Originally Posted by
SASless
As the Third Party has to satisfy the Customer....so long as the Customer sets a Standard that must be met....The Third Party has no axe to grind and has no need to play favorites.
A true Third Party impartial evaluation of both the Pilots and the Operational Procedures cannot hurt. Sometimes an outside look is beneficial.
Problem is SAS, the customer is the beancounter who lets the contract, not operations. They also have nothing vested in how he performs later, or even if he conforms to the overall company culture.
I myself have yet to see any civil 3rd party training that comes even close to the level of auditing and data acquisition you are talking about.
Originally Posted by 26500lbs
The main difference is that in the military environment you have time to train in the aircraft and a large amount of budgeted training sorties. Here the Squadron QHI can have his input on the process and feed down the directives from his boss. That does not exist in the offshore world. There are no dedicated aircraft training sorties available after the initial aircraft famil following the type rating.
If an operator were to wholeheartedly embrace third party training they must be able to address the shortfalls. I think the way it is done in the military is an excellent example of how it can work. The key is the two systems must work closely together and be on the same team. An operator cannot just let go of the ropes and say goodbye to training - “third party provider - you have control”.
Exactly!
Originally Posted by Double Bogey
My previous and current job gives me oversight of a lot of Operators procedures and checklists. All I have seen do not formally address how the Pilot Flying intends to deploy the automatics in sufficient detail to correlate the contingencies when a Mixed Mode approach is flown. It is rather implied by a very simplistic statement like "This will be a 3 Axis coupled ILS etc."
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So Overthawk, Instead of slamming the door in his face lets hear if anyone is currently briefing in such detail that there is no doubt, at the start of the approach, the clear division of duties between the AP and the Crew??
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However, please be reassured that to 99.9% of offshore crews on this forum you are "Passengers". Anyone referring to our Passengers as SLF is a stone cold moron and most likely not an Offshore Pilot. Even in jest it is disgusting to me given the nature of the human tragedies that these events actually represent.
SLF is something I first heard on PPRuNe. Agreed!
From my own experience, the SOP's cover a lot of items that shouldn't need to be rebriefed in the aircraft. The checklist covers what is needed very well as long as the SOP's are well understood. Over the years I have found that some pilots, for various reasons, aren't completely aware of every SOP and so confusion results.
An example from my own past: A few years ago, I briefed an ILS to minimum weather. In the brief I stated that this would be a Pilot Monitored Approach (well defined in the SOP's) and asked if there were any questions when the brief was done. There were none. At DH,
he asks me, "do you have visual?"! After the missed we had a discussion to clarify things and when I was satisfied we were ready we completed the ILS successfully.
In the debrief it came to light that 1) as an experienced new hire he didn't think that the IFR SOP would have very much new [definitions of PMA vs PFA?] to show him so he gave it scant attention in his studying (and training) and 2) had never done an approach to real minimums outside of the sim.