Barbiesboyfriend

Do what I did. We got acquired by a major airline so they had some pretty lame procedures so when in training I did their lame procedures but in the air knew I would never do them because they were not safe and I could endanger my passengers and crew. They had a major accident using those procedures years earlier. I retired at 60 using this technique with no problems so they were happy and I was happy. It is kind of screwed up to train differently from what you would do but I felt it was necessary to keep my job and protect my crew and passengers. Your experience puts you so far ahead of anybody getting hired now. You could move into the left seat of any airliner in a year with your experience. Good luck.

I believe there are two completely preventable accidents coming.

1 - Airborn Fuel exhaustion due to the current company rules about FOD mixed with 1-timid 2-inept and 3-unlucky crews.

2- An attempt to land in conditions beyond the capability of either pilot but well within the aircraft's.

CNN had an article today about pilots losing their hand flying skills and new pilots never having them. Maybe the industry will wake up and insure these skills will be restored to what they were 20 years ago. You can not do this in a brief sim session. We need to encourage hand flying so we can return to the talent we had 20 years ago.

I well remember my first trip in a 737 Classic simulator. The simulator instructor was shouting "Follow the flight director" when it was bloody obvious the FD was giving erroneous information. Decades later where loss of control in IMC has become the major cause of aircraft accidents, it seems to me blind reliance on the FD has probably killed more people than it has saved.

Getting my initial IOE check out with a check airman out of San Jose, Costa Rica in a 757 transitioning from a 727 he had the FD all screwed up showing a left diving turn and I did a right climbing turn following the SID using raw data.
I didn't care because I did not rely on automation. He finally caught up so we were on the same page. We had to maintain 250 knots to 13,000 and he set in normal climb out of 10 so ignored that too.

Flying dinosaur aircraft keeps you in the loop so you don't blindlly follow automation. I am sorry those wonderful old 727's went away.

Original study
 

Everyone is writing about that FAA study. But has anyone sighted the original study published by the FAA? It would be far more interesting to read the original source than just newspaper stuff...

hand flying
 

I'm just a simple PPL (1973) and came across this discussion.

I am a dental/oral surgeon who must totally rely upon training/knowledge/experience/and hand(digital?) skills to be successful.

My airborne exploits are really little different (RV6) enjoy!!

However on a recent Airbus flight we had a medical emergency which needed a "soon" landing at Munchen. The plane was expertly flown to a smooth landing - rapid loss of height and 30* bank.

The pilot (like me) had a head of grey hair.

Question: was this hand flown (as I suspect) or a/p ?

The next question would appear to be who should be responsible for one`s own handling skills ?
lf a plumber only ever works with plastic pipe connections and then stuffs up my copper pipe work l would blame the plumber, not his boss, for attempting the job.
Get`s interesting, doesn`t it ?

@grahamcalder,

The descent until final approach was most certainly flown on automatics.

Agree with el commandante.

A medical diversion is the last time that you'd want to be hand flying.

It would almost certainly have been flown with A/P & A/T in until established on final.

You're probably high on profile with ATC giving you short cuts towards final approach, you have to programme MCDU, find the plates, brief the approach and G/A, tell the passengers what's going on, advise the company (time permitting) all whilst trying to manage the energy associated with the short cuts and ensure that you're stable and "in the grove" when you need to be. The last thing you want is the PNF working like a one armed paper hanger whilst this is going on.

Much better to let the airbus fly in NAV around the sharp turns so you can watch your speed (avoiding the low speed hook) and engage the approach in stable flight after the rollout. Mexico City 05R is a good example.

The autopilot wants to fly at 30 degrees of bank.

With a good, smooth pilot you generally can't tell whether the pilot or autopilot is flying. If it's really, really smooth it's probably hand flown.

Oh boy, this thread is gonna give all those insufferable braggarts who go on and on about how great their hand flying is. Face it, the world has changed! Aviation philosophy has changed. There is certainly a place for hand flying...where no PRNAV procedures required and with planes without the modern automation, or bush flying.

Most modern busy airspace require precision flying which the auto systems are required. I need not go into the details.

Anecdotal evidence; I did sim checks with old farts who swore on their great grandfather's names that they are flying aces who are 100% precise in flying manual.......most busted the limits of PRNAV SIDs and holding patterns. They screw up the proper use of automation and blame the whole world for it.

Come on folks; a delicate balance is required. There will always be situations beyond the capabilities of the automatics but there are also situations well beyond the self proclaimed perfect proficiencies of the manul flying aces.

If we can't fly it ourselves, let's not expect anyone else to do it for for us. Being honest to oneself. Anyways, guess this has been spoken enough. Wake me up, when the show is over.

SLF question if you don't mind: If we accept the premise that hand-flying skills are on the wane across the industry, what options do we the travelling public have besides buying a ticket and hoping for the best? Do you think it's possible to identify airlines where the pilots - for whatever reason, be it amount/type of experience or company operating procedures - are IN GENERAL likely to have better (or less degraded) hand flying skills than at others?

For example, I soon need to fly between Manchester and Copenhagen. I have two options: SAS, operating their classic MD80 series, or easyjet (with the recruitment policies well-discussed on this forum) operating their A319s. Would I be justified in feeling, as a passenger, that I might be in better hands, should anything go t1ts up, with the old school SAS guys on the old school aircraft, than with easyjet and its relatively young, low time pilots in the glass cockpit? Or is that just a totally unfair and unjustified feeling?

I'd love to know what choice you industry guys would make if you were putting your wife/kids on the flight. If you tell me there's no real difference, I believe you. But I think if there is...even a marginal difference in favour of the legacy pilots, then it ain't worth that £20, £30 you save to go orange.

Every day in life is a craps-shoot. You never know when your number will come up! :uhoh: Even Sully could have a bad day.

Seriously though, I think the difference in actual risk to your safety between riding on one Western European Airline versus another is probably rather insignificant. I'd ride on either if I had to because of work. But I understand your concern after reading some of these threads. I'd still feel better if I knew pilots with skills like Sully and Skiles were at the controls too. So I suppose you could find out all you can about any airlines you were considering riding with, then decide which ones make you feel more secure. It's the right of any consumer to vote with their wallet.

HOLISTIC SAFETY RATING 2011
Published on 08/31/2011
From a dataset of the 100 most important airlines, exhaustive information (2009) was found in 44 companies in 2011. The top ten airlines 2011 (2009 data) from the holistic safety profiles are...
From a dataset of the 100 most important airlines, exhaustive information (2009) was found in 44 companies in 2011.

The top ten airlines 2011 (2009 data) from the holistic safety profiles are (by alphabetic order):
Air France-KLM
AMR Corporation (American Airlines, American Eagles)
British Airways
Continental Airlines
Delta Airlines
Japan Airlines
Lufthansa
Southwest Airlines
United Airlines
US Airways

Full details of the 44 airlines holistic safety rating are presented in the 2011 ATRA competitive report (see Solutions for professional)

Agree in principle. Except when it comes to that one in a million event where something goes seriously wrong and requires the captain to fall back on superb airmanship and pure flying (not automatic pilot) flying skills.

Sully had "0" time in the sim or real in 320 water landings.


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.

Airlines with seasoned pilots would be my first choice. The new startups might be fine but no one knows how much experience they have, especially the FO. They could be fresh out of flight school flying your airplane. The more established airlines probably don't have any pilots under 45 with tons of good experience. Air France obviously has low time pilots and the Buffalo, NY commuter crash did and we saw what happened.

If a Sully type qualified pilot had been in those cockpits they would not have crashed. The inexperience did both of these flights in. Pay a few extra bucks for your loved ones tickets and maybe it will send a message to Airlines to hire qualified people.

I agree! Hence my hedge later in the above quoted post that I too would feel better flying behind skilled pilots like Sully and Skiles. I'd prefer to share the skies with experienced and dedicated professional pilots who know their craft well. But even the typical product of the training mill manages to get the plane from A to B without incident often enough to satisfy almost everyone. Until something happens that is...

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...

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.

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?

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.

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:

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

l will ask again.

Who is responsible for ones own hand flying skills ?

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.

ln the end.

So what is the remedy ?

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.:ugh:

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!