Flight International - January 13, 2015

32 | Flight International | 13-19 January 2015 flightglobal.com

AIRLINE SAFETY

level, on the grounds that pilots remain essential

components of a safely operated airliner.

ICAO, IATA, IFALPA, RAeS and ICCAIA to-

gether look like a formidable set of big guns to

train on what is, ostensibly, a simple problem:

to modernise and harmonise pilot training. The

IPTC’s stated mandate is this: “To improve the

safety, quality and efficiency of commercial avi-

ation by developing international agreement on

a common set of pilot training, instruction and

evaluation standards and processes.”

Meanwhile a lot of work had already been

done through ICAO to determine what mod-

ern pilot training should look like. One of sev-

eral results was the development of the com-

petency-based training system that leads to

the multi-crew pilot licence (MPL).

What has transpired, however, is that the

industry and NAAs have proved to have such

deeply-embedded inertia, prejudice and re-

DAVID LEARMOUNT LONDON

The industry needs to make a radical shift in pilot training, to get flightcrews safely

in tune with modern airliner technology, but the authorities are dragging their feet

NO SECOND CHANCE

The IPTC was formed to bring together several groups working to modernise flightcrew education

Rex Features

A

irlines and the world’s aviation au-
thorities have been warned that if they
miss the opportunity to modernise
pilot training now, when the Interna-
tional Pilot Training Consortium (IPTC) and
ICAO have finished preparing the ground for
change, they may be stuck with 1950s-based
training regulations for the foreseeable future.
The industry has acknowledged that airline
pilot training desperately needs updating for the
modern piloting task, but national aviation au-
thorities (NAA) are doing nothing to enable it.
In September 2013, a US Federal Aviation
Administration-led committee published a
study showing that pilot training needs radical
change if it is to prepare aviators for the specific
task of flying the latest generation of complex,
highly automated modern airliners safely.
In parallel, a cross-organisational expert
group called the IPTC was working to define
the changes in pilot training philosophy that
would deliver the goods.
Based on operational incident and accident
data, the FAA-led study established that the fly-
ing task and navigational environment has
evolved with advancing technology, but train-
ing for the task has not evolved at all, so safety
was suffering. It concluded that pilots are some-
times proving unprepared for today’s flightdeck
and air traffic management environments.

CORPORATE ACTION
Since this is a recognised global phenomenon,
several years ago, the UK-based Royal Aeronau-
tical Society drew up a partnership with two
other international industry bodies to identify
what action was needed. Overseen by ICAO, the
RAeS joined forces with IATA and the Interna-
tional Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associa-
tions and set up the IPTC. More recently, manu-
facturing industry body the International
Coordinating Council of Aerospace Industries
Associations (ICCAIA) has also joined the IPTC.
Before the formation of the IPTC, each of
these bodies was working individually on what
might be done to correct the mismatch between
traditionally trained pilots and state-of-the-art
flightdecks. The automation itself was not reck-
oned to be the problem – it was making aero-
planes safer and more efficient. So the correc-
tion, according to logic, had to be at piloting

“We will publish a report.

Please do not read that report

and do nothing about it”

PETER BARRETT

Outgoing executive chairman, IPTC

sistance to change that broad-based action

still seems impossibly distant.

This has become so clear that, at the end of

the 2014 RAeS International Flight Crew

Training Conference (IFCTC) at its London

headquarters in September, the IPTC’s outgo-

ing executive chairman Peter Barrett effective-

ly asked the participants whether they want-

ed to renew the consortium’s researching and

campaigning mandate, or just give up.

As it happened, the conference renewed the

IPTC’s mandate, but the work is still completely

unfunded and continues to be carried out vol-

untarily by industry people with busy day jobs.

IPTC has worked hard with ICAO to create a

series of updated training standards, but the re-

sulting published ICAO standards and recom-

mended practices (SARPs) on pilot training are

being comprehensively ignored in almost all

the organisation’s 192 signatory states. Speak-

ing at the RAeS IFCTC, the director of ICAO’s

air navigation bureau Nancy Graham said the

increased frequency of fatal accidents resulting

from loss of control in flight (LOC-I) is a major

focus for the organisation, which it believes is

one result of traditional pilot training being

mismatched with the modern flying task.