Christopher Lutat - Automation Airmanship: Nine Principles for Operating Glass Cockpit Aircraft

Copyright 2013 by by Christopher J. Lutat and S. Ryan Swah. All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the United States Copyright Act of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced or distributed in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

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Automation Airmanship is dedicated to the countless pilots, instructor pilots and aircrew who, for over a century, have worked tirelessly to smooth the integration of advanced technology into safe, reliable flight operations.

About the Authors

Christopher J. Lutat and S. Ryan Swah.

Christopher J. Lutat, ATP, has been an airline pilot for a large global airline for more than 17 years and was a search and rescue pilot for the U.S. Coast Guard for eight years. He currently flies the Boeing MD-11 for a major global airline. He is a founding owner of Convergent Performance, LLC, and serves as President of its Government and Aerospace division. Captain Lutat is also a Check Airman and has been an instructor in advanced technology, wide-body global transport aircraft since 2003.

S. Ryan Swah, ATP, is a retired U.S. Navy Captain with experience in attack, fighter, and transport aircraft. He currently flies the Boeing MD-11 for a major global airline and has held positions as an FAA Aircraft Program Designee, Line Check Airman, Proficiency Check Airman, Standards Check Airman, Aircraft Technical Pilot, Flight Standards Manager, and Senior Flight Standards Manager. Captain Swah leverages his expertise in glass cockpit, automation checklists, procedures, and flight manuals as the Content Manager of Convergent Performance, LLC.

As this book was going to press in the fall of 2012, Pierre Sparaco, now-retired Paris Bureau Chief for the industry journal Aviation Week and Space Technology, wrote a brief commentary entitled, Airmanship Anew. This article was largely centered on the report of Qantas flight 32s recovery, by its captain, Richard Champion de Crespigny, after a catastrophic in-flight engine failure. Sparacos comments echoed those of many in our industry who believeeven as technology has changed the nature of everything from air traffic control to security to flight deck protocolsthat there has been too little emphasis on the concept of airmanship compared to the focus on improving profit margins gained from efficiencies and cost cutting. Along with the dramatic engines-out landing on the Hudson River of U.S. Airways flight 1549, Qantas flight 32 joins the ranks of those popularly recognized heroic saves resulting from the display of expert airmanshipand rightfully so. Both of these now widely discussed events seem to evoke qualities of a special kind of airmanship that their crews displayed in saving the lives of hundreds of passengers and crew, following catastrophic failures aboard normally reliable, highly advanced aircraft. It is the search for this special kind of airmanship that has led us for the past decade into the field where we have been involved in helping organizations to adopt advanced aircraft of all kinds, and ultimately, to write this book.

In the early part of 2003, as a result of our work with the U.S. Marines and U.S. Coast Guard (both organizations had just begun acquiring aircraft with new, highly automated flight decks), we began to sense that an undertaking like this book might be necessary. The airplane that both organizations were bringing into service was a completely new version of the venerableand legendaryLockheed-Martin C-130. The new airplane was the C-130J, and both the Marines and the Coast Guard had been flying earlier models of C-130s for decades. We were in the midst of projects with both organizations to streamline procedures and flight deck processes to fit their individual cultures and each organizations unique mission.