About That Associated Press 'Automation Addiction' Story

The guard changes are frequent enough in the mass media that you're guaranteed a fresh crop of bright-eyed youngsters about every five or ten years who go out into the world and encounter something which they believe they are the very first to behold. One example is war reporters who express some surprise that combat is hellish; it's the first time they've ever witnessed it.

This week's example is a story  credited to the Associated Press in which the airline industry is described as suffering from "automation addiction." The report, under the byline of reporter Joan Lowy, is based, in part, on an interview with Rory Kay, a member of an FAA committee on pilot training and an airline pilot himself. The committee has decried the vanishing stick-and-rudder flying that has been absent now for at least 30 years since the airplanes became robotic devices in which crew members more or less sit back and monitor the systems like technicians at a nuclear power plant. There's even one school of thought that says machines do a better job of flying, and the less the person in the front seat touches things, the better.

But this is an oft-repeated observation that has been made since the 1980s at least. Pilots don't seem unenlightened on the matter, and at least among business aviation professionals, the opportunities have grown to seek out training in unusual attitudes with schools and individuals who specialize in it. One who is coming late to that party is Lee Lauderback, a principal at Stallion 51 Corp. in Florida. He says he's putting together a course that will employ some newly procured L-39 jet trainers that have had their tip tanks removed to improve handling. Tip tanks alleviate wing loading but reduce roll response due to the mass at the wingtips. Lauderback doesn't know whether he'll have his ducks lined up in time for this year's NBAA, but he'll be there one way or another.

Recovering from unusual attitudes is a key module of pilot training that really doesn't suit a simulator. One veteran corporate pilot says he used to do some modest upset training in Gulfstreams when he had a test pilot along with him. He also says he knows a trick or two to get the airplane into a steep bank with the nose down while the instructee has his head between his knees, and the airplane gets into really bad shape without even hinting that anything's going on. The pilot looks up and does an OMG and, he says, the best recovery he ever saw was a guy who flies a Christen Eagle in his spare time.  No surprise there.

At a little airport here in the Carolinas, you can find a gaggle of J-3 Cubs, most of which belong to Delta and US Airways captains. One of them used to delight in seeing how slowly he could fly the thing, often hanging there in the upwind leg of the pattern until he had a groundspeed of zero. Most people who learned to fly by sensing what the airplane was doing through their fingertips instead of looking at a video screen miss that feeling.

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