It can not be argued that today's automation has made life easier for us airline pilots. Today's modern systems monitor all aspects of the flight and bring our attention to anything that maybe required. They allow us to have a greater "situational awareness" by flying the aircraft for us to different degrees by various levels of automation. It has been seen, however, that pilots struggle with not only changing levels of automation but also how the aircraft responds in each level or mode. Two recent accidents have highlighted this issue, Air France 447, and Asiana 214.
Air France 447 has been widely discussed in the aviation industry as an example of "automation overload". After entering into icing conditions, loosing airspeed indications and subsequent auto thrust failure the pilots
were unable to control the aircraft and eventually entered into an unrecoverable stall. Cockpit voice recorder transcripts chilling described how these pilots "battled" with trying to come to grips with their situation.
In a more recent incident, Asiana 214 it is highly suspected that once again pilots struggled with reducing their level of automation. Although the investigation is not complete in the Asiana 214 accident in SFO there is high speculation that the pilots became confused with how the auto thrust would respond in the mode they were flying. After getting high on a visual approach (ILS not operational), the crew needed to increase their descent and turned off the autopilot. While attempting to stabilize the aircraft on the correct descent profile they for some reason neglected to notice a decay in airspeed. The big question is how experienced pilots flying ultra modern aircraft could make mistakes like this?
It is my humble opinion that the answer to this question is a lack of training. Gone are the old days of "after you can build it then you can fly it". A time when pilots had to know their aircraft and it"s systems intimately. Airlines today treat training as a unit cost measure. They want to get pilots trained as quickly as possible and for as cheap as possible. They cover the MOT,FAA.JAR minimums and not much more. There is very little time for pilots to just "fly" the airplane both with autopilot on and off in the simulator. Thankfully this concern seems to be gaining some traction. A recent article in the Wall Street Journal focused on this very topic and mentioned that the FAA was looking at mandating airlines to conduct this type of training. Hopefully the MOT in Canada and JAR in Europe follow suit.
