The Skill That Is
Being Forgotten

There was a time when every pilot knew this intimately. Not as a behaviour in a competency framework, not as a section in a QRH — as a feel. The relationship between pitch attitude and speed. How thrust changes affect that relationship, and how the lag between moving the thrust lever and feeling the result plays out differently at different phases of flight. The way trim takes the load off and the way neglecting it compounds every other input. How configuration changes shift the whole picture and require a recalibration of the hand that is holding the controls. These things were known through repetition, through feedback, through thousands of hours of flying aircraft that required constant active management.

That intimacy has eroded. Not because pilots are less capable — because the operating environment has changed around them. The modern airline pilot spends the majority of their career with the autopilot engaged, the autothrottle managing thrust, and the flight management system doing the thinking about pitch and power. The aircraft is controlled beautifully, efficiently, and safely. And the raw skill of understanding what attitude, speed, and thrust are doing to each other — without the mediation of any system — quietly atrophies from disuse.

What the Skill Actually Requires

Controlling an aircraft safely using only the relationship between attitude, speed, and thrust is a knowledge discipline as much as a physical one. The knowledge is the framework within which the physical inputs make sense. Without it, the pilot is reacting to instruments rather than managing a set of understood relationships.

Attitude is the primary control. In the climb, a given pitch attitude at a given thrust setting produces a given speed and rate of climb — specific to the aircraft type, weight, and altitude. In the descent, reducing thrust at a given pitch attitude allows the aircraft to accelerate or descend, depending on the relationship between the drag being produced and the component of gravity acting along the flight path. In level flight at constant speed, the pitch attitude required to maintain altitude changes with thrust — an increase in thrust initially causes the nose to rise before the speed stabilises, and the pilot who does not know this will chase the instrument rather than manage the relationship.

These are not abstract principles. They are the operating knowledge that allows a pilot to select a pitch attitude and predict, with reasonable accuracy, what the aircraft will do next — without looking at a flight director, without waiting for the autothrottle to respond, without a speed tape trend arrow to tell them which way the situation is developing. The pilot who has this knowledge is ahead of the aircraft. The pilot who has lost it is following it.

The Muscle Memory That Automation Replaces

Beyond knowledge lies coordination — the physical calibration of control inputs that comes only from repetition. Thrust lever movement and its effect on pitch. The rudder input that is needed to coordinate a turn precisely at this weight and speed. The amount of back pressure on the sidestick or column that holds altitude through a configuration change. Trim management — loading the trim in the climb, releasing it carefully in the descent, using it to take the sustained load off the controls so that corrections require only small additional inputs rather than sustained force.

These are learnt through practice. They cannot be acquired from a QRH table. The tables exist — pitch attitudes for various phases of flight, thrust settings for different configurations — and they are genuinely useful as a reference, particularly in degraded or unfamiliar situations. But they are not a substitute for the internalized feel that comes from having made these inputs thousands of times and received immediate feedback from the aircraft. The table tells you where to start. The skill tells you where you are and what to do next.

Automated flight interrupts this feedback loop almost entirely. The autothrottle moves the thrust levers; the pilot does not. The autopilot makes the pitch inputs; the pilot's hands are off the controls. The coordination between thrust and attitude that was once built through continuous repetition now goes unpractised for entire sectors, entire weeks, entire months. The muscle memory does not disappear overnight. But it fades — and the pilot who has not noticed it fading is the most concerning case, because the erosion is gradual enough to be invisible until the moment it becomes consequential.

Where We Practice and Where We Don't

The simulator is where this skill is most commonly exercised in the modern airline environment — and overwhelmingly in asymmetric thrust scenarios. The engine failure after V1 is the exercise that most reliably returns the pilot to raw manual control: the thrust is unequal, the aircraft wants to yaw, the rudder input required is significant and must be coordinated with the ailerons to maintain the desired track, and the pitch attitude required for the single-engine climb speed must be held precisely while all of this is happening. It is demanding, it is well-practised, and it is increasingly manageable on modern fly-by-wire aircraft where the flight envelope protection significantly reduces the consequence of imprecise inputs.

But the asymmetric scenario, precisely because it is so well-rehearsed and so well-supported by protections, is not a complete substitute for the broader skill of raw aircraft control. The coordinated, symmetrical, attitude-and-thrust management that underlies controlled flight in all its phases — the ability to fly a stable approach on a raw data ILS, to manage a go-around manually through the thrust and pitch changes, to hold altitude in turbulence with trim and attitude rather than automation — requires practice that the typical simulator programme does not systematically provide.

The paradox is precise: this is a skill that the operating environment actively discourages practising, and that the operating environment still requires to be present. The MEL does not prohibit flight without an autopilot. The non-normal event does not wait for a pilot who has been practising. The skill must be maintained despite the conditions that make maintaining it difficult.

The Knowledge That Supports the Feel

The QRH pitch and power tables are there for a reason. In a situation where the normal references are unavailable — a degraded flight display, an unusual configuration, an aircraft behaving in a way that does not match expectations — having a reference pitch attitude and thrust setting to establish as a starting point is genuinely valuable. It gives the pilot something known to work from rather than searching for a stable state from scratch.

But the table is a starting point, not an answer. The answer comes from the pilot's ability to read the aircraft's response to the initial setting, understand whether it is diverging or converging on the intended state, and make the adjustments that the specific conditions require. A table gives a number. The skill gives the ability to use it.

This is why the behaviour sits in the competency framework as something to be assessed and developed, not simply assumed. It is not a theoretical capability that pilots either have or do not have. It is a practical skill that exists on a spectrum of currency — genuinely sharp at one end, eroded to the point of unreliability at the other — and that moves along that spectrum based on how often and how deliberately it is practised. The professional pilot's relationship with this skill is not passive. It requires active management of one's own currency and honest self-assessment of where on that spectrum one actually sits.

Maintaining What the Environment Erodes

The practical answer is deliberate practice in the right conditions. The low-workload cruise sector in uncongested airspace is the opportunity — disconnect the autopilot, manage the thrust manually, fly the aircraft with attitude and power while the monitoring pilot holds the systems picture. The raw data ILS in VMC, when there is no operational reason to use the autopilot, is a direct practice of the skill this behaviour describes. The go-around flow, flown manually through the thrust increase and pitch change, builds exactly the coordination between thrust and attitude that the simulator asymmetric scenarios address in only one dimension.

None of this requires compromising the operation. It requires choosing moments where the skill can be exercised without adding risk — and making those choices deliberately, with the same professional intent that goes into every other aspect of performance on the line. The pilot who waits for the simulator to practise this skill is the pilot who practises it once a year. The pilot who treats appropriate sectors as development opportunities is the pilot whose skill remains genuinely current.

The skill that is being forgotten does not have to be forgotten. But it will be, without deliberate effort to maintain it. The operating environment will not do that work. The pilot has to.