tinpis
bet you would get the same outcome with lot of Captains if you made the FO dead.
Absolutely right, in fact the fast jet people I referred to were Direct Entry Captains.
swh
As training pilot your are there to training people, not to show everyone that you are the master of all. To build their skills up, to arm them with techniques on how to get through situations.
Sorry, you have missed the point and that is due to not enough info from me!
Under the JAA system, CRM is assessable on every recurrent check - so you can fail your check on CRM alone in Europe. We therefore have to assess CRM throughout training, and all our check and training staff hold a qualification for that.
Now in the case of the pilots I was referring to, we were presented, in the early stages of their training, with an "I can do anything, I'm an experienced SPIFR guy, I am more skilled than any of you and I can handle anything" attitude. That could not be allowed to continue, so we had to demonstrate to these guys that not only weren't they as all-powerful as they thought, but that their attitude had no place in a multi-crew airline environment.
The demonstration was purely to show them how easily they could lose the plot, not unlike the demonstration of how quickly a pilot, robbed of a horizon, will lose control.
The object of the exercise was not to belittle them, but to educate them.
The only other alternative was to chop them from the course as unsuitable for two-crew ops. We simply don't have the time, or the training budget, for large egos.
Yes, we were setting them up for one outcome, and that was realising that they couldn't do it all themselves. You sometimes have to apply a harsh lesson to get the rest of the stuff to stick - but the intention is that the trainee will always learn, move on, and become a better pilot. There is no room for the idea that you set a student up to fail
per se - that should never happen in this age.
They had, at that point, had several weeks of training in two-crew ops, emergency procedures, checklists, memory drills, etc etc. They had all the equipment they needed
if they chose to use it.
One of the interesting things is that very few of the "cocky" ones ever asked for help from ATC, or from their cabin crew - SOP in most airlines and something we train into them from day one.
prospector
I would like to suggest that you can fail anyone in a Sim ride if that is your intention.
Yes you can, and it is
never our intention.
I would like to suggest that people with the experience in operations that you mention would last longer before making embarrassing stuff ups than most.
Not at all. For a start, it is not about making "stuff ups", it is about handling a deteriorating situation in the safest possible manner, using ALL the resources available to you. The Standard Operating Procedures that we work to require a certain set of responses in these situations, and we found that pilots who had been trained to be self-reliant (such as SPIFR and ex-military fast jet pilots), lost the plot very quickly indeed. The ones who knew how to act as part of a crew, would usually extend the scenario a lot longer.
For example in the case of one guy - a 20-year fast jet pilot who had flown Lightnings, Phantoms and Tornados in the RAF - once he was "single pilot" with a sick F/O, he went quiet. He never asked for help from ATC or his cabin crew, and just kept trying to "handle" a deteriorating situation. In the end it overwhelmed him. His fellow trainees called Mayday, had the cabin crew read the checklists, asked for medical advice from the "ground" for the sick F/O, and so on. In fact, I was the busiest guy in the simulator, trying to be ATC, ATIS, company ops etc all at the same time. We used to include a cabin crew member in all our sim checks, so our trainee had access to a real one if they wanted.
Is it not a fact that the failure rate of the major equipment in modern aircraft is so low that one can complete a career without one significant failure.
It is the case, but you can
never repeat
never train pilots with that as a guiding principle. You have to ensure that they are always ready for the worst possible combination of failures, which is what six-monthly airline recurrent training is all about (notice I didn't use the term "checking").
Actually, looking at what I have just written, there is point here about the difference between SPIFR and multi-crew airline ops - which is that your SPIFR guy has virtually no access to this level or intensity of training. Another reason SPIFR has a bad safety record.
Is this not the reason that it is now common practice to have first officers commence on line operations in jet aircraft with some 250 hours total.
It isn't common practice in this part of the world! Even in countries where it is - and my employer did it - the biggest advantage to it is that you get a blank piece of canvas - you don't have to spend a lot of time and money getting people to un-learn old habits!
30 or 40 years back this would have been unheard of
No, it wasn't - I have met many people over my career who have found themselves in an airline cockpit with 250-300 hours. They taught me a lot when I was a First Officer. Most of them are retired now. They used to have great stories.