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These threads come up often in various news aggregation sites, and I feel that the comments tend to overflow with people that have no commercial flying experience stating things like, "commercial pilots don't do REAL flying like small aircraft pilots do, they just turn on the autopilot and watch." This is only true in the sense that there is less hands-on-the-flight-controls time. Flying a large commercial aircraft is actually very difficult - so difficult, in fact, that the menial tasks like physically handling the controls can be better delegated to an autopilot most of the time. The control of the aircraft has been abstracted out into much higher-level management of systems. It's more like the manager who has one eye on where the company is headed and one eye on what tasks his employees are completing, and it is his responsibility to make sure those things match. I try to explain this relationship to my friends by likening the autopilot to something more like cruise control in the car: when you turn on cruise control, it allows you to take your foot off the gas pedal, but by no means does it mean you aren't actively managing the safe outcome of the trip; it's just a different tool. Sure, autopilots are more complex than cruise control, but that doesn't adulterate my main point. Don't get me wrong, it has always been a struggle to make sure that pilots of large aircraft get enough stick time and emergency training; you have to fit recurrent training into an already very busy schedule and spend lots of money on expensive simulators. That being said, the FAA (USA) regulates pretty heavily how much and exactly what types of recurrent training is necessary to maintain your position, and stall recovery is one of them. This statement: "many pilots struggle to perform the most basic and critical maneuver, a stall recovery" seems like pure applesauce, and if they want to back that up with some better data about how that has changed over time and how it has affected airline safety over the years, I'd love to see it. We are in a relatively safe period of airline travel, and I believe we will continue to be.. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2014/07/travel/aviation-data/ |