Total Time v Training

[Trojan1981]

This is an issue that has come up at work a few times lately. Insurance brokers and air safety consultants are trying to get their head around how to qantify the amount of risk clients are exposed to when chartering aircraft, and how that changes with certain variables.

Does having pilots with high total time reduce the risk substantially, or does the quality of training have a more marked effect?

Would an airline captain with thousands of RPT hours experience cruising long sectors be as safe or safer than an ex-military or Turbine GA pilot with less hours but more varied flying experience?

What are people's thoughts?

[717tech]

Well it seems that the mining companies simply want the hours. From memory it was difficult even trying to get approval to take a King Air into Moomba!

[Trojan1981]

Yeah, that is the traditional focus, but there seems to be a bit of a shift in opinion within the companies lately.

[Tankengine]

Define " quality training"!?:rolleyes:

Experience counts. Total hours don't tell the whole story but for insurance purposes covers their issues.
Hours minimums need to be set reasonably, ie; 5000hrs Command might be quite OK asking for Airline DECs but way too much for an operator asking for casual Baron Pilots.:bored:
My last GA company had no hours requirements for the singles but 500 hrs with IR for the C310 ( and one company required two Pilots):ok:

Once a reasonable hours limit is set then other factors can be added to recruitment requirements.:cool:

[Tee Emm]

Does having pilots with high total time reduce the risk substantially, or does the quality of training have a more marked effect?


Neither applies in real life. Take the case of the recent Lion Air crash at Bali where the captain stuffed up a go-around. In that particular case he had many thousands of flying hours in his log book yet his obvious indecision about going around until too late indicated incompetency in airmanship. Yet, no doubt his training marks were reasonably good otherwise he would not have been promoted to be in charge of a jet transport. So where did he go wrong in this instance? The answer might be because of a culture where loss of face dominates over sensible decision making. In other words it is about personal attitude as well as technical competency.

Rather like learning to drive a car. A new driver may pass the driving test with flying colours. Hopefully, as he gains new-found confidence with experience, he may become a more careful driver aware of the pitfalls of driving at unsafe speeds on a wet road or similar situations. On the other hand, he may go the other route and become a hoon - a slave to peer group pressure, and a real danger on the roads. It's all about personal attitude regardless of hours of experience in flying or driving.

[Trojan1981]

I'm predominantly talking turbo props and business jets here. By quality training I mean pilots with a pre-approved and audited training and endorsement system (often with the OEM overseas), an approved and regularly audited system of check and training (over an above those mandated by the regulator), a well documented 'just culture' policy and pilots with extra traning beyond the minimum mandated, such as aerobatics, LL and formation endorsements (that can provide experience in accurate and demanding flying).

[Lookleft]

The biggest variable is the attitude of the individual which would be very hard to quantify in a risk analysis. Simply saying a pilot has 5000 hours therefore is a "safe" pilot is too simplistic. A pilot who has has been trained by Oxford as part of an integrated course is not going to automatically be better than someone trained at an aero-club. Maybe you need to consider how long a pilot has been in a CAR217 organisation. No matter what your background is if you are in a CAR217 organisation the standards of the individuals tend to be a bit more predictable.

[Seagull V]

Old aviation saying - Nothing beats experience ... except recent experience.

[airwolf117]

I have actually seen some stats, breaking down hours into 250 hour blocks, all the way up to 2000 hours and above.

Interestingly enough, the stats show pretty evenly spread out accidents caused by engine / equpiment failure. Experience shows almost no factor in the rate that engine failures occur.

Accidents caused by decision making are a different story. As expected, a large chunk are in the group below 250 hours. Then it levels off to 500 and stays that way, Until 1000 where there is almost an equally big spike! (I've got 1000 hours, I obviously know what I am doing). There after, it levels off to the 500-1000 hour rate and stays that way throughout the rest of a pilots career.

[Jack Ranga]

Every flight is analysed by the safety department? Must be a farkin big safety department? How did that get past the beancounters?

[Centaurus]

After 4-5 years in a large airline with a good quality training organisation most pilots are of the same standard

Interesting observation, that. We found a similar correlation when training RAAF ab-initio pilots back in the Fifties using Tiger Moths, then Winjeels and Wirraways. Occasionally, a new recruit would arrive on course having flown anything from 100 hours to 500 hours previously in general aviation.

Regardless of previous flying experience, the student would undergo the full course same as those with no flying exxperience. At the end of the six month basic flying training phase when they all had 50 hours on Tiger Moths and some 80 hours on Wirraways, those that started with zero hours were generally the same standard of proficiency as the bloke that arrived with 500 hours.

By the time they graduated from the Advanced Flying Training course with 210 hours total (included instrument rating, aerobatics, low flying, night flying and dive-bombing and air to ground gunnery), the standards were the same - pretty good, otherwise they would not graduate

[Mach E Avelli]

It is not the hours you put in, but what you put in to the hours. 20,000 hours of SYD-LAX returns in a wide-body may look good on the resume' but how would a pilot who had ONLY that route experience cope with a short-notice flight in a corporate jet to some remote place in the mountains of South America or to a busy but poorly-controlled destination in China or somewhere where the only navigation aid was a NDB?

I would venture that a pilot who had but a mere 5000 hours of RFDS or similar flying - and was current in that type of flying - would be better equipped to take on the task described, provided of course that appropriate type training was given beforehand. Yet on paper, appears to have only 25% of the "experience" of my hypothetical long-haul pilot.
This is not intended to denigrate long-haul pilots, many of whom have met challenges during their careers. But maybe not very recently.

Insurers and advisors specifying pilot experience need to pay more attention to relevance to the task and recency, and fuss less about raw hours.

[601]

Would an airline captain with thousands of RPT hours experience cruising long sectors be as safe or safer

Especially when they round out at 50 feet in a 172:ok:

It is not the hours you put in, but what you put in to the hours. 20,000 hours of SYD-LAX returns in a wide-body may look good on the resume' but how would a pilot who had ONLY that route experience cope with a short-notice flight in a corporate jet to some remote place in the mountains of South America or to a busy but poorly-controlled destination in China or somewhere where the only navigation aid was a NDB?

I would venture that a pilot who had but a mere 5000 hours of RFDS or similar flying - and was current in that type of flying - would be better equipped to take on the task described, provided of course that appropriate type training was given beforehand. Yet on paper, appears to have only 25% of the "experience" of my hypothetical long-haul pilot.

Yeh - I could never figure the pay difference.

[Ex FSO GRIFFO]

Pick an 'old' pilot......not a 'bold' pilot....

There are NO 'old, bold' pilots.......

And, along with several colleagues of the same sort of age bracket, I am sure they would agree....
'WE' Could be the safest pilots in the argument....
:p:cool::p

[Trojan1981]

Some great posts here, from several different perspectives. :ok:

Some companies are seem to be beginning to question the old perception that raw hours (above a certain minimum level already mandated) has any improvement on safety outcomes. Obviously experience is valuable & easily quantified, but I guess other factors such as attitudes to safety, training and continuous improvement (both organisational and individual) are being equally weighted when assessing the risk of chartering with a particular operator.

I think the industry is going to see increasing amounts of (non-regulatory) scrutiny in the future; with OGP and BARS accredited operators already in high demand.