28 | Flight International | 10-16 April 2018 flightglobal.com

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

Special report

Don’t read

the manual

K

eeping airline pilot training rele-

vant while flightdeck technology

advances apace – and as airspace

management demands ever greater

flight trajectory accuracy – is a task that will

end only when airliners no longer have flight-

decks.

The end of flightdecks, most experts agree,

is in the distant future – even if the single-pi-

lot flightdeck is looking feasible within the

next decade or so, starting with freighters. For

there has long been, and still is, a conserva-

tive belief among many senior figures in the

industry that traditional pilot skills, and less

tangible qualities such as airmanship, are im-

mutable absolutes.

Certainly these basic qualities are still an

essential part of what makes a good pilot, but

aircraft have changed massively in recent

years, as has the airspace environment, the

means of navigation, and also that of traffic

separation and flow management. Expecta-

tions of safety standards are far higher than

they used to be, and young recruits to the pi-

loting profession have been raised and edu-

cated in a different era.

For three decades after the first digital avi-

onics and flight control systems began to be

introduced in the early 1980s, neither ab ini-

tio nor recurrent airline pilot training was

modified accordingly. As cockpit technology

continued its rapid advance, although acci-

dent rates were reducing, when they did

occur it was increasingly because the pilots

found themselves unable to cope when faced

with an unexpected occurrence that called for

independent decision-making.

Evidence that training philosophy and

technique has not prepared pilots well for to-

day’s “fourth-generation” cockpits has been

the elephant in the flight simulator for a long

time. The most obvious evidence is the dis-

tressingly regular incidence of loss of control

in flight (LOC-I) involving aircraft that were

Advances in airliners’ digital flightdeck technology has

outpaced evolution of pilot training, leaving the industry

scrambling for new ways to ensure aviators stay in control

DAVID LEARMOUNT LONDON actually controllable. As a statistic – given the

number of flights that take place globally –

LOC-I crashes do not represent a high risk,

but their regularity over the years since 2000

is unacceptable, and no-one at present can

claim confidently that they will not continue

to happen.

The very existence today of a European

Aviation Safety Agency advisory body called

the Airline Training Policy Group (ATPG) is

testimony to the fact that the ab initio pilot

training system frequently does not produce

the finished product airlines need, and that

more needs to be done to correct this.

The ATPG is made up of training experts

from the airlines, training industry, aircraft

manufacturers and EASA. They are address-

ing the fact that many pilots with commercial

pilot licences who present themselves for jobs

at airlines are just not good enough to fly to-

day’s jet airliners safely. EasyJet puts the fig-

ure at up to 90% of applicants, while adding

that graduates from consolidated training

courses are usually good.

But even when those pilots who do pass

the airlines’ acceptance tests get on to the line,

evidence from incidents, accidents and flight

data monitoring (FDM) suggests that recur-

rent training does not advance their knowl-

edge and skills the way it should.

At many airlines, recurrent training is a

misnomer, because it is still more about recur-

rent checking than training. And since the re-

liability of today’s aircraft is such that it de-

prives crews of experience of dealing with

real failures or anomalies, recurrent training

is needed more than ever to advance pilot

knowledge, resilience and confidence.

Capt Chris Warton, director of customer

training in Europe for Bombardier Business

Aircraft, says his company no longer reports

on recurrent training sessions simply as pass

or fail; it grades individual performance. The

old pass/fail system did not encourage pro-

gress, Warton says, nor allow progress to be

accurately monitored.

ATTITUDE PROBLEM

Ryanair’s head of training, Capt Andy O’Shea,

who is on the ATPG, summarises what is miss-

ing in pilot graduates from the ab initio system.

He says they lack – to a greater or lesser degree

• knowledge and understanding, flight path

Smart flightdecks did not

lower the workload, they

changed it. It became less

physical and more cerebral