Originally Posted by
Uplinker
I cannot see their worth for selecting pilots, since the tests bear no relation to the flying task.
They test for intelligence, which is fair enough, airlines or aircraft operators do not want to employ dim people. A dim person could have good hand-eye coordination, but a pilot needs also to have intelligence to deal with all the peripheral tasks outside actually flying a plane: fuelling and loading calculations, delay management, team work, knowledge of limitations, procedures, rules and regulations etc.
But when they put very tight time limits on the tests, I am pretty sure that they are being used as a proxy for age. As we get older, our thought processes slow down because, like a computer whose hard disk is nearly full, our thought processing involves going through more memory content than when one is younger.
Age discrimination is illegal in most countries, so I think airlines develop ways of selecting the younger candidates, and I think they do this through tightly timed tests. At one airline, we had to do 25 or so maths questions in 12 minutes, and a similar tight restriction on a verbal comprehension test. One important thing pilots are taught is that in an emergency don't do anything quickly; sit on your hands, assess all the information carefully. DODAR etc.
The only things pilots need to do quickly is get the rudder in to keep straight on the runway during an engine failure; operate the flight controls when landing in a turbulent crosswind, or do an RTO. These are all physical actions, involving hand-eye coordination, not answering maths or verbal questions, or whether you like poetry or guns.
So to have to pass time-limited computer based puzzles and tests cannot be anything to do with pilot ability. They are arguably fair enough for newbies applying for their first jobs, but any pilot with decent experience has proved their psychometric ability already.
Funniest **** I’ve read in a while. Thankfully it appears that psychometric testing does work, because it filters out the crowd of “I can fly a 389ft circuit using only my superior skills and I don’t need maths” pilots who can’t accept that through human factors research, we are discovering that there’s a lot more to being a pilot than plonking it down without waking row 4.
If you can’t pass them, maybe you need to accept that you may be one of the type they’re not looking for.