BA manual flying policy?
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BA manual flying policy?
Can any BA pilots tell us a little about the company manual flying policy? I heard a rumour the auto thrust is not supposed to be disconnected even during manual flight. It’s surly not true………
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Hi
I would also be really interested to know what British Airways policy is towards hand flying!
Also the monitored approach, is the PF allowed to hand fly the entire approach or just the final stages when you have confirmed your visual with the correct runway?
Cheers in advance
ADWJENK
I would also be really interested to know what British Airways policy is towards hand flying!
Also the monitored approach, is the PF allowed to hand fly the entire approach or just the final stages when you have confirmed your visual with the correct runway?
Cheers in advance
ADWJENK
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During a monitored approach PF will not land the aircraft. PNF will take over at DA (or before if visual). At DA PF will say "decide" and PNF will either say "Land, I have control", or "Go around". If go around is decided then PF will fly the go around (there will be no change over of roles).
I don't fly for BA, but that's how the monitored approach works in my company.
I don't fly for BA, but that's how the monitored approach works in my company.
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Auto throttle must not be disconnected on the 777, but as it's a Boeing you can override it without disconnecting it. Monkey see, monkey do, so the Airbus managers decided you can't fly an Airbus without autothrust, perhaps not realising that the thrust levers don't move on an Airbus so it's not the same as a 777. On the 747 and 737 it's accepted practice to use manual thrust for a manual landing otherwise the pitch power couple destabilises you. Manual flying is approved, all the way from top of descent if you like, just so long as the weather is appropriate and your colleague feels suitably up to speed to operate. Nothing worse than someone saying 'mind if I fly it' as they take the automatics out then promptly proceed to make a Horlicks of the whole thing necessitating continuous prompting. On the 'bus people don't fly manually often because it's been done so many times before and you've had too many sectors that day. On the 747 people don't do it because you're either at a field with dodgy ATC or you are just plain knackered and can't be bothered.
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ZBMAN
Not quite
Replace PNF and PF with HP and NHP in your description and you're there. By definition, when the PNF takes control he becomes PF, therefore the PF must land the aircraft
During a monitored approach PF will not land the aircraft
Replace PNF and PF with HP and NHP in your description and you're there. By definition, when the PNF takes control he becomes PF, therefore the PF must land the aircraft
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Originally Posted by Strepsils
ZBMAN
Not quite Replace PNF and PF with HP and NHP in your description and you're there. By definition, when the PNF takes control he becomes PF, therefore the PF must land the aircraft
Not quite
Replace PNF and PF with HP and NHP in your description and you're there. By definition, when the PNF takes control he becomes PF, therefore the PF must land the aircraftHowever I was quoting my ops manual
!
This has all been covered before and the replies above give the flavour of our operation. The overiding point is "fly if you want to" - just be mindful of the weather/ATC mix and don't forget to ask your colleague if she/he minds. If you are hand flying a complex SID then the other one (PNF,NHP co-pilot er Dave!) is going to be busy on the RT and keeping the MCP selections up-to-date and monitoring your efforts 
On the other hand, visual approach into simple destination and good weather then go for it - it's one of the reasons we do the job...........
On the other hand, visual approach into simple destination and good weather then go for it - it's one of the reasons we do the job...........
In the bad old days when the weather was poor it was traditional for the captain to fly the aircraft to minimums AND then to land it. This meant that he was kept pretty busy and didn't always make a great job of it. Whilst this was going on the F/O didn't really do a lot except move the flaps and the gear.
Then some genius came up with the idea of the monitored approach. This meant that one pilot flew the approach to minimums and was programmed to make a G/A if necessary. The other pilot monitored the approach and was geared to looking for the runway and landing.
The next perfection came with which pilot did which. It was established fairly rapidly that it was better for the F/O to fly the approach and the captain to land. Simply put, if a very senior captain was making a bit of a mess of the approach then a very junior F/O might be reluctant to make comment whereas no captain would even hesitate slightly to put the F/O right.
I don't know who invented the system but I first saw it in BEA in 1964 and I have been using it ever since. All airlines that I have ever worked for used this system.
Then some genius came up with the idea of the monitored approach. This meant that one pilot flew the approach to minimums and was programmed to make a G/A if necessary. The other pilot monitored the approach and was geared to looking for the runway and landing.
The next perfection came with which pilot did which. It was established fairly rapidly that it was better for the F/O to fly the approach and the captain to land. Simply put, if a very senior captain was making a bit of a mess of the approach then a very junior F/O might be reluctant to make comment whereas no captain would even hesitate slightly to put the F/O right.
I don't know who invented the system but I first saw it in BEA in 1964 and I have been using it ever since. All airlines that I have ever worked for used this system.
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The subject of manual flying is oft mentioned on these pages so I hope the mods forgive the use of band for posting the following.
Watching and Waning
By Patrick R. Veillette, Ph.D.
01/31/2006 11:19:26 AM
The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) recently and officially voiced concern that "Airline pilots increasingly lack 'basic flying skills' and may be unable to cope with an inflight emergency such as sudden mechanical failure." The union warns that pilots are becoming too reliant on automated systems and are not being encouraged or trained to fly manually.
Martin Alder, a line pilot and BALPA safety expert who helped compile the findings, said: "The style of flying and training means that people will be less able or less likely to cope, which has obvious safety concerns."
To help crystallize the problem for the flying public, he told The Observer, "The ultimate scenario is to go to Aberdeen in really bad weather and a short runway and suddenly you have to start learning basic flying skills."
Oh my. I double-checked the date on the notice to be sure it was fresh and not from some safety information morgue. Sure enough, it was current, a fact that was both surprising and frustrating. It's often said that pilots aren't discovering new ways to kill themselves, but rather stick to the old standards. And automation malaise became that long ago.
The dangers posed by cockpit automation was a subject on everyone's mind at an international cockpit resource management (CRM) conference held a decade and a half ago. I was there, one of hundreds gathered in a large public room, listening to a steady stream of respected airline check airmen reporting their observations of the first generation of pilots who had recently transitioned to glass cockpits.
I recall one instructor at a major airline saying, "The FMS must have a gravitational pull because it can easily get both pilots heads-down in a heartbeat with the slightest problem." The whole room seemed to nod in knowing agreement. Later, a simulator instructor recalled sim sessions when, "we failed the automation during an approach and the crew was instructed to proceed direct to the VOR and hold." He went on, "Do you know how many of the crews weren't able to do it? More than two-thirds."
Cockpit automation promised many things, including increasing the capacity of the national airspace system because the boxes would make navigation more precise, reduce manual workload, relieve humans from routine operations, enhance the management of their aircraft and reduce human errors.
However, once the automated cockpits began entering everyday line operations, instructors and check airmen grew concerned about some of their unanticipated side effects. Despite the promise of reducing human mistakes, the flight managers reported the automation at times actually created much larger errors. In the terminal environment, they said, the workload in an automated cockpit actually seemed higher than in the older steam gauge cockpits. Certainly the tendency for both pilots to go "heads down" while in busy terminal airspace was a problem that couldn't be overlooked. At other times the automation seemed to lull the flight crews into complacency. Finally, over time concern surfaced that the manual flying skills of the automated flight crews had deteriorated due to over-reliance on their computers. The flight crew managers said they worried that pilots would have less "stick-and-rudder" proficiency just as those skills were needed to manually resume direct control of the aircraft.
When so many senior check airmen from so many airlines agree unanimously on a safety concern, it's important for aviation safety professionals to take notice. In the conference room that day were some of NASA's human factors researchers and advisers, several of whom had spent a career in the front of airliners before retiring. Others in attendance were active members of various committees from the pilot unions, airline safety and training managers, and researchers from prestigious universities.
At the dinner reception later that night, a plan was hatched to conduct a thorough scientific study of the subject, identifying problems and formulating solutions. A major airline would provide access to flight crews undergoing recurrent simulator training in basic and automated versions of their medium-haul aircraft. The pilot union promised to add a considerable wealth of line pilot observations as well as active participation from their committee members, NASA would provide its research scientists as well as funding, and a major university would contribute its research team. Then working on my doctoral thesis in aeronautical/civil engineering, I was appointed a member of the research team.
One of the crucial elements of the study was to record and analyze objective parameters rather than rely on purely subjective opinions. The data set included all of the various aircraft parameters such as heading, altitude, airspeed, glideslope and localizer deviations, as well as pilot control inputs. These were recorded during a variety of normal, abnormal and emergency maneuvers during four-hour simulator sessions. The control group was composed of pilots who flew an older version of a common twin-jet airliner equipped with analog "round dial" instrumentation and the experimental group was composed of pilots who flew that same aircraft, but newer models equipped with a first-generation EFIS and FMS.
Experiment Results
So what did the experiment determine? Overall, when pilots who had flown glass cockpits for several years were required to hand fly various maneuvers, the aircraft parameters and flight control inputs clearly showed that some erosion of flying skills had occurred. During normal maneuvers such as turns to headings and two-engine ILSes without a flight director, the glass-cockpit group exhibited somewhat greater deviations than the steam gauge group. Most of the time the deviations were within the practical test standards, but the pilots definitely didn't keep on the localizer and glideslope as smoothly as the steam-gauge group.
I was to discover during post-simulator interviews that the flight director on the older aircraft was considered by many steam gauge pilots to be "behind the curve" and thus they tended to trust their raw data more on an everyday basis and to fly without the flight director. By contrast, in their post-simulator interviews the glass cockpit crews expressed the common view that their flight director was quite "tight" and that they always relied on it whether they were hand-flying or letting the autopilot do the flying. For the latter group, a problem arose when their flight director disappeared from view. It was clear from tracking eye movements that it took time for these pilots to adapt their scan.
The smoothness of the flight director did prove to be a defining element. When the flight crews flew a simultaneous ILS maneuver (in which flight director use is required), the glass cockpit crews flew tighter to the localizer and glideslope centerlines than the steam gauge crews, both when using the autopilot and when hand-flying with the flight director. This vindicated the "tightness" of the newer generation flight director as well as the opinions of the steam-gauge group regarding the "looseness" of their flight director.
How often does a glass cockpit crew have to fly raw data maneuvers with no flight director these days? Very seldom, and it showed even way back then. However, to be fair to the glass cockpit crews, we were asking them to substantially modify habit patterns thoroughly ingrained over thousands of hours of flying during the previous three to four years.
The differences in hand-flying skills between the two groups became more significant during abnormal maneuvers such as slam-dunks. When given close crossing restrictions, the steam gauge crews were more adept at the mental math and usually maneuvered the aircraft in a smoother manner to make the restriction. On the other hand, the glass cockpit crews tended to go "heads down" and tried to solve the crossing restriction on the FMS.
Now remember these were some of the first generation of glass cockpits and the flight crews were still trying to adapt to the flying glass. They clearly weren't yet adept at working "the box" efficiently and would stumble around the various pages trying to figure out how to insert the crossing restriction. Often I heard the expression, "Oh, what page is that on?" And then both crewmembers would go heads down trying to figure it out. Many of the glass cockpit crews mismanaged their time trying to figure out how to insert the crossing restriction in the box, becoming so absorbed in the process that they'd barely make the assignment.
Often times in the real world we get changed to a different approach at the last minute, and this was another situation we used in the simulator experiment. Once again, the steam gauge crews were able to transition easier to the parallel runway's localizer, whereas the glass cockpit crews had a much more difficult time, with the pilot-not-flying going heads-down for a significant amount of time trying to program the new approach into the FMS. Clearly, the "box" was not user friendly for this task. In most cases, the effort would have been made easier by simply tuning in the new localizer frequency, clicking off the automation and hand-flying the approach. While that might sound like common sense now, at the time, the general guidance in the industry was to let the box do as much of the flying as possible. That view has since changed and airlines have adopted policies recommending that pilots use their best judgment when choosing which level of automation will most efficiently do the task considering the workload and situational awareness.
It's easy to suggest that the automated pilots' hand-flying skills were getting rusty, but the workload was significantly higher for the glass cockpit crews in this situation than for the steam gauge crews because their box demanded so much attention.
The emergency maneuvers clearly broadened the difference in hand-flying skills between the two groups. In general, the steam gauge pilots tended to fly raw data anyhow, so when they were given a V1 cut and instructed to fly the maneuver without a flight director, they performed it expertly. By contrast, SOP among glass cockpit operations at the time was to use the flight director during a V1 cut, so when those crews had their flight directors disabled, their eye scan again began a more erratic searching pattern and their hand flying subsequently suffered.
The single-engine ILS maneuver distanced the glass and steam crowds even more. The analog crews who flew the approach without a flight director did admirably. Interesting enough, when the steam gauge crews asked to fly the maneuver with the flight director, those who matched the V-bars had rougher performance than those who merely used the V-bars for guidance but relied on their own skills to track the localizer and glideslope. When the glass cockpit crews had the flight director taken away, they fumbled, and some flew so awkwardly it was somewhat embarrassing for everyone. When the glass cockpit crews flew the maneuver using their flight director (as the airline recommended), most of the pilots nailed the needles almost dead center all the way down.
The preliminary results of our simulator experiments were thoroughly reviewed by airline training and standards captains, by the pilot union representatives, by NASA scientists and by a peer review panel from the Transportation Research Board, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences. There was a general agreement among all involved with the senior check airmen who had earlier opined that some erosion of the manual flying skills had occurred among the automated cockpit crews.
Those who looked deep at the data saw that the glass cockpit pilots who better managed the automation also had better flying skills. The data could not reveal whether those skills preceded or followed the automation. However, it was very clear to all involved that improved automation management needed to move to the forefront. Since then, recommended "best practices" and procedures have evolved to the point at which some of the earlier problems with automation have been adequately remedied.
Pilots need to maintain their flight skills and be able to maneuver the aircraft manually within the standards set forth in the FAA's practical test standards. To that end, pilots of automated aircraft should occasionally turn the boxes off and hand-fly the machine to maintain their stick-and-rudder skills. That was the recommendation that came from the study back in 1994 and it still stands today. (Unfortunately, because of budget cuts NASA never did determine which maneuvers and how much hand flying was needed for a glass cockpit pilot to keep basic skills sharp.)
As the aviation environment presents ever-newer safety challenges, it will take the combined efforts of industry, government, pilot groups and academia to come up with better solutions. That's what happened when automation took control back in the 1990s, and the solutions the research team put forward went a long way to solving the problem -- despite BALPA's recent re-discovery of the glass cockpit's flaws.
To those who are looking for answers, I suggest you first conduct a thorough search of the scientific literature. It's much smarter to learn valuable lessons from the past rather than research the same problem all over again. Those who fail to study history are often compelled to relive it and to repeat mistakes for which solutions are already in place. And in the case of the automated cockpit, the solutions include switching the box to OFF. B&CA
Editor's Note: The results of the study, "Effects of Cockpit Automation on Pilot Manual Skills" were published in the April 1995 edition of the Transportation Research Record, an academic journal of the National Research Council, which is an organization within the National Academy of Sciences.
The study received several prestigious national awards, including one from the Transportation Research Board, and another from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
It is significant to note that since the adoption by many airlines of the procedures recommended in the study, the lack of stick-and-rudder proficiency has not been an issue in any incidents, nor a significant factor when pilots return for their proficiency checks. Evidently, BALPA airlines have not followed suit. Had they done so, the organization's member pilots might not have displayed the diminution of manual flying skills that now so concerns BALPA.
While business aviation doesn't have the resources to actively participate in studies such as this, its pilots are impacted. After all, business aviation embraced automated flight decks early and widely. And pilots of the ultra-long-rangers such as the Bombardier Global Express and Gulfstream V might not get to exercise their manual skills much at all, getting maybe just four landings per month on transoceanic flights.
Reprinted from the February 2006 issue of Business & Commercial Aviation magazine.
Watching and Waning
By Patrick R. Veillette, Ph.D.
01/31/2006 11:19:26 AM
The British Airline Pilots Association (BALPA) recently and officially voiced concern that "Airline pilots increasingly lack 'basic flying skills' and may be unable to cope with an inflight emergency such as sudden mechanical failure." The union warns that pilots are becoming too reliant on automated systems and are not being encouraged or trained to fly manually.
Martin Alder, a line pilot and BALPA safety expert who helped compile the findings, said: "The style of flying and training means that people will be less able or less likely to cope, which has obvious safety concerns."
To help crystallize the problem for the flying public, he told The Observer, "The ultimate scenario is to go to Aberdeen in really bad weather and a short runway and suddenly you have to start learning basic flying skills."
Oh my. I double-checked the date on the notice to be sure it was fresh and not from some safety information morgue. Sure enough, it was current, a fact that was both surprising and frustrating. It's often said that pilots aren't discovering new ways to kill themselves, but rather stick to the old standards. And automation malaise became that long ago.
The dangers posed by cockpit automation was a subject on everyone's mind at an international cockpit resource management (CRM) conference held a decade and a half ago. I was there, one of hundreds gathered in a large public room, listening to a steady stream of respected airline check airmen reporting their observations of the first generation of pilots who had recently transitioned to glass cockpits.
I recall one instructor at a major airline saying, "The FMS must have a gravitational pull because it can easily get both pilots heads-down in a heartbeat with the slightest problem." The whole room seemed to nod in knowing agreement. Later, a simulator instructor recalled sim sessions when, "we failed the automation during an approach and the crew was instructed to proceed direct to the VOR and hold." He went on, "Do you know how many of the crews weren't able to do it? More than two-thirds."
Cockpit automation promised many things, including increasing the capacity of the national airspace system because the boxes would make navigation more precise, reduce manual workload, relieve humans from routine operations, enhance the management of their aircraft and reduce human errors.
However, once the automated cockpits began entering everyday line operations, instructors and check airmen grew concerned about some of their unanticipated side effects. Despite the promise of reducing human mistakes, the flight managers reported the automation at times actually created much larger errors. In the terminal environment, they said, the workload in an automated cockpit actually seemed higher than in the older steam gauge cockpits. Certainly the tendency for both pilots to go "heads down" while in busy terminal airspace was a problem that couldn't be overlooked. At other times the automation seemed to lull the flight crews into complacency. Finally, over time concern surfaced that the manual flying skills of the automated flight crews had deteriorated due to over-reliance on their computers. The flight crew managers said they worried that pilots would have less "stick-and-rudder" proficiency just as those skills were needed to manually resume direct control of the aircraft.
When so many senior check airmen from so many airlines agree unanimously on a safety concern, it's important for aviation safety professionals to take notice. In the conference room that day were some of NASA's human factors researchers and advisers, several of whom had spent a career in the front of airliners before retiring. Others in attendance were active members of various committees from the pilot unions, airline safety and training managers, and researchers from prestigious universities.
At the dinner reception later that night, a plan was hatched to conduct a thorough scientific study of the subject, identifying problems and formulating solutions. A major airline would provide access to flight crews undergoing recurrent simulator training in basic and automated versions of their medium-haul aircraft. The pilot union promised to add a considerable wealth of line pilot observations as well as active participation from their committee members, NASA would provide its research scientists as well as funding, and a major university would contribute its research team. Then working on my doctoral thesis in aeronautical/civil engineering, I was appointed a member of the research team.
One of the crucial elements of the study was to record and analyze objective parameters rather than rely on purely subjective opinions. The data set included all of the various aircraft parameters such as heading, altitude, airspeed, glideslope and localizer deviations, as well as pilot control inputs. These were recorded during a variety of normal, abnormal and emergency maneuvers during four-hour simulator sessions. The control group was composed of pilots who flew an older version of a common twin-jet airliner equipped with analog "round dial" instrumentation and the experimental group was composed of pilots who flew that same aircraft, but newer models equipped with a first-generation EFIS and FMS.
Experiment Results
So what did the experiment determine? Overall, when pilots who had flown glass cockpits for several years were required to hand fly various maneuvers, the aircraft parameters and flight control inputs clearly showed that some erosion of flying skills had occurred. During normal maneuvers such as turns to headings and two-engine ILSes without a flight director, the glass-cockpit group exhibited somewhat greater deviations than the steam gauge group. Most of the time the deviations were within the practical test standards, but the pilots definitely didn't keep on the localizer and glideslope as smoothly as the steam-gauge group.
I was to discover during post-simulator interviews that the flight director on the older aircraft was considered by many steam gauge pilots to be "behind the curve" and thus they tended to trust their raw data more on an everyday basis and to fly without the flight director. By contrast, in their post-simulator interviews the glass cockpit crews expressed the common view that their flight director was quite "tight" and that they always relied on it whether they were hand-flying or letting the autopilot do the flying. For the latter group, a problem arose when their flight director disappeared from view. It was clear from tracking eye movements that it took time for these pilots to adapt their scan.
The smoothness of the flight director did prove to be a defining element. When the flight crews flew a simultaneous ILS maneuver (in which flight director use is required), the glass cockpit crews flew tighter to the localizer and glideslope centerlines than the steam gauge crews, both when using the autopilot and when hand-flying with the flight director. This vindicated the "tightness" of the newer generation flight director as well as the opinions of the steam-gauge group regarding the "looseness" of their flight director.
How often does a glass cockpit crew have to fly raw data maneuvers with no flight director these days? Very seldom, and it showed even way back then. However, to be fair to the glass cockpit crews, we were asking them to substantially modify habit patterns thoroughly ingrained over thousands of hours of flying during the previous three to four years.
The differences in hand-flying skills between the two groups became more significant during abnormal maneuvers such as slam-dunks. When given close crossing restrictions, the steam gauge crews were more adept at the mental math and usually maneuvered the aircraft in a smoother manner to make the restriction. On the other hand, the glass cockpit crews tended to go "heads down" and tried to solve the crossing restriction on the FMS.
Now remember these were some of the first generation of glass cockpits and the flight crews were still trying to adapt to the flying glass. They clearly weren't yet adept at working "the box" efficiently and would stumble around the various pages trying to figure out how to insert the crossing restriction. Often I heard the expression, "Oh, what page is that on?" And then both crewmembers would go heads down trying to figure it out. Many of the glass cockpit crews mismanaged their time trying to figure out how to insert the crossing restriction in the box, becoming so absorbed in the process that they'd barely make the assignment.
Often times in the real world we get changed to a different approach at the last minute, and this was another situation we used in the simulator experiment. Once again, the steam gauge crews were able to transition easier to the parallel runway's localizer, whereas the glass cockpit crews had a much more difficult time, with the pilot-not-flying going heads-down for a significant amount of time trying to program the new approach into the FMS. Clearly, the "box" was not user friendly for this task. In most cases, the effort would have been made easier by simply tuning in the new localizer frequency, clicking off the automation and hand-flying the approach. While that might sound like common sense now, at the time, the general guidance in the industry was to let the box do as much of the flying as possible. That view has since changed and airlines have adopted policies recommending that pilots use their best judgment when choosing which level of automation will most efficiently do the task considering the workload and situational awareness.
It's easy to suggest that the automated pilots' hand-flying skills were getting rusty, but the workload was significantly higher for the glass cockpit crews in this situation than for the steam gauge crews because their box demanded so much attention.
The emergency maneuvers clearly broadened the difference in hand-flying skills between the two groups. In general, the steam gauge pilots tended to fly raw data anyhow, so when they were given a V1 cut and instructed to fly the maneuver without a flight director, they performed it expertly. By contrast, SOP among glass cockpit operations at the time was to use the flight director during a V1 cut, so when those crews had their flight directors disabled, their eye scan again began a more erratic searching pattern and their hand flying subsequently suffered.
The single-engine ILS maneuver distanced the glass and steam crowds even more. The analog crews who flew the approach without a flight director did admirably. Interesting enough, when the steam gauge crews asked to fly the maneuver with the flight director, those who matched the V-bars had rougher performance than those who merely used the V-bars for guidance but relied on their own skills to track the localizer and glideslope. When the glass cockpit crews had the flight director taken away, they fumbled, and some flew so awkwardly it was somewhat embarrassing for everyone. When the glass cockpit crews flew the maneuver using their flight director (as the airline recommended), most of the pilots nailed the needles almost dead center all the way down.
The preliminary results of our simulator experiments were thoroughly reviewed by airline training and standards captains, by the pilot union representatives, by NASA scientists and by a peer review panel from the Transportation Research Board, a unit of the National Academy of Sciences. There was a general agreement among all involved with the senior check airmen who had earlier opined that some erosion of the manual flying skills had occurred among the automated cockpit crews.
Those who looked deep at the data saw that the glass cockpit pilots who better managed the automation also had better flying skills. The data could not reveal whether those skills preceded or followed the automation. However, it was very clear to all involved that improved automation management needed to move to the forefront. Since then, recommended "best practices" and procedures have evolved to the point at which some of the earlier problems with automation have been adequately remedied.
Pilots need to maintain their flight skills and be able to maneuver the aircraft manually within the standards set forth in the FAA's practical test standards. To that end, pilots of automated aircraft should occasionally turn the boxes off and hand-fly the machine to maintain their stick-and-rudder skills. That was the recommendation that came from the study back in 1994 and it still stands today. (Unfortunately, because of budget cuts NASA never did determine which maneuvers and how much hand flying was needed for a glass cockpit pilot to keep basic skills sharp.)
As the aviation environment presents ever-newer safety challenges, it will take the combined efforts of industry, government, pilot groups and academia to come up with better solutions. That's what happened when automation took control back in the 1990s, and the solutions the research team put forward went a long way to solving the problem -- despite BALPA's recent re-discovery of the glass cockpit's flaws.
To those who are looking for answers, I suggest you first conduct a thorough search of the scientific literature. It's much smarter to learn valuable lessons from the past rather than research the same problem all over again. Those who fail to study history are often compelled to relive it and to repeat mistakes for which solutions are already in place. And in the case of the automated cockpit, the solutions include switching the box to OFF. B&CA
Editor's Note: The results of the study, "Effects of Cockpit Automation on Pilot Manual Skills" were published in the April 1995 edition of the Transportation Research Record, an academic journal of the National Research Council, which is an organization within the National Academy of Sciences.
The study received several prestigious national awards, including one from the Transportation Research Board, and another from the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics.
It is significant to note that since the adoption by many airlines of the procedures recommended in the study, the lack of stick-and-rudder proficiency has not been an issue in any incidents, nor a significant factor when pilots return for their proficiency checks. Evidently, BALPA airlines have not followed suit. Had they done so, the organization's member pilots might not have displayed the diminution of manual flying skills that now so concerns BALPA.
While business aviation doesn't have the resources to actively participate in studies such as this, its pilots are impacted. After all, business aviation embraced automated flight decks early and widely. And pilots of the ultra-long-rangers such as the Bombardier Global Express and Gulfstream V might not get to exercise their manual skills much at all, getting maybe just four landings per month on transoceanic flights.
Reprinted from the February 2006 issue of Business & Commercial Aviation magazine.
