Back in the days, cars all had manual transmissions. Fast forward through technology and voila, automated transmissions. Like Airbuses and Boeings, the degree of automation—the amount of kick in the stick—affects how one drives. The steering sensitivity of the Aston Martin DB9 varies from the Ford Focus which varies from the Maserati GranTurismo, and on and on.

Is the car operating with a manual transmission, souped up power steering or somewhere in between? If you drive a car, you know the answer by feel. It is through touch, experience and handling that car that you learn how it stops and starts, how it corners, how it takes a hill, or if it is sputtering under pressure and why. The vehicle is unique. Your hands on operation informs you, deliberates with you, engages your senses as part of a machine so you know its paces–the height and depth and breadth it will reach. But even in a car you know backwards and forwards, if you’re on the road with the autopilot on, distant, not communinicating, letting the machine turn over on its own, when you take control again, it can take a measurable length of time for your response to kick in from passive to active. And that’s just braking on a highway.

I believe that stands true for a lot of our daily gizmos.

I believe this autopilot/manual distance between car and driver stands true for plane and pilot.

Take the infamous Air France Flight 447, when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, lost in international waters, and eventually after Herculean effort, found. The ill-trained pilots lost track of what was going on, exacerbating what should have been a minor hiccup into disaster. We know there was an investigation, and hopefully it is still ongoing. I really hope it is ongoing because problems are ongoing. In July, an Air France Bordeaux to Paris flight in July nearly stalled. The near stall makes me wonder about Air France pilots, maybe all post eighties pilots. I’ll let pilots talk about the details of the stall, if they want to discuss it; but I am trying to focus on the bigger picture.

My pilots tell me that these days, their primary cockpit activity is monitoring instrumentation.

I would postulate that drivers drive hands-on, and so should pilots. Flying requires reflexes. Too much automation insulates the pilot from developing and practicing “pilotry”. We all know that sports stars become the best in their field because of the doctrine of practice practice practice makes perfect perfect perfect. But pilots do a lot of sitting back and monitoring when they could be practicing.

Are pilots losing touch? Is there a wholesale lack of connection between plane and pilot caused by automation?

I fear passive monitoring rather than active flying is guilty of dulling the reflexes which make a pilot a superstar. Are all pilots actually learning how to fly? or just how to monitor?

Is there a solution? You tell me.

The one thing that stands out the most in today’s NTSB statement [about the US Airways Airbus A320 that crash-landed on the Hudson River] is that there is nothing but praise and admiration for the crew, whose quick reflexes, cool heads and complete professionalism saved the lives of everyone aboard.

The NTSB is NOT so positive regarding Airbus, the manufacturer of the plane involved in that crash. See the NTSB’s Executive Summary

There was no appropriate checklist for the event in the manual; and some procedures were so precise they could not be carried out.

Ingesting birds into an engine is rarely so dramatic, mostly because it doesn’t usually happen to both engines. The circumstance allowed experts to examine cause and effect on the plane and a number of surprising things were concluded. Certainly more than I am talking about here.

Some of the concerns conceivably could have applied to Air France Flight 447…if it had landed intact (although we are assuming it did not.)

That the cockpit instrumentation did not reflect the status of the engines.
Did the pilots of AF 447 also not have inaccurate reportage of the status of the engines? We think this is true. How can a pilot in the middle of the Atlantic in the midst of a storm with inoperable speed sensors know what the fly by wire engines are doing of the operating system doesn’t tell him something is wrong? The answer is: he can’t.

That the rate of descent in the manual is unrealistic (claiming a safe 3.5 feet per second when in reality 13 feet per second caused damage.)
Although there’s no telling what the rate of descent was for AF447, it appears likely that neither did the pilots. Also, 447 was not guided/glided down by Sully; if AF447 came down intact at all, it probably fell at a high rate of speed with only limited awareness of the pilots when it was too late.

That in the Hudson event, slides were not flotation devices; wings did not float; and there were no rafts over these wings although the passengers scrambled out there.
In the Hudson crash, the passengers exited to the wings, expecting flotation resources. Fortunately rescue came quickly before they sank. There were no “wing rafts.” Could AF passengers, had they survived the landing have exited, and been able to access rafts? We think not. Of course this is a moot point as we doubt they survived hitting the water–whether or not the plane was intact.

Given that the NTSB called the Airbus manual unrealistic and inappropriate, that Airbus’s claim that for the Hudson crash “LaGuardia Runway 13 was technically feasible from an aircraft flight performance point of view” seems equally unrealistic. In fact, Airbus has a lot of nerve to extend a pseudo-panglossian commendation to Captain Sully for appropriately considering the high urbanization of airport surroundings. At this point, any statement from Airbus is highly suspect.
At this point I consider Airbus itself, “theoretically feasible” but highly unlikely.

George’s Point of View

Yet another theory:

Problems with airspeed indicators led to excessive speed for the Air France A330, triggering the sequence of events leading to the crash. Blame it on pitot tubes. If the pitot tubes froze up during the storm, pilots would get mis-readings on their speed, accelerate, and subject the plane to stresses the structure was unable to withstand.