Wiblin Wonders If Auto-Pilot Time Should Count

by Gary Wiblin, Editor, International Aviation & Safety Forum

I recently spent some time having lunch with an airline pilot friend of mine and the topic of flying hours logged came up. It was during our conversation that I began to question the system of logging flight hours we are subject to.

This particular pilot flies international routes between South Africa and the USA and regularly logs in excess of 10 hours for each crossing. I asked if he, the Captain, actually sat in the pilots seat for the entire trip and he said that for at least half those hours he was either sitting elsewhere reading or in a bunk, sleeping. Even then, when he was sitting in the pilots seat, the huge aircraft was being guided along pre-determined pathways by a pre-programmed computer system and was also being carefully monitored by countless personnel on the ground. This got me thinking.

There is obviously a vast difference between an airline Captain and a charter pilot. I do acknowledge that many airline pilots began their flying careers as charter pilots but many of them stepped but briefly into that realm before spending the rest of their working lives in the sharp end of a large airliner. It is therefore obvious that the hours logged by an international airline pilot have a somewhat different texture to those logged by a charter pilot.

It would appear that a charter pilot faces a somewhat different working day to that of an international airline pilot. A charter pilot notoriously needs to be airborne at 6am and therefore has access to no reliable meteorological information when doing his flight planning at 4am. He often needs to collect the catering on route to the airport. He then needs to be at the airport at 5am to remove the aircraft from its hangar and prepare it for flight. When the passengers arrive he needs to "check them in" and issue them with tickets.

He needs to offer coffee and pack their bags into the aircraft. The passengers need to be boarded and the pilot must give a safety briefing. It is almost certain that one of the passengers will be sitting up front with the pilot and during the entire flight will ply the pilot with an endless stream of questions that need to be answered politely and accurately. At destination, the pilot may well need to sit at a deserted airfield and wait while his passengers go into town to conduct their business. The passengers will arrive back at the aircraft later than they said they would.

With the weather worsening and visibility for take-off looking marginal, the pilot will have no access to RVR (runway visual range) information or have any idea what the weather is like after take off. He will need to make an educated guess as to whether it is safe to go. A decision to stay the night due to worsening weather is always met with derision and scorn and your ability as a pilot will be in question. On the way home the passengers will partake of the liquid refreshments in the cooler box and will often become rowdy and boisterous. About an hour into the flight they will question how much longer before landing, as the downed beers will need to be expunged, one way or another. On hearing that they will still need to wait another hour the cabin will take on an eerie quietness. After the landing the passengers will remember only the uncomfortable section of the flight, when they were longing for a toilet, and will leave with but a cursory wave. After tidying the aircraft and returning it to its hangar, you will arrive home after a 16-hour day consisting of hard labor, boredom, fright, and derision, and will get to log four hours in your logbook.

An international airline pilot, on the other hand, will arrive at work to find that all flight planning has been well taken care of and the aircraft has been fully prepared for take-off. Passengers will be checked in and boarded and the Captain will merely apply a standard set of rules pertaining to the take-off or in deciding on any alternative routing due weather. There will be no surprises and a veritable team of experts will take care every detail right down to strapping passengers in and giving them a safety briefing. After take-off the Captain will activate the bevy of computers tasked with flying the big bird and will settle back with a nice hot cuppa! It is therefore quite obvious that the international airline captain with 10 000 hours may well have less claim to 10 000 hours of flying experience than the charter pilot with a similar number of hours logged.

I also once knew a pilot who logged all his hours on an IF flight plan as actual instrument flying. When I advised that he could only log instrument flight time when he was manipulating the controls with no outside reference to the horizon he appeared unconvinced. To the best of my knowledge this pilot continues to log all his flying as instrument flight merely because he has filed an IFR flight plan.

The point of all this is to perhaps call for a shake-up of the way flight time is logged. To my mind, in order to log flight time as a pilot, you should at the very least be sitting in the pilots seat, as well as being the pilot in command. In order to log instrument flight time, you should be manually flying the aircraft with absolutely no reference to the horizon.

A logbook should be an accurate record of your flying experience, and not just time spent in an aircraft, or a wish list. I personally keep an extremely accurate log of all my flying experience and often enjoy paging through my logbooks, knowing that each and every minute recorded was a real moment in time flying an aircraft.

(Gary Wiblin is editor of the online South African journal "International Aviation Safety Forum." He's also out with a new print publication -- "Aviation and Safety Magazine." Visit his website for information on how to subscribe. -- ed.) 

FMI: http://efc.org.au