FAA: Pilots should be capable of flying aircraft manually when needed

Sliced bread! Good job folks at FAA…
 
Yeah no kidding. Ten years ago, most SE Asian airlines were flown by American, UK and Aussie pilots. Since then, there have been a whole generation of locally trained pilots who have never actually hand flown an airplane outside of takeoff and short final. E.g. Asiana Airlines flight 214 in to SFO.

But there have been LOTS of times when Vietnam Airlines and Jetstar flights have been diverted hundreds of miles away simply because the ILS was out out of service at the destination airport and the pilots were not up to doing a visual approach. I had a good friend who was a Vietnam Airlines pilot (German) who told me that she regularly did visual approaches for practice, but company SOP for locally trained pilots was for them not to do visual approaches, at all.
 
Here in the US there was a push for YEARS away from hand flying skills.

Im the only airline pilot I know who has flown entire legs manually (including turning auto throttles off) voluntarily. Captains and first officers thought I was nuts…. Just never wanted to be stressed if simple automation failed.

I argued endlessly for years with captains who thought I was way off base… and then a few planes crashed with nothing wrong with them from Bernoulli’s viewpoint.

This has been a LONG time coming.
 
Daleandee said:
Seems this is a no brainer and should have been the idea from the start .
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FYI: the loss of pilotage/flight skills with the increase in cockpit automation has been an issue since the mid-1990s. After several reports and committees, congress passed a mandate in 2016 for the FAA to develop a way to ensure 121/135 pilots could still manually fly the aircraft without autopilots or other flight automation systems. The recently issued AC is one guidance doc to meet that mandate. The single pilot/AI thread also touches on this topic. But it is not something "new."
 
I have occasionally binge watched air crash documentaries and there have been a number where I find myself wondering why they didn't just turn off all the automation and hand fly it. I'm sure I'm missing a ton of training and theory that goes into standard and emergency procedures in large airliners but man.... the number of times confusion about what the automation is doing being a cause or contributing factor to an accident is pretty hard to ignore.

Then again this is from the perspective of a private pilot who's only automation is a janky 40 year old autopilot that I've learned to completely turn off at the first sign of difficulty.
 
They all fly like normal airplanes, only a LOT more stable and powerful.

Power plus attitude equals performance….
 
Cites 2013 incident.... haven't even got to the max fiasco.
 
The average hand flying time on my fleet is 8 minutes. I try to do at least that on every flight. It really doesn’t take much skill to follow a flight director direct to a fix so that gets old quickly. They want us to hand fly more but then they put restrictions in our manual like the AP has to be on if vis 3/4 or less for an ILS and for all non precision approaches, it has to be on if we’re in IMC.:dunno:
 
I got censored, ha ha

But my comment was that the FAA has removed many hand flying and skill related criteria for certification and replaced with being able to just fly a 172s with glass panels and auto plots, their comments are funny in comparison to their actions
 
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Tools said:
Here in the US there was a push for YEARS away from hand flying skills.

Im the only airline pilot I know who has flown entire legs manually (including turning auto throttles off) voluntarily. Captains and first officers thought I was nuts…. Just never wanted to be stressed if simple automation failed.

I argued endlessly for years with captains who thought I was way off base… and then a few planes crashed with nothing wrong with them from Bernoulli’s viewpoint.

This has been a LONG time coming.
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Can’t really do that today with RVSM.
 
Shorter legs, SAV-ATL, etc. RVSM was around.
 
1960: Pilots should be fully competent in their ability to control their airplane
1980: Pilots should be able to take over promptly when 'George gives up again'
2000: Pilots should be able to control the airplane briefly, when the aircraft computers occasionally act up
2020: Pilots should have a passing familiarity with yoke, pedals, throttles but need not actually touch them
2040: The on-board "pilot" should have a sound understanding of the history of those times when pilots had to physically control the aircraft, and be able to retrieve and insert the yoke into the pedestal in the event of an emergency.
2060: Ground-based aircraft-control systems managers need to know how to reboot the systems efficiently
 
Racerx said:
Cites 2013 incident.... haven't even got to the max fiasco.
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To put this in context, the early 90s crash of an Airbus in Japan due to auto-throttle mis-management initially brought automation/manual skills into upper level discussions. The Asiana crash initiated a review of those 90s discussions and moved the discussion to the congressional level which passed a law in 2016 mandating the FAA address manual flight skills. The MAX accidents initiated a 2nd congressional initiative with a 2019 published research report on cockpit automation vs manual pilot skills. The AC referenced in the OP is the result of the 2016 law and 2019 report. Given the AC now provides guidance, I suspect there will be a FAR revision that makes “FPM” a separate training requirement in the near future.
 
TravisRNT said:
I got censored, ha ha

But my comment was that the FAA has removed many hand flying and skill related criteria for certification and replaced with being able to just fly a 172s with glass panels and auto plots, their comments are funny in comparison to their actions
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Specifically which hand flying and skill related criteria have been removed?
 
Did not have to hand fly a single engine approach OR wave off when I was type rated in an Airbus 330…. For example.
 
Tools said:
Did not have to hand fly a single engine approach OR wave off when I was type rated in an Airbus 330…. For example.
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That would be the FAA allowing a carrier to do that. The ACS for a type rating still requires two hand-flown approaches.
 
Ok, fair enough. Still, kinda scary isn’t it?!! Believe me I enjoyed the ease of it…

Reread more carefully. We hand flew a couple, just not the ones that required ANY skill… so maybe not even a relaxation of standards.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
1960: Pilots should be fully competent in their ability to control their airplane
1980: Pilots should be able to take over promptly when 'George gives up again'
2000: Pilots should be able to control the airplane briefly, when the aircraft computers occasionally act up
2020: Pilots should have a passing familiarity with yoke, pedals, throttles but need not actually touch them
2040: The on-board "pilot" should have a sound understanding of the history of those times when pilots had to physically control the aircraft, and be able to retrieve and insert the yoke into the pedestal in the event of an emergency.
2060: Ground-based aircraft-control systems managers need to know how to reboot the systems efficiently
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2061: Terrorists learn how to hack into the ground-based aircraft-control system comm links
 
Daleandee said:
Seems this is a no brainer and should have been the idea from the start ...
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In the US, it is very much data-driven. Data is collected from ASAP reports (airline version of ASRS), routine DFDR data downloads, incidents, and accidents. Trends are identified and training, policies, and procedures are modified to mitigate threats.

Automation mis-management was a big threat and training and procedures targeted that for many years to reduce the error rate. Now the data is pointing more toward errors from hand-flying skills and more hand-flying is being encouraged and included in simulator training.

It takes an intentional effort to maintain skills in both highly-automated operations as well as at various levels of de-automation and hand-flying. You can't focus only on one end of the spectrum at the expense of the other end.

Tools said:
Im the only airline pilot I know who has flown entire legs manually (including turning auto throttles off) voluntarily.
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Hope you didn't have too many trans-cons!

After departure, you reach a point where you aren't making many turns and are have completed all configuration and speed changes. At that point, there's little value in continuing to hand-fly, IMO. There's more opportunities during the descent and arrival but a busy ATC environment, possibly with some weather, may not always be the best place to turn off the automation. In those situations, the proper use of automation is does a great job of reducing the workload and allowing more attention to be devoted to the bigger picture of the busy environment.

I've seen some posts on night currency recently. The GA-only pilots may be interested to know that under part 121, we don't have to maintain night currency with the three takeoffs and landings at 'night'. We need three takeoffs and landings, but it doesn't matter if they are day or night. Pilots who typically fly at "bunkies" will often have to revisit the simulator every 90 days for landing currency.
 
Larry in TN said:
After departure, you reach a point where you aren't making many turns and are have completed all configuration and speed changes. At that point, there's little value in continuing to hand-fly, IMO. There's more opportunities during the descent and arrival but a busy ATC environment, possibly with some weather, may not always be the best place to turn off the automation. In those situations, the proper use of automation is does a great job of reducing the workload and allowing more attention to be devoted to the bigger picture of the busy environment.
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While it’s not the same skill set, straight-and-level hand flying does have value…practicing division of attention in a longer term environment.

True, probably not the best thing to practice when you’ve got a tough approach in weather coming up, but definitely a skill set many pilots simply don’t have. I’ve had several instances where hand flying enroute was required due to autopilot malfunctions, and often there was no choice but for me to fly the whole leg, as the copilot couldn’t maintain altitude hand flying, and was so abrupt that the passengers thought something was wrong.
 
It helps keep the scan proficient, for one thing.
 
I see it when my coworkers show up from a long hitch of flying the magenta laden skies and back to our flight training dedicated enterprise. The atrophy is very real. In a way, we're [team Dod] giving the airlines free recurrent fodder with our Guard/Reserve folks who dual-hat the a-word thing. Though it's no longer a plurality of the hired demographic in 121, they still represent a not insignificant portion of meat in seats in US6 121. Anything we can do to keep the swiss cheese outcome of two atrophied pilots paired up at the same time while an electrical bus malfunction requiring alternate cross-check occurs (a statistically rare occurrence in the wild, which masks the atrophy).
 
MauleSkinner said:
While it’s not the same skill set, straight-and-level hand flying does have value…practicing division of attention in a longer term environment.
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Almost all of my cruise flight time is in RVSM airspace where regulations prohibit hand-flying straight-and-level flight beyond what is necessary for trimming. There is a good bit of straight-and-level flight in the departure and arrival phases of flight which most of us frequently hand-fly.

Once out of the terminal area, the rest of the climb is usually just keeping the wings level and holding a mostly constant pitch attitude. That's usually by 15,000' to FL200 on the climb.
 
Pretty sure rvsm a/c need to be equipped with an autopilot
that autopilot needs to be operational
But I've seen no FAR/AIM notation/AC that says it always has to be on above 290
However (a common term in these aviation discussions)
-the AFM may require it to be on (this document has legal standing)
-some company opspecs and some company policies may state it has to be on.
 
Let'sgoflying! said:
Pretty sure rvsm a/c need to be equipped with an autopilot
that autopilot needs to be operational
But I've seen no FAR/AIM notation/AC that says it always has to be on above 290
However (a common term in these aviation discussions)
-the AFM may require it to be on (this document has legal standing)
-some company opspecs and some company policies may state it has to be on.
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100% true.
I would add that Air Carrier manuals and OpSpecs that may require the autopilot to be on in RVSM airspace also have some legal standing.
 
I probably should add that my hand flying above FL290 was done pre-RVSM, and the autopilot malfunctions I mentioned prevented me from entering RVSM airspace after its introduction.
 
In other news, the DOT requires Tesla drivers to be able to drive the car when the “Autopilot” does something funky.

Cheers
 
TravisRNT said:
I got censored, ha ha

But my comment was that the FAA has removed many hand flying and skill related criteria for certification and replaced with being able to just fly a 172s with glass panels and auto plots, their comments are funny in comparison to their actions
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Off the cuff, spins and being able to work a complex airplane
 
TravisRNT said:
Off the cuff, spins and being able to work a complex airplane
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So you see issues with the wunderkind in regional jets not knowing how to work the gear and flaps properly? Or are you more alarmed by the high number of Boeing products that spin into the ground?
 
MauleSkinner said:
So you see issues with the wunderkind in regional jets not knowing how to work the gear and flaps properly? Or are you more alarmed by the high number of Boeing products that spin into the ground?
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Both
 
I guess the flip is hand flying the aircraft all the time. What was the accident rate like back in those days? That is what we’re really concerned with, no?
 
TravisRNT said:
Both
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I'd suggest that if they can’t avoid or recover from stalls in the first place, spin recoveries are going to be beyond their capacity. And if they can’t figure out how to get the airplane from Point A to Point B or control their flight path in a technically advanced airplane, gear and flap operations are minor issues.

I guess you’re seeing a different part of the industry than I am.
 
Maybe someday in the future TAA will mean "Technically Archaic Aircraft" instead of advanced, and you'll be forced to fly without a nanny.
 
About 10-12 years back CAP was pushing for "AP on" in the G1000 182's from a few hundred feet after takeoff, till on final. I don't remember the specific altitudes or mandates since many of us ignored them - I could be mis-remebering, but I think it was stressed in the mandatory G1000 conversion "training" - a very long PowerPoint presentation that was just a glorified (and tedious) walk-through of the G1000 pages. It was silly in VMC and we mostly ignored it.

I don't like single pilot in real IMC without an AP, or at least a wing leveler - IMHO it's a necessary avioincs item for serious IFR. Yeah, it can break - but it it ain't broke I want to use it.
 
My plane doesn't have one but that would be my next upgrade, money aside. IMO, it relieves stress, allows for better attention on engine parameters and more eyes outside the cockpit. Not having to watch the vertical speed, compass, ipad etc..
 
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