside (not wholly including) the subset of guys who wax lyrical about former glories - ALL THE TIME! You know who you are....

(Breathe mate .... Breathe, or maybe punctuate next time)

Oh and BTW, absolutely not agin' story time, got a few myself, they are fun between the right mates but irrelevant to today's job, get over it. (And maybe if you're gonna publish one, come up with something better than basically a visual circuit)

Gnadenburg

There are old pilots and bold pilots but not many old bold pilots.

This attitude was fine in your 402 doing them on a regular basis, but the fact is we don't do them any more, so the occasional one in the sim is not enough to send my family off with you to practice one for real.

Actually according to the article in Crews News, it says we are not to do circling approaches but that any manouvreing in future will be done as a visual approach. So effectively can't we basically do the same manouvre anyway but just call it a visual approach? Albeit with the 5000M viz required instead of the 4600M.