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clock did the rest. I got pretty good on an E6B. It was old-fashioned in the new millennium, yet a testimony to the possibility of life without digital intervention.
My flight training was on and off for many years. Aviation job opportuni- ties were lousy for the first decade of the millennium. In 2007 – a couple of months after I got my commer- cial certificate – I landed a job flying Cessna Caravans out of Albuquerque. It had a mechanical flight director, a dual-stack Garmin, an autopilot and a turbine engine. I was in paradise.
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
The Caravan is a great aircraft, but the DC-10 had put big iron in my blood. You need multi-engine time to land one of those jobs. The pilot market was finally beginning to open up. It wound up being a slim window of op- portunity. The Great Recession was on the horizon as the aftereffects of 9/11 f lowed into the financial crisis. The retirement age for airline pilots was extended from 60 to 65, right as the stock market was crashing. Nobody could afford to retire. 2008 saw only a dozen pilots hired for the airlines in the U.S. I managed to be one of them, flying the Beech 1900D around the slopes of Colorado. It was back to no autopilot, sometimes no flight director and a six-pack. Add snow, mountains, ice, and a maintenance department under the thumb of the accountants, and you have a nice start to an ASAP report. The vast majority of my peril- ous stories come from my time with that little airline.
The first generation iPhone came out at the very beginning of my fledgling career. Buzzing around the Rocky Mountains in the twin Beech, it was clear that the phone in my pocket was the most sophisticated piece of electronic equipment onboard. Regula- tions required GPWS, so a GPS antenna had been installed in the fleet. It was the only bit of high tech on the other- wise stock Beech Airliner.
The failure rate on checkrides was pretty high. There were a couple of classes where 80 percent were sent packing. My class did pretty well in
comparison – a 20 percent washout rate. NDB holds are ridiculous little maneuvers. Doing it while hand-f lying a powerful twin takes quite a bit of concentration – and, to be frank, a little good luck. Even Chuck Yeager lost a dogfight every once in a while.
NextGen
The aircraft I currently f ly has enough computers that it’s pointless to count. We have an autopilot, auto- throttles, vertical navigation, EGPWS, TCAS, FMS – a never-ending cortege of processing power. The f light con- trols are f ly-by-wire. Higher-level logic prevents aerodynamic stalls and will trim the elevator to compensate for the thrust vector of the wing-mounted engines. FADECs keep the engines from exceeding limitations and will abort a start automatically. Oddly, the flight director cannot capture a VOR. If you really need to track one, you have to twist the heading. The message is clear: Why bother with VORs when you have a dual GPS? Use the flight man- agement computer instead. Ground- based NAVAIDs are a dying breed.
Automation ensures compliance with speed limits below 10,000 feet (an altitude that can be adjusted when f lying outside of America). The com- puters are capable of automatically adjusting speed as f laps are extended. It will yell at you if the gear is not down on short final. It will yell at you if you
are about to hit terrain. It will yell at you if you are about to hit another air- craft. There are over 100 different an- nunciations and verbal alerts to draw the pilots’ attention to a risk that needs to be managed.
There is an old saw that the cockpit of the future will be occupied by a pilot and a dog: the pilot to satisfy regula- tory requirements; the dog to bite the pilot if they touch anything. The first American in space was a four-year-old chimpanzee named Ham (Ham the Astrochimp if you believe it). He was trained to press a lever when a blue light flashed. If he failed to respond in 5 seconds, he got an electric shock. A correct response was rewarded with a banana pellet. I feel a kinship with Ham.
The Upside of Automation
The accident record clearly demonstrates the positive impact that automation has had on safety. Controlled flight into terrain – historically the bane of the broad pilot community – has all but been eliminated as a cause of crashes following the advent of GPWS. Likewise, the probability of aerial collision has decreased in line with the proliferation of TCAS. Automated lighting systems at large airports are helping to eliminate runway incursions as we speak. Fly-by-wire logic is reducing loss-of-control
A useful resource or a source of distraction? Technology can be both.
May 2021 / TWIN & TURBINE • 7