Recently, The Atlantic has published a series of articles by James Fallows about the F16/Cessna mishap a few weeks ago. Fallows, I think, enjoys being able to say the military did something wrong; however, I found these articles to raise a few interesting questions and showed quite a bit of disagreement within the USAF aviation community itself. As someone who is pretty fresh out of flight school and has a pretty narrow perspective on flight training, I was curious what some of you all thought about these articles, especially jet guys.
Some highlights:
One former F16 pilot asserts task saturation in the F16 cockpit is so bad that it is "unsafe" to fly approaches at unfamiliar airfields. On the surface, this seems like an absurd statement, but his explanation makes sense.
There is some disagreement on what turn "immediately" really means. I know if I heard that, I'd be going to max AOB if it was VFR. However, one reader (another former USAF pilot) asserts military pilots perhaps don't necessarily respect controllers' vectors because the pilots are commissioned and the military controllers they know are enlisted. In my little experience, I think this one is a pretty long stretch.
A civilian airline pilot suggests that former military pilots in his line of work are arrogant and feel that they are infallible. I have not seen this to be the case in my experience. In fact, throughout flight school, my very experienced instructors always said "I can kill you, just as much as you can kill me. If something isn't right, voice it."
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4
Some highlights:
One former F16 pilot asserts task saturation in the F16 cockpit is so bad that it is "unsafe" to fly approaches at unfamiliar airfields. On the surface, this seems like an absurd statement, but his explanation makes sense.
There is some disagreement on what turn "immediately" really means. I know if I heard that, I'd be going to max AOB if it was VFR. However, one reader (another former USAF pilot) asserts military pilots perhaps don't necessarily respect controllers' vectors because the pilots are commissioned and the military controllers they know are enlisted. In my little experience, I think this one is a pretty long stretch.
A civilian airline pilot suggests that former military pilots in his line of work are arrogant and feel that they are infallible. I have not seen this to be the case in my experience. In fact, throughout flight school, my very experienced instructors always said "I can kill you, just as much as you can kill me. If something isn't right, voice it."
Article 1
Article 2
Article 3
Article 4