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Article about lack of hand flying skills - FAA concerned

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Article about lack of hand flying skills - FAA concerned

Old 8th Sep 2011, 11:47
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Bubbers44,

You could argue that the fresh-from-flight-school FO has been exclusively hand-flying for 1-2 years before the jet job and so has no qualms about flying pitch and power without dribbling over the lack of FD and AP/AT...
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Old 8th Sep 2011, 13:15
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The more established airlines probably don't have any pilots under 45 with tons of good experience.
Negative on that. The likes of Lufthansa or British Airways either used to have or still have their own flight schools and train young pilots from walking to flying their precious jets in a pretty short time. Same as the military does actually. The problem of manual flight is not with those young pilots just entering the line, it is a much bigger problem for those flying only longhaul for a long time with only 1 or 2 landings every couple months. Shown both by inhouse and by NASA safety studies.
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Old 8th Sep 2011, 14:48
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Yes, but he had lots of landings. A water forced landing is a lot easier than a land forced landing -- no obstacles. The basic drill is keep the wings level and land as you would normally.
If I land my jet with 11 degrees NUp there will be a load scraping noise, followed by Oh S*&t, followed by tea & biscuits. What I find disappointing is the airlines who discourage visual approaches. The reason quoted is becasue so many, even captains, screw them up and either make glide landings or hopefully G/A's. One is consdiered a no-no, the other a waste of time & money. There's no time to train the most basic manoeuvre, so don't let them do it. In answer to "why is it a problem when they'v e passed base training?" is that an on line visual is never a level circuit. It's the descending circuit, or dare I say straight in without ILS, that causes the probs. All this wizardry and it's difficult. I can't remember being trained to do visuals around the Greek islands, it was just bthe way it was. That was the norm, and Mk.1 eyeball and an altimeter was all you had. A DME near the rwy was a luxury. No night landings without PAPI's etc. No wonder they want to pay us peanuts. They think we are useless, but who's fault is that?
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 14:59
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I'm really confused why there is any serious discussion about this subject.

Outside of the carriers (and their minions who will defend them) who have let their zero time FOs languish in the right seat for thousands of long haul "hours', many logged in the bunk, and have done nothing to improve their flying skills - ie set up a commuter for them to earn their bones or encourage or require some flying in an airplane where you can't memorize the PFD picture in the sim to get a desired result, I can't see how anyone can argue this.

Almost every military hot stick started out as a zero time cadet. Starting as a cadet is not the problem.

Lufthansa does not have this problem. Neither does BA. I don't work for either and could not if I wanted to.

If you don't know how to use the automation you can't pass the sim checks anywhere- that isn't really an issue, so it isn't what is better or more desirable- hot chops or good automation skills. The issue is that there are thousands of so called pilots sitting in big jets who never really learned to fly and, with the program they are in and the amount of hand flying the will get in their career, probably never will.

Do you really want to divert into KEF February 4 with a 30 knot crosswind and patchy ice with a Captain with less than 400 hours total actual flying experience in his entire life? A guy that was picked for the ab initio for reasons other than aviation interest and aptitude in the first place? Keep in mind there are plenty of people worldwide of all ethnicities and nationalities who would love to do the job. Besides 4 or 5 star service of whatever ridiculous claim they have in the back, what is the airline's priority? It ain't putting the most capable person in the left seat that's for sure - and I am not advocating DECs here, just to quell that squawk. You can't upgrade a great Captain if you don't start with a good FO. Cr** FOs make cr** Captains. Always have and always will.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 17:19
  #105 (permalink)  
 
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Example of Confused Over Reliance on Automation

This is an interesting article from Aviation Week:

High-Altitude Upset Recovery | AVIATION WEEK

This is a quote from Sully in the article, that illustrates part of the current over reliance on automation:

Training also needs improvement. "Currently, to my knowledge, air transport pilots practice approaches to stalls, never actually stalling the aircraft. These maneuvers are done at low altitude where they're taught to power out of the maneuver with minimum altitude loss." In some aircraft, they're taught to pull back on the stick, use maximum thrust and let the alpha floor (AoA) protection adjust nose attitude for optimum wing performance.

"They never get the chance to practice recovery from a high-altitude upset," he continued. "At altitude, you cannot power out of a stall without losing altitude." And depending upon the fly-by-wire flight control system's alpha floor protection isn't the best way to recover from a stall at cruise altitude.
There are several fundamental problems with the development of specific procedures like this one (powering out of a stall using AOA protection), that Sully describes.
  • The procedure WOULD NOT EVEN EXIST without the automated AOA protection.
  • The procedure RELIES upon the automated AOA protection to work.
  • The procedure ASSUMES the automated AOA protection will ALWAYS be present.
  • The procedure IGNORES the possibility that the automated AOA protection might not be present (as in AF447)
  • The procedure IGNORES the physical-ware aerodynamic fact that you cannot power out of a stall with minimum loss of altitude, at higher altitudes.
  • The procedure ERODES basic flying skills by teaching pilots to perform flight maneuvers contrary to good basic airmanship (in stall recovery).
This is a fundamental failure of the proper design of procedures, that results from a confused over reliance on automation.

Last edited by Flight Safety; 9th Sep 2011 at 18:34. Reason: Edited for Clarity
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 20:01
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Hi,
The real enemy here is not the experience, but the company, that have SOP's so restrictive and punishing that encourages pilots not to hand fly the aircraft, but obviously if something goes wrong be it an automation fault or a pilot fault it will be punished hard.
The SOP for the aircraft that fly recommends to hand fly the aircraft at least once a week, at captains discretion, and I really enjoy that, and I'm gonna miss that for sure when I go up to the Airbus, cause its the complete opposite, don't mess with it just let fly alone policy.
As for the fresh out of flight school topic, I understand that you only acquire experience through flying and the more experience you have the more criteria you get, but being a F/O I think that you need to be given the chance to get experience, in some way you have to start somewhere.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 20:39
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What if they did recover?

What would the outcome have been if they saw the stall and recovered before impact on the water, would this incident ever get out? Would Airbus have studied this incident to help them understand the human/machine interface?

I guess the passengers might have a few comments after landing.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 20:41
  #108 (permalink)  
 
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Loss of hand flying skills is not new

Back in 1965 I was an F/O on the brand new B727-100 series Jet.
This was the first Jet Aeroplane most Domestic Airlines had in Australia and we did not have any simulators for a few years and even then they were only fixed base so there was one hell of a lot of learning to do.
I used to fly with some very wary old pilots who got their wings long before WW2 and really had to fly by the seat of their pants.
These guys had some incredibly interesting stories to tell.
One old chap used to make me hand fly this "new fangled beast " all the way until cruise and then all the way from Top of decent .
When I asked him " why " as we did have a good auto pilot , although with no Mach hold , he said " If you keep using that thing you will lose a lot of your hand flying skills after a while ".
So you see this concern about losing hand flying skill is not that new albeit modern aeroplanes do require more use of the autopilot .
The Old Dog was quite right in his assertions and it certainly enabled me to keep my skill level a bit higher for longer.
This was something I used to do wherever possible even up to my flying the A320 & 330.
It is a very wise Pilot who does listen to those who have been around long before they started flying.
Experience does not only come just with hours , it's coupled with what happened during those hours.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 22:49
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Daniel - you are right. Everyone starts with 0 hours. But, IF your company allows it - try to get as much hand flying as possible including FD off raw data autothrottle off. It may save your bacon.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 22:50
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l will ask again.

Who is responsible for ones own hand flying skills ?
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 23:02
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In the end each pilot. However if the company rule framework simply does not allow it anymore because of whatever silly reasons its very hard to do it on the line without endangering ones own job or promotion prospects. Those companies do exist, but there are others that do not really like that kind of restriction.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 23:22
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ln the end.

So what is the remedy ?
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 23:35
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Hand flying etc

Many pilots, such as myself, who enjoy the actual stick and rudder stuff, take up recreational flying as an outlet, but it also keeps the skills up. I fly gliders. I notice that Captain Pearson of Gimli glider fame, and Capt Sullenberger, of Hudson river fame also kept their skills up with glider flying.


This quote says it all ! I knew one of these fellows and can assure everyone that flying was in his blood and he loved it. Sure as G'd made little apples, his experience in hands on judgement saved his bacon and a load of passengers when the sh't hit the fan.
Maybe todays "managers" of aircraft no longer have the love of flying
"pilots" enjoy! Otherwise they, too, would follow the example of the two fellows mentioned in the quote.
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Old 9th Sep 2011, 23:52
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l would suggest that they acquired those skills years before they were needed.
The remedy is plain.

Stop producing aircraft that inhibit flying skills ......... no, wouldn`t work.

Companies that suck in the reduced operating cost of such aircraft bite the bullet, and pay for handling sessions in the sim, alongside licence renewal and loft.

lt will have to happen.
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 01:12
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Ok, here goes.

Some of the people that don't have good hand flying skills don't know that they don't have the skills until they are faced with a situation where they needed them. That might be blindingly obvious, but it's happened, and smoking holes, or a missing aircraft are too often the result.

It can't be stalled? Oh? I don't have the exact memory of the specific details, but it is very possible to fly the bus into the ground, if the wrong inputs to the sidestick are made, and maintained, as it tries and fails to do what it's being told to, and I'm not talking about AF here.. The specific issue is that it won't stall wings level, but there are scenarios where the decision tree in the automation seems to be in the wrong order of priority, so it goes wrong, very quickly.

I cringed when I read how long it took a heavy and experienced crew to work the check lists on the A380 that had the serious uncontained engine failure. The length of time it took to get through all the issues was scary.

Standard Operating Procedures are exactly that, STANDARD. If something NON standard happens, then there will be occasions when the procedures may make the situation worse rather than better, but to make the call on that requires a level of knowledge of the aircraft and it's systems, and the skills to then use that knowledge to acheive a result that is acceptable given the circumstances. The 748 at Stansted a while back that had the engine fire and landed ahead rather than fly the circuit is an example.

A long time ago, a specific exercise in a large aircraft sim was to fly an exercise that was designed to make the use of almost any procedures impossible. Start from a runway threshold, ready to roll. As the brakes are released, start the stopwatch. Climb at pilot's discretion, in any way that the airframe can handle, to 10,000 Ft. Land back on any runway, full stop, shortest time wins.

To make it easier a good sim, with good visuals, and of course, CAVOK, and no wind.

It was interesting, in the wrong way, when this was tried with a group of type rated first officers. 2 of the 3 broke the aircraft in the air, as they didn't have the underlying raw flying skills to acheive the exercise. The time record was set by a non type rated pilot, in a 747, the time was 6 Mins 25 seconds. A bit of fun, not really too important? Maybe, maybe not. If you have a choice of doing something very non standard, and getting it on the ground and stopped in (say) 10 minutes, or flying a full and "proper" approach and procedure that takes maybe 18 minutes, so what? If there's a major fire that cannot be contained or controlled, 8 minutes is possibly literally a lifetime, maybe for all on board, but to do a quick and dirty dive to a runway mainly visually, requires skills that we now are seeing are possibly no longer there.

Do we blame the pilots, or maybe look more closely.

Was some of the problem the decision by the beancounters that low time first officers would be good (cheaper!) simulator instructors? A human factors researcher that I worked with a long time ago said something along the lines that an instructor cannot pass on more than 80% of his skills and experience. Keep changing the instructors on a regular basis, and the skill level is diluted significantly, espcially if the instructors train the new instructors.

I did my CPL/IR in California, and after the first flight of what was meant to be a month with the instructor, went to the owner and had a long discussion with him about the rest of the course. Turned out the instructor that was meant to be taking me to ME CPL/IR had 10 Hours on type, a Seneca II. I'd frightened the instructor rigid by doing things that were so outside of his experience and skills that it became obvious to me that there was no way it could work with him. Maybe 350 Hrs of ME time, and a lot more unapproved sim time before I did the CPL course had a lot to do with it, but it's another aspect of the dilution of skills. A different instructor with a lot more time and it was problem solved.

Are some of the issues that some of the simulators don't fully model the extremes of the envelope, and that applies to some of the Level D sims used by the major airlines. If the sim can't do it, it can't be trained, or even experimented with. Again, from bus exerience, one manufacturer's sim didn't correctly model things so that a trimmed aircraft that was disturbed in pitch only and then allowed to do whatever it would, didn't recover, and eventually departed, and I won't even discuss what happened when we tried manual reversion! We had to go and use another sim from a different manufacturer to get the information we needed for the project we were doing, and in the process, did something without being aware of it that the trained pilots had been told wasn't possible.

The end result is that yes, you can take just about anyone, train them in the right way, and when everything is going even reasonably OK, no one will be worried. If something does go wrong, with either the aircraft, or the external scenario, then it can change, very rapidly, and possibly badly so. The only way this scenario will change for the better is for each pilot to look very objectively at their experience, and skills, and decide if they are happy with the way that they, and their employer are allowing them to operate, and if they are not happy, something has to change.How that will happen may not be easy, as it's not something that will happen without pain to the entire system. At least it's out in the open a bit more now than it has been for a while, and rightly so.

Steve
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 11:53
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Once upon a time I found that most pilots I flew with were avoiding visual approaches. The company encouraged FOs to do practice sims on their own time. They had the required Visual Circuits wired by memorizing sim triggers - ie at this point do this, hold this attitude exactly, turn here, etc. As all the check flights were done in the sim and always at the same airports under the same conditions that worked swell. No one EVER expected to see a vis app on a line check.

That doesn't work out so well in the real world.

Several times on the line, after I had flown a visual approach, I had FOs confide in me that that was the first time, in their life, they had done one outside the sim. Huh?

It seems to me that the insurance companies would get involved with this as some regulatory agencies seem hopelessly out to lunch in regards to testing real world skills. I cannot imagine that Lloyd's really wants someone wrapping a perfectly controllable airplane into a ball of aluminum simply because they were incapable of doing a night visual approach into an airport with snarky weather. Right. You aren't supposed to do that. But I had a colleague who had to because the turb was so severe on the ILS due to terrain that he had to use the other non instrument runway. At night, with an engine out, in ice, with a bad cross-wind. And he couldn't go anywhere else. It can and does happen that you must be able to fly the airplane yourself.
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 13:32
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The problem of manual flight is not with those young pilots just entering the line,
I am not so sure about that. Risking generalisation, but a study of relatively recent (last ten years) loss of control accidents have been on 737's or similar short haul types. In many of these the first officers were former 200 hour cadets with no previous experience apart from their first airliner. Most of that experience would have been on the autopilot.
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 14:32
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Hand flying an airliner should be easy for all pilots. If it isn't easy you shouldn't be in the pilots seat. My sim check for my airline job they put me in the left seat of an Electra and had me do a single engine ILS with three shut down in an aircraft I had never flown in my life. Now they see if you can push the right buttons, apparently.

I felt very lucky to get that job because there were so many equally qualified pilots with many thousands of hours, a lot in jets trying to get that job. I do not know if the Electra had an autopilot but am sure they would not have let me use it. They were looking for pilots, not computer managers.
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 14:41
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First off, i was writing about 200 hour (nowadays 80 hour) wonders out of in-house flight schools or company supervised flight schools. Usually the money spend on training those even if they pay part of it themselves is quite high, as is the effort in selecting them in the first place. It is not a way to get cheap pilots, it is a way to get the highest quality and best trained pilot and costs a lot more than just getting some out of work guy from an unaffiliated school or even some experience guy, even though a company has to retrain the latter one at cost between both prior possibilities. And those companies usually have a longer than normal and very hands on supervision phase on short haul operation which means a lot of landings and manual flight each day. Unlike those long haul guys that do around one or two landings a month (3 long haul rotations a month with 3 or 4 pilots per rotation).

Besides, you mean the likes of THY in amsterdam? The FO had gained around 4000 hours on fast jets in the turkish air force, still didn't help his handling qualities.

Anyway, you can't really generalize, as cadetship pilots are a different thing than your run of the mill flight school graduates. Even companies running their own cadet scheme will have to take on occasionally external direct entry pilots and you usually see a big difference in training right away.

@bubbers, i haven't been in a screening where any automatics was allowed. And yes, my initial screening was done in an MD80 simulator for a 737 company. No chance to train for it as they changed the type of screening aircraft each time, using especially older generation jets. And of course completely manual flight including an engine failure even for us 200 hour wonders.
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Old 10th Sep 2011, 16:02
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Besides, you mean the likes of THY in amsterdam? The FO had gained around 4000 hours on fast jets in the turkish air force, still didn't help his handling qualities.
Unfortunately that was a basic CRM problem ... not an handling one ... which is not a rare case to encounter in airlines like TK and KE ... but you know that!
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