Easy to make him change his absurd plans. Avoid booking Ryanair.

I find a miserable move.

I second this. Un booked seats make the Euros dip and that gets soon noticed.

I never do fly Ryanair anyway as usually they fly to way out airports in Europe and the cost of travelling in to the main city outweighs any saving made in flight costs and is a nuisance in time.

Maybe they will sell passengers that cannot wait leg bags and adult ‘nappies’ if the flight is delayed while in the air, and the only toilet on board ends up with a queue outside it, and additionally charge for garbage bags to place the ‘mess’ in and of course disposal of the bag (after customs clearance) will be the passenger’s responsibility or alternatively they could pay an additional fee to have the garbage disposed of by Ryanair.

The nonsense never ceases.

So nJayM,

What you are advocating goes something like this?:

Fly, Navigate Communicate – in that order
One head up at all times
Cross check the accuracy of the FMS
Know your FMA at all times
When things don’t go as expected – TAKE OVER
Use the proper level of automation for the task
Practice task sharing and back-up each other

exmpa

Hi Exmpa
I think the list and order are nearly exhaustive with respect to the aviation industry.
Pilot man years – actual flying experience, training others, simulator hours, near miss recoveries, professional peer group brainstorming, keeping accurate records (all forms of media, that can be shared with other professionals safely), learning from both young, old and from the fairer sex [many good female pilots], sitting in the third seat on long hauls – ex engineer’s seat (used to have one on some older airbuses [cannot vouch for there being a third seat since 9/11 as the flight deck has become a sacrosanct no go area], and using it as a training environment (e.g. in flight simulation re-runs, video clips, secure professional information forums using airline’s secure intranet [technical/manufacturers’ updates, hazard warnings on products, etc]
Also once the current ultra paranoid anti terrorist situation returns to being able to trust designers, scientists and other useful contributors [non pilots] on the flight deck again at the discretion or special invitation of the airline/technical manufacturer, then progress will be made even more safely but rapidly in technology. That means that technical ‘hiccups’ just do not have to be only reported after the fact, by flight crew they can be possibly lived in real time by the technical designers [‘boffins’].
Most adult passengers who are in control of their normal faculties respond far more sensibly to a human voice (usually the senior on the flight deck) and place their trust in this human/s from the point they board the aircraft until they disembark.
Without taking up the roll of being an expert psychologist, in the present time frame I am sure if the majority of passengers knew there was a hint of dying while in flight they would rather than purely trust a robot, place their ultimate trust in a capable human/s working with his/their entire team on board and if possible on the ground, in harmony with the working technology/systems to deliver the best result. That result may sadly be sometimes death but possibly their thoughts at the time of death may be trust rather than distrust. Complete trust in robots may occur even in my lifetime but we aren’t fully there yet.
As a practising Christian I do not think I blaspheme by saying that passengers revere good senior flight crew like they may do ‘God’.
Maybe ‘God’ needs to be counted as being part of the team, especially in economic recessionary times and pilots young and old stick together and keep up the pressure to improve safety and efficiency of both men and machines.
One word sums it up improving QUALITY has to always be tending to infinity. NEVER ENDING.

I doubt that the pilots will rip into you as you have given a very clear and balanced appreciation of why the current operational philosophy has developed.

Automation is there to assist, not hinder, and the correct approach is to ensure that you employ the level appropriate to the situation. It is also frequently the case that the younger pilot is more adept at managing the automated flight deck than his more experienced older colleague.

exmpa
A very old pilot!

Neither your response nor the one previous nor anything in this forum is absolute in the real world – varying standards of pilot skill, operational conditions, environmental/atmospheric conditions ,etc (and that includes my own response to Keltic).

Just trying in this reply to combine some the positive thoughts in the useful postings.

Of course technology (including supercomputer software) and it’s advances are my forte for more years than I wish to recall and my beginnings were as a pilot. Aviation (both military and civil is what I have in my blood )

Technology including automation is only as good as the combined ‘person’ years of knowledge in designing, refining, testing and finally implementing any device/automation/software application.

The granular logic and effective reactions an experienced knowledgeable pilot possesses (including familiarity of the route, the weather patterns en-route, the strengths and weaknesses of fellow crew, the strengths and weaknesses of each individual aircraft including it’s components and equipment, etc) far surpass that of any possible decision taken purely by any super intelligent computer/s or automated system.

Using the strengths and weaknesses of all automated systems on board yet knowing when to take a calculated decision to override automation is what makes a good experienced flight crew different from a bunch of ‘rookies’.

There are a few recent examples of when this human intervention succeeded (of course there are some cases where it failed as well and although we may know technically, yet we may not ever know absolutely of what actually went wrong in some cases).

Australian A330 cockpit fire

http://uk.news.yahoo.com/18/20090611/twl-australia-probes-a330-blaze-after-fo-4bdc673.html

http://forum.keypublishing.co.uk/showthread.php?t=91602
also some interesting technical problems reported from other locations in this same thread.

Hudson river crash following bird strike

Heathrow Boeing 777 crash landing

I have also the good/bad fortune to be living through my 6th economic recession in the West (possibly the 3rd really big one, the other 3 being smaller in comparison), and during and for a good while after an economic recession (with failing companies all around) components, software, service level agreements, ‘you name it’ suffers badly with respect to quality.
The supply chain weakens in multiple places and to add additional quality testers at the consumer end becomes counter productive and economically prohibitive.

One of the possible ways to counteract some of these inevitable possibly growing risks is for pilots to keep their faith in their skills, their fellow professionals, learn and share to the fullest the strengths and weaknesses of all their equipment and to carry out risk analyses (‘what ifs’) on single or multiple systems (including human) failures and try to simulate or agree on what measures may be taken to react positively to the failures.

Technical quality has let down (with fatal results) space ventures and the aviation industry is not immune.
We all need the technology and we all need to accept that flying is still safe.
Brainstorming as we do here without disrespect for any dead or each other will bring out useful ideas and concepts.

The follies of Brown and Salmond – victim the RAF

If Mr. Brown has his way the RAF will be flying surplus Russian aircraft similar to the Cartoon.

And with no to any defence contracts on his brain Mr. Salmond will be flying a microlite like the cartoon.

Between them they may see the demise of the RAF in Scotland and since 43 Squadron at Leuchars following recent disbanding were rumoured to be re-forming with Eurofighter capabilities (but who knows if they are in the lucky reduced number of aircraft UK is buying)

The university he went to does not of itself equate to a good education. Some would say, in fact, that the university in question might tend to militate against the acquisition of “a good education”.

The Open University used to advise it’s naive students in the 1980s to buy Alan Sugar’s crap Amstrad PCs with twin 5.45 inch floppy drives.

No one else did if they had any grey matter of their own.

So I guess if he went to any Uni it was the Open University and did the module titled ‘Your Fired’

Alan Sugar could do with being fired considering his empire was built on ubiquitous and unreliable consumer electronics in the 1980s. Don’t know which consumers though – must have been people with little grey matter.
Jay

Yikes,

It is PC gone completely raving bonkers.

Top Gear is Top Gear and it is great – JC, JM and RH are great. If they need a female co-presenter then they can get one but let’s not use PC correctness to enforce it.

More power to JC, JM and RH

Jay

[SIZE=”1″][SIZE=”1″]Re Tucano; I worked in the MOD(PE) Tucano office for almost three years from the time of the first delivery. There was a saying which went like this:

Embraer designed a Skoda,
The RAF wanted a Rolls Royce,
But they were only paying for a Ford,
And they got a Jaguar!

Bearing in mind that Skodas were a joke then, and Jaguars had good performance and poor quality/reliability (at that time ), I think it is still a pretty accurate summary.

But they have only lost two Tucanos in accidents, I believe – that must say something positive, surely?

And, yes, of course, the procurement decision was political – what galled us was for MoD then to get criticised by the House of Commons Defence Committee in a large report which failed to even mention the name “Michael Heseltine”, who was a friend of the Chairman (Michael Mates). And it still hurts.

[/SIZE][/SIZE]
This is adding factual but humorous overtones, I like it and I am sure when Mr. O’Neill recovers he will also be able to laugh about it as he sounds that sort of ‘chap’.

Embraer could have rather than a Skoda designed a Lada and then everyone would have been deep in the ‘brown’ stuff but they didn’t.

Thanks to the ‘Tuc’ being a Skoda the RAF aren’t as yet joining the land army ‘down on the farm’ where most of the ‘brown’ stuff ends up.

Let’s all toast to good times and better informed politicians and civil servants and a forever increasing standard amongst RAF pilots. Hats off to the boys in blue.

As a footnote when I learnt to fly it was in an Auster, which got pranged badly on a huge pile of granite placed near the grass strip awaiting a runway tarmac upgrade.The superb Auster (in those days) was replaced by an Indian built Pushpak with a very sluggish (snail like) throttle.
It was like flying a Hindustan Ambassador car – Indian built version of ancient Morris Oxford which had leaf springs guaranteed to give you a sore back on the roads, but with a set of white walled tyres the same car was used by the Indian PM). – Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Indian style.
It was inevitable that one bounced in one’s early days as a trainee pilot as fine throttle control was non existant on the Pushpak – (pity they didn’t include the Ambassador like leaf springs on the Pushpak for the amount of bouncing we did – synonymous with Tigger in Winnie the Pooh).

That said two of my school and batch mates are senior captians on Airbus and another is a Senior Captain on United Airlines so like the RAF trainees on the ‘Tuc’ who go on to better things they too succeeded the rigors of the Morris Oxford like Indian Pushpak.

Also we had no RT, it was all by visual and in an emergency the tower would use a very pistol if any unscheduled civillian airline flights came in. We used grass parallel to the main runway and our circuit and landings were well clear of routine airline flight paths.

When I first flew out of Biggin Hill I remember coming in with my instructor into finals and the ATC squalked in my ear “Watch your landing speed Cessna G…. (I was in a Cessna 150), there is a twin engined Beechcraft coming in right behind you at over twice your landing speed, so any doubts about making it first time please go round again”. I remember glancing back over my shoulder and there was a continuous series of light aircraft all lining up in circuit waiting to come in to land. With my instructors hand on my hand on the throttle I made it safely down, and the Beechcraft didn’t ‘prang’ us.