Quote:
Originally Posted by widgeon13
I know one thing, I wouldn't have been talking about the weather under those conditions, my focus would have been on the instruments and flying the aircraft.
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It's fine and actually a good thing to discuss the weather situation with your fellow cockpit crew as it's happening as long as it pertains to your observation and interpretation of what's happening, or about to happen, and your plan to deal with it. Flying the airplane, for most very seasoned pilots, even in bad weather, is really a fairly simple and routine task.
I can speak for the majority of pilots who work for my airline when I say that they are VERY competent instrument pilots. The men and women I fly with are provided a high a level of automation and use it, but they can - and do - click off the autopilot and hand fly in conditions that would challenge ANY pilot - and they do it with utmost skill, precision, and calmness - leg after leg, day and night, in thunderstorm areas, ice conditions, heavy winds, and blowing snow (sometimes all of them combined). Likewise, the vast majority of pilots I have observed while sitting in other airline jumpseats have been just as impressive in their hand flying skills. Most do as I do and click off the autopilot somewhere near 10,000 feet on the descent and hand fly it in - especially when the weather is bad.
I honestly have only met a few (experienced) pilots in all my years in this business who I thought were less than excellent stick and rudder pilots. Yet there seems to be this idea among other pilots that the pilots of highly automated airplanes are somehow less skilled in the stick-and-rudder and instrument flying disciplines. My eighteen years in the airline business has shown me that this idea is almost totally false.
This crew was inexperienced however, and that fact, combined with the captain's obvious lack of talent in this endeavor (c'mon...FIVE failures?! Why was he still employed there anyway?) led to a senseless and totally preventable accident.