Oh, the irony of progress.
In 2005, the FAA issued its first Safety Alert for Operators, “an information tool that alerts, educates, and makes recommendations to the aviation community [that] includes air carrier certificate holders, fractional ownership program managers, and 14 CFR Part 142 training centers.” There’s no irony in this, or the next paragraph:
“Each SAFO contains important safety information and may contain recommended actions. SAFO content should be especially valuable to air carriers in meeting their statutory duty to provide service with the highest possible degree of safety in the public interest. The information and recommendations in a SAFO are often time critical.”
Here’s the irony: SAFO 13002 (released last week) is dedicated to Manual Flight Operations. Why? I’ll let the FAA explain: “A recent analysis of flight operations data (including normal flight operations, incidents, and accidents) identified an increase in manual handling errors. The [FAA] believes maintaining and improving the knowledge and skills for manual flight operations is necessary for safe flight operations.”
In other words, the FAA is saying that failure of the flight management system and autopilot is now a critical in-flight emergency that demands special training and practice: flying an airplane by hand. Many are aghast at this recommendation, but they shouldn’t be. Technology has so infiltrated flight that “manual flight” is only the latest of a number of similar recommendations the FAA has made since it created SAFOs in 2005.
[Read more…] about Aviation Safety: What Has Become of Us?