Every airline pilot who has ever left the cockpit on a long flight to stretch their legs while walking down the aisles, has heard this question: “Who’s flying the plane?” Well, due to a series of fatal accidents over the last few years, that might be a very valid question.
Since the dawn of aviation in the early twentieth century, there has been one thing which separated the good pilots from the mediocre ones. That is what is commonly referred to as “Stick and Rudder skills”. Simply put, the ability to make the aircraft do what you want it to do by manipulating the basic flight controls, the ailerons, elevator and rudder. All aircraft, from the smallest to the largest, have them. In addition to those, large swept wing jets added “spoilers”, which augment or replace the ailerons, especially in a high speed environment.
Over, the years, the development of “auto-pilots” reduced the work load in the cockpit by allowing a mechanical device to maintain altitude and heading. Gradually, these systems became more and more sophisticated, using ground based electronic transmitters to allow the aircraft to navigate from point to point and even make instrument approaches at the destination. Modern aircraft, using state of the art auto-flight systems are “on auto-pilot” from just after liftoff to when the aircraft “auto-lands” on the destination airport runway.
Some aircraft manufacturers, like Airbus Industries, have a design philosophy which attempts to basically “pilot proof” the airplane, giving the flight management computers the ability to override pilot inputs if the computer senses that they will violate design limits or protocols. But therein lies the problem. What if there is a faulty or erroneous sensor input to the auto-flight system? Who is in control then, and can the autopilot be disconnected, allowing the pilot to be in full control? More importantly, does he or she have the basic “stick and rudder” skills to hand fly the aircraft in an unusual or emergency situation?
Unlike most professions, pilot competency is frequently judged by the total number of flight hours attained, which they have logged in a particular aircraft type, or as an aggregate of all types. Having 7000 hours of logged pilot time is useless in an emergency situation where hand flying the aircraft is required, if most of those hours were on auto-pilot. The recent crash of a virtually brand new Lion Air Boeing 737-Max killed all 189 people onboard. Initial reports about that tragedy hint at a very disturbing factor. A key sentence in a recent newspaper report said: “maybe this would indicate that the pilot wasn’t very good flying the aircraft in the manual mode”.
The 737-Max has a system called the “Maneuvering Characteristics Augmentation System” (MCAS) which physically pushes the control yoke forward if the airplanes computers sense an inflight “stall” is about to occur. If that is a false indication, there are several ways that the pilots could physically override the the pushover, disconnect the system, and hand trim and fly the airplane. I think that the Lion Air pilots may have been insufficiently trained on hand flying skills. That might have been exacerbated by a lack of knowledge concerning the “MCAS”. To survive this type of situation, you need a well trained crew, acting in total coordination. I fear that was lacking on the Lion Air flight, and the same condition exists at many foreign airlines on a daily basis.
The tendency of many airlines to hire minimum skill aviators, and then train them basically as autopilot manipulators is epidemic at many foreign carriers these days. Years later they may have thousands of hours of logged flight time, but 99% of that time is with the aircraft on autopilot.
I fear they will never know for sure what happened in that Lion Air cockpit if the voice recorder isn’t recovered intact. However, here’s a valid scenario: The accident occurred at 6:30 AM. It might have still been dark at that hour, so visual reference could have been limited. Over the water, they basically were “on instruments”. If for whatever reason they got a pitch-over from the autopilot and disconnected same, they could have found themselves in a nose down stabilizer condition. If using the stabilizer control switches on the yokes (see cockpit photo above) didn’t solve the problem, they could have turned off the electric stabilizer using the switches on the center console. Then, even in a maximum pitch-down situation, they would have been able to maintain control manually. It’s tough, but doable. We trained doing that maneuver on every Boeing type I flew. It’s called a “Runaway Stabilizer” drill.
The possible lack of basic flying skills as a factor in the Lion Air crash is hauntingly reminiscent of the crash of an AIr Asia Airbus 320 on December 28, 2014. In that incident, 162 lives were lost, and the accident investigation concluded that a non-critical malfunction in the rudder control system prompted the captain to perform a non-standard reset of the on-board flight control computers. Control of the aircraft was subsequently lost, resulting in a stall and uncontrolled descent into the sea. Miscommunication between the two pilots was cited as a contributing factor.
My last aircraft flown for TWA were the Boeing 757/767 series. They were so-called “glass cockpit” airplanes, with fully automated flight control systems. Because the emphasis on those aircraft was to be on auto-flight as much as possible, I was alarmed to discover that my co-pilots were spending too much time programing the Flight Management Computer, and too little time looking outside the airplane, especially below 18,000’, which for years has been referred to by airline pilots as “Indian Country” because of all the Apaches, Aztecs, Comanches, Navajos and Senecas (different models of Piper aircraft for the non-pilots reading this) which are found below that altitude.
I made it a personal rule that I would fly one leg using auto-flight, and the next hand flying. I required my co-pilots to do likewise. In that way we maintained the all important hand flying “stick and rudder” skills which are so necessary for a safe flight in all imaginable conditions. So, in the final analysis, “Who’s flying the airplane?” is a question we might ask in all seriousness.