30 | Flight International | 10-16 April 2018 flightglobal.com
TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT
Special report
So, for more than two decades now, the
commercial air transport industry has been
confronted with a dilemma regarding pilot
training policy, but it seems the changes
needed are still under development.
The advent of the digital flightdeck brought
with it improved avionics capability and reli-
ability at the same time as higher design and
engineering standards reduced equipment
failure rates for airframe and engine hard-
ware. The result was that accident figures re-
duced significantly.
Meanwhile, in the early days of digital
cockpits, the new smart flightdeck avionics
were marketed as lowering pilots’ workload.
In fact they did not lower the workload, they
simply changed its nature. It became less
physical and more cerebral. It demanded
knowledge of the sophisticated flight manage-
ment equipment and its capabilities, but it
did not take away the need for crew planning
and decision-making, and pilots still needed
to exercise trajectory management and moni-
toring skills.
Nevertheless, the combination of reduced
serious accident statistics and the illusion of
lower pilot workloads provided the airlines
with what they saw as an opportunity to trim
pilot training cost.
As it became clear that LOC-I was here to
stay, one solution to it was seen as being
upset recovery training. Over the years, how-
ever, Airbus argued long and hard that it was
better to train pilots to prevent upsets than to
recover from them. Buried in the Airbus ar-
gument is the belief that the shortcomings in
skills and knowledge that allowed licensed
pilots to get the aircraft into an upset were
the real problem, not their failure to recover
from a situation they had played their part
in creating.
As the entry into service of the Airbus
A350 was approaching, the manufacturer’s
training policy experts engaged in a bold
programme of rethinking the way pilots
were prepared for the state-of-the-art digital
flightdeck on a new aircraft type. Airbus
called the new approach “learning by dis-
covery”, or learning by doing. Boeing has
adopted a similar approach and calls it “ac-
tive learning”.
This starts with the concept that nobody
nowadays reads a manual before operating a
new tablet, computer or smartphone. Theyknow what the device is designed to do, and
what they want to do with it, so they switch it
on and experiment to discover how this par-
ticular product can deliver the results
they want.JUST FLY IT
According to the new Airbus training philos-
ophy, the crew are presented with a full-flight
simulator for the aircraft on which they are
going to do their type-rating course, and told
to “fly” it. After all, the aircraft, however ad-
vanced, is an aircraft like any other, and it
will fly like any other. The pilots are told they
can work out for themselves how to start it,
taxi it, line up and take-off, but they are not
allowed to engage the autopilot or flight direc-
tor. They are encouraged to find out how it
behaves in standard flight scenarios, and fi-
nally they land. This exercise also includes
“learning by failing”, by being permitted to
find out what does not work; this approach is
the diametric opposite of the “don’t touch
any thing until you have learned all about
it” attitude.
The psychology of this approach is sound.
The rules of aerodynamics have not been al-Ryanair sees shortcomings ranging from basic skills to attitude, while EasyJet reckons 90% of applicants are not ready to fly a modern airliner
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