Why it really should be about the man and not the machine

"...but often times they do not understand the 'why' behind the answer to a question.
So, what is the solution? I believe we need to get back to the basics."

This applies to so many things - piloting, math, spelling, baking bread, etc. It is vital to learn how to do just about anything "by hand", so that the process is understood (and unforeseen problems can be solved based on a thorough understanding), before turning to the convenience of automation. I have long felt reliance on technology is dangerous.

I can't remember the occasion that prompted it, but a few months back, put out an ADVISORY to all the airlines that the ought to put HAND FLYING back into their training regimens. Maybe it needs to be MANDATORY. It is really no wonder that we are getting automation dependent but as our time on automated aircraft increases, we get farther away from our roots or our basic instruction and at some point, the automation is well in the majority.

At <my airline>, I always hand flew to level-off, and I swear the passengers could never tell we were leveling. I hand flew every approach descending thru 10K all the way to the gate unless the regs said coupled due to low ceilings, and I was a microsecond away from knowing what that airplane was doing all the time. And I wasn't boresighted on the gauges. It bothered me no end to see the other pilot take-off, raise the gear, and start punching buttons. It's a no-brainer, and Asiana proves it in spades.

Mr. Wright,

"Back to basics" was my take-away from the article. And, it is correct.

In both accidents that you cited, some very, very basic flying skills were seriously lacking. AF447 is more egregious, in my opinion, for many reasons not mentioned (that had to do with equipment deficiencies) but, notwithstanding, it WAS primarily the onus of the pilots to have used or relied upon those "basics" firstly, and not to be confused and inundated with the (many) conflicting 'Warnings' and other computer-based indications.

I mention AF447 because (and not elevating it above the Asiana214 case) because that EXACT scenario (clogged pitot tubes, or static ports, affecting the Air Data Computer) had happened before! Albeit in other airplanes, at other airlines. But, ANY pilot worth his or her 'salt' should always be aware of those mistakes that have gone before, in order to learn from them.

In the case of AF447, there was NO EXCUSE not to refer to (what I presume would be similar to a Boeing QRH procedure) titled "Unreliable Airspeed" (or similar).

Pitch attitude, and power setting. Stabilize the airplane. THEN, diagnose the faults.

Of course, we 'could' get into the specifics and oddities of Airbus thrust lever movement compared to the actual thrust settings...etc. There, we begin to show some cross-over to the Asiana 214 case ... EXCEPT that with a Boeing the thrust levers (when physically AT the Flight Idle stops) show what the engines are being commanded to do. Airbus? ...eh.....

Ted,

the reason you can hand fly the Eclipse is because your SW version isn't rated for A/P use in all procedures.. Lucky you!

I agree with Musketeer1 but lets all be real. It is not an airline's job to train pilots. Pilots are trained by Flight Schools. The airline's job is to make sure it's pilots are current in procedures of its aircraft types and thats it. Even the regulations state its the pilots responsibility to make sure he is current not the airlines responsibility. If the aircraft is autopilot centered then so be it that is the procedure, however the funny thing is: The procedures are made by pilots not the airlines!!! Meaning one airline might engage autopilot at 1000 AGL the other at 200 AGL and who is responsible for these procedures the airline's flight training department(which consist of pilots). Last time i checked most of these guys are not young 20 year old guys heading up the flight training department of these airlines its the older guys(the veterans) so clearly its a top down issue. Today its now required by most airlines to have a 4 year college degree to get hired but honestly tell me if i have a 4 year degree in economics how does that help me fly a commercial aircraft or even prove I'm more capable of flying an commercial aircraft more efficiently than the guy who doesn't? If it does why dont people get a degree in biology and go work on wall street.
Now during instrument training pilots are taught 3 important words "TRUST YOUR INSTRUMENTS". A perfect example was Air France 447. 2 veteran pilots none were the young cowboy type that most people are afraid to fly with and they placed the airplane into a deep stall because the Air Data Sensor failed. Sure Airspeed and Altitude data were inaccurate but they clearly had pitch and roll indication properly because thats not linked to the Air Data Sensor so the question becomes "who was monitoring the attitude indicator/EADI for this 40,000 foot free fall?
Sounds to me like we are not even good at monitoring the aircraft in the first place. Another perfect example that hits closer to home Colgan 3407. This accident occurred in IMC first rule of instrument flying "Trust Your Instruments" that aircraft got into an unusual attitude that went uncorrected by both pilots the Air Data Computer didn't even fail who was monitoring the flight instruments? In a stall training you are drilled add power push the nose over break the stall then recover. In both these cases the pilots did the exact opposite they pulled up making the situation worse. Pilots in flight school are also trained to recover from unusual attitudes. So was this pilot not trained in procedure or he clearly forgot what to do? Here is a link to the Flight Data Recorder of Colgan 3407 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=33NUAy3eomg. So far i have not seen in any of these situations were the crew were not trained to deal with the situation at hand. Now I know someone will come and say pilots aren't trained for high altitude stalls in the cause of Air France 447. My answer would be yes they are back to private pilot training Slow Flight. Slow flight simulates decreased airflow over the wings and you have to maintain airspeed and altitude in this state its part of training same applies at high altitudes: decreased airflow over the wings because the air is less dense.
Seems to me the airlines aren't the one at fault it's the pilots. In both these cases the pilots were in a situation familiar situations and failed to apply corrective action. Not the autopilot's fault but pilot error. So maybe the real problem is pilots and not the flight school(because they do teach you what you need to know its up to you the pilot to retain this information) or the airline(because they bring you up to par with the operating procedures of that aircraft type).
Pilots ask yourselves honeslty "Have i forgotten the basis of my flight training" if so start taking corrective measures now before you end up in one of the bove situations and make headline news(and thats not the way you want to make the news.)

!!!

Many arguments have been made here for (re)teaching professional flight crews basic airmanship, prompted by a few high profile accidents that can be attributed to obvious (at least in retrospect) pilot error. As a 5000 hr ATP Part 135 charter pilot, I am ALL in favor of improved training. As FlightSafety says, "The best safety device in any aircraft is a well-trained crew". Amen. That said, and at the risk of offending some of the very qualified pilots on this thread, I don't fully agree with the sentiment that we need to return to the 'good 'ol days' when men were men and pilots were, well, pilots.

Let's start with the premise that the primary goal in air transport is safety above all else. Then take a look at the overall statistics regarding airline safety:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aviation_safety


The data shows a steady decline accident rates... roughly speaking from 1 fatality in 1 Million passenger miles (1926) to 1 fatality in 2 Billion passenger miles (1997)... a 2,000x improvement. The most recent statistics are even better, showing 1 death per 30 billion miles (0.05 deaths per Billion Kilometers).

Of particular note, is the fact that safety has continued to improve during the very decades that automation proliferated in our cockpits.

Should we learn from tragic accidents and implement changes to improve safety? Of course. Are these highly visible accidents (Colgon, AF447, Asiana 214) reason to revise training syllabi? Sure. But it would be a mistake to attack the use of automation as an evil when it has, overall, contributed to dramatic safety improvements over the years.

What comes to mind is the clerks that cannot make change at the Register without keying in the transaction amounts.

I've been telling anyone who would listen for as long as I can remember that upset training needs to be part of EVERY rating. Do it once for PPL, again for CPL, then periodically afterwards. How else to maintain stick and rudder skills and the muscle memory. Unfortunately, there are two types of pilots; those who can fly and those who can memorize procedures and run the computers that do the flying. There are increasingly fewer pilots that are both.

Go fly a Cub, Champ, Citabria, Deke, Pitts, anything that REQUIRES coordination to fly and rudder skills. Forget about a nose wheel. Learn again to FLY THE AIRPLANE. Isn't that the montra that is drilled into every PPL student... always FLY THE AIRPLANE and deal with everything else when you can.

We have a local retired Red Bull racing pilot who, as far as stick and rudder goes, is the best I have ever seen. He has more time in an Extra that most senior airline pilots have total. We could all learn from him and his like and maybe, just maybe incidents like those mentioned in the article and many, many more could be a thing of the past.

*This article does not apply to the Mighty Beech airline pilots :D

''Airspeed, altitude and some brains'. It takes at least two of the three to complete any flight.

Sorry, double posted.

As a retired military and civilian pilot, I agree wholeheartedly with the author. In my years prior to retirement, I had occasion to fly with an assortment of non-military trained pilots, and, with one exception, none had the training to recognize "feel" of the aircraft, i.e. the bottom falling out feeling when the aircraft is sinking. All were nervous about more than 60 degrees of bank. It has always been my contention that ALL pilots-to-be should experience inverted conditions to be able to recognize unusual recoveries. We of the industry need more voice in demanding proper training for more than systems operators in the cockpits. Good "gamers" don't necessarily make good pilots!!

I am not a pilot but have been interested in aviation as long as I can remember and I am COMPLETETY SURE I would have recognized Air France 447's stall. It is as basic as it gets. If you have only ever flown a computer flight simulator you should be able to recognize a stall. I think that crash was the ultimate in pilot error.

This is a really insightful article and it addresses a concern that I have thought about for years past. I look back to 2009, when the Northwest flight bypassed its destination by an hour because the pilots were on their laptops while HAL did the flying. It underlines just how automated flying jets has become and why a change is needed.

I expected an outcry for change following that incident but it never came. When the details of Air France 447 determined the cause to be pilot error, I thought a concerted effort within the industry would result. Never happened. Now the Asiana crash at SFO seems like it will fall into this category again; pilot's inability to handle their aircraft in an emergency when the machine it came with can no longer do so.

I hope that this latest, tragic accident will be the catalyst for change. I don't want to doubt it. I don't want to see another loss of life due to a pilot's lack of manual flying ability.

I couldn't agree more with the article. I'm now training these new pilots after 30k hrs of airline flying. It is difficult to insist on " appropiate level of automation " while at the same time demanding adequate down-grade, mode-reversion or respect for raw data upon pilots who have long lost all ability or desire to fly the airplane, as opposed to pushing buttons.
To James 801 I'd like to mention that more fuel than planned makes the act heavy on RTOs, EFATOs, desired optimum levels, icing, turbulence, steep turns, landings and go-arounds. I carry the exact amount of fuel for safety ,if the company saves money, all the more power to them, but my reason to limit fuel on board to what I need is the integrity of the flight, not the company's gain. Over more than 15k airline sectors, I remember carrying extra fuel in less than 1/2 dozen times, never once landing with less than legal limits. Indeed, over the last 20 years of flying long haul, I seldom saw differences of more than 7 or 800 lbs on fuel figures computed more than 14 or 15 hrs before landing, and total burns of over 250k lbs. The idea of " always carry more fuel " was totally justified in the 1920s, when wx forecasts were iffy, on-board instruments primitive, means of measuring fuel out of the truck non-existent, burn figures unreliable and processes misunderstood. Things have changed

Goes back to what my flight instructor always insisted upon, Avigate, Navigate, Then Communicate. Scary part is I returned to the US from Thailand a day before AF447 plummeted into the Atlantic and I made it home safely in a Boeing 777 and 767-300 in severe weather.

The reality is that while we do tend to fly on autopilot a lot because of the need to provide a comfortable smooth ride for the passengers on board, you would be surprised at the amount of hand flying that is actually done by us (airlines) to keep stick and rudder skills alive. The problem arose for AF447 that you had a newly minted FO in the right seat that was holding his stick all the way aft with NO visual clues to the other FO in the left seat or the Captain when he came back in the cockpit. The setup here is that they lost airspeed indications, which sent the aircraft controls into a different set of "laws" (airbus term for feel and actions/protections) which we only get to play with in a simulator. To "practice" them in the aircraft would require turning off systems to make the aircraft go into those. Big No No of course. Couple that with trying to figure out what they did have, noise, darkness, inexperience and you have an accident. Probably would never have progressed that far if it had a yoke because you would have seen the inputs. Asiana is self explanatory....my union had a contract provision NOT to fly on Korean Airlines and any airline under Korean ownership due to the pilot standards observed at the time. There is a cultural difference in the cockpit that also contributes highly to the issue. Training tells them to rely on the "magic" and they don't get to perform hand flying as a result.

The good news...we do get to practice engine out approaches in the sims without the autopilot. Plus the occasional single engine Go around :-)

I am not a pilot but have been interested in aviation as long as I can remember and I am COMPLETETY SURE I would have recognized Air France 447's stall. It is as basic as it gets. If you have only ever flown a computer flight simulator you should be able to recognize a stall. I think that crash was the ultimate in pilot error and did show that you have to learn to fly before you are a pilot.

Your article reminded me of this one regarding the A350: http://www.flightglobal.com/blogs/learmount/2012/09/airbus_takes_pilots_back_to_ba/

...which could be seen as a much-needed step in the right direction for the industry in general.

As a student pilot (PPL/SEL) I don't have much experience to offer to this discussion, but my CFI told me a story about a pilot he knew who was flying a regional jet, climbing to cruising altitude, when both engines flamed out. They began descending, and managed to get one engine restarted and make a safe landing. He was hailed as a hero -- until the flight data was reviewed, and it showed that he simply forgot to advance the throttles as they gained altitude. He lost his job and his career over that simple mistake. (If anyone knows about this incident or could link me to a story on it, that would be great.)

Anyhow, in an industry where you wake up every day already knowing where you're going, what route you're flying, never seeing anything new, it's easy to get complacent. I make a conscious effort to resist that mindset in my current career as a bus driver, and I hope to someday be the kind of airline pilot who doesn't fall into the bad habits of relying on automation, skipping checklists, or anything else that has gotten people killed in the past.

My wife and I were schoolies at #1 Fighter Wing Marville in Northern France. Because we were both members of the Officers Mess and the fact that I played on our mess hockey team we made lifetime friends with several young officers, several of them pilots and now retired airline Captains I forgot to mention that the years were 1965 to 67. All of them started their training on th Chipmunck then moved to the Harvard (I think you call it the Texan) then to the T33 Shooting star and then some went to the F86 and some to the twin engine prop or piston. By the time they joined the airlines they had 3000 plus hours with lots of takeoffs and landings and aced the airlines one month training programme. However the srogs who came over in 1966 started on the Tudor jet and missed that single piston engine training. Unfortunately for the arlines the number of airforce pilots joining the ailines has diminished greatly. Your point about the long autopilot flights with little real flying should be heeded.

On the topic of misuse of automation, I highly recommend "Children of the Magenta Line:" http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h3kREPMzMLk

It's from American Airlines back in 1997, and is still quite relevant and entertaining.

I also was trained to use the autopilot. It was also drilled into me that if shit hit the fan, turn it off and hand fly. Another comment--I actually learned how to fly an approach better with a stiff crosswind or head/tail wind by watching what my autopilot did. It made nice small corrections and didn't chase the loc or glideslope like I've seen many other pilots do. It helps that I graduated from the Air Force Instrument Pilot Instructor School and first flew a Jetstream for 5 years with no autopilot. Those were great training opportunities that many pilots don't get.

That is why those "autopilots" are just glorified bus drivers.

The man speaks "THE WORD". Nuff said!

I agree with the article 100%!!! However I think in the case of the AFR447 A332 crash you have to cut the crew and Airbus some slack.

What happened to them is something both Airbus and Boeing flight crews didn't train for before that accident and was a very unusual scenario. This applies for even the older generation of hand-flying pilots.

I agree that airline pilots need more experience actually flying the plane but the autopilot is meant to ease pilot workload.

The sad, and a bit scary reality, is that most aviation disasters are not the result of failures of structure, systems, or nature. Pilot error is the root cause of most aircraft crashes. In those instances where advanced systems existed, the vast majority of those blamed on pilot error would have been avoided by simply relying on the aircraft's own ability to "decide" actions to take, or to avoid. While AF447 could be cited as an example where the auto-pilot probably would not have saved the aircraft (due to other failures), human intervention certainly doomed it. In today's generation of highly-automated aircraft, we are far safer trusting the cability of technology to process more information than a human has the ability, and in fractions of seconds as opposed to (in many cases) several minutes to direct the airplane away from danger or toward safety. Neither humans nor technology alone are failsafe. The question is when we acknowledge the far safer of the two, and admit to our own natural limitations. Think of the comparison of this century's pilots flying aircraft more capable of flying themselves to the elevator operators in the early 1900's. Riding an un-manned elevator was un-thinkable at first. Elevator safety/technology advanced beyond any benefit to what human intervention or participation could ever offer. But we're on our way, like it or not. UAVs are a start, and the F-22 is the last aircraft of its type that will be required by the USAF to be human-piloted. It's just a matter of time before technology tips the scales so far that the argument to have a human involved is moot.

This article is right on the money. Very enlightening.

I'm a wish-I-could-be-pilot (bad eye sight) and I wholeheartedly agree. It's scary to realize that those kids sitting up front on an airliner may not actually know how to fly the plane. I strongly believe that in all the modern technical fields of endeavor, the fundamentals should be reviewed periodically. My son is a mechanical engineer, and a good one, but does not know how to use a slide rule.

I cannot for the life of me disagree with any of your points.
I am not a pilot. My interest here is that of an aviation enthusiast.
With that said, I am what one would call "old school"...I believe in being prepared for the worst case scenario. With that in mind, no pilot trainee should be anywhere near the flight deck on an active PAX carrying flight, the trainee should be well versed in operating the aircraft in all conditions with an emphasis on hand flying the aircraft under adverse conditions.

Although there were numerous problems here I believe one to be the Capt/PF had extensive Airbus experience. To him it was normal the throttles didn't move unless he moved them. Since his autothrottle wasn't working, either because it wasn't engaged or failed, he didn't notice the cue the throttles weren't moving.

I like this article, but it isn't really grounded in reality.

Are you saying you want a pilot hand-flying your airliner into the flight levels? Hand flying Cat II's? (I'm guessing both of those are against SOP's). Should flight time only count when the autopilot is off?

The autopilot is the most talented guy in the cockpit, and as much as I hate to admit it (We all have sensitive ego's); All he needs is a good commander.

As far as takeoffs and landings go, which I think is all that this article is really about, I really like your idea with the Pitts...airlines should pay for their pilots once every 90 days to go do 3 in the pattern and some aerobatic stuff. I think this would solve the problems you are referring to.

Excellent article, sir. It's too bad that few, if any, of the aviation regulatory agencies will probably not read and heed your words. Though it would be a bit difficult, every airline flying to, and within, the US, should be required by the FAA to have the same training requirements and instruction.

Again, Sir, nice job.

This is a really insightful article and it addresses a concern that I have thought about for years past. I look back to 2009, when the Northwest flight bypassed its destination by an hour because the pilots were on their laptops while HAL did the flying. It underlines just how automated flying jets has become and why a change is needed.

I expected an outcry for change following that incident but it never came. When the details of Air France 447 determined the cause to be pilot error, I thought a concerted effort within the industry would result. Never happened. Now the Asiana crash at SFO seems like it will fall into this category again; pilot's inability to handle their aircraft in an emergency when the machine it came with can no longer do so.

I hope that this latest, tragic accident will be the catalyst for change. I don't want to doubt it. I don't want to see another loss of life due to a pilot's lack of manual flying ability.