Probably more true w helos than fixed wing. At least setting aside close formation flight which I suspect is about like hovering in terms of the dynamics.
But as a wise old squadron commander once said to me, “You don’t fly with your hands. You fly with your mind.” He was right.
When someone is first learning anything, it does seem like a lot of “muscle memory” really is in the muscles. As one gets more experienced, and does something regularly enough to get and stay proficient at it, pretty quickly the situation shifts and your mind can drive either hand pretty effortlessly. At least for flying-type tasks; I’m not suggesting an e.g. pro golfer could pick up a set of opposite hand clubs and do much with them.
As you once pointed out to me when I made the same observation as @Francis_Vaughan about the Airbus sidestick design and how the captain in the left-hand seat must steer with his left hand, this is in principle no different from a plane like a Boeing with a conventional yoke during takeoffs and landings when hand-flying typically happens the most. Because as you pointed out, in those situations the captain will have his left hand on the yoke and his right hand on the throttles, just like with an Airbus sidestick.
I remember once sitting in the co-pilot seat of a bizjet as it was landing, and thinking, wow, the pilot is so comfortable and confident that he’s steering with only his left hand! No, this is standard!
As I recall from being a student pilot in a Piper Cherokee, it’s a little different in small planes because during final approach, the throttle is already at idle so there’s nothing you need to do with it as long as you’re on the right glide slope. If you’re me, you have both hands tightly gripping the yoke while you say a small prayer! Even after I was pretty comfortable with landings, I think I was always a two-hander.
If you need to go around, once you’ve made the decision you probably need to implement it ASAP. Finding all the right knobs, and finding them timely, especially if they’re the old-fashioned push-pull kind, is not guaranteed. And you may be too busy steering to look away from whatever you’re trying to avoid hitting. If your hand is already grasping the throttle with fingers at the ready to bump the mixture & maybe prop & maybe carb heat knobs forward too as the throttle goes in, everything will be much happier.
My car has a stick-type gear shift in the center console. It’s an auto tranny of course, but can be manually shifted if you want to play racer. I drive pretty much constantly with left hand on wheel & right hand on shifter. It’s not actually a good habit in cars. But it’s a leftover from planes. I ought to work to fix that.
No doubt you’re right. FWIW, the Piper Cherokee has a throttle lever similar to larger planes, not the Cessna type of push-pull thingie. Anyway, the reason I was doing the two-handed thing was because at my stage of (in)experience, maximum control during landings was the immediate priority. I’m sure I would have adapted to the proper procedure in time, but alas, I admit it, I’m a flight school dropout. My instructor was most upset and said that I was just about ready to get my full PPL.
I agree. I would think that having both hands on the yoke might contribute to over-controlling. I was taught to always cover the throttle. (In helicopters, the throttle is on the end of the collective lever, so your hand is always on it.)
I won’t argue with licensed pilots. But I will say that on one occasion when I landed in a pretty fierce crosswind, banking the Piper against the wind so it landed on one wheel before it settled down on the other, gripping that yoke with both paws was pretty much the only way I could have done it at my stage of inexperience.
FYI / GA trivia …
That quadrant-style engine control for their single-engine planes was a marketing gimmick Piper introduced in the mid 1960s after a few model years of Cherokees built with the old push-pull knobs akin to Cessna’s design.
Here’s a pic of a pretty much as-delivered VFR-only equipped early 1960s Cherokee 140. The only newness here is having a transponder. The mixture knob is the one just above the right seat’s left rudder pedal.
But why would you call it a “marketing gimmick”? The throttle and mixture controls that I was accustomed to, as in the pic below, seemed to me to be a very natural and instantly accessible placement.
That must be new. It was never mentioned in the Air France analysis, where if I recall, one was trying to dive out a perceived stall and the other was trying to climb hard out of perceived turbulence.
The announcement seems like a simple fairly effective compromise; although I did see an article many years ago complaining that too many things went bing bong in the cockpit (they were commenting on the “PULL UP PULL UP” addition to the cacaphony).
As regular readers know, I’m not a fan of loud noisemakers, and especially not loud voice callouts, that cannot be silenced. There really ought to be a big “Silence everything for 20 seconds so I can think & talk” button.
ISTM, on not much thought, that really DUAL INPUT ought to be the highest priority voice callout. The only thing worse than a burning, stalling, or impact-approaching airplane is a burning, stalling, or impact-approaching airplane that two people are both trying to steer in different directions.
I’ll also point out for the general audience that even if Airbus had sticks where you could feel the other pilot’s inputs, that does not guarantee that confused or panicked crews still won’t both be tunnel-visioned and both pushing and pulling.
That can and has absolutely happened even on Boeings with big hefty yokes. Once everybody is scared to terrified, normal crew discipline can take a back seat to “mad flail for survival”. With predictably poor results.
The Hughes 500 has left side command, mostly because if the RH collective(and cyclic) is removed you can sit three in the front. So all civilian 500s the pilot sits on the left.
BUT! In military 500s, the pilot sits on the right, and they are not equipped with removable sticks.
You can fly from either side, but the “pilot” has the start button, and the collective and cyclic friction.
It sums the inputs, so if one pilot pulls back and the other pushes forwards, the result will effectively be stick neutral, but if both pilots apply an input in the same direction the inputs are added together. You also get the “DUAL INPUT” warning.
IIRC - This was exactly the problem. The pitot tube froze, giving incorrect (no?) airspeed, so both pilots were guessing, the indicators were confusing; one guessed they were hitting turbulence (buffeting) and tried to climb above, the other took the buffetting (apparently correctly) for a stall and pushed the nose down to recover.
Because the inputs were added the plane did nothing, neither nose up nor down; and so pancaked into the ocean. Evidence was neither pilot was aware what the other was doing.
This was what the article I read said - that adding noise overload - multiple bings and buzzes to identify plus an overload of voice warnings. Bad enough the pilots are trying to read the instruments and figure things out, now they have audio distraction galore. (One of the things I recall - I think The Right Stuff - one of the tests for prospective astronauts was having them do complex math problems with plenty of loud noises and other distractions.)
The article, IIRC, was about the time of the crash in the Everglades, discussing distractions while they were trying to analyze the front geear problem.
One of the primary rules of flying in a multi-crew aircraft (any aircraft with dual controls really) is that only one person has control at a time. The problem of both pilots applying opposing control inputs isn’t limited to Airbus’ non-connected sidesticks. If pilots of an aircraft with conventional controls apply opposing forces the result is also a sum of those forces. If one pilot pulls and the other pushes with the same force, the controls will remain neutral until enough force is applied to disconnect the two sides of the control circuit, then you get one elevator up and the other down. It’s never pretty when both pilots are fighting each other for control of the aircraft. It’s mostly a human problem rather than a technical one.
Discussion on the issue of dual inputs in aircraft with conventional controls:
Surprised by the high pitch rate resulting from the co-pilot’s actions, the captain (PM) made an opposing nose-down input. The two pilots then simultaneously made inputs on the controls for 53 s. The pitch controls were desynchronized for 12 s due to the opposing forces exceeding the mechanism’s activation threshold (difference of 23 kg).
Following a non-stabilized RNP approach to runway 20, in turbulent conditions, the aeroplane encountered windshear. Faced with the imminence of a hard touchdown, the captain (PM) made inputs on the controls at the same time as the co-pilot (PF). The dual inputs lasted around ten seconds, and continued after the crew had begun a go-around, and after the captain had called out that he was taking the controls.
The solution isn’t necessarily to connect the sidesticks, it’s for the pilots to be trained in, and apply, the appropriate task sharing rules. “I have control”, “you have control”, etc.
There were a lot of factors that contributed to AF447, at various points they even recovered safe flight, only to then mishandled the aircraft back into a stall. If all they had done was just nothing when they first encountered the airspeed failure, they would have been fine. It’s similar to the Colgan Dash 8 accident, where the captain’s response to an artificially conservative stall warning was to heave the controls back, place the aircraft into a real stall, then hold it there until they hit the ground.
True. But. Different aspects of machine design make different mistakes easier or harder to make. Ideally designs would make nearly all errors hard to make and make catastrophic errors extremely hard to make.
Despite intensive training, crews will occasionally become disoriented and will stop working as a team. And that often leads to GAME OVER.
IANA Airbus pilot but I don’t see this issue as severe enough often enough to force a retrofit to thousands of existing machines. Nor is it obvious to me that the rather small addition of force feedback between sidesticks that move just a smidgen at most would be enough to break the cycle of near panic that exists when a crew stops operating as a crew. Remember that two folks yanking on great big yokes don’t always seem to get the message that they’re both trying to steer. They too fight each other all the way into the crash. Occasionally.
Might it be a nice addition to Airbus’s next clean-sheet design? Yep. Is it a real safety game-changer? I doubt it.
Even after I was pretty comfortable with landings, I think I was always a two-hander.
