As a pilot who flies "modern" aircraft, this didn't feel much different than the training & procedures we use today.
I wonder if future spacecraft pilots will be saying the same thing in 75 years when "old SpaceX training videos" surface, or if everything will be automated by then and pilots will have gone the way of lighthouse keepers.
I’m often reminded of that scene in the right stuff where Glenn and Co demand a window... and a hatch. The “conspiracy” against pilots isn’t a new one! :)
Which might become a bit of a self-fulfilling statement. When I grew up in the 80s, lots of boys and more than a few girls had 'Top Gun' posters on their walls. Everybody wanted to be Tom Cruise. I doubt very much that's the case nowadays. What does the future of both civil and military aviation look like, now that becoming a pilot looks like a poor long-term career choice?
We may end up being forced to develop self-flying aircraft, not necessarily because it's the right thing to do but simply because everyone expected it to happen and planned accordingly.
>> military aviation look like, now that becoming a pilot looks like a poor long-term career choice?
Military flying isn't like civilian flying. There are plenty of jobs where the machines are nowhere near a replacement, where nobody is even hinting that the humans will be replaced. SAR, tactical helicopter ops, mountain flying, special operations ... these are things that no machine is anywhere near understanding. Anyone here seriously believe that navy seals will be dropped off on some remote rooftop, blades feet from power lines, by a computer-flown helicopter?
What you describe is the difference between a career that a lot of people can aspire to and a highly-specialized job that has traditionally relied on being able to draw the best of the best from a wide talent pool.
There will always be a need for a few ridiculously good men and women in military aviation. But going into aviation thinking you'll end up in that position is like trying out for high-school basketball under the likely misapprehension that you're the next Michael Jordan.
Historically, the Royal Air Force used to go around recruitment fairs with a bunch of (analog) machines designed to test the hand/eye coordination of possible trainees -- use a couple of geared wheels to keep the dot on the moving target, for example.
They gave up on this about a decade ago, because the average applicant for an air cadet slot now had better reflexes and hand-eye coordination than second world war fighter aces. (They might fail on the physical fitness requirement, but the average kid today is insanely good at keeping the gunsights on the target using a joystick compared to the average kid in the 1940s.)
For those interested, it’s been speculated that video gaming has caused this. In many ways playing a lot of console video games as a young child is basically the best possible early training to become a pilot of some sorts.
There may be something to this but objectively humans will be a hindrance in airplanes soon. They are too slow, can't multitask, need life-support systems, can't handle acceleration. A self-flying plane or even remote controlled plane will be superior in every aspect.
I good pilot does this or that this or that way. I cannot imagine how the instructor could have put it in a better way of saying, this is the right/suggested way. Also, for some reason the guys voice is just right! Watching these videos may be my new guilty pleasure!
It depends on the aircraft. It started out as SOP, but after a while it became expected practice. A few airframes require the right to be started first, either because the left doesn't have an electric starter or because various power devices are attached to the right but not the left, common in multiengine helicopters.
Passengers and crew traditionally enter from doors on the left of an aircraft. So in many situations the right engine is kept running while the left is shutdown to accommodate passenger entry. You wouldn't start left, then right, only to shutdown left to board pax.
As for safety, one would never start an engine if it would be unsafe to start a different engine. You wouldn't start the right while someone was working around the left. A single crossed wire or slip of the finger is too high a risk to take.
One of the things I've never found an explanation for is the voice these guys use on the radio. Where did it come from?
The 'airline pilot' voice we all use these days comes from Chuck Yeager, and everyone trying to sound cool, but these guys sound always sound like they're telephoning the front desk.
I've heard that that is apocryphal. The airline pilot drawl was a consequence of early voice activated microphones. They would stretch out the first syllable to wait for the mic to turn on.
The most impressive thing to me is that this video, in all of its detail, only covers how to get the plane off the ground and back down---it doesn't even scratch the surface of where to go or how to tell where you are. Navigating planes of this era by dead reckoning seems terrifying.
The thing I like about this video is that even though the recipient is just a pilot it still tells the "why" behind most of the stuff. A modern video would just say "do X because we told you to and we know what's right" because giving people the minimum information needed to do their jobs is more popular at present.
There used to be a channel devoted entirely to stuff like this, run by a guy named Jeff Quitney. YouTube recently yanked his account for reasons they (apparently) didn't disclose, even though he (apparently) had no copyright strikes at all, and wasn't breaking any other rules as far as I could tell.
Sadly, unlike some of the more popular YouTubers, he was unable to raise enough of a shitstorm on social media to draw the attention of anyone at Google who could look into it.
His channel is now on Vimeo at https://vimeo.com/jeffquitney . Even though Vimeo sucks in numerous ways compared to YouTube -- no captions, no variable speed, no user comments -- they do seem to provide a valuable refuge for victims of the Google star chamber. It's well worth checking out for those who like this sort of thing.
One gets the sense that YouTube is downranking and filtering content according to a branding effort that projects a certain image. Thus, anything in conflict with the desired YouTube brand (especially if not feeding the financial flow), regardless of real trends, gets smothered.
HN actually operates the same way, albeit as an aggregator, and thus with greater subtlety.
