It is interesting to ponder one of the themes in Perky's offering of how the two year process was kicked off, with the airline's position being ...
The airlines wanted simplified procedures which were common to all aircraft in their fleets and which were easy to teach and easily reproducible. This is understandable because you are all interested in having a standard product at the end of your training programmes.
I am reminded of an old adage: complex problems frequently have offered simple, and wrong, solutions.
Granted, the two year process hopefully hammered out most of the wrongness, but you can see a trace of dangerous group think that needed addressing from the outset. And the problem is so noted ...
Where we differed was in our conviction that there was no such thing as a standard upset and our reluctance to endorse simplified procedures for recovery from an upset. We wanted a general knowledge based approach, as opposed to a rule based one. For this, after proposing some initial actions, we talk about “additional techniques which may be tried”. This obviously is more difficult to teach. ...........
What are computers? Rule based machines.
That's a source of tension, and friction, that isn't going to go away anytime soon. I concur with the knowledge based approach, and have long been an advocate
of both education and training.
Might have made a lousy executive.
That said, techniques can be taught, but the opportunity and structure (to keep things standardized) has to be there.
By the way, a few years back (Within the past ten years) I ran into a USAF field grade officer who was not novice at training. He'd flown various planes, and had instructed in T-38's, and in less awesome training aircraft. His attitude was, for military pilots nowadays ... "We don't need to teach them stalls and spins anymore, we need to teach them how to avoid stalls and spins."
(Mind you, when he and I were both young'ns, we'd both been taught both) He and I disagreed, as I took the position that one needs to teach both. (Whoever wants a bit of extra credit can look up the T-6A Texan II, and see if it spins or stalls ...
)
It appears that the "corporate front office bean counter" attitude about training can infiltrate into the most unexpected places ...