Good Airmenship is based on three pillars. Assessment (talent, motivation), Training (basic training and ongoing further development) and Experience (exposure, analysis).
Discussions like on here often fall too short. It is not an absolute matter of time on wide-bodies, but it counts towards the two last pillars. The same applies to the turbo-prop, or regionally limited Loco guys …. and so on.
The underlying problem is best described with the Swiss cheese model. Any hole is basically one too many, but there will always be some. Our intent should be to eliminate as many as possible.
In today’s aviation environment elimination of such holes is however threatened by the incredible expansion of number of aircraft and aviators and the decay of final profit for operators brought on by deregulation, unfair competition and lowering of standards to satisfy an artificially boosted demand by overly cheap prices. Sort of a vicious circle.
Concerning our topic, it is the lowering of standards that matters. Obviously the older farts (count me in) are the witnesses of this erosion. Airline owners, managers and their hollow beancounter and HR stooges are all much newer to the industry and never take long to fail and get replaced by even more obedient henchmen (or get back as walking dead archaic like TCAS). Our observations and warnings are cried down, because it goes against short term interests of greedy owners and fast career wishful dreams of wannabee pilots. We are called arrogant and worse, mainly to be quickly silenced. Nobody likes messengers like that.
To have no jet experience, no wide-body or no LH experience is no disqualification, everyone passed through this stage. To counter these holes there is training and exposure. Both mean a lot of money and time, two things airlines hate and logically try to avoid. Regulators should be the counterbalance, but we witness a rampant corruption in that respect, worldwide. We more and more witness jumping training and experience steps at an alarming rate (ab-initio right onto WB, MCC and quota-bound assessments i.e. “Emiratisation”). This means leaving some holes unfilled, against all aviation mantras.
To counter this threat, the industry handily presents all kind of further automation and the operators greedily jump on it. It not only leaves these holes unfilled, it even creates new holes (children of the magenta and dependence on automation). The remedy is quickly found and called “revert to basics”, but it is as hollow as the claim to always put safety first. Because the “basics” are no longer here! Today’s new pilots do not have all essential basics, they never got the chance to acquire them. The bad part is that they don’t even know that they don’t have them, just as their new instructors don’t! They are of the same breed.
We might no longer be able to go back and train all the modern aviators to these basics. What has to be acknowledged in all honesty though (by everyone, the new pilots, managers and especially the regulators), is that they are really missing them and try to form the training syllabi in function of this evidence. This to mitigate the deficiencies. Expansion will suffer a little bit, but we have to shape assessment and training to accommodate that trend. After that we have to shape rostering as to give as much exposure and experience as possible. This is more costly and complicated, but the way pilots are thrown into new environment without some guidance is frightening.
This is not meant to belittle any fellow pilot. If they had passed the same honest assessment, the same good basic training and time to get exposure and experience, they would be as proficient as the old and arrogant farts …..
I however shudder almost every week when I read the latest incident reports. It seems as if the reporters and the concerned postholders can no longer see the forest for the trees. I sometimes try to put some report back in time and just imagine the reaction of my first CP or TRE to that.
I guess I wouldn’t have survived such daffiness.