Can the flight engineer fly the plane?

Factual Questions
6

Former airline pilot & flight engineer (“F/E”) …

Pretty much as folks above said.

  1. Very few F/E equipped airplanes are still in use. And of those still flying, the vast majority are in the cargo biz. And concentrated in the primitive or poorer parts of the world.

  2. In about 1965 the FAA mandated that all flight engineers of US commercial passenger planes be pilots. Prior to that it was a separate career growing out of aviation maintenance technician.

  3. Since then, in US passenger service the F/E has been a stepping-stone position to co-pilot & eventually Captain. So the F/E would have been hired by an airline with the expectation that he/she would be a co-pilot some day and would therefore have come to the new job with suitable experience as a military or civilian professional pilot.

  4. Typical new-hire training for F/Es contains a bit of hands-on flying the sim, but just a taste. And pretty much no such followup training is done later. So somebody who’d been F/Eing for years would be pretty rusty at steering even though he/she was utterly familiar with the machine and the “script” for flying & landing it.

  5. US freight and non-US carriers follow their own regs. In many cases that means the F/E has never flown any airplane, much less the 747-300 or 727 he’s strapped into. Some of those guys are real interested in flying & other are just mechanics / switch flippers.

  6. Prior to about 2007, the mandatory retirement age for US airline pilots was 60. It’s now 65. There is no mandatory retirement age for F/Es. During the 1970s-90s, when F/E-equipped airplanes were common, many airlines had programs where when a Captain turned 60, rather than retiring he (always a he in those days) could become a flight engineer & continue working. For round numbers F/E pay is about 1/2 Captain pay, but for somebody whose finances were devastated by a couple divorces or a few layoffs over a long career, it was a job. So if you were riding in a A-300, 747, DC-10, or L1011 back in those days, you had a decent chance of having an F/E who’d been a Captain for years, probably on the same type.
    Bottom line: nowadays this is 99% moot. But … If you somehow find yourself as a passenger on an F/E-equipped airplane today, the odds are real high the F/E is not a pilot & wouldn’t be a real good one in a pinch.