A certain darkness on the flight deck.

Nothing wears a pilot out like watching the other guy fight the jet. And nothing degrades flight performance like the inevitable outcome–the jet wins, as it should.

This pointless tail chase arises out of two competing malignancies. First, there seems to be an inborn reluctance to consign more and more vertical and lateral (read: climbs, descents, and navigation) maneuvering to flight management systems. Part of that, I believe, comes not only from a reluctance to acquiesce to the reality that in most cases, the automation can do a better job than the humans, but in a real sense, from a backlash against the encroaching automation subsuming what used to be mostly art.

Hogwash, in both cases. Because not only has such resistance to the encroachment of technology been going on since the Wright Flyer gave way to the Curtis Jenny, (when we first started getting CRT flight directors rather than the old mechanical gages, the crusty old guys swore they “didn’t work worth a damn” and distorted their vision), there’s also the incontrovertible fact that technology has made the airline industry the safest it’s ever been.

Ground Proximity Warning, Windshear Detection, terrain and weather escape–all possible because of the integrated software and hardware now part of the wraparound design technology inherent in the new jets.

The second, darker factor in the resistance playing out on flight decks worldwide is more insidious, but no less troublesome. That is, an undercurrent of frustration and dissatisfaction, most that has little or nothing to do with the technology that becomes the focus of the bad ideas. Specifically, there’s a generation of professional pilots who have seen their retirement wiped out, pay slashed, career stagnated, base (and thus domicile) closed, job moved or in thousands of cases, eliminated; families torn apart, a suicide rate grown to 4 times the national average, and promotions eliminated, reversed or in so many cases, downgraded.

When those factors are the undercurrent of the profession, they don’t simply vanish when the gear retracts.

The end result, the “kick the dog” outlet–knowingly or not, often becomes an opposition to standard operating procedures. Not necessarily blatant, but distinct: “These autothrottles don’t work worth a damn!” (Yes they do–and more smoothly and efficiently than you) or “This descent profile is bullsh!t” (No it’s not–and it would have saved the thousand pounds of fuel you wasted descending and flying level fifteen miles early).

This seems consistently evident in the case of pilots busted back from captain due to job cuts, or pilots forced from larger to smaller aircraft for the same reason: they hate–and fault find endlessly–in their “diminished” circumstances.

Which leaves a crew flying a complex jet with a few “I know better” techniques born of resistance to the new, nostalgia for the old, and a self-righteous need to pay back some of the huge bloodletting in an increasingly anemic career field.

Any step outside the normal operational profile throws a two-headed onus on the other guy. First, there’s the WTF paralysis as you try to figure out what the “new” technique is. Second, there’s the very complicated and moving target that is return to the normal profile–either from the computer’s design or more rudimentary airmanship. Are we getting there? How, when or even, if?

All the while, there hangs in the air the unasked, unanswered but certainly prescient question: when push comes to shove, will professionalism necessarily trump resentment?

So far, the industry-wide results speak for themselves–yet hardly create any assurance that they will continue to do so. I’m fortunate to fly in a Flight Department where Standard Operating Procedures rule the operation, period. And they always will, in my cockpit.

But with constant downward pressure on pilot pay, airline profitability, flight manning, and ultimately, the profession under siege, the unasked question may eventually provide its own answer, and my guess is, it ain’t gonna be pretty.