ightglobal.com 10-16 April 2018 | Flight International | 31
TRAINING & DEVELOPMENT
Digital technologytered just because this is a state of the art fly-
by-wire machine. And after a couple of practi-
cal sessions flying the simulator, the
ground-school classes will feel more relevant
to the pilots, and the more traditional process
of learning details about the new type
can begin.
Pilots need to be re-introduced to the fact
that their complex machine, with all its auto-
mation, is just an aeroplane, and it still flies
like one. If a pilot loses sight of this basic fact,
the traditional “get out of trouble” mantra that
tells pilots to “aviate, navigate, and communi-
cate – in that order” does not mean very
much. These reminders need to be provided
not only when they begin their type-rating
training but also in their recurrent training.
Jacqui Suren, head of regulation and train-
ing development at L3 Commercial Training
Solutions, talks of new teaching/learning pro-
cesses using virtual reality and “gamification”
of the learning process, which she says relates
ground-school more closely to flying.
Regulators such as the US Federal Aviation
Administration and EASA have always
known that innovation brings risk as well as
reward, especially during the introduction of
new equipment or capabilities, but they also
acknowledge that technical advances tend to
bring net benefits. Modern flight instrument
and navigation displays may have a graphic
clarity that improves pilot situational aware-
ness, but the flight management computers,
with their multiple capabilities, have also in-
troduced the potential for mode confusion,
and flight management systems (FMS) can
take the pilot out of the cognitive loop by
being so accurate and reliable that his/her
critical faculties become comatose.
Training changes – such as evidence- and
competency-based training – designed to cor-
rect this situation, have only begun to be
adopted in the past three years or so, but at
least the process is beginning in some parts of
the air transport industry. There is, however,
a long way to go, and technology will still
keep advancing, so the training goalposts will
keep moving and the new instructional meth-
odologies have to have flexibility built-in.
The principal change that is making recur-
rent training more relevant now is the gradual
adoption of evidence-based training (EBT).
Data provides the evidence of what pilots are
getting wrong – or not getting quite right –
whether through individual aircraft FDM, or
“big data” assembled by organisations such as
the International Air Transport Association.
The possession of this evidence enables air-
lines to identify where their training challeng-
es lie as an operator, but also enables a fully
capable in-house training department to tailor
training to individual pilot needs.
In Europe, EBT will be fully implemented
as policy in early 2019 by EASA. The agen-
cy’s executive director, Patrick Ky, observes
that the capacity of this carefully mined data
to maximise the effectiveness of an EBT ses-
sion works best when airlines carry out their
training in-house. This is so, he says, because
the specific lessons are naturally brought to-
gether with the airline’s own standard operat-
ing procedures.
Achieving this with the use of third party
training organisations is much more difficult,
he points out, suggesting that the full advan-
tage that EBT should be able to deliver can
only be provided by third party trainers if
they work extremely closely with the airline.
Global third party training provider CAE
commented at the 2017 IFCTC that “airline-
focussed” flight training provision is increas-
ing as a proportion of the market, and generic
third party training is reducing. CAE points
out that an airline can provide a third-party
training supplier with FDM data so as to tailor
the training to the airline’s needs.STAYING AHEAD
Ky insists that syllabus-based or generic
training is not adequate for the task when
flightdeck technology is advancing fast, and
when some risks are declining and others are
increasing. Pilot training now, he says, has to
be aimed at coping with identified risks, and
providing pilots with the knowledge and
skills to use cockpit technology to its best ad-
vantage. The old adage that the crew should
always be ahead of the aircraft contains the
implication that today’s pilots must now be
ahead of the FMS.
Asked whether, in these days of perfor-
mance-based oversight, close training stand-ards inspection by regulators still needs to be
exercised, Ky observes that airlines are al-
ways looking for training economies, and if
they start cutting corners “it immediately
shows”. That sounds like a “yes”.
Finally, Dr Georgina Fletcher, principal
consultant at analyst Frazer Nash, was given
the task of taking a look at training systems
from a UK perspective and making recom-
mendations to ensure the maintenance of
quality pilot training. She presented her find-
ings at the 2017 IFCTC, and recommended
that training quality would benefit if all parts
of the industry were to take “collective own-
ership” of the task.
That means the end-user – the airlines –
should work closely with the Civil Aviation
Authority, flight training organisations, edu-
cational establishments and with what is now
the Department for Innovation, Universities
and Skills. There should, Fletcher says, be a
training needs analysis, and training policy
should be based on its findings.
Unfortunately, airline representation was
thin on the ground at the 2017 IFCTC, which
tends to validate Fletcher’s recommendation.
Now that EBT is to be formally implement-
ed, and because there is a growing awareness
of the need to train and improve crews in
simulator sessions rather than just checking,
recurrent training has the potential to address
skill needs far better than it has been doing.
The product of ab initio flight training or-
ganisations, however, remains hugely varia-
ble and even the top quality still seems to fall
short of expectations. But that problem can
only be solved if the airlines will invest
in improvement. ■Sipa Press/REX/Shutterstock
Loss of Air France flight 447 showed that cockpit automation has not banished LOC-I risk