"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).
Same thing will happen with car drivers as “autonomous” driving becomes more prevalent.
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.
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.
. The pilots were confronted with a load of warnings in the cockpit, more than anyone could be reasonably expected handle, he said.
If pilots don’t know to get the wings level and nose where it belongs, first thing, then they are terminally stupid.
Just wait until robots are flying the planes remotely.
This is pure bullshit. My younger son is a pilot for Delta. He goes through extensive training when changing planes that he flies. He also goes through very tough simulator evaluations every six months in order to maintain proficiency.
He will be starting training next month when he will go through two months of training on the Airbus 330 models before he starts flying routes from Sea-Tac to Asia and Europe. My son is 42 and has been an airline pilot for 21 years.
In a crisis due to loss or malfunction of the external angle of attack indicator, one has to defeat MCAS while manually trimming the aircraft. Sure, a good, experienced pilot who has trained for such an emergency can carry it off by disabling MCAS. Unfortunately, Boeing's 737-MAX manual and training glossed over the possibility of an emergency due to loss of the angle of attack indicator. US airline pilots complained to Boeing of this and other safety issues only to get brushed off.
Even worse, Boeing made certain safety features into extra cost options. Plausibly, even with poor pilots, the two crashes might have been averted had the optional safety features been on those aircraft instead of being omitted as costly options that would have strained the budgets of Third World carriers.
Ominously but deservedly for Boeing's corporate management, the SEC has taken an interest in the controversy. There is a fair chance that between the NTSB and the SEC, Boeing will be called to account for business decisions that made for bad engineering choices that led to two major air crashes. The FAA also deserves a going over for becoming so accommodating to America's leading civilian aircraft maker.