Originally Posted by
heliski22
HC,
Yes, I do understand.
You're right, of course, with new people after such an intensive start-up process. Perhaps the scenario I outlined while trying to keep the post short wasn't the best example.
I've been in company where more senior people, well established on Type, have been complaining about the idea of going straight into Check mode after 6 months on the line without any or very little preparation. I had the impression at the time that one of the problems giving rise to the situation was a cut-back in the number of Sim hours available for each training interval.
I've been labouring, perhaps naively, under the idea that the objective of Training/Checking was to ensure standards of proficiency are being maintained and, where there is evidence of some degradation in performance, to provide an opportunity to recover the ground lost rather than it becoming a check-driven, livelihood-threatening moment.
Am I wrong to think that the level of proficiency in certain areas, emergencies which are practiced/trained only in the Sim being one, would follow a slight downward trend over time?
There is of course a legal requirement for ground and refresher training. The requirement is annual, though Bristow does it every 6 months. In the Bristow training regime this is typically day 1 of a 3 day trainer. Mostly classroom but also a 2 hr sim trip, usually for night offshore recency.
Days 2 and 3 are 2x2hr sim each. Normally roughly half testing and half training. So that's effectively 2 days training and 1 days testing every 6 months.
As I posted earlier, its inappropriate to coach prior to testing. I very much doubt our passengers would be too pleased to know that our pilots may not be able to cope with emergencies etc unless they had been coached in the sim the day before.
We train to proficiency plus a bit, thus allowing for the inevitable decline over the following 6 months so that they should still meet the minimum standard at 5.9 months.
In a large fleet, there will be some good, mostly average, and a few weak pilots. Unfortunately as I keep saying, we cannot and should not coach the weak ones into just being able to pass their check following extensive coaching. That inevitably means that a few weeks later they will be below the standard. This is certainly not fair to our passengers, our other fellow pilots etc.
In such cases, the correct course of action is to take the pilot off line duties (aka fail their check) and give them some retraining, followed by retesting. If this has to happen over consecutive checks, there is something wrong and it could be that the pilot lacks the ability to operate in his/her current role, and might for example be appropriate to regrade them as copilot for a while, fly them with a Line Trainer etc.
One thing I have noticed is a massive difference between individuals in terms of the amount of preparation they do before checks. Some arrive keen, full of knowledge they have read up on, and are a pleasure to check/train. A few arrive having clearly not opened a book, cannot describe a normal takeoff that they (supposedly) do each day from Aberdeen, and have no idea how systems work etc.
This latter group (fortunately a small minority) seem to benefit from being failed - they subsequently buck their ideas up big time!
There are hardly any I can think of who, after an attitude adjustment, can't make the required standard each 6 months.