Originally Posted by
A320LGW
The bit about the partner complaining about their progress being held back due to the pilot in question struck a chord with me, I have had this exact same experience. I complained and was told there was nothing that could be done (my partner was literally landing nosewheel into the grass and we were spending whole sessions repositioning at 3 mile finals). It's incredible what can be accepted.
Every U.S. training department seems to have a small group of 'frequent fliers' who repeatedly bust their rides but somehow get passed eventually. I got paired with one of those folks years ago as an FO on a reserve callout for a sim session. She was under some special monitoring by the feds (double secret probation) so an FAA guy was observing on the sim jumpseat.
'Just do your job and don't worry.' the instructor briefed me when I arrived at the training building. It was back in the days where almost every engine failure on takeoff in the sim was the classic V1 cut. As expected, she went off the side of the runway, then cartwheeled and next rolled inverted on the first three tries. She finally got a very wobbly climb out and I prompted her slightly on the gear and flaps. The maneuver was deemed complete. I did some approaches, a V1 cut and a reject and her PNF stuff was fine. The session was complete, they thanked me for the sim support and said I didn't need to stick around for the debrief.
A couple of decades later I flew a trip with another FO who had been recently paired with the same captain for AQP training. She had her customary performance issues and busted the ride as usual. However, this time with crew concept, the FO was busted as well for not taking command of the sim when she couldn't keep it upright.
The pilot flying in the UPS 1394 BHM A306 crash had a similar training history revealed in the docket documents. He took several attempts to upgrade to captain, some documented and perhaps some not according to the 'incomplete' training records. He had been hired by UPS after flunking out of initial training at TWA.
The FedEx 647 crash at MEM and the FedEx MEM 705 hijacking uncovered similar cases of pilots with unusually bad training and employment records hired to fly large freighters.
Originally Posted by
Check Airman
Airbubba
I'll pose the same question to you as Contact Approach and A320LGW . Was the Colgan Dash 8 Captain also a diversity hire?
Nope and I doubt that he would have been hired at Atlas, UPS or FedEx with his weak training record.