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Flying around in empty airspace or towing banners doesn't give you the training you need to fly a complex airplane. I am no pilot, but two recent high profile
by ern 14y ago
Flying around in empty airspace or towing banners doesn't give you the training you need to fly a complex airplane.
I am no pilot, but two recent high profile crashes, the Colgan Air crash at Buffalo and Air France 447 were caused by pilots not handling stalls correctly.
Perhaps, there really is a need for more basic flying experience?
- UnoriginalGuy 14y agoI'll grant that Colgan Air raises serious questions about the pilots abilities. Air France 447 was more complex than you make it sound. The pilots lost their spacial awareness due to weather and then made a number of mistakes which caused their instruments to "malfunction" (the stall warning stopped even though they were still technically stalling, and then came back on when they tried to correct the stall). Essentially Air France 447 is what happens when a pilot decides some of their instruments aren't working correctly and aren't sure which (air speed was in fact malfunctioning but everything else was fine). This wasn't helped by things like Alternative Law turning on and disabling AoA protection (which the pilots wouldn't know they were violating without a visible horizon line or one that they trusted). Now, yes, Air France 447 was caused by human error. But it wasn't simply "not handling stalls correctly." They literally didn't know which was was up or down, and the stall warning was starting and stopping at seemingly random times.