Traditionalists believe that modern aircraft are dumbing down the piloting profession. Are they right and does it matter anyway?
Is flying being “dumbed down” for the present generation of young pilots? Has it already been dumbed down for all pilots of modern aircraft, especially commercial airliners?
There are those – mainly older traditionalists – in the industry who maintain piloting is getting so easy and so relatively trouble-free that when things go wrong the youngsters can’t cope. For these people, the US National Transportation Board’s (NTSB) recommendation to the Federal Aviation Administration that flight manuals for commercial transport aircraft should contain advice about the technique for controlling bounced landings – a technique that most instructors try to ensure their students have mastered before sending them solo for the first time – will prove their point. Flight manuals are traditionally supposed to enable pilots to master the systems, procedures, performance, and peculiarities of a specific aircraft type, not to teach them to fly.
Actually there is no evidence, in accidents over the last 20 years in which pilot actions were either causal or – more often – insufficient to save an aircraft in trouble, that younger pilots were more frequently involved than the older generation. Besides which, leaving aside statistically freakish periods like the August that has just passed, commercial flying has never been safer. So where is this dumbing down?
Granted, flying a modern airliner is different to what it was 20 years ago. The cockpits are better designed, the amount and quality of information available to the pilots is much advanced, the displays confer infinitely better situational awareness, and total aircraft reliability is massively improved.
But there is a downside. Increased automation and the rarity of failures can lead pilots to become complacent and so unstimulated in the quieter phases of flight that it is easy for them to get “behind the aircraft” without realising it. But experienced pilots are just as likely to suffer from this as the rookies – unless they recognise the danger. Meanwhile young pilots hear old aviators muttering about how good at their job they had to be in the old days, but no-one ever hears them suggesting that a return to traditional flightdecks would be desirable.
While aircraft have become better to fly, the need for pinpoint four-dimensional navigational accuracy has become more common in busy terminal areas, and aircraft systems have become both more capable and more complex. Since pilots do not have a flight engineer, they need to understand the systems better than used to be necessary. Information systems like Airbus’ electronic centralised aircraft monitor and Boeing’s engine indicating and crew alerting system are informative when anomalies crop up, but they do not confer understanding. They confer the “what happened” but not the “why”. And if pilots under pressure are not to become confused, systems understanding – “getting your head around the problem” – is essential. For a few years now Airbus has been working to counter an insidiously growing “need to know” culture among airlines keen to keep training costs down. It has produced programmes designed to help pilots learn more about their aircraft systems, because it believes this is essential for safety on the rare occasions when things go wrong. None of this is dumbing down.
Now back to the NTSB recommendation that a basic flying technique should be incorporated in flight manuals. That is a seriously bad idea. Flight manuals are already large documents, and the larger they get the less well they will serve their purpose. There is nothing better calculated to make a professional lose respect for a serious document than to fill it with material that should be provided elsewhere, or in another form. Finally, today’s flight manuals must not become “flight manuals for dummies”, because pilots will stop taking them seriously.
There is a tendency for agencies – and airlines – to cover themselves legally by using manuals that attempt to foresee every eventuality. This makes them massive, turgid and impenetrable. The NTSB would do better to recommend to airlines and manufacturers that any time something is added to a flight manual, it should not add to its size. It should be an improvement, not an addition.
Meanwhile if the NTSB wants to see pilots better prepared to control a bounced landing, which can happen to anybody and can be very expensive if not handled properly, it should address its advice to airline training departments.
Source: Flight International
