Apparently losing your autopilot is now an inflight emergency...

https://www.flightglobal.com/safety/experienced-crew-struggled-with-instrument-flight-after-737-lost-autopilots/140072.article?fbclid=IwAR09TZWjlPIKgMxQgxUI-8bv76MhAx2OjJc9aPB-DPV3LHSJj3IglK1ysm0

Not sure about the magenta line but more a severe lack of hands-on instrument flying skills.

Gotta love this bit: 'Although the cockpit-voice recorder was retrieved and its data downloaded, it had not captured audio information about the flight. The inquiry has not been able to determine why.'

Yeah right, like they don't know the pair of plonkers flying the thing didn't wipe it to cover up their ineptitude. 35 minutes, including several failed approaches to get the thing back on the deck because the magic 'fly it for me' button stopped working. 🤣

Just goes to show you how rubbish loads of 'pilots' are: 4,000 hours in their log book, but about two and a half hours of actual time controlling the thing for real, so they actually declare an emergency for something like this.

It isn't even worthy of a pan call, let alone a mayday, at worst it's an inconvenience and actually really it is an opportunity for some practice; lemons from lemonade if you will.

I get that they probably didn't want to hand fly it all the way from Spain to Lithuania (about three hours flight time), but it was entirely possible to do so. That they clearly were not skilled enough to manage that means the P1 from that crew needs firing immediately, and probably the P2 as well. It's not as if the 737 is a handful to fly manually.

Edited September 11, 20205 yr by Chock

Wow! If the facts are as stated, that's embarrassing to say the least.

The problem is not autopilot or GPS. The problem is when a pilot becomes so accustomed relying on them, that he's incapable of safe flight without either.

 

Magenta. My favourite colour

An illustration of this in our small world is simmers boasting of flying « complex » airliners when they couldn’t land and rollout a taildragger in a crosswind.

1 hour ago, Dominique_K said:

An illustration of this in our small world is simmers boasting of flying « complex » airliners when they couldn’t land and rollout a taildragger in a crosswind.

True, but then again, unlike in this incident, boasting of such things in a flight sim is no big deal, because they are not being held to the standard of being paid to fly the thing whilst being responsible for the safety of 57 passengers, plus the crew and everyone whom they fly above whilst unable to drive their aeroplane to a satisfactory standard. I've never yet been to a funeral for a pixel.

Edited September 11, 20205 yr by Chock

@Dominique_K no argument from me, but as Al says, flight simmers do not get paid the big bucks to be responsible for real passengers.

I cannot see the article as they want me to create an account. It might be free ,but meh...

From what I can understand, I believe that Sully should visit those two guys and give them a slap!

4000 hours experience? Did they just repeat that same, single hour 4000 times? 

How would they have fared if they actually had to revert to backup instruments, fly straight and level until the fuel runs out??

As the late Capt. Warren Vanderburg used to say in his seminars "Click, click... Click, click", whilst mimicing turning off the autopilot and autothrottle...

Isn't flight simulation all about learning from the real world even if the stakes are not the same ?

Some fellow simmers have a curious narrative which says that a simulator to be worth its salt has to include "complex" airliners (often wrongly assimilated to IFR flying but this is another story). Anything else is a "game" of "sightseeing". 

This incident in Spain shows that the art of flying is first and foremost the ability to manually  operate and navigate an aircraft. Mastering the avionics complexity, knowing the difference between FLC vs VS is less important, at the end of the day, than to be able to stabilize an approach and land a Cub in a turbulent setting. There lies the real complexity.

 

It's very easy for us computer game players to sit here and criticise the real world, although none of us should fall into the trap of boasting we could have done better than the crew on the day because vanishingly few of us are type rated ATPL holders.

It's also very easy for us to expect that a trained, rated and experienced crew paid to do this professionally are capable of manually flying the aeroplane when the autopilot puts its feet up and lights a cigarette. That's the reason we have humans up front, after all.

Perfect opposite to this: Last year, a United 737-800 was dispatched out of Indianapolis with both autopilots inoperative, heading for Denver. They flew the entire flight at FL280 below RVSM airspace manually. In Denver, they had to go-around twice due to low visibility (Captain was on 'low minimums', meaning he required at least a mile visibility to be allowed to land, autopilot or not, which the weather at Denver didn't permit) and eventually diverted to Gunnison, CO and landed about 46 minutes after the second go-around. They flew more than 03:30 h manually including three low visibility approaches.

No problem for a competent flight crew really.

 

I think a lot of you guys are missing the bigger picture. As someone said, it isn't about the lack of automation.....it's about poor foundational basic IFR skills. 

This was and most likely has been an issue for some time for both the captain and the FO. When I did IOE before covid at my airline, any deficiency a pilot had ALWAYS came out and was magnified when they started flying the jet.

Another thing too is that I wonder what the training program is like. Is this airline only having their pilots fly the automation during their check rides? Are they allowed to hand fly in the sim? Are they required to hand fly at least one non precision approach?

Secondly, did the flight director still work? (I skimmed over the article) let's be real, flying a flight director is a piece of cake.

What was their total time when they both got hired? This matters because what ever foundation they had before they got hired is cemented and will not grow. You don't learn how to foundationally fly on a jet. You just merely learn how to fly a specific jet. Meaning, if you sick at flying basics and flying ifr basics, you are stuck with that amount of suck on the jet. It's rare someone's fundamentals develop on a jet in a short time. That takes years usually to fix ineptitude. Not only that, someone's short comings usually get covered up by automation.

Lastly, the push for more automation in the flight deck in the past decades was a good idea on paper and in practice. However, people forgot about how fragile it can make pilots. Over time, it weakens a pilots ability to fly instead of strengthening it. An unintended consequence that no one wants to talk about.

 

Edited September 11, 20205 yr by ahsmatt7

Part of the Level D checkrides are dealing/training with emergencies and lousy visibility. Autopilot is surely not an imminent emergency.  Best way to simulate this in the sim, is handfly the aircraft and only looking at instruments. Set your viewpoint below.   No looking outside.  Not sure why they couldnt handfly the ILS. Maybe there was a control issue? But you should be on point down to minimums and only look up just before minimums.  This keeps you focused and not always reliant on  AP.  Same goes for any part of the AP.  VNAV for example, gets a bad rap because its hard to program and has bugs from a particular modelled sim aircraft. So what. Fly it manually, either with another mode, or handfly.  It actually makes it fun when cruise flights get boring. 

1 hour ago, ahsmatt7 said:

Lastly, the push for more automation in the flight deck in the past decades was a good idea on paper and in practice. However, people forgot about how fragile it can make pilots. Over time, it weakens a pilots ability to fly instead of strengthening it. An unintended consequence that no one wants to talk about.

Bingo!  Skills are learned and when you do not regularly use skills you begin to lose those skills.

I know a retired instructor and check airman for an airline...a few years ago he told me he was called on the carpet for insisting that his FOs hand fly the acft on occasion, violating the company's policy regarding maximum use of automation "for passenger comfort."

Then there are the international crews that fly 10+ hour legs with either a cruise pilot or a whole second relief crew.  That's one takeoff and landing per 10 hours or more for the operating crew, and none for the cruise pilot.  I know a United pilot that was stuck flying 777s as a cruise pilot for years, and they had to regularly send him back to the sim in Denver just to keep him current (not to be confused with "proficient") because he rarely touched the yoke, much less flew a landing in the jet.

Airlines tout their sim training as the answer to this very real problem of poor proficiency in hands-on flying.  But in a recurrent sim, you have an opportunity to shake the dust off during the first session or two and get your chops back before the checkride at the end.  When it comes time for an unplanned "Hey Mav, do some of that pilot stuff" event in the jet for real, there is no opportunity for catch-up before your proficiency actually counts...and as we see in this case, that applies to routine non-emergency flying skills as well as the more challenging abnormals.