EridanMan writes:

Except it's not. The simple act of braking a car for a light depends
highly on the sense of motion, and humans manage that feat hundreds of
millions of times a day with a relatively low failure rate.

That's because the sensations associated with driving a car are reliable;
those associated with flying are not (for the most part).

Flaring an aircraft on landing on the other hand is almost entirely
dependent on sense of motion.

Autoland systems seem to manage it without a sense of motion.

We are not autopilots, we are human beings. Human beings do not have
the mathematical capacity to make the quick, precise calculations that
are trivial to a computer, what we can do is synthesize a large number
of sensory inputs and make conclusions based on them far in excess of
a computers capacity for wrote logical calculation.

Human beings manage to do it in simulation without motion, so it's hardly
beyond their capacity.

The human sense of balance/motion is a tremendously powerful, and
tremendously fast, and very quick to adapt ...

And phenomenally unreliable, for types of motiong for which it was not
designed (such as flight).

Again as long as we, as pilots, understand when it can be tricked, and
how to overcome it.

It can only be tricked when you're in the air. It's very reliable on the
ground.

Landing flares simply cannot.

Autoland systems do it. You can do it on a simulator as well.

I have a friend who is an Ex military
pilot, his last assignment was flying drones for the navy- he was
mentioning how the landing gear on the drones needs to be many orders
of magnitude stronger than for piloted aircraft simply because without
the sense of motion, landings flares are nearly impossible to judge
correctly. For the rest of the flight, he managed without any sense
of motion, but he mentioned it was one of the hardest assignments of
his career, far harder than, say, landing a sea-king on a pitching
destroyer's deck. And even then, the only way he managed to fly
precisely remotely was by visualizing and imagining the missing
sensations as he went.

He originally trained on something very different, and had difficulty
adapting.

Disorientation is generally along very specific attitudes and, with
practice, can be very easily ignored.

Just about any attitude can cause it. Human beings are extremely poor at
integrating accelerations to derive other components of movement. They can
tell that they are being accelerated in one direction or another, but they
judge the magnitude of the acceleration poorly, and they are even worse at
determining the final motion after the acceleration.

Tell me please how any pilot in the aircraft is supposed to fly with
'visual cues alone' ...

By looking out the window.

The motion is there, and whether or not
they're consciously aware of it, they're responding to it.

Not in a non-moving simulator, and yet pilots still manage to fly in that
case.

I understand why you believe this, but it is arrogant, sophomoric and
incorrect.

It's a day-to-day reality. It's possible to fly with instruments exclusively,
if you have the right instruments.

Computers can, yes... but we are not computers.

We are better than computers in some respects. Computers are fast, but
primitive.

Physical
sensations, while very powerful and precise, "fall out of trim" _very_
easily, unless 'reset' by some other sensory outside reference.

If they rapidly fall out of trim, how can they also be precise?

About the only thing you can depend on with sensations is that they will tell
you that something has changed. That's it. And even then, it has to change
beyond a certain speed, because slow change cannot be detected.

This is a tremendously powerful realization, and one that I think all
pilots should have. Sitting here, spouting off to pilots about how
'easy it is if you only follow your instruments' is not only
incorrect, its downright irresponsible and dangerous. You do _NOT_
understand the mechanisms and manner of training that pilots receive,
you have no concept of the full complexity of factors that can lead a
pilot, in the moment, to abandon something they 'know' is true in vain
attempt to bring their senses into order. Simply put, the experiences
involved are beyond verbal portrayal.

My impression is increasingly that pilots have a constrained subset of
experiences and training upon which they base a very broad set of conclusions.
While the conclusions may be valid as long as the original constraints are
respected, they can be wildly incorrect when applied to anything outside those
constraints.

Sitting here spouting that 'its so easy' only serves to make those who
live in the fantasy rationalization that 'it could never happen to me,
I'm smart enough to know better' more likely to put themselves in a
situation where they get killed.

Anyone who flies based on what he reads on USENET already has a cognitive
deficit great enough to endanger his safety.

This is especially irritating coming from someone who I'm absolutely
certain (through my own personal experience) would not be able to
maintain a constant altitude or heading, VFR or IFR, in a real
airplane. Not because you're not intelligent, not because you don't
know how, but simply because "knowing" how intellectually is not
sufficient.

Maybe. Perhaps some day I'll try it, and then we shall see.

You frustrate me because I (perhaps incorrectly) recognize shadows of
my own personal demons in you. You are the modern manifestation of a
long-ago miserable period in my life where I walled myself off with
arrogant notions of intellectual superiority, oblivious to the value
and necessity of others' experience.

What I am is the product of having been burned on countless occasions by
people who claimed to be competent and expert and knowledgeable and turned out
to be far more clueless than I am. Today, people must prove things to me in
the most basic and irrefutable ways. I trust no one, and I believe no one,
without proof. Credentials mean nothing, and nobody gets respect by default.

--
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