Boeing Company (BA)

[Jetmek_03052]

Absolutely. My brother was a check airman for Continental before he retired. He would give Captains proficiency checks and evaluate First Officers for Captain upgrades. In the US that is. He said in his last years, he thought pilot basic airmanship was deteriorating at a rapid rate. It was due to the automation of the flight deck. Everything is figured out for pilots these days, they don't have to do much other than sit in the seat. Auro throttle, Auto Braking, Auto pressurization. EVERYTHING is done for them. And everything is fine until it breaks. The crew is supposed to be able to fly the aircraft without all that fancy "auto" stuff. They learn how to, but things so very rarely break, they forget. So in a true emergency, they lose that split-second decision-making edge. My brother said that many of the pilots he checked would choose to cancel flights, rather than go with an aircraft that a piece of equipment out - even if the MEL (Minimum Equipment List) said they could safely depart without it.

The Asian pilot crews are the worst ones. There is almost no CRM (Crew resource management). The captain is considered GOD-like and what he says goes. Most Asian first officers would sit on their hands and watch the captain corkscrew the aircraft into the ground, rather than raise some sort of alarm!