Flying with the wrong hand

I would have thought one of the main requirements for a pilot was good hand eye coordination

Muscle memory is pretty hard to overcome especially if one has spent years and thousands of hours in a particular seat. The initial switch from right to left or vise versa can be a bit disorienting to say the least. I found that after grabbing for a particular knob for 3000 hours with my left hand in the right seat my initial and subconscious reaction was to use the left had to grab it even in the left seat. It takes a while to replace or reset your muscle memory. Honestly the flying portion wasn’t as much an issue as the cockpit orientation problem was.

And this is what wrecks PC flight sims for me… I am a [private] pilot, and as mentioned above I am used to left hand on column right hand on throttle. And yet almost all PC joysticks are for the right hand – totally wrong for anyone in the “captian”‘s seat. Why do the PC stick makers mould them for right hand control?

Andy

I’d say most of the PC market is for combat sims, and there, the throttle is on the left side.

Occationally it happens with my (still functioning, but only just) airline that two Captains fly together. In case both Captains are either seat qulified, there is a silent “rule” that you are PF from the left seat only. In case you are flying with another Captain that is not R/H seat qulified, you can fly both (all) sectors as PNF in the right hand seat. That will reduce the changes of something like this happening.

On the other hand, to get the R/H seat qulification as Captains, we do need to do a training in the simulator to accepted standards. If this person had done so, and was passed, someone will be having tea and biscuits in the training manager´s office:rolleyes: The report above also begs the question, what was the guy in the left seat doing while all of this was going on?

I remember once asking an EZY A319 captain in Belfast about the whole idea of flying the jet with his left hand. He answered that on the grand scheme of things, as a convert from the 733, the side-stick was the easiest thing to get accustomed to when flying on his new type. I am right handed but when it comes to flight sim I can fly approaches with either hand. Though I am sure there are multiple differences between an A320 on FS and a real Airbus.

I would have thought one of the main requirements for a pilot was good hand eye coordination

And this is what wrecks PC flight sims for me… I am a [private] pilot, and as mentioned above I am used to left hand on column right hand on throttle. And yet almost all PC joysticks are for the right hand – totally wrong for anyone in the “captian”‘s seat. Why do the PC stick makers mould them for right hand control?

Andy

All flight training is conducted with your left hand on the control column and your right on the throttles, when you start with an airline you have to convert to the other way around. This is done in the sim and is no big deal. For me I was lucky, after flight training I did a few hundred hrs instructing so I converted to the right seat earlier, it took about 5 flight hrs to get it right. Converting back to the left seat should be just as painless, by the time you come out the sim from the command course you’ll be conversant.
Last november I did Chambery training, we only had F/Os on the course so we had to act as Captain on some legs (in the sim may I add), flying it was fine, the thing I found that was broken down was my instrument scan, the right/left combination had little or no effect.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/02/09/322272/inquiry-a321-landed-hard-after-uncomfortable-pilot-forgot-to-retard-throttle.html

Always wondered how it is to learn to fly with the proper hand and do so as co-pilot for years, and then when they become Airbus captain, they switch. Very strange concept!

But that somebody might get so used to the wrong hand that he can’t fly properly any more … 😮

Given that most people are right-handed, when sidestick controllers were introduced was any consideration ever given to revising the usual practice of the captain occupying the left-hand seat? Always struck me as a bit odd that
the majority of Airbus captains apparently fly with the “wrong” hand.

I admit I saw this elsewhere, but my gut feeling was, if he spent less time complaining about being put in the co-pilot’s seat and more time getting on with the job he may just have worked it out! :rolleyes::confused: