rickair7777

That's the cold hard reality. Airbus always knew who they selling jets to. Boeing forgot.

Texasbound

Boeing did not forget. They decided to stick with giving the pilot ultimate control.

Guess we want them to build the planes not to need pilots now.

rickair7777

No that wasn't the issue. They're selling a 1960's monster of complexity to 200-hour children of the magenta line.

The FO on a 737 literally does more work on the taxi out than a bus FO does all month. He's basically doing his job plus the FE's job.

Boeing made a bad ASSumption that just because their stable of yeager-esque test pilots could fly their way out of an MCAS malfunction that everybody else in the world could too. Maybe a safe enough assumption for US legacy airlines. But not for everybody.

You could automate a lot of those subsystems and still leave the pilot with ultimate authority, that's a philosophical call, not a technical requirement. I would prefer that to the current bus model (although if you know what you're doing you can take full control of a bus by pushing a couple buttons). But I do understand and agree that SOME operators need the nerf flight envelope protections of the bus.

Excargodog

The Wright brothers flew at Kitty Hawk in 1903. The 737 first flew in 1967, sixty-four years later. It is now fifty-three years after that and Boeing is trying to keep the “same type” as it’s big seller? That is insane.

Just because you have a monopoly in US transport category aircraft does not mean you can keep ‘tweaking’ a design forever. Like the Wright Flyer and the DC-3, the 737 was a great state of the art aircraft at one time. That time, however, was 30 years ago.

Elevation

It's tempting to think we're at a nadir of cockpit skill today, and we were sharper in days gone by. In fact pilots who flew DH-4s through DC-7s thought the same thing of kids walking right into DC-9s. So when we forget just how fouled-up we used to be it's tempting to focus on easily accessible factors at the expense of accuracy.

What I think you get right is that we consistently fail to put sufficient emphasis on maintaining basic airplane control. Fifty years ago, just like today, people would come out of training with an inappropriate level of fail-safe confidence in their flight engineers, FMCs, navigators, anti-ice systems, autofeather or whatever else. Ultimately it's on us as aviators to silently trust but verify the information in front of us. Inappropriate training will get a candidate to absorb technical information without forming the right priorities. Without the right priorities, you get dumb responses to problems, especially those that require short OODA loops, like flight path control.

Over time that leads to corrosive problems within a company or squadron like tolerating a degradation in basic flying abilities. We paint over this corrosion for a while with corporate culture, over-reliance on crutches, social factors, etc. Eventually, the corrosion wins, and people get killed.

There's reason for hope, though. Just like today, fifty years ago there were organizations getting it right. They usually weren't the folks we'd expect, but the knowledge and capabilities are out there. Given sufficient crisis that knowledge will make it to the managers who need it. They'll then wrap those ideas up as their own to preserve their careers and apply positive change in their companies. History dorks can find a great example of this in the AVG and later air war in the Pacific.

Unfortunately, we always seem to need a crisis experienced to generate this response rather than a crisis averted. That's human nature. It's also a persistent threat to Western organizations.

As an aside, I think Yeager is overrated. Come fight me.

rickair7777

I agree with all. I think the trick is to work smarter, not harder. Automate distracting busy work while still keeping your hand in at actual flying. Maybe they should allow less AP in the sim. I hand fly quite a bit, but quickly turn it over to George if I'm tired, not feeling it, or things get busy unexpectedly. Many folks overseas hand the rotation and (maybe) the flare, and that's it.



Yes, you're right he is. I just use him as the stereotypical model of "right stuff". Had he been less of a tool and bothered to get the education his peers had he could have walked on the moon.

badflaps

His time was luckies, Rebel Yell, girdles and tiny hats, The creatures of the I-devices will be looked at as silly gooses in 30 years.

Elevation

I don't know, man. There are names with a lot less glamor and marketing that got a lot more done. Richard Bong, Claire Chennault, or John Boyd got a lot more done. Those guys are still the relatively famous ones. This sort of relates to a problem in aviation, generally and a GTI3591 problem specifically. We ignore the facts in front of us way more than we care to admit.

I beleive the problem is that our identities as aviators is tied up with a popular idea of what an aviator should be. That idea evolved in film and pulp novels that came out right after the first world war, and it hasn't changed much in the intervening years. (Transatlantic differences in what a "model" aviator is persist in our culture too). From the very outset aviation culture has had this double-identity where many of us want to carouse at bars and be bros (Rickenbacker-esque, typified in the film "Dawn Patrol") and others become technical dweebs obsessing over technical, combat and safety challenges (Albert Ball, etc. typified in no movie anywhere). These two identities set us up for conflicting goals where chumming it up over drinks in Wan Chai. Maybe we'll even catch ourselves trashing other aviators who aren't inadvertently hindering our ability to self-evaluate. I'm no exception to this. It's way more appealing to hang out with people who like you than to be the guy who says "Did you guys notice none of the maintenance actions on this deferral have been done?".

This is one of the root causes of why we've killed people at Atlas. While we nominally have procedures in place to address faults, ultimately we run like a small, disorganized company. There isn't a practical procedure to address a training shortfall. The only thing that matters is whether the chief pilot, fleet captain or director of training decide to pick up the phone when you call. We talk about having performance watch programs and training review boards, but what really matters is whether a guy behind a desk enjoyed talking to you about your family in the islands. We essentially are running around with organizations built to function like a frat house when we need some clinical dweebs to clean house.

This is why I keep coming back to ethical, professional and cultural failures here. The technical factors are symptoms. Those professional and ethical failures cite big names without really looking inward.

We need more dorks.

rickair7777

May be something to that. My current airline has plenty in flight ops, safety, etc and it's a good thing as far as I can tell.

METO Guido

Culture, role awareness and credibility are slippery aspects of modern professional life. So is being subpoenaed to testify in a claimant's deposition against your employer. An employer who will act exclusively to protect its own interests. Something the West Virginia hayseed who jumped on a padded lawn chair and rode the blaster into history didn't presumably fret over. Titles carried more weight then, from above and below.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chuck_Yeager