Scudrunners

When I was in the training business specialising in advanced flying I found that Canadian flight instructors were turning out an inferior product compared to other countries generally speaking especially in multi engine training.


And in my opinion it is because T.C. allows it because their main concern is their own self promotion.

[quote]the training and recency quota has to be a lot higher than in my bird[/quote]

We are now entering an aviation topic near and
dear to my heart.

It really pisses me off when people tell you, that
to fly their airplane, you have to be some kind of
super-hero.  You need the eyes of Chuck Yeager,
the skills of Bob Hoover, the brains of Albert
Einstein, etc.

What self-serving egotistical bullshit.

It's a goddamned certified aircraft.  A tremendous
amount of time, money and effort went into
developing it into something less than a "Fire
Breathing Dragon".

What you need, to safely fly something with a
bit of characters, is an instructor that didn't learn
to fly last year.  You know, someone with a clue
that can explain what you need to know.

That's it.  That's all.

People like to attack me all the time, but I
have spent the last 25 years helping people
become better aviators and mastering such
skills as tailwheel, aerobatics, formation,
IFR, radial engines, turbines, etc.  I try to
communicate everything I have learned about
these topics over the last four decades to
help people to NOT HAVE ACCIDENTS.

Oddly, this makes me a BAD PERSON.


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Getting tired of the bullshit rhetoric about that.

Colonel, I have never ever found a certified airplane that was difficult to fly...ever.


Anyone who claims that a certified airplane is difficult to fly is either lying or incompetent.


I have lost count of the different airplanes I have flown over the past sixty or so years and there is only one certified airplane that was re.engined and did have some handling characteristics that made you watch how you handled it.


The Turbo Goose.

Statistically speaking you're going to be better off with the redundant crew member than the redundant engine.

[quote]In fact, pilot error is the leading cause of commercial airline accidents, with close to [b]80%[/b] percent of accidents caused by pilot error - Boeing[/quote]

The ATR in Taiwan is a demonstration of where both sets of redundancies didn't help, but they didn't help because of incompetent fuckwits for crew.

I'd personally rather be in a Caravan or a PC12 with The Colonel and Chuck driving than a Twin with a poorly trained or inexperienced pilot. It doesn't matter to me if it's over open water or mountains, the math speaks for itself and besides I'm FAR more likely to die mountain biking than in either of these situations, and I do that without fearing death. Nothing in life infallible.

E

I'm going to offer the opinion that a light piston twin is one of the easiest (mainstream) aircraft in which to kill oneself.  They often lack the spiffy safety features, like auto feather and the ability to climb on one engine, found in their big brothers, the multi turbine.  Touch wood, I've only dealt with engine failures in a multi turbine in the sim.  However, they are pretty much non events, especially when compared with the "mixture-props-throttles-gear up-flaps up-indentify-verify-feather" dance of a light twin.
I'll also opine that an engine failure in a single on climb out is a lot easier to deal with than an engine failure in a light piston twin on climb out.  In a single, you just have one job, glide to the ground in a controlled fashion; essentially fly the plane.  In a light twin there is a lot to distract you from aircraft control.  This can easily lead to hitting the ground in an uncontrolled fashion.

[quote]The ATR in Taiwan is a demonstration of where both sets of redundancies[/quote]

It's an incredible outcome, given:

1) two engines
2) turbines
3) auto-feather
4) 28,000 hours in the cockpit
5) wx was NOT a factor

Statistically, this accident [i]shouldn't have happened[/i].

Statistics are very, very slippery and can only be
reasonably applied against large data sets - NOT
a single sample.

87% of statistics are made up on the spot.

Satire aside, you are correct in saying that that accident should not have happened, however it did, and the reason it did was because of the crew. You can have 28,000 hours and never have had to deal with a real emergency, lucky, but that level of experience doesn't guarantee the ability to react correctly when the shit hits the fan.

When looking at the bigger numbers, generally speaking it's the crew that kills the passengers not the equipment. Even when equipment is the initial point of failure, it's often the crews actions that lead to fatalities queue: Air France 447, Air Canada 621, American 587, Colgan 3407, Comair 5191, JAL 471, Korean 801, Pan Am 292, First Air 6560.... and the list goes on. Those were arguably all in very safe aircraft with several of them in the 4 engine category, unfortunately even with 8 working engines you won't survive running into cumulusgranite at highspeed (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1994_Fair ... B-52_crash). I stand by with putting myself (no family) on a single turbine with a redundant crew member.

I realize that every accident I just listed, also had a redundant crew member.

E

[quote]generally speaking it's the crew that kills the passengers not the equipment.

Even when equipment is the initial point of failure, it's often the crews actions that lead to fatalities[/quote]

Right - especially given a highly automated cockpit,
one of the crew's most important jobs is to:

[b]HANDLE EMERGENCIES[/b]

The problem is, the automation is expected to stop
working - or worse, do something wrong and need
to be defeated - and at that moment, the pilot must
take over, hand-flying the aircraft.  He is the emergency
backup - and often, not a very good one.

The irony is that with all that automation, his hand-flying
skills may have deteriorated - or were never developed,
as is the case these days with the Cinderalla stories that
step into the right seat of an Airbus with 300TT.  They
think they are winning, but they have only cheated
themselves by skipping their pilot development that
comes with experience.

Even more irony: the automation worked perfectly
on the ATR-72.  The auto-feather did it's job.

Unfortunately the pilot had his hand a blur in
the cockpit and pulled back the wrong lever.

Evidence shows that pilots are often not very
good emergency backup systems.

Back discussing automation ... I am sure that Airbus
engineers would be horrified to learn that Air Canada
pilots became proficient at popping breakers on black
boxes when they started to make the airplane do the
wrong thing.

People don't talk about this much.  Pity.

Even worse: with all the required redundancy and
backup in the cockpit, you inevitably end up with an
incredibly complicated system that really no one
understands.

Everyone shits on the Asiana 214 crew that took out
the seawall at SFO, but the guy flying it honestly
thought he had auto-throttles - but he didn't because
of the incredible software complexity.  Do some research.

I don't think "[font=verdana][size=0px] the guy flying it honestly [/size][/font][font=verdana][/size][size=0px]thought he had auto-throttles[/size][/font]" is a valid reason for writing off a 777 and killing a couple people. Automation is a very good thing to have, however being able to recognize when the Automation isn't working and then having the skills to deal with a non automated cockpit are vastly more important.

Post before last was spot on.

E