We are.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
Pilots only get (and stay) where they are after stringent selection, training and repeated checking. They are a small part of the community.
According to
wikipedia, there are 290,000 airline pilots worldwide.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
That doesn’t mean they have to be especially clever or elite - but just ideal people for their job. Other people are ideally suited to other professions, at which many pilots may fail.
Yes, that's why they are pilots.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
A professional pilot should be well up on your scale - if that scale applies to flying skills/aptitude as applied to the general community. The bad ones get found out with very few exceptions.
This paragraphs seems to indicate either:
a) lack of understanding of basic statistics / probability
First of all, the picture above is not a scale, it's a distribution where 100 represents the average pilot. There will always, always be pilots who are below average and pilots who are above average. The question is, how below average is the worse commercial pilot currently flying (and how good is the best one on the opposite side).
The only thing that could be up to debate is weather the standard deviation is small (blue graph) and all pilots are almost equally good in skills, or is it (in the extreme) like orange graph and some pilots are way worse than the average pilot.
I don't have the data to support either of the cases. I hope we are closer to the blue graph, but... are we?
Interestingly, Boeing - by blaming the pilots for recent crashes - is saying that there is a wide gap between average and sub-average pilots AND that their airplanes are only meant for average skilled pilots, which in essence means, Boeing is saying the current certification is to permissive (you can't accept the current pilot certification as acceptable AND blame the pilots, it's a contradiction).
b) all pilots are exactly equal
You need to believe that all pilots are exactly the same if you are saying there is no distribution. Oh, I hear you, you are thinking "but that's not what I said, what I said is that the bad ones are filtered out".
Then we are back to a). Because, if you have pilots who have skills 89,93,100,101,110, the average is 98.6. You filter out the bad ones and end up with 93,100,101,110. Now your average is 101, but that is not above average, that's just the new average.
Now the pilot with skill of 100 is below average. By pruning the bad ones you are improving the average, but the
distribution is still there
There is another phenomena, if the airplane manufacturers are truly targeting "average" pilot, and that average goes up, the number of pilots who can handle the plane properly
will decrease, simply because there are just so many pilots who are at or above average, which is a problem.
According to wiki quoted above, Boeing expects 790,000 new pilots in 20 years from 2018. What will their skills be compared to the current population, where we still have pilots who are not "children of magenta"? Where will the average move in the next 20 years with so many fresh pilots AND old pilots retireing? My bet is, it's going to go down cosiderably, while the airplane manufacturers are building planes for just the best of them. If that is the case, perhaps MCAS (hidden system which below average but certified pilots could not handle) is just showing us the future where we are going.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
A doctor or an architect doesn’t go through this process - has to prove him(her)self to stay in business in other ways...
Everybody goes through the process, including (or especially) doctors. But yes, some fields have wider variations that others.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
So an aircraft designer has the right to expect a certain level of skill.
I would argue they need to support
any pilot with a valid license. If they think licensed pilots are not good enough for their machines, we have a big, big problem.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
I seem to remember in my manual, that Boeing were pretty clear on the skill tests their pilots were expected to pass. That needs to be borne in mind when using terms like “average”.
Boeing can only dictate the minimum. Average is outside of their control. That said, do they specify that "a pilot should at minimum be able to identify a problem with an undocumented system, while flying close to the ground at high speed with stick shaker, no indication that AoA diasagree, and trim behaving like it's just the opposite of STS but not quite runaway stab trim". Do they? No really, do they? We are talking about a minimum skill required here.
Originally Posted by
bill fly
On the other hand, a professional pilot has the right to expect a level of skill from the manufacturer. This includes honest self criticism such as is required of a professional pilot.
B
Challenger didn't happen due to engineering skill problem. On the contrary, engineering told the managers exactly what the risk was. These problems are created by greed.