Originally Posted by
CaptainMongo
Fine, then pilots should demand appropriate, effective, and recurrent circling training.
A company like Ryanair effectively adds circling training on regular basis as far as I know (maybe Ryanair pilots can confirm). When I was on an intercontinental network, we did circling training as some of our alternates had nothing but circling to get in. Even though we were flying ETOPS flights (Kangerlussuaq comes to my mind) it's wasn't a result of solely ETOPS alternates. We did a full emergency circle to land into Tabriz in the simulator and that worked out fine... with all the technology the aircraft provided us. And that's the goal of training I guess.
And I think that to me is the most important question: do we need it? On the network I fly currently on, I don't see the need for circling. From a "threat" perspective I think the idea of "it's a threat" is more safe than training hard and making pilots believe it becomes another standard thing. Because it is not the same safety level, it is pretty old school - based on visual clues. There are other issues to tackle in training. The goal of our job is to fly from A to B in the safest/economical best possible way.
So if operations need it, yes, train, give pilots the opportunity on a regular basis. If operations don't need it... I would avoid the simulator hassle. Because it could be very enlightning yes, but also leading to a lot of avoidable confusion and discussions.