Posted on 05/26/2019 7:53:43 AM PDT by logi_cal869
Link only
"Task saturation" is a canard imho. Pilots should be disqualified from certification if they bolo certain simulator tests. Boeing's now-public performance has exposed a disturbing trend both within the company and the industry.
Heh, heros like Sully learned to fly a controllable brick (F-4). After that, he didn’t need no stinkin’ computers to fly. (Good thing, since the Airbus has even more crazy computer control than Boeing.) It’s a shame that Boeing had to “go with the flow” and let automation replace skill.
A very broad observation can be made about much of current society —
Good anti-theft device for cars? Standard transmission: few people in the criminal class (which skews young) know how to drive standard.
A lot of people don’t know anything more than Google.
People can’t read maps. Why bother? I have GPS.
Skills have degraded all over the place. When it comes to flying a plane, the cost is deadly. In other areas, the cost may not be deadly, but is still high. We’ve dumbed ourselves down.
The trim failure mode has been observed and recovered by experienced pilots, and recovered successfully. This is US airlines, and many foreign airlines. The unsuccessful has been from low-time inexperienced and/or questionable airlines. That said, clearly US domestic pilots understand the issues, and have been vocal complaining... knowing full well that the trim motor s/w should not make them have to rely on instantly knowing what to do, because in this case, even an 50,000 hour experienced pilot could, given the second or two of reaction time, still succumb.
Juan Brown is a great source of info on this...
As for the impending ADS-B deadline..., I've never seen a buzzard with a transponder attached to it! Bird strikes can ruin your day (had 2 over the past 50 years flying).
Lion Air has a program that allows inexperienced pilots to fly their 737s, but they pay the airline instead of receiving a salary.
Also, a starting captain at Lion Air makes less than 15k a year.
If Boeing wants to compete with Airbus in the third world they’ll have to make their aircraft tolerant of really bad pilots.
ADS-B,
I helped a pilot mount That
2k dollar widget last week.
He’s going to swap it between
2 aircraft.
I’m still not sure of all
the particulars.
That said, clearly US domestic pilots understand the issues, and have been vocal complaining... knowing full well that the trim motor s/w should not make them have to rely on instantly knowing what to do, because in this case, even an 50,000 hour experienced pilot could, given the second or two of reaction time, still succumb.
...
Instantly?
The electric trim control on the wheel overrides MCAS. Simply holding on to the trim wheel will prevent the worst kind of automatic trim failure. Pilots have a long time to figure what’s wrong if they are competent.
“The trim failure mode has been observed and recovered by experienced pilots, and recovered successfully. “
Yes, the old “needle, ball and airspeed” flying skills have been lost. I’ve mentioned it before, but it bears repeating. In the Asiana Airlines crash in San Francisco, weather was not a factor. The Cat 3B ILS was out of commission on a clear day, and the pilots ( the infamous Wee Too Lo, Sum Ting Wong, Bang Ding Owe, and Ho Lee $hit as noted on Fox Channel 2 here), could not establish a proper glide path to the runway by using basic flight instruments. They were even too stupid to execute a “go around” when it was clear that the plane was not in a stable, ready to land state. And yet, these guys, whose skills are probably limited to successfully taxiing the plane to and from the runway and knowing how to turn on the automated flight control systems, log ten or more hours of “flying time” on trips between the US and Asian cities (and quickly become “high time pilots”).
Another FReeper sent me a piece at the time from a retired UAL pilot who had been fired from both Asiana and KAL for failing their student pilots because they could not really fly their planes. So a word to the wise, if your plane isn’t being flown by round-eyed, white pilots, you are at risk if the pilots are really needed to fly the plane at some point in your trip.
Same thing will happen with car drivers as “autonomous” driving becomes more prevalent.
“We’ve dumbed ourselves down.”
We’ll be easy picking for the machines! :)
Don't get me started on medical education!
“It’s a shame that Boeing had to “go with the flow” and let automation replace skill.”
I don’t understand how you came to this.
I’d still rather get to fully automated flights, from takeoff to landing - human pilot errors can’t be debugged and fixed. Neither can deliberate acts of human pilot sabotage or suicide missions.
15K for all that machinery and responsibility.
Sad.
I made about that starting in TV production.
We have a couple of married friends who are quite a bit younger than us. Both of them are in the reserves and both are test pilots for Boeing. My wife said that they ought to come over and fly one of our airplanes sometime. She thought that maybe they would enjoy getting back to the basics. But they said that they wouldn't be comfortable flying our airplanes because they both started flying after joining the military and had never flown non-computerized aircraft. At first we thought that they were joking, because our planes are extremely easy to fly and we are sure that they would have no difficulties with very minimal instruction. But they were actually serious.
I have always felt that my years of hang gliding in the mountains around here made me much more aware and able to visualize what to expect from the wind and weather. And my years of flying my homemade ultralight which had engine monitoring gauges but no flight instruments at all gave me a better “seat of the pants” feel for a small plane than others who have all been trained to watch their flight instruments closely at all times.
MY favorite book on flying is of course, Stick and Rudder: An Explanation of the Art of Flying by Wolfgang Langewiesche. If you are not a pilot and you want to actually understand how flying an airplane really works then it is the book you should read.
Pilots should be disqualified from certification if they bolo certain simulator tests.
That is what happens at U.S. based carriers. The pilots would get remedial training in a Level D simulator, then fly a re-test in the simulator. They may not be "de-certified", but they would not fly on the aircraft until they successfully fly a re-test in the simulator.
One can only guess what would happen at a "third world airline".
"Task saturation" is a canard imho.
I would have to respectfully disagree, based on personal experience. However, I most of the cases I observed, the pilot was low time, transitioning from the T-38 to the F-4.
The problem is that airline pilots are logging thousands of flight hours without ever flying the aircraft manually. Then, when a compound/complex emergency occurs, they don't know how to respond, especially if a quick response is required.
In the old days, in the Air Force (90’s), a LOT of the Sim time was devoted to various in flight emergencies. I wonder how true that is for current commercial Sim time.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.