Flight International - 10 April 2018

ightglobal.com 10-16 April 2018 | Flight International | 29

TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT

Digital technology

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management skills, crew resource manage-
ment ability, and what he calls “maturity and
attitude”. The ATPG’s answer to the deficit is
effectively a course extension to the commer-
cial pilot licence/instrument rating training
course, adding high quality multi-crew co-op-
eration (MCC) and jet orientation courses
(JOC). Unlike off-the-peg MCC/JOC, this in-
cludes simulator instruction in the style of
line-oriented flight training, plus advanced
knowledge consolidation ground-school. The
result is a course dubbed the Airline Pilot Cer-
tificate Course, which Ryanair requires all of
its own new recruits to go through.
This is an admission that the present sys-
tem, as designed, does not work well enough

for airlines which expect pilots with licences

to arrive on the line completely trained.

Although improving the effectiveness of

pilot ab initio and recurrent training has been

much discussed at forums such as the Royal

Aeronautical Society’s annual International

Flight Crew Training Conference (IFCTC)

over the past decade, until recently the focus

has continued to be directed at making “better

pilots” in the traditional sense, and on react-

ing to the kind of accidents that continue to

happen, rather than on preparing pilots to be

experts in understanding and manipulating

the high-technology cockpit tools with which

they manage flights today.

But this year’s conference (25-26 Septem-

ber) plans to home in on the human interface

with technology, and on competency-based

training. As national aviation authorities

move towards “performance-based regula-

tion” rather than the traditional prescriptive

kind of rulemaking, it will also be taking a

look at training quality oversight.

Even aircraft with fourth-generation highly

automated flightdecks need pilots with tradi-

tional skills because, as the notorious exam-

ple of Air France flight 447 (LOC-I over the

South Atlantic in June 2009) demonstrated,

the automation is programmed to trip out if

the system recognises it is receiving faulty

sensor data. And that will, inevitably, contin-

ue to happen from time to time.

Airbus

With the A350, Airbus introduced

state-of-the-art digital flightdeck and

a bold new concept of type-rating