WHAT THE HECK IS THE FAA THINKING THIS TIME

The FAA just passed new pilot training rules that state more emphasis is to be placed on stalls and slow flight for airline pilots. Their reasoning behind this is the FAA states that pilots have forgotten how to hand fly with all the automation on board. Another caveat to this ruling is that the airlines have 5 years to reprogram their simulators. A lot of good that is going to do now.

If you are a pilot you know that the first 20 hours or so of training as a student pilot are spent doing stalls, slow flight and how to avoid a spin. The FAA thinks that due to automation airline pilots have forgotten how to fly. In airliners (and business jets) upon takeoff and approaching 200 feet the autopilot goes on until approach at approximately 500 feet. I still know airline pilots that like to hand fly as much as possible. The best airline pilots I know are those that own a small GA airplane and keep their skills up to date.

When I transitioned from my Bonanza to my friends Citation Jet (CJ) I could have flown it the way airline pilots do, 200 feet AGL and auto pilot on. I wanted to hand fly the airplane to get the feel of it in all kinds of conditions. My first landing in the CJ  we were flying the autopilot following the ILS into Colorado Springs (COS). The weather was choppy, and I turned off the autopilot and hand flew the approach smoother than the autopilot did. 

My Bonanza, as my previous airplanes, does not have an autopilot. I feel that my hours of hand flying is more than most airline pilots have today. On a trip from San Diego (MYF) to Phoenix Deer Valley (DVT) this past summer we were in the soup (IMC) for almost the whole 2 hour trip. Not only was I hand flying but we had to divert for weather. I was very thankful for my IPad as I only had to place my finger on three VOR’s and hit add to route to change our routing. In the old days of paper charts I would have asked ATC for vectors until I could figure everything out. This would not be a good situation to be in without an autopilot. For me to buy a STC’d autopilot would cost around $15,000. This is why I believe the FAA should approve non TSO’d autopilots for enroute use in certified airplanes...SAFETY! My cost would then be a more manageable $5000. These units have proved themselves over the years on experimental aircraft.

In closing what the FAA has stated is that airline pilots no longer know how to fly. I think this is bull hockey.