>>27693751>>27694391I work on C-47 aircraft, and the non-profit organization I'm with, offers flight experiences. Where anyone, with or without flight experience, can fly left seat with our instructor and actually take the controls for Taxi, take off, touch and go, and landing.
This is all generally speaking, of course.
The guys who do the best, are usually the tail wheel pilots and bush pilots. Flying tail wheel or in the bush takes a lot of good airmanship because of the lack of forgiveness. Rotor pilots do pretty good too.
The guys that do the worst, are the airline pilots with thousands of flight hours. Flying an airbus or Boeing takes 0 airmanship because it's all automated. And because they know everything, they have a hard time listening to the instructor. The guys who have never been in an aircraft cockpit before fly better then the airline pilots.
I won't ever forget this one southwest airline lady capitan who almost ran the plane off the runway after doing exactly what the instructor told her (several times) explicitly not to do. The instructor saved the plane with his control inputs. The worst part was that she never noticed.
When she was flying, she couldn't hold altitude, or make coordinated turns. At the end of the flight, we told her that she did an outstanding job and she believed us.
I guess where I'm getting at, is that they teach them how to use all these systems instead of really teaching them how to fly.
There is an Asian airline, I don't remember which one, that actually tells their pilots to declare an emergency when the autopilot and/or automatic landing system fails because they don't have the skill to land by them selves. We saw this happen in California last year, where the pilots stalled the plane before they got to the runway.
