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A Worry For Some Pilots: Their Hands-On Flying Skills Are Lacking (nytimes.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: Pilots now spend more time learning automated systems than practicing hands-on flying, so newer pilots are less comfortable with taking manual control when the computer steers them wrong, according to interviews with a dozen pilots and pilot instructors at major airlines and aviation universities around the world. "The automation in the aircraft, whether it's a Boeing or an Airbus, has lulled us into a sense of security and safety," said Kevin Hiatt, a former Delta Air Lines pilot who later ran flight safety for JetBlue. Pilots now rely on autopilot so often, "they become a systems operator rather than a stick-and-rudder pilot."
As a result, he said, "they may not exactly know or recognize quickly enough what is happening to the aircraft, and by the time they figure it out, it may be too late." [...] While automation has contributed to the airline industry's stellar safety record in recent years, it has also been a factor in many of the crashes that have still occurred around the world. A 2011 study by a federal task force found that in about 60 percent of 46 recent accidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or handling the automated controls. Complicated automation systems can also confuse pilots and potentially cause them to take action they shouldn't, pilots said.
As a result, he said, "they may not exactly know or recognize quickly enough what is happening to the aircraft, and by the time they figure it out, it may be too late." [...] While automation has contributed to the airline industry's stellar safety record in recent years, it has also been a factor in many of the crashes that have still occurred around the world. A 2011 study by a federal task force found that in about 60 percent of 46 recent accidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or handling the automated controls. Complicated automation systems can also confuse pilots and potentially cause them to take action they shouldn't, pilots said.
The 737 is not primarily fly-by-wire (not even the MAX). Some secondary flight controls are fly-by-wire (electric tail stabilizer trim, spoilers). The problem is that a pilot needs to know how to recover from runaway stabilizer trim and know that the situation is happening. Since the system was poorly documented, this was a problem.
... because I used to have a solid memory for most of the landline numbers I needed to call.
Now, I say, "Hey Siri? Call Sue."
I got no fucking idea what her phone number is.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
Because even if they have it on autopilot they don't just get to check out. They have to stay on the radio, check radar, monitor instrumentation and be able to take control back from autopilot at a moment's notice. That is mentally taxing because you are forcing yourself to keep focus.
I did fly around in glider planes now and then. That's very visceral. Stall the thing, you *know* you're losing control. So regularly when I'm watching mayday / aircrash investigation episodes, I'm like "nose down! pick up speed! get control back! THEN try and get back on track", or something like that. A number of crashes might possibly have been avoided if the pilots had caught on to stalling and remedied it in the obvious way.
Frankly I find it amazing, but intellectually I understand that big airline pilots need stick shakers for them to even notice a stall. Apparently this lack of viscerality is how air france 447 managed to fly into the sea and nobody noticed. That and a couple other things with pilots not being in full control, being kept by a smart aleck computer confined to "safe spaces" that weren't so safe after all. A glider plane will really just lose lift, drop its nose on its own, and you'll *know* when that happens. You can feel the air flow disengaging and so your wings lose lift and your control surfaces lose control. If that didn't wake you up, that violently dropping nose will, hopefully. At that point you steer with it until you get control back, then ease out of trouble. Of course, you lose a good bit of height while doing that, so doing it too close to the ground can end with you sitting on the ground in the remains of the airplane, and you can count yourself very lucky if all you got is a few scratches. Apparently big aircraft, even just motorised aircraft, work differently. They certainly crash differently.
Anyhow, I'd be very uncomfortable flying if I knew the pilot didn't have hands-on experience with stalls and the like, or was even the slightest bit uncomfortable with taking manual control. Who's the pilot here, hm?
It also makes me a little jealous. Back when, prospects for pilots were dim. Expensive training (and now I'm like "but what tf do they even teach the kids there?!?") and probably no job. So I skipped on that "opportunity". Fast forward a couple decades, and they can't find enough experienced pilots so they'll just hire almost anyone? Why, maybe I should fire up the old flight sim for a bit again, eh. Haven't hit 50, so maybe. But no, the cut-off for pilot school was something like 29 and three quarters, and I'm way past that. Oh well. I'll take the train when I need to be somewhere, and plan accordingly. Only 80 days around the world, what.
Actually, this is blatantly untrue.
It has been well over twenty years, and probably closer to thirty years or more, since enough data had been amassed to prove conclusively that women were SAFER pilots than men.
At the time, no one knew why. I suspect no one knows now. I saw one writer speculate, very carefully, that women MIGHT be a bit more risk-averse than men, to the point that they MIGHT make the determination that "this is getting just a bit too interesting for my taste" a bit sooner than a man might, exercise the Captain's prerogative to choose the alternate plan, a bit sooner than a man might.
A lot of pilot training is teaching judgment and caution and knowing how to recognize that a situation is getting a bit too "interesting", for a suitable definition of "interesting".