| Pilots must continue to physically fly the aircraft to maintain skills and continue to increase the level of safety within the aviation industry. The purpose of this qualitative case study was to identify pilot's perceptions of their loss of physical pilot skills due to the aviation industry's dependency on complex automation with a goal of refocusing industry training standards toward a pilot's physical flying skills. The research method for this qualitative case study was a multiple case design and a process of deductive thematic analysis. This approach used semantic driven codes to identify themes from the sample size of instruments. The population for this qualitative study were participants selected from pilots flying off the coast of Florida, Louisiana, Texas, and Alabama who had an aircraft flying job with at least 1,000 hours of Air Transport Pilot (ATP) experience in a highly-automated aircraft based on current FAA standards. The study had 29 participants that were any race, male or female between the ages of 20 to 60, and spoke English. Samples from the population were drawn, using the data collection technique of in-depth surveys, and data was collected from appropriate resources. Data was analyzed using QDA Miner Lite software. The results indicated pilot's felt cockpit automation added value to Flight Systems Management by enhanced Cockpit Resource Management, degraded manual flight skills from lack of use and increased complacency from over dependency and failure to complete cross checks on the automation while decreasing overall situational awareness from loss of cognitive skills. The automation could add to programming errors due to the pilot's lack of knowledge, distrust of the automation, or may cause automation surprise from over dependency, usually as a result of automation bias which manifests as always expecting the automation to be correct. |
