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Dan in Maine's avatar

To my earlier post, "situational awareness" was a skill that was sacrosanct throughout my airline flying career. I'm skeptical that operational automation can ever replace that. So far in these reports, what I'm seeing is that the Fedex crew demonstrated it, to the benefit of all. Automation, in the form of the CAT-III autopilot autoland approach may have helped the Fedex crew's ability to assess their operational situation without the distraction of a hand-flown approach procedure in this case, which is far more attention intensive for both pilots. The 'go-around' call was a real time evaluation, its execution based on pilot-controller communications that automation would most likely not be aware of, and couldn't react to. But the Fedex pilots did. They figured it out in time.

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Justin Dillon's avatar

Great post, Jim. Thank you for explaining so clearly how bad this almost was. And man, you're right about the Right Stuff thing. No shouting, no raised voices. Amazing.

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