Simplified Vehicle Operation. I recently spent an afternoon with a friend who’s in management for a major airframer and almost at the same instant, we got around to asking each other about this idea. It hasn’t gotten a lot of coverage but deserves to because it represents the inevitable advance of cockpit automation that will require less traditional knowledge of flying—call that stick and rudder if you like—and more systems management and simplified operation and decision making.
This shouldn’t sound new. Pilots of technically advanced aircraft have been doing exactly this increasingly with each new generation of avionics. To the extent that this tilt toward automation has evolved training, it really hasn’t. The ACS adds the requirement to demonstrate knowledge of and competence with these systems, but fundamental training remains largely unchanged.
If SVO gains traction—and it inevitably will even if it’s not called that—what evolves into the ACS of the future won’t look like what we have now, unless we somehow manage to sabotage it. //
Yeah, it’s robotic flying. Traditionalists will howl, but traditionalists have run out of ideas to grow pilots and build more airplanes for them to fly. Eventually, there could be a specific rating for SVO, says GAMA’s Lowell Foster. “If you get an SVO license, there’s no expectation that you have to be proficient to fly a regular airplane,” he said at the NBAA event. Given the reactionary hidebounded nature of GA, it’s impossible to say how long such an evolution might require. It will take younger executives to drive it, I suspect. //
what got me thinking about this, in addition to the conversation with my friend, is a comment someone made on the video I did about hand propping. He mentioned that he had flown Cubs where I did, too, at College Park, Maryland. He said he never could make friends with the J-3; just couldn’t figure it out. And he thought that was bad for aviation. I concede the point. Old airplanes, and especially the J-3, force you to conform to their oddities and inadequacies and around this we sometimes erect the artifice that this makes them good training airplanes. They have character and personality.
Maybe. But probably not. If I were doing a Young Eagle flight to introduce a kid to the wonder of lift and had the choice of a modern LSA with a little glass in the panel or a Cub, I’d take the former. It has more to do with the future said kid is likely to encounter than a crotchety ragwing designed when Franklin Roosevelt was president.
