FAA urges ICAO to address erosion of 'manual' piloting skills

I have the a problem with my cellphone!

Surprise, surprise! It's called BLOATWARE! Loading a machine with stuff you don't need and will never use in the either your lifetime or the expected useful life of the equipment!

Stuff this younger generation loves to add on and is so enamoured with!

My flying started with a inherently stable airframe and a powerplant that we knew the limitations of. Days before GPS, when a map, compass and clock (several, for redundancy) kept us safe and on track.

And my instructors words of wisdom - the best pilot on board is YOU!

Until Artifical Intelligence can do a helluva lot more than just beat a grand master at chess, the ulimate fallback must always be - Pull the plug. Switch it off. Go back to basics.

Use that God given gift called the human brain that is still today the best tool we know in the whole Universe, and put men safely on the moon.

Happy landings all you guys with wings.

I have been saying this for years. I call it skills atrophy. If you don't exercise the skill set, you will lose the skill. I was a Boeing 757 instructor pilot for 17 years at a major airline. On the line and in the simulator, you could see it in their eyes when it came to disconnecting the A/P and A/T. I always felt pilots were not afraid, but reluctant to disconnect because they feared embarrassment of a demonstration of skills not practiced. It manifests itself negatively more during an emergency. They try to use the A/P when the situation demands hand flying. The other reason to disconnect is it's FUN. You have to be skilled in both autopilot usage and hand flying. That's the job! ( that includes Autothrottle)

My very first flight instructor back in the 60's always said. Follow your checklists and "Fly the Bloody Plane!Nothing else matters" Sadly we are now in age where pilots should be applying this rule, but are not able to in a lot of cases.

I already made my basic airmanship rant some time ago somewhere else on FlightAware so I'll do the very short version...we are discussing no longer teaching stall recovery because of several crashes during instruction. We need to support the instructors in learning and teaching stall recovery, and quite frankly, I think the ideal (not realistic but I'll say it anyway) would be for ALL pilots to have at least a couple hours of basic aerobatics. The best way to learn to drive in the wintertime is to find a big open parking lot after the first snow and feel what it is like to skid and slide. The best way not to freak out and pull the yoke when you should push it in an upside down emergency is to fly upside down under controlled circumstances and feel what it is like.

I know it is a film, but the scene from "The Right Stuff", where the couple are arguing about a recent crash w/ a test pilot is as relevant today as then. The wife says, "You know what happened, the machine just broke!" The husband replies "It is not the machine, it is the man, the guy was dead before he went up." I would love to see younger pilots try to use a good old-fashioned chart & Jeppsen plotter today & not a handheld GPS unit.

I'm a young pilot... less than 35... people look at me crazy when I tell them I prefer round gauges and NDB & VOR navigation over glass panels and GPS.

My son (ATP Captain) and I (ASEL, Instrument, High Performance, Complex, Tail Dragger) were just talking about this. The differences between "flying" the airplane and "twisting knobs". Bottom line is, one still has to be able to "fly it".

I had 6000 hours of airliner flying before having a autopilot. Now students starting with autopilot on first flight.

While I don't own or fly a TAA, I do have some glass and an autopilot. Nonetheless I still hand fly most of my flights, I know how to do accelerated, power off and power on stalls to the full stall and recovery which I continue to practice. The main rule of aviation is "Fly the Plane" everything else is secondary. Systems analysts are great, but an airplane needs foremost a pilot.

I would say to this...most certainly!computers and machines were meant to be an"assist" to pilots,and not to replace them..passengers appreciate technology,but its human nature to feel more secure if there are a couple of people capable of handling problems or issues when flying!

May I add that the complexity of today’s regulations contribute to automation dependency. A good example is noise abatement. We are forced to fly paths so precise to avoid complaints that most companies require automation on all RNAV SIDs. In some cases STARs were deleciped that older aircraft autopilots couldn’t keep up with ... a few in ATL gave the MD aircraft a run for the money and they had to delay implementation for a while.

I would much rather hand fly a departure to 18,000 feet but often times am required by SOP to automate (as long as safe to do so).

Transitioned out of DC-3's & 4's to the Herc. Typed for AN-2's. Happy PILOT, end of story.

Gliders are an answer - a few hours in gliders teaches raw piloting skills, is inexpensive, is FUN, and instills the love of flying. Love flying and the rest is easy. Let the commercial skills come from the schools that teach button pushing.

So many posts here place blame on the pilots in each of the incident examples. I believe we would be better to focus on training systems and revising them. From my observation, the SIM training, both equipment and instruction, is too far displaced from real world flying. I ask a director of one of the Flight Safety facilities recently if the goal of my training was to make safer pilots or complete a checklist of tasks established by governing bodies. The reply was "its always been that way". Well then why is there any confusion about why we replicate the same mistakes? The FAA urging ICAO and changing their own requirements could be a great step in the right direction

this probably won't happen, but new hire airline pilots, besides having some 1500 hours, more or less, ought to be required to have a few hundred gilder hours, actual IMC flight time no auto-pilot, some acrobatic instruction: at least two of those ideals, so as to instill the semblemce of pilotage. The generations of military pilots that flew the stearman or the texan all benefited from those balkly aircraft that required full attention to maintaining control, then they could fly the more complex birds once they got the ground school.

Great article in the NYT by William Langewiesche (anyone who doesn't recognize that name has no business reading this page) bemoaning the lack of airmanship that (among other things) brought down the 2 MAXes. https://www.nytimes.com/2019/09/18/magazine/boeing-737-max-crashes.html

What do you expect when Management wants/expects you to use the AP as much as possible. Pilots should resist that and hand fly as much a possible to stay sharp!

Not knowing all the ins and outs of many of the reported stories, yet it does seem to me that many of the accidents are the result of lack of basic airmanship. Things that are learned from the first hour of flight instruction. Like recognizing and avoiding or getting out of stalls.

It is about time. Hours in the cockpit does not mean actual flying time experience.

Fly the plane don’t let it fly you....

Question ... Are you a pilot or an AVIATOR? There is a huge difference.

Soon after the second MAX accident, I posted the question something like "could US major airline pilots fly a MAX completely manually say from DFW to DEN?"

As I recall, the answer was something like "some pilots could but I would have a hard time getting volunteers!"

The 737 Max is dynamically unstable: something not anticipated during the design, but because of decisions made by Boeing! They could have extended the landing gear to accommodate the larger engines under the wings, so as not to negatively impact the center of gravity.Instead they opted for changes that moved the thrust moment forward and up!Boeing at the time said a small "automated" compensation was all that was needed.Further flight testing showed that 4 times more corrective was actually needed to compensate. Boeing could not have hidden this from the FAA and the pilots if the cert process was an honest one, but Boeing chose to hide it. Southwest was happy to skip the extra millions in training costs. No software fix can address the over 300 people who are dead. Boeing is STILL producing the aircraft during it's grounding. Why? Influence the FAA, maybe? Or threatening to place itself in bankruptcy should the 737 MAX not be successfully re certified?Lets hope if it is certified, the FAA does it's due diligence this time and independently tests the aircraft, instead of relying on Boeing's "scouts honor" promise that they have resolved their own flawed design! As someone else in this thread mentioned, "Could the aircraft once again fly under some other moniker and under a different type certificate? Maybe. Show me an airworthy aircraft that can operate safely at the original 0.6 degree MCAS authority limit and with the previous-version stabilizer cut-off switch arrangement (allowing computer disconnect from the stabilizer trim separate from main power to same) that passes FAA and international (proved this time by those authorities independently, not asserted by Boeing) certification testing -- which of course comes as a different aircraft type complete with all the training requirements that come with same."

I guessing this conversation is taking place because of the 737 MAX accidents. Its easy, in hindsight to say piloting skills are the problem. Maybe just look at aviation safety records before saying pilots need more flying skills. The problem, in my humble opinion, goes back to the MAX design and a lot of short sidedness on Boeings part. To many assumptions were made, two many pilots warnings were ignored, to much emphasis on time to market. Modern day heavy commercial aircraft aren't designed to be hand flown from point a to b. Piloting skills are used every flight, from pushback, taxing, takeoff and landing. Why would i want to hand fly a 1000 mi flt by hand? Most in the left seat are very good at what they do.

After reading these comments I sense that the respondents are judging the pilot skills and initial training of the two crashed aircraft as being similar to their own. They were not!
General aviation in Eastern Europe and Asia and SE Asia is illegal! They have no 1500 hours flying a pattern or local cross country flights. They come out of the military where they generally fly single engine trainers and simulators, and while some are good pilots, many are drones with weak English skills and poor pilotage. They train these pilots in sims and computers and when things go awry the pilots simply can't handle it.
Lion Air typically has one rated pilot and one seat warmer, and this example was a combination of abhorrent maintenance and poor pilotage.
Yes, Boeing cut corners by having just one aoa sensor, but the poor pilotage was the real cause. Note that American and Southwest pilots have reported problems and they countered by turning off the a/p and hand flying the plane - smart and well done.

I have been concerned about this for years. I wrote a book "On Being An Airplane Pilot Not An Airplane Driver", but I have not been able to get it published. I spent over 40 years as a flight instructor, bush pilot, commuter airline pilot, and charter pilot, over 35,000 hours mostly flight instructing. I observed a serious lack of stick and rudder skills in some air carrier accidents and my book addresses lack of fundamental skills and misconceptions that get pilots in trouble. If anyone knows how to get my book published and marketed I believe it could have an impact on air safety. rawhp@aol.com

I'm well past my prime, however, I feel I could get out of most situations because I was taught stick, rudder, ball & airspeed meant something! Also had to recover from stalls and unusual attitudes because thats what my instructor taught me!
I am amazed a retired 777 pilot friend told me the Asians and probably lots of others in every country, can't wait to flip on the AP everything and enjoy the view!

in the modern scenario , Techno-Humans are the actual bottelneck of processes created by them and for them. More safe flying in a electrical drone at 61k ft.

Flying by the pants, a vanishing skill....

old news...been a problem for a long time...and probably worse now that we have all these simulator pilots added to the mix.

https://www.bing.com/videos/search?q=warren+vanderburgh+children+of+the+magenta&view=detail&mid=97CB347C1382F8B5212797CB347C1382F8B52127&FORM=VIRE

Explanation heard yesterday was ICAO only requires 450 hrs pilot time for 2nd in command with 425 hrs of that allowed to be simulator. If 25 hrs of actual flight time for a 2nd in command is correct.......wow. Person doesn't need to be an ATP. I'd hope, which is probably useless, the 2nd in command would be required to at least know most of the manual.

You pick the third paragraph as your synopsis?. Dude, could you be any more obvious? I honestly hope you're getting paid for this, because if not you must be one seriously bored individual.