"birdog" wrote in message
...

Full disclosure - I am an 86 year old ex pilot,but my soul is still in
the cockpit. Don't know how pertinent this is, but I got a lot of free
time nowadays.

Back in the late '60's we had a flying club - 3 planes including a 7AC
Champ. An airline pilot temporarily stationed locally joined the club.
The club instructor checked him out in the Champ (his only interest). On
inquiry by the instructor, he was told that he felt that over time his
basic "pilotage" skills eroded, that sitting in a "boxcar" staring at an
instrument panel did not constitute staying sharp as a pilot. He was an
infrequent visitor due to job demands, but he spent his time, according
to the instructor, flying dual under the hood recovering from unusual
attitudes and navigating using only needle, ball, airspeed and magnetic
compass. (That's all the old Champ had.) Otherwise, he was shooting
landings, performing lazy eights, etc. Having no experience in
commercial craft myself, I couldn't relate to his logic, but was
impressed with his attitude.


As for the Asiana pilots, many of us U.S. pilots who have taught Orientals
have found that some of them seem to be able to understand the individual
elements of a situation but have difficulty putting in all together. An
example might be to be flying manually and get low on the glide slope and
raise the nose a little but fail to add a little power. They frequently
have difficulty in visual approaches where THEY have to come up with the
overall corrections to fly to the runway safely. But they seem to easily
fly an instrument approach using a flight director for spatial guidance and
autothrottles to control the speed.

They also frequently come from a culture where it is “bad” to correct a
superior when errors crop up. I remember a situation years ago where a JAL
pilot flew into the water. They asked the surviving FO if he didn’t see the
Captain was getting too low. He said basically, “Yes, but it was the
Captain’s leg”.

“Honkies” come from a culture where we don’t always “trust the magic” and we
pay more attention to the supporting instruments rather than just the flight
director. After the La Paz incident where they allowed the autoflight
system to turn the wrong way and descended into a mountain at night our AA
bosses put out directives that we were not “automation managers”. We were
pilots and we should turn off the “magic” whenever it was safe and possible
and use our basic skills to fly the approach and landing ourselves. That
way if the “magic” was not doing what we thought it should be doing we
should “click-click” turn off the magic and hand fly the aircraft.