Originally Posted by Airway

FLYING magazine is a popular magazine that isn't just read by private pilots and kiddies with aspirations. It has a huge readership. This is precisely why your article was so damaging to the piloting profession, MY profession, which is already demeaned enough. We have enough misinformation spread over our profession, and then we have a "fellow aviator" decided to spread it some more. I can't tell you how many times I've had people say "well the autopilot just does everything anyways, doesn't it?" What you forgot is that after so many years, we have become so proficient that everyday operations are easy. Just like anything else. But you remember how easy it is to screw up when you go into recurrent. After hundreds of hand surgeries, I'm sure it's easy too. I once had a doctor explain that arthroscopic knee surgery is so easy it's like playing a video game! He'd done thousands of them. It became easy. And that's why he was worth what he charged. But telling me what he did kind of hurt the image of his skills. It was bad PR.

I spend a lot of time explaining to people that "autopilot" is a terrible word to describe the system. That it is NOT a pilot, it is solely a flight control manipulator that takes direct input from a PILOT, that I can command the damned thing to do whatever I want it to do, and it's sole reason for existence is to ease workload because we have so many other tasks to accomplish on any given flight, especially during the departure and arrival phases. I had one guy (a physician) at a friend's dinner party tell me he thought we just press an autopilot button and then sit back and let it do it's thing.

The biggest problem with aviation is that so many pilots have such poor PR skills and are so socially inept that they don't understand other people. Sometimes we don't understand the consequences of what we say. When you write an article about flying for an airline, you don't just have an opportunity to improve our image and fix some misconceptions, you have a duty to your peers not to do what you did. It's also a mark of maturity.

Telling the world through one of the most popular aviation magazines on the planet that our jobs can be condensed to being bored and autopilot and autothrottles is a perfect example of the social ineptitude that plagues this profession. Furthermore, it's not even TRUE! It's so far removed from the truth, that it's an insult to pilots all over the world. This kind of damage can't be easily fixed. And this sentiment is not only shared by a lot of people on this thread, I guarantee you that the majority of airline pilots who read this article will be thinking the same thing: "Oh GREAT".

You write it off as "self-effacement" in your reply...but remember that you were describing an entire profession to the world. You were an un-chosen and (obviously) unwitting representative of all of us in that article. You didn't just efface yourself. You effaced all of us.

Thanks, guy.