Kforekyle

According to the 10/14/19 FAA report 92% of pilots don’t know how to hand fly. How do you think Endeavor pilots do when it comes to hand flying. Any thoughts?

Meow1215

Does 9E pilots know how to handfly? Yes.
Paid enough to do so? No.
Next topic.

Kforekyle

I agree with you 100% on your 2nd statement. On your 1st statement, not so much so.

theUpsideDown

I think you read a news article instead of the study. Is the FAA upset Lion Air and Ethiopian as well as a number of JAA pilots who can't shoot a visual because they never hand fly? Yup. The Canadian aerospace regulation body was upset a Canadian airline pilot felt flying a jet with a deffered autopilot was unsafe so he refused it. That ain't the USAs problem

Our problem is we check out when we turn the auto on. That's why you've got those stupid FMA callouts coming back. The FAA approves of autopilot use to de-clutter the NFP from their duties of radio, nav and spinning all the FP dials. During busy times the auto should be on to keep workload down and let two pilots concentrate on clearances. The USA has a different pilot culture, vastly different from EU and Asia where they hand fly with the auto on pretending that's hand flying, which the rj doesn't even have. And the Airbuses they dont even do that. Imagine never hand flying and every approach to a ils or rnav to 100ft. Endeavor, and us pilots in general don't do that.

Anyone that commutes can hear that calvary charge a lot higher than 100ft off the ground. Our problem is overwhelmingly we land u stabilized 99%ofthe time because we are so comfortable hand flying, and when the auto goes on we check the f out of monitoring autopilot duties.

Kforekyle

I don’t really understand your last paragraph. Are you saying we are very comfortable hand flying?

IAFDOF

You mean like that thing I do in the sim once a year?

ninerdriver

Most are pretty good, actually. I'd say about 75% of the captains with whom I fly handfly on the way up to 10000' or so, then turn it off somewhere around 1000' on the way down, so they have practice at it.

There are definitely some outliers. The worst are the 600 on, 400 off pilots when they have to fly something other than an ILS. For every one of those, though, there's also another pilot who turns the FD off at 400' up and flies raw data like a champ.

theUpsideDown

Yeah, American pilots have a very high comfort level hand flying as compared to the rest of the planet's airline pilots. That's why we have a very low go around rate, and a very high level of "saving it". The FAA in your study was talking about the pilot shutting his brain off when the autopilot came on and being terrible at monitoring it. But the newest media spectacle has been the FAA submitting to ICAO that some sort of hand flying program must start across the globe to get the rest of the pilots up to speed.

The FAA has even backed off 1000ft to stabilized approach or go around garbage because a couple airlines proved it was wrong headed . Until the approach gets below 500ft unstabilized, 97% of pilots can get the plane back in the right place before landing safely, which most of us who used to fly it the other way remember.

For instance, this might be before your time, the same year that study you quoted came out the dtw pilots had a fairly "standard" , non standard callout, of "flight director off set takeoff thrust". They'd hit their stupid TOGA buttons 1-8 times because most 200pilots had no idea what those buttons really did then remove the FD. They'd turn it back on above 10000 before engaging autopilot. Extremely common practice. So common FOQA finally put the smack down on the practice early 2016 when the FOQA guys finally caught the data for the FD was missing, in mid 2015 they started asking recurrent classes what the hell was going on with broken FDs (because they didn't naturally think pilots were shutting off everything). The excuse was, way back in 'Nam, Pinnacle used to make pilots shut off the FD from zero to 400ft due to a software glitch. Pilots liked it so much they just kept it off for takeoff and landing until many pilots just turned it on for autopilot use only. If the autopilot was like the DC9 a lot of 200 pilots would have left the FD off with the autopilot on.

American pilots and edv pilots hand fly a lot and there's guys like you who are telling peers to handfly even more. Our nation's culture is a hand flying culture. I'm guilty of it too, search my posts there should be one about, turn the auto off on the descent below 12000, and all the ways its better. Hand flying at multiple airspeeds and altitude level offs and trim settings and flying through the flap transitions. That's real flying. Take it from me, I spent the first 1000 plus hours hand flying the northeast with no auto pilot and no flight director, in a 19 seat airplane that, unlike the stupid rj, trimmed out correctly.

Flew 4 different airliners, CRJ is hands down the worst flying airplane autopilot on or off. Don't @ me. And I still think guys should hand fly it as much as I did anyway.

sigler

Where did you get this info about the FAA “backing off” the stabilized approach concept at 1000’?

theUpsideDown

From your ex fleet standards guy. I didn't say delta or edv were embracing it, but other companies proved it to the FAA and have changed their books.

It turned out the old guys gut reactions were right for once, I doubt itll break that way again soon.