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IS PILOT TRAINING IN A SPIRAL?

With increased automation in aircraft cockpits, pilot
training needs to focus on flying ability

 Geoffrey Thomas

he world’s airlines need to rethink pilot training if the beyond their ability to manage. “Beyond the
upward trend of avoidable loss of control accidents are to ability of the average modern human pilot,”
T be reduced according to an updated report “Airline Pilot questions Capt. Leahy. He adds that these
Training – Time to Revisit the Basics” from the Flight Ops Group accident reports often conclude that the focus
of the RAeS. Authored by former Ryanair chief of safety Captain should be on these external factors rather
John Leahy FRAeS and Captain Robert Scott FRAeS and a small than improving pilot training to deal with
team from the Flight Ops Group the report’s (Leahy et al) primary them.”
argument is that the quality and duration of pilot training could
be on an unrecoverable downward trajectory. And that warning
comes as the US FAA recommends that airlines should allow These effects, Startle, Surprise, Somatogravic
pilots to hand-fly during normal operations whenever possible. Illusion (the illusion of being in a nose-up atti-
tude) and other distractions do of course exist,
and some aircraft do have systems that could
“The rationale [of the report] is that too many recent accidents, be better designed adds Capt. Leahy. “These
fatal hull losses and Loss of Control (LOC-I) events could be aircraft will be with us for decades to come.
attributed, at least in part, to a lack of flying ability. Flying abil- It should be imperative then to employ well-
ity in the sense of manual flight skills and Instrument Flying (IF) trained instrument-rated IFR pilots able to
skills,” Capt. Leahy told Asian Airlines and Aerospace. “We are overcome such issues and recover not only
concerned where official final accident reports fail to allocate their ability to think and act but to maintain
cause to what were clearly human-factors failings. These reports control of the aircraft even after multiple fail-
would sometimes discover and remark upon the human failing ures,” warns Capt. Leahy. He points to QF32,
but then move on to cite such effects as startle, surprise and/ the Qantas A380 which suffered an engine
or illusions as the primary cause of the event. Or cite the failure explosion on take-off from Singapore in
of some technical system that should have been well within the 2011 as perfect example. “It suffered dozens
capability of properly trained pilots. In other words, some reports (54) of failures yet was landed safely by its
suggest that the pilots were “caught out” by factors that were well-trained crew.” The Australian Transport

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