On Monday, July 15, 2013 12:27:34 PM UTC-4, Panic wrote:
"birdog" wrote in message

...



Full disclosure - I am an 86 year old ex pilot,but my soul is still in

the cockpit. Don't know how pertinent this is, but I got a lot of free

time nowadays.



Back in the late '60's we had a flying club - 3 planes including a 7AC

Champ. An airline pilot temporarily stationed locally joined the club.

The club instructor checked him out in the Champ (his only interest). On

inquiry by the instructor, he was told that he felt that over time his

basic "pilotage" skills eroded, that sitting in a "boxcar" staring at an

instrument panel did not constitute staying sharp as a pilot. He was an

infrequent visitor due to job demands, but he spent his time, according

to the instructor, flying dual under the hood recovering from unusual

attitudes and navigating using only needle, ball, airspeed and magnetic

compass. (That's all the old Champ had.) Otherwise, he was shooting

landings, performing lazy eights, etc. Having no experience in

commercial craft myself, I couldn't relate to his logic, but was

impressed with his attitude.





As for the Asiana pilots, many of us U.S. pilots who have taught Orientals

have found that some of them seem to be able to understand the individual

elements of a situation but have difficulty putting in all together. An

example might be to be flying manually and get low on the glide slope and

raise the nose a little but fail to add a little power. They frequently

have difficulty in visual approaches where THEY have to come up with the

overall corrections to fly to the runway safely. But they seem to easily

fly an instrument approach using a flight director for spatial guidance and

autothrottles to control the speed.



They also frequently come from a culture where it is “bad” to correct a

superior when errors crop up. I remember a situation years ago where a JAL

pilot flew into the water. They asked the surviving FO if he didn’t see the

Captain was getting too low. He said basically, “Yes, but it was the

Captain’s leg”.



“Honkies” come from a culture where we don’t always “trust the magic” and we

pay more attention to the supporting instruments rather than just the flight

director. After the La Paz incident where they allowed the autoflight

system to turn the wrong way and descended into a mountain at night our AA

bosses put out directives that we were not “automation managers”. We were

pilots and we should turn off the “magic” whenever it was safe and possible

and use our basic skills to fly the approach and landing ourselves. That

way if the “magic” was not doing what we thought it should be doing we

should “click-click” turn off the magic and hand fly the aircraft.

Dear Sir:

It seems that the investigation is leaning that way.

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article....596107.xml&p=1

http://www.aviationweek.com/Article.aspx?id=/article-xml/AW_07_15_2013_p22-596107.xml&p=1

The latest on it from Av Week.

DEP