Flying skills
 

Without wanting to point fingers, the current thread 3 discussion on the AF disaster refers to the risks of pulling back on the yoke/stick as a reaction on an unexpected stall.

This leads to discussions about basic flying skills.

Which airlines discourage free time piston prop (or similar) flying?
Which airlines condone the above?
Which airlines encourage such basic skills free time flying?

Does such flying limit the hours a pilot can be put to work for his commercial activities through either aviation regulations and/or collective bargaining agreements?

Thx

Victor Hotel

Every employer is different, the list would be nearly endless, my airline doesn't have qualms about it as long as the pilot or engineer wishing to do so gets an ok from management (it has happened before).

That being said, there is a terrible attitude amongst companies and HR groups these days that suggests it's ok to hire people with less than stellar flying ability, so long as they have a good "personality" and can "get along with others" etc. etc. etc. I'm not trying to suggest "good sticks" should go around being :mad:. In my opinion the #1 driving factor as to whether or not to hire somebody is their abilities in an aircraft, on both the flying side and the technical side (systems). How they comb their hair, talk, who recommended them or how nice they are should be near the bottom of the list, not the top.

Furthermore, GOMs an SOPs will not and never have covered every single possible situation that may arise. Yet most flight crew members are afraid of doing anything (or unable to do anything) that falls outside of what is referred to as "standard".

Non-commercial flying outside of the job is allowed as it does not decrease the block hours available to the company. The company therefore has absolutely no right to say anything about it, and therefore doesn't do it. If you want to instruct in a flying school (that is commercial, in a club it isn't) you have to get a permit for it.

In fact we are encouraged to train our basic flying skills while flying the line as well by regularly flying manual and raw data, just to keep our skills up as many of us do not fly outside of the job anymore, be it for lack of money or simply time.

I know quite a few (very good) glider pilots who are also commercial pilots.

Yup, one of my colleagues won the world championship in the open class, i think two times already, not quite sure though :)

Times have obviously changed. When I worked for a charter airline in UK we had at least three pilots who were well known on the air display circuit, flying non-commercially whenever their roster allowed.
The summer being a busy time for charter and air displays the CAA required that they keep the company fully updated with their display hours in order that the combined total didn't breach CAA FTLs.

Kind of surprising to me, it's like telling a regulated driver (truck for example) that he can't drive home on his own time in his own vehicle if he hits the limit for his regulated driving. In the US we have a clear separation between is commercial and what isn't.

Why not practice basic skills in the airliner you are flying? I flew a 757 to Central America all the time. On the climb out being vectored into Havana airspace I would practice flying only by standby horizon, altimiter, airspeed and whiskey compass. South headings were easy because you get compass lead errors. I never needed this drill but thought it would be nice to have done it just in case that is all you have one day. It is free and gives you confidence in instruments you normally would never really look at.

No, I didn't disable the main instrument panel, just didn't look at it. Back then we were allowed to fly with the autopilot off.

That's the catch, I'm still not clear as to why hand flying is frowned upon and/or forbidden at many airlines these days.

All I can say is that I am very happy to have 1400 hours of fighter (no A/P installed) and several hundred of hours doing single pilot IFR without A/P before getting into the world of FMS and A/P and A/THR. There is NO substitute to handling a single pilot jet at maximum performance at both high and low levels, doing stall recoveries, hand flown IFR, pilotage nav at low level and in poor weather. An education not to be missed.

Then again, it did result in a mid-air and an ejection

GF

@parabellum, probably it was because the CAA thought of doing display flights as either areal work or commercial flying. And in that case you have to advise the company about hours and times and on the other hand need a permit from the company. Anyway, i'm not flying in a UK airline, just in a small european one and employment laws are different in each country, with that the required or not required permit from your primary employer.

EU-OPS however mandates that someone keeps a master list for FDT calculation. usually that would be the primary employer, but it can be the employee or the secondary employer as well. However only commercial hours need to be take into account as far as i know. Privately flown stuff doesn't matter.

We do in the UK. It generally is based either on "hire and reward" [not if you are paid, but if the passenger/pupil is paying], or above a certain weight (~3000lbs MTOW).

NoD

I'd say another pertinent question is what is your airline's cultural view on hand-flying?

At my current gig, it's A/P on at 400' and off on approach at 1500'. A Captains will actually reach over as PM (PNF) and turn on the FO's A/P if it isn't on early enough for his taste. Most of the pilots at this airline can handle about 5knots of crosswind before they start sweating.

At my real airline, it's A/P sometime before RVSM and often off again at 10,000'.

I'm not certain which came first, the eagle or the egg, but I know the latter group is better sticks and safer pilots.

I'm too close for guns, switching to...ramming! :ok:

Going back to the 60s/70s when on the B707 and then the 80s on the B737-200 we, more often that not, hand flew the a/c from take off to top of climb and then again from top of descent to landing. We wouldn't dream of flying a visual approach with the automatics engaged! We only got altitude alert in the mid 80s, let alone altitude acquire on the autopilot.

Because of this we were all extremely skilled in hand flying the machine to a high accuracy, so much so that we could almost do so in our sleep (we often did LOL).

Autopilot u/s for a night Tenerife or PIK to YUL (Montreal) and no engineers? No problem we can take turns and hand fly it!

Recently my new FO remarked to me after briefing a relatively simple SID out of a European airport "Gee this would be hard to fly raw data!" - I looked across and replied "We always did - very accurately".

It's great to have all the modern automation but, quite simply, professionaly pilots should be able to hand fly the aircraft accurately but they can only do so if they are practised in the art on a regular basis.

I'm not at all convinced that the issue is whether you can hop between an airliner and a single engined piston aircraft. As previous posters have indicated, you can also hand-fly a transport aircraft. I think that the problem is the gulf between highly integrated information rich modern cockpits, and remembering that it is "just" an airplane, and behaves exactly like every other aircraft in terms of pitch/power/lift/drag and all those simple aerodynamic laws.

Many studies have looked at the surprisingly poor job pilots make of the transition from VFR to IFR flight. Even experienced instrument pilots tend to "hang on" to fast disappearing visual cues rather than simply transferring their gaze to the instruments and flying the way they were trained. The number of continued VFR-into-IFR accidents where both the pilot and the aircraft were fully IFR capable is testament to just how hard that can be.

In my experience, the same applies the other way around. Many times, with new-ish first officers (and some not so new), I was surprised at their inability to transition from IFR flight to a simple visual approach. On a lovely day, their sector, we would brief for the instrument approach, and if it was a smaller airfield where a "shortcut to a visual" was possible, we would brief for that as "plan B". Sure enough, the airport is right there, the pattern is empty, and ATC offer the visual. We accept, but for some FO's this became a stressful moment! They were so strongly oriented to commanding the FMS or A/P through bugs and buttons that they found "flying the aircraft" to be quite overwhelming - EVEN THOUGH THEY HAD THOUSANDS OF HOURS HAND FLYING OTHER TYPES.

In other words, the problem is not about basic muscle memory, or experience, it is very situational. Humans are poor at switching context.

After 4000 hours in the Airbus cockpit, the AF pilot would be completely baffled by the contradictions being presented, and in the 3 minutes remaining probably never figured out what was going on. Paradoxically, a pilot from almost any other type of aircraft might have spotted in a few seconds that the aircraft was fully stalled, and be able to solve it.

many of you may not remember but for recent students coming through the cessna ranks, the most scary and yet educationational part of training is the spin recovery. in some jurisdictions, one no longer needs to have to go through that but personally i think getting into that position in a very forgiving aircraft (for me cessna 172) was mostly educational not for the recovery procedures themselves (you basically do nothing and the aircraft does it by itself... sort of..) but for being put in a position of having to think when you are looking straight down at the ground which is seemingly spinning out of control. very good mental excercise!

Bigjames, I hope you're not spinning a 172. :=

not as we speak anyway...

True, but the Birgenair 757 Captain was also an ex-Turkish Air Force jockey, and he was thrown by the situation he was presented with, despite both his F/O's calling out "ADI" (referring to the nose-up attitude) and "Stalling". He'd got it into his head that all speed information was bad (when in fact the F/O and Standby instruments were working correctly) and seems to have just "maxed out" psychologically. When the investigation tried the same scenario with very experienced pilots, almost all of them suffered the same reaction.

IMO sufficient stick-and-rudder skills are something that definitely needs to be improved, but that's only part of the problem. There's the whole issue of what happens when you lose pitot/static information over water at night (as NOD posted on the other thread, low circadian times), and the psychological "shock" of having what should be a routine operation turn against you within a few seconds.