Never mind the in-flight movie and the heated meal on a tray. What you want to be sure of on your holiday flight is that the pilot can actually fly the plane.
According to one safety group, however, today’s pampered pilots are becoming so reliant on computers they are forgetting basic cockpit skills.
With airliners increasingly navigating the crowded skies by autopilot, officials fear more accidents will be caused by the lack of hands-on experience.
Hundreds of people have died over the past five years after planes stalled during flight or got into unusual positions that pilots could not correct.
In some cases, pilots made the wrong split-second decisions with catastrophic results.
Rory Kay, a pilot and co-chairman of the US Federal Aviation Administration committee on pilot training, said: “We’re seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the-art planes. We’re forgetting how to fly.”
Pilots use automated systems to fly airliners for all but about three minutes of a flight - the take-off and landing.
Most of the time pilots are programming navigation directions into computers. That means they have few opportunities to maintain their skills by flying manually, Mr Kay’s committee said.
Because computerised systems are so integrated in today’s planes, one malfunctioning piece of equipment or a single bad electronic instruction can cascade into a series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to rely on the equipment.
In a draft study examining data from 46 accidents and more than 9,000 flights, the FAA found that in more than 60 percent of accidents pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or made mistakes with automated flight controls.
A typical mistake was not recognising that either the autopilot or the auto-throttle, which controls power to the engines, had disconnected.
Others failed to take the proper steps to recover from a stall in flight or to monitor and maintain airspeed.
In the most recent major crash in the US - two years ago near Buffalo, New York - the co-pilot of a regional airliner programmed incorrect information into the plane’s computers, causing it to slow to an unsafe speed. That triggered a stall warning.
The captain, who hadn’t noticed the plane had slowed too much, responded by repeatedly pulling back on the controls, overriding two safety systems, when the correct procedure was to push forward. The plane crashed, killing all 49 aboard and one on the ground.
Bill Voss, president of the US Flight Safety Foundation, said the ability of pilots to respond to the unexpected loss or malfunction of automated systems “is the big issue that we can no longer hide from”.
“We’ve been very slow to recognise the consequence of it,” he added. - Daily Mail