jynxyjoe
Queso King
OK. Thanks! (What the hell just happened?)
AF447 Vanity Fair article
- Thread starter NewYorkophile
- Start date
OK. Thanks! (What the hell just happened?)
Given education, it would appear.
lthompson020
I told you the Drake was bad. I hate the Drake!
If 10 hours at a time on a widebody in cruise in 3 or 4 man crews comprise most of your time, then is there a difference in the ability of the 3000 hour pilot vs. the 8000 pilot? If not then there needs to be a shift in how we gauge experience. I think you can learn from any type of flying, but not all flying has the same learning value.
Cherokee_Cruiser
Bronteroc
jynxyjoe
Queso King
Boris tells us about the MU-2 in 5...4...
Baronman
Well-Known Member
I don't think any other RJ's or Boeing auto trim like the Airbus does during hand-flown periods. Keep the stick back and the horizontal stab will eventually fully deflect as it did with AF.
I 100% agree with whoever wrote that 3000hrs while mostly flown in a wide body doesn't necessarily lend itself to handling the aircraft in an undesired state or at the edges/outside it's normal envelope.
Give me a guy who instructed 1000hrs or more, doing stalls, slow flight, steep turns, short field landings, VME demos, single engine flight...Then went on to larger aircraft with less automation, be it a Dash8, Beech or RJ flying without all the gizmos, doing multiple legs a day, snow, thunderstorms, etc......While not necessarily a master of the skies, this pilot has spent much more time outside the comfort zone than a 3000 guy who has lived in an Airbus. I love the Airbus, it's a great machine but if this is the only thing you know, and most of your legs are long-haul, mmmm....it wouldn't surprise me that a stall recovery goes poorly.
I 100% agree with whoever wrote that 3000hrs while mostly flown in a wide body doesn't necessarily lend itself to handling the aircraft in an undesired state or at the edges/outside it's normal envelope.
Give me a guy who instructed 1000hrs or more, doing stalls, slow flight, steep turns, short field landings, VME demos, single engine flight...Then went on to larger aircraft with less automation, be it a Dash8, Beech or RJ flying without all the gizmos, doing multiple legs a day, snow, thunderstorms, etc......While not necessarily a master of the skies, this pilot has spent much more time outside the comfort zone than a 3000 guy who has lived in an Airbus. I love the Airbus, it's a great machine but if this is the only thing you know, and most of your legs are long-haul, mmmm....it wouldn't surprise me that a stall recovery goes poorly.
Dugie8
Well-Known Member
This. Hours mean bupkiss. I want the guy sitting next to me (either to the left or to the right) to have the mental capacity of something greater than an East African Lemur. Sadly, most places don't place any emphasis on a varied background and only on how big that integer is in the TT column.
I reject the notion that a large integer has any direct correlation to said mental capacity.
jynxyjoe
Queso King
Well if I was doing the hiring Lemurs would be right out... Lorises though? Hired every time.
It always occurred to me that TT was a good measure, not the best, but good. The alternative is digging through low time guys looking for diamonds in the rough. I don't work HR though.
Dugie8
Well-Known Member
That's funny!
To my eye, using TT as the gauge is just lazy (not directed at you). In theory one should be hiring folks whom are going to take the best care of the equipment and customers (in that order). If it is too much to ask to vet through some resumes to find that, well, we get what we deserve.
jynxyjoe
Queso King
No I understand your point but what we should do, versus what we can realistically expect a hiring board to do... Also the US has this great expanse of flying gigs. It's not unreasonable to expect a guy to get a thousand hours before getting behind something Trashy (for all you Dash folks out there). It's not unreasonable for an insurance group to say, look a guy needs 5k TT before he touches the blah blah blah at your small operation. Oh you're a big time airline with AQP? Well hire whatever you want, as long as they have some ATP mins.
We're talking Air France, France has no sizeable GA community (unless you want to count experimentals / ultralights). It's unreasonable to expect 5k TT before starting up as an FO on the old A330. So some situations TT is not just lazy, it's stupid, other cases I think TT is a reasonable line to draw before you start looking at or training guys.
Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
I'm not what you'd call a huge GA booster (if I'm never in another 172, that'll be fine). But I do think that one underappreciated side effect of a robust GA presence is that one gets a chance to go out and do a few things that it would be stone-stupid to allow in an airplane with paying passengers. It is, of course, impossible to prove a negative (eg. that on such and such a date, a transport didn't crash because someone remembered something from their Cessna days), but I personally rather suspect that this has something to do with the excellent safety record of US airlines.
PhilosopherPilot
Well-Known Member
I think the automation policies and technology advances have played a key part in the safety record that US airlines now enjoy. That's not to say that it's not a double edged sword, and that we should ONLY rely on the automation. But the demonizing that automation has received recently seems misplaced, particularly for the Airbus. How does one go about flying an Airbus without automation? Unless you're in direct law, it seems that manual flight is really just manually telling the autopilot what to do using a side stick. (Oversimplification, I know, but it has some truth to it.)
At any rate, we focus more on hand flying in the training program at my current airline more than my previous one. Recurrent has a couple of hand flown departures and visual patterns flown with level 1 automation (completely raw data, no auto throttles). But when the emergencies happen, we expect crews to turn on the automation to help increase their situational awareness.
At any rate, we focus more on hand flying in the training program at my current airline more than my previous one. Recurrent has a couple of hand flown departures and visual patterns flown with level 1 automation (completely raw data, no auto throttles). But when the emergencies happen, we expect crews to turn on the automation to help increase their situational awareness.
Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
Ha! Ha ha! I get it.
It really is. It fails to consider what you were doing and flying in those however many hundreds of hours. It fails to consider what else you might know, your attitudes, and so on.
Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
Hard to see how that would have helped in this instance, but I quite agree with everything else you wrote. It's not "either/or", it's both. Basic airmanship AND sophisticated systems and the knowledge thereof. The problem (from my perspective, anyway) is that the modern notion has essentially abandoned one in favor of the other.
PhilosopherPilot
Well-Known Member
Our director of training said in our instructor meeting yesterday that the AQP data show an correlation in hours (total time) and failed lesson counts. The higher the flight time, the more failed lessons there are. Of course there are many reasons that could be, but it's an interesting thing to find in the data.
Autothrust Blue
Welcome aboard the Washington State Ferries
Now I'm curious. Maybe some bright spark at my airline can run that analysis too.
The business of pilot selection is interesting. (I've positively no idea how to pick pilots, other than I want to have, as my first officer some day, a guy or gal who has sufficient stick and rudder skills, the right attitudes and knowledge, and enough cojones to tell me when I'm screwing something up and to tell me when he or she thinks we shouldn't be doing whatever it is we're doing. You will notice that there is no total time number associated with these characteristics.)
Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
I'd be more interested in a statistical analysis of TT vs. flaming holes in the ground (or, I suppose, water). To borrow a tired old trope from the "SATs are Racist" crowd..."Testing is great at testing how well you take tests...everything is at the very least open to argument".
jynxyjoe
Queso King
Well that's HR's job. Having a high or low TT has nothing to do with attitude from what I've seen. There's a young man on here that used to fill my 1900 up in between instructing, charter, local jobs, girlfriend, school if I remember right and so on. He probably had more character than me, probably still does, but he's at your airline now (after a short stay at Cape Air), so I think HR did it's job.
Boris Badenov
Fortis Leader
While we're on the subject, why do we do v1 cut after v1 cut in the sim, but never have anyone try to vector us in to a mountain or some creeping systems failure that doesn't have a four step "solution" in The Book?
PhilosopherPilot
Well-Known Member
I don't know enough about the Airbus or this example in particular to say with any certainty at all, but didn't the airplane recover normal flight data prior to the impact? I'm wondering if the FO had just let go of the stick and turned on the autopilot would the plane have recovered to level flight?
My limited understanding of this event was that the FO misinterpreted the data after the initial failure, and essentially created the problem. Is that correct?
I think you'd be hard pressed to find any major airline training department that days that ONLY automation is the way to go. Maybe that's how thing have trended out on line, but that's not the intent. Again, I can only speak to our training, but we make it very clear, if automaton is the problem reduce the level of automation. Or, if you're feeling overworked, increase the level of automation. It's a tool, not THE tool.