"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
John Mazor writes:

You didn't have that geographic qualifier when you made
your
sweeping statement. It's true that a few countries are
using ab initio training to breed their own pilots, but
that's a tiny minority.

Minority or not, it proves that it can be done.

And it's possible for crew to fly for 16 hours straight with
no relief crew or stops, without an accident. Just because
it can be done doesn't mean that it's desirable, let alone
optimal.

Starting and finishing in a jet airliner is a pretty good
proof of concept for
primary training in a high-performance aircraft.

So the abiity to make an incision and sew it up is pretty
good "proof of concept" that a freshly minted medical intern
can do brain surgery?

Another weasel-worded qualifier. "Most of the time" is
not good enough.

It's good enough for an entire career,

Bull****. You deleted the following sentence in my
statement: "One sufficiently bad pilot screw up = one
smoking hole." That's the whole point.

and it's a lot cheaper to cover only
the normal case than it is to train for the exceptions as
well.

Not when you factor in the costs of accidents caused by
inadequate training. Note that "costs" include a lot more
than just the liability suits.

"Our wings do not fall off most of the time" would not be
good enough, either.

Then no aircraft is good enough, because there is no
aircraft for which it can
be said that the wings _never_ fall off.

Hey, asswipe, where did I say that wings could never fall
off? Not only did I not say that, there's nothing in my
statement that even implies that, so don't put words in my
mouth. If you're going to argue rationally, please do
follow the rules of logic.

Every airline pilot with whom I've discussed automation
makes it a point to occasionally do a little hand-flying
just to maintain those skills.

Good for them. But not every airline pilot does this.

Such as who? What's the basis for you making such an
assertion (outside of the minority of pilots who are trained
to think that the airplane is always smarter than they are)?

More significantly,
there are many emergency situations that are not routinely
practiced by many
airline pilots.

Well, duh, you can't do them all in a sim or training
flight. Training typically involves a mix of the most
common emergencies - engine cuts, etc. - and a few "special"
scenarios, such as new procedures or techniques. But
every year we get any number of emergency scenarios that
transcend normal training routines. That's what separates
the pros from the amateurs - the ability to draw on other
experience and extrapolate to whatever doo-doo has just hit
your fan.

And since airliners are so reliable and normal air travel
is
so routine, pilots can get away with this and have
productive and rewarding
careers, anyway.

You obviously have not the slightest concept of what goes on
in the cockpits of airliners every day. Yes, the vast
majority of flights are routine or encounter only minor,
easily fixed problems. Be it 99% or 99.9%, it's that last
"9" that "proves the concept" that on any given day,
somewhere in the entire air transport system, some crew
saves their behinds and those of their passengers by
exercising experience and skills that rise above the lower
level of what is normally required. And that's what makes
flying on on an airline the safest possible way to get from
A to B in the U.S.

You have to draw a line somewhere. It's possible for a
747 to enter a spin, I
suppose, but spins are not normally practiced by airline
pilots, and there
isn't any good way to simulate them. So most airline
pilots have no
experience with spins in the aircraft they fly. But is
that really a problem?
How often do 737s or 747s enter spins, anyway?

Not nearly as often as the real-life situations that are
what I was referring to in my previous paragraph. The Sioux
City accident, where Capt. Al Haynes dealt with a system
failure for which there was no training and marshalled his
resources, is a classic example of the difference between a
button-pusher and a real pilot. And your vast pool of
ignorance probably is enhanced by no knowledge of events
that don't make big news splashes. For example:

http://www.alpa.org/alpa/DesktopModu...DocumentID=154

http://www.alpa.org/DesktopModules/A...458& Tabid=73

http://cf.alpa.org/internet/news/2000news/nr00066e.htm

http://www.alpa.org/DesktopModules/A...618& Tabid=73

**** happens like this all the time. Trained-monkey button
pushers, let alone automated systems, cannot be expected to
routinely rise to such levels of airmanship.

With increasing automation comes a decreasing need for
qualification. That's
just a fact of life. And it seems to be an irreversible
evolution of commercial aviation.

Only when nothing really bad happens, see previous cites.

Eventually, I expect that airline flights will be fully
automated. The lead
flight attendant or purser will press a "start flight"
button where the
cockpit used to be when it's time to push back from the
gate, and the rest
will be controlled automatically. No need for pilots at
all. There is
probably nothing that airlines wish for more, except
perhaps free fuel.

I learned a long time ago never to say never, but by the
time that the technology matures enough to provide
sufficiently reliable automation to do that at a level that
the public will accept, it also will have given us the means
to conduct most interpersonal transactions virtually, thus
eliminating most of the situations that require us to
physically transport ourselves from A to B. So air
transport already will be on the wane, except possibly for
cargo. I'll leave it to the futurists to predict when we
reach that tipping point, but it won't happen in our
lifetimes. Which makes it irrelevant for discussions of
current conditions and realities, such as your moronic
opinion that minimally trained and experienced
button-pushers can replace real pilots.