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Old 6th February 2012 | 15:58
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alf5071h
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Joined: Jul 2003
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From: An Island Province
SIA, you are probably asking the wrong question.
Even where a ‘required’ level of experience is defined (competency), there is no assurance that the skills and knowledge gained would be applied to a specific situation.
Most training is based on competency for a range of tasks – those anticipated in normal and non-normal operation according to the task expected to be encountered. This training needs to be associated with the skills to recognize situations and recall those skills and knowledge appropriate for those situations.
In the accidents quoted and many similar ones, the crew’s actions were most likely driven by the crew’s perception of the situation. If incorrect the initial actions may aggravate the situation; the aircraft did not ‘lose control’, the crew’s actions resulted in the manoeuver.
Perception (situation assessment) is therefore an essential skill, but exactly how this can be taught or checked as a competency is difficult to define as it depends on the context of each situation. The problem is that we are human.

Experience is a key feature; in general it does not depend on hours flown, more on the situations encountered and visualized. The most important aspect (skill) is to generate appropriate experiences in memory and associate them with specific situations or a range / class of situations.
Thus experience is partly about how individuals behave; so a general standard of competency would include how an individual behaves in a range of situations.
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