Originally Posted by
NightIP
Agree 100%.
Sadly enough when I was furloughed from my regional it took concentration to even hand fly an ILS with the flight director. I remember how unprofessional I felt after that.
I know it...guys I fly with give me grief for hand-flying, not realizing how perishable a skill flying really is...but their first hand-flown ILS quickly humbles them.
Originally Posted by
JoeyMeatballs
No disrespect, but it must be the people you are flying with, I fly with guys and girls that can hand-fly on green needles down to minimums w/o a FD with dead on accuracy.........
Don't doubt it...my first gig at Trans States had me flying with some phenomenal pilots -- guys who taught me how to fly an airplane, and I am eternally grateful for the experience. Unfortunately, SkyWest's culture beats into our heads from day one in training that the RJ is not to (and cannot) be hand-flown...and the pilots here just eat that up. Unsurprisingly, the end result of this is that a majority of our pilots can't barely keep even a
semblance of airspeed/altitude/course/heading with the FD, much less raw-data. Yes I just said that, and I meant every syllable. This is coming from over three years of my Captains overshooting altitudes by 200 feet while hand-flying with the FD up, and then struggling to keep the airspeed within 20 knots. Of course, there are some good sticks here as well -- they're just in the minority.
Originally Posted by
usmc-sgt
No problem with singling me out.
I do not trust myself on a blue needle DME arc because we do not have any in our system. I hand fly a good deal in the plane and feel proficient in all aspects of the envelope we fly in but that does not account for the situations outside the envelope.
Unless we load one up in the sim I will not see one.
Fair enough!! Unless you fly regularly in the mountains (which I do not either), I know it's impossible to remain proficient in a procedure like that...when I go into HLN, for example, I'll fly the DME Arc in my head half-a dozen times before we even begin the descent, and even then I'm shaking off the rust while flying it.