Wellll, I gotta say that Dog14 was probably a better pilot than I was in Airbus training.
(Of course the fighter pilot in me must comment that I am now the best of the best, but I just keep that Neanderthal well caged in the dark, Bitburger beer-damaged recesses of my mind).
By that tribute to Dog14, I mean that the transition to glass was a bit difficult for me, but only to the extent that I made it so. Let me explain.
The A320 will do what you tell it to do, but you have to know the syntax of how approaches are sequenced into the system. During one of my early sims at the Airbus center, my sim partner and I managed to somehow program the dang thing to fly a holding pattern exactly backwards. To boot, it made an extra 360 over JFK before it even entered the wayward holding pattern.
To make things worse, my partner and I sat there like absolute numbnuts through it all, watching this machine fly some irregular geometric pattern over a synthetic NYC that would have made a monitoring center controller cry blood and the grandma in 8C puke her colon out. Our instructor finally put the sim on freeze and said in a well modulated voice "Well, that was special, wasn't it?" Gulp.
I was humbled. As Dog said, A-N-C are the three basics, and I had forgone the first two of the steps. I learned a valuable lesson that day, Albie--if the jet ain't moving in the right direction, you toggle off that autopilot (risking incipient heart attack/vapor lock from that WAY loud autopilot disconnect chirp) and fly it. Gee--it acts just like a regular airplane if you let it! I have since used that autopilot disconnect without hesitation during a wayward approach; lesson learned.
Was the transition difficult otherwise? Hmmm. It was interesting, if nothing else. For example, the airspeed tape works backwards in the A320 from that in the F-15 HUD (the higher airspeed numbers go up from the centerline of the flight display vs. downward). The instrument scan is not difficult to master at all, once the instructors have doled out the requisite number of dope slaps to read what the autopilot thinks it is doing.
The most difficult part, after knowing how to sequence the box and when to hand-fly the rascal, was to understand the autopilot system. As mentioned before, you have to (duh) know what the flight management annunciator (the thingy over the attitude indicator that tells you what the autopilot thinks it should be doing) is saying to you afer you engage one of the two traditional auto flight systems (autopilots). An additional task is to figure out the reversion modes; a good example of this is when you are descending on an arrival with a crossing restriction ahead. If you make a managed descent (meaning you are allowing the jet to figure out how fast to descend on the arrival to make the restriction) and subsequently get vectored off of the arrival, the autoflight system cannot calculate the descent to a point you are no longer heading toward. It will thus revert from a managed descent to a simple vertical velocity value, say 2500 fpm down. As long as you know what it is going to do, it isn't a surprise.
The great stuff? When it works, and that is 99% of the time, the system is smooth, reliable and safe. Information is logicallyand well presented. Having triple IRs and a double GPS system is very cool. The jet will land in frog choking rain, right on centerline, without my paltry help. The ability to run the emergency checklist directly from the displays makes life pretty easy as well.
All in all, I think the transition to a 121 environment and the myriad of regulations, OPSPECs, SOPs, etc. was an equally daunting task.
Glass cockpit transition? Was it tough? Kind of.
Paper regulation transition? Even on the laptop, those are still kicking my rear end!
