I think one issue is basic airmanship skills. Another is deep understanding of the systems, and this second point relates to the way the systems are designed, from a user-interface standpoint, in the first place. In his book Taming Hal, which I’ll be talking about in a future post, Asaf Degani reviews a whole set up disturbing situations — in aviation, in medical devices, in sea transportation — in which what the crew thought the control system had been programmed to do and what they had actually programmed it to do were quite different.

So, instead of measuring output, we measure input — but not all flying hours are the same. Really, it’s surprising that flying on autopilot counts at all. Anyway, if the old metric is 1500 hours of “flying”, perhaps 500 hours of really flying — taking off, landing, otherwise maneuvering — should qualify.

Allowing some hours outside a jet-liner to count seems perfectly reasonable.