Pilots Cited in Asiana Crash

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If you rely solely on computers and auto throttles to fly your airplane you will have issues... Not if, but when.
FMS systems are great tools but it's a thorough understanding of their limitations and a keen situational awareness that will save your ass.
You are the pilot....Don't allow someone or something to turn you into a robot or an ignorant button pusher. Fly the damn plane!
 
I'd love to get my hands on the NTSB report to dig through it.

Being on a heavily automated airplane, training emphasis was on what you asked the aircraft to do, and what it's actually going to do. Sure the autopilot or flight director says X, but is the symbology telling you it's going to do Y and where is the disconnect between anticipated performance and actual performance.
 
Derg said:
I'd love to get my hands on the NTSB report to dig through it.

Being on a heavily automated airplane, training emphasis was on what you asked the aircraft to do, and what it's actually going to do. Sure the autopilot or flight director says X, but is the symbology telling you it's going to do Y and where is the disconnect between anticipated performance and actual performance.
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This is a very common theme these days. I fly old stuff, with limited automation and crappy autopilots, where you have to babysit what's going on.
The ability to say "well X is programmed into the FMS" but "why is the jet turning the wrong direction" doesn't sound all that complicated, but apparently for some (and I can certainly see this being a much bigger issue with the "gee whiz" equipment in new aircraft), there is an inherent trust that the plane is going to do EXACTLY as it should, which inadvertently removes the babysitting and monitoring from their thought processes.

Particularly, in this instance, many of us know how a swept wing jet flies even a tiny bit under ref IF you're hand flying, but if you're on a coupled approach, and you let the thing get slower and slower, the autopilot is just going to keep running the deck angle higher and higher until it finally disconnects.

Not that I've done it yet, but I can also imagine that a somewhat different mindset exists when flying an approach after a 10 hour leg, vs a 2 hour leg.
 
CaptBill said:
If you rely solely on computers and auto throttles to fly your airplane you will have issues... Not if, but when.
FMS systems are great tools but it's a thorough understanding of their limitations and a keen situational awareness that will save your ass.
You are the pilot....Don't allow someone or something to turn you into a robot or an ignorant button pusher. Fly the damn plane!
Click to expand...


From what I've heard that it is basically company policy to be a button pusher.

Even in my own company the reliance on automation in our SOPs is really high. Thankfully most of it is termed as "highly recommended." I'm sure it is termed that way to give us the option, but gives the company the option to throw us under the bus if we screw up.
 
I think the mindset is to train to the highest levels of automation available since we (the company) paid to install it in our airplanes. Why buy it if we aren't going to use it? This makes sense to a degree because being able to shoot RNAV RNP approaches and use VNAV / LNAV are very nice tools to have in your bag. What we are seeing throughout the industry though is the guys that were taught using automation from day one getting themselves into trouble when that same automation fails them or they don't understand when not to use it. There are also some cases of older guys who should know better, just getting lazy and relying on the FMC to figure it out. I completely understand how easy this is to do. I consider myself pretty well versed in using automation, and still at times, I find myself wondering what the FMC is thinking and doing. My philosophy is to ALLOW the automation to help me to the extent it relieves my workload, thereby improving safety. But, when I have situations where the automation is not working for me, or, If I just need something done now, off it goes.
There's no one answer for all pilots, but unless we as professional pilots start to be as comfortable with "no automation" as we are "with automation", we will continue to see crews crash mechanically sound airplanes and then have everybody asking " How could that happen?"

A lot of this "awareness" has to be presented and reinforced in training departments, and in my opinion, that's where we are falling a bit short.
 
CaptBill said:
I think the mindset is to train to the highest levels of automation available since we (the company) paid to install it in our airplanes. Why buy it if we aren't going to use it? This makes sense to a degree because being able to shoot RNAV RNP approaches and use VNAV / LNAV are very nice tools to have in your bag. What we are seeing throughout the industry though is the guys that were taught using automation from day one getting themselves into trouble when that same automation fails them or they don't understand when not to use it. There are also some cases of older guys who should know better, just getting lazy and relying on the FMC to figure it out. I completely understand how easy this is to do. I consider myself pretty well versed in using automation, and still at times, I find myself wondering what the FMC is thinking and doing. My philosophy is to ALLOW the automation to help me to the extent it relieves my workload, thereby improving safety. But, when I have situations where the automation is not working for me, or, If I just need something done now, off it goes.
There's no one answer for all pilots, but unless we as professional pilots start to be as comfortable with "no automation" as we are "with automation", we will continue to see crews crash mechanically sound airplanes and then have everybody asking " How could that happen?"

A lot of this "awareness" has to be presented and reinforced in training departments, and in my opinion, that's where we are falling a bit short.
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This. It really all depends on the situation. If I'm tired, I'm using all automation available. If not, I love flying and turn off as much as possible.

My concern is companies that may require automation to be used at all times, as I've heard is the case with a few of the asian airlines.
 
A lot of it has to do with the theater of operation.

Here in the US, we get a lot of visuals, "follow that traffic to the marker" and vectors to a dog leg on final.

In other parts of the world, they're transitioning to RNAV STARS to an approach transition to an ILS approach. You can hand fly it if you'd like but you'll just be playing a video game with the flight director.

Like if you fly from JFK to LHR, there's really not much of an opportunity to hand fly yourself to a visual, making decisions about how high you are above glide path or getting yourself situated on a lateral extension of the centerline of the runway.

Often times, leaving the eastern seaboard, you press "NAV", maybe get a direct or two off the tracks then you're basically following LNAV paths with altitude constraints, 'slow down points' and it spits you out right on the ILS, on glideslope, on localizer, at 160 knots.

I gather that if the crew spent 99% of it's time flying in those environments, which is probably possible because it's not like Asiana is flying 777's into Bozeman, the transition to a more 'visual'-driven environment like we have in the US, especially in a training environment, it may have been a hindrance to safety from a number of angles.

It's not that we're "better" because we're driven to give and accept visuals, it seems more a low tech method of squeezing more airplanes into less airspace without spending additional resources on equipment and procedures to maintain separation.

Again, this is all half thought-out theory and I accept that it's full of bullet holes.
 
Derg said:
A lot of it has to do with the theater of operation.

Here in the US, we get a lot of visuals, "follow that traffic to the marker" and vectors to a dog leg on final.

In other parts of the world, they're transitioning to RNAV STARS to an approach transition to an ILS approach. You can hand fly it if you'd like but you'll just be playing a video game with the flight director.

Like if you fly from JFK to LHR, there's really not much of an opportunity to hand fly yourself to a visual, making decisions about how high you are above glide path or getting yourself situated on a lateral extension of the centerline of the runway.

Often times, leaving the eastern seaboard, you press "NAV", maybe get a direct or two off the tracks then you're basically following LNAV paths with altitude constraints, 'slow down points' and it spits you out right on the ILS, on glideslope, on localizer, at 160 knots.

I gather that if the crew spent 99% of it's time flying in those environments, which is probably possible because it's not like Asiana is flying 777's into Bozeman, the transition to a more 'visual'-driven environment like we have in the US, especially in a training environment, it may have been a hindrance to safety from a number of angles.

It's not that we're "better" because we're driven to give and accept visuals, it seems more a low tech method of squeezing more airplanes into less airspace without spending additional resources on equipment and procedures to maintain separation.

Again, this is all half thought-out theory and I accept that it's full of bullet holes.
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Very true, particularly in Asia. I think the only place that I've seen that advertises visuals is Nagoya, and that's mostly due to noise abatement at night. Everywhere else is RNAV 1 to an ILS, even in VMC.
 
Derg said:
A lot of it has to do with the theater of operation.

Here in the US, we get a lot of visuals, "follow that traffic to the marker" and vectors to a dog leg on final.

In other parts of the world, they're transitioning to RNAV STARS to an approach transition to an ILS approach. You can hand fly it if you'd like but you'll just be playing a video game with the flight director.

Like if you fly from JFK to LHR, there's really not much of an opportunity to hand fly yourself to a visual, making decisions about how high you are above glide path or getting yourself situated on a lateral extension of the centerline of the runway.

Often times, leaving the eastern seaboard, you press "NAV", maybe get a direct or two off the tracks then you're basically following LNAV paths with altitude constraints, 'slow down points' and it spits you out right on the ILS, on glideslope, on localizer, at 160 knots.

I gather that if the crew spent 99% of it's time flying in those environments, which is probably possible because it's not like Asiana is flying 777's into Bozeman, the transition to a more 'visual'-driven environment like we have in the US, especially in a training environment, it may have been a hindrance to safety from a number of angles.

It's not that we're "better" because we're driven to give and accept visuals, it seems more a low tech method of squeezing more airplanes into less airspace without spending additional resources on equipment and procedures to maintain separation.

Again, this is all half thought-out theory and I accept that it's full of bullet holes.
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It's very true that it would only be natural to fall into almost complete automation dependency at that point. And while the RNAV STARS may be far technologically superior to what we have in the states at the moment, what happens when the screens go blank in night MVFR? How will the guys getting hired with majors across the world now deal with an emergency like that 30 years from now in the left seat after all that reliance on technology? Its a very, very complicated problem before you even bring in the cultural issues that were also more than likely present in this accident. I'm eager to see how the NTSB thinks all this should be addressed. As long as airlines codeshare world wide, airline pilots should be held to a global standard of safety.
 
dasleben said:
Very true, particularly in Asia. I think the only place that I've seen that advertises visuals is Nagoya, and that's mostly due to noise abatement at night. Everywhere else is RNAV 1 to an ILS, even in VMC.
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God almighty.

I don't think I'd ever pass up being a domestic Captain to be an international FO then.
 
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