Originally Posted by JeroenC
Actually, sensible post from AirRabbit. I do see the trend in my outfit (no widebodies though).
Thanks JeroenC … this trend isn’t terribly obvious – or it wouldn’t be continued. However, my opinion is that such trends do, indeed, exist, and, in my opinion, there are a few issues that “bubble up to the surface” that have more sinister consequences than this type of “cheat sheet attempts” to assist training or passing tests where airplanes are involved. The really sinister part is that it’s not like what students in school used to call “cheat sheets” – where the answers to the chemistry exam were written on the inside of someone’s shirt cuff or on the underside of a baseball cap brim. This would be more like those students actually practicing the mixing of reasonably dangerous chemicals, but use chemically modified versions that produce a vastly lessened effect, even though they have been told that mixing these chemicals are critical with respect to rate of mixture or the sequence of mixture. If they get sloppy or hurried, or don’t follow the precise requirements of mixing, the result is still well within the margins of what they believe to be acceptable – and if the instructor hasn’t seen or didn’t witness the short cuts or the ratios or any other aspect that was not within the prescribed boundaries, it might appear to that instructor that all the students did what they were required to do – and met all the established requirements. Sounds good … sounds reasonable. However, if those students developed habits of a mixing philosophy that, in the classroom, allowed what appeared to be safe and innocuous results, but could likely result in massive explosions if those mandatory specific rates and sequences are not followed, the “what” and the “when” and the “how” that the students learned through practice could easily cause severe injury, or worse, when they get to the “real world” and use “real chemicals.” I don’t think that this analogy is overly dramatic when one considers the fact that pilots control expensive machines, and are responsible for the lives of numerous persons who are on board. Of course, as the airplane gets larger, carries more passengers, the more important the training and the more impact will result if that training suffers in a similar way.
No, I’m not saying that we are on the verge of seeing massive airplane accidents, but I am saying that we’ve likely come close in the past – on several occasions … and as the daily flight numbers continues to grow and the “old head” pilots finally reach the required retirement age – the younger, every eager, lesser experienced pilots, who will be more and more dependent on what they learn in training will become more and more the norm in airline cockpits. You do the math. IF such short cuts are appearing – if such incomplete or mostly accurate training continues – it’s only a matter of time.
I’ll throw out one example for your consideration. Do you recall the ABX DC-8 crash in Narrows, Virginia in December of 1996? It was a post-maintenance flight check with very experienced flight crewmembers on board. One of the tasks they were conducting was a recovery from an approach to stall. You can read the report for yourself, but the crew on board had been trained, most recently in a simulator – and presumably some likely had performed the task in a training airplane at some time in their career. But the long and short of the accident was that as the airplane entered the stall, the flight crew attempted to recover by simply adding power while maintaining the pitch attitude (or increasing it slightly) to avoid a loss of altitude during the recovery. Unfortunately, the procedures used in any airplane training, very likely never took the airplane into the actual stall – in fact the instructors were very likely to have carefully ensured that recovery was initiated just when entering into the approach to stall area. In the simulator, it didn’t matter, because the understanding had been ingrained into these crew members – and they practiced it in the simulator, over and over – that if the power was simply added, the airplane would fly right out of the stall – regardless of the pitch attitude – and that was what they did – over and over and over – all the way through 16,000 feet! Each time they attempted to add power, they only generated compressor stalls on at least 2 of the engines. They reduced the power to allow the engines to recover, and then added power again, while maintaining (perhaps even increasing) the pitch attitude. The experienced captain and the former chief pilot for that airplane, along with a very senior flight engineer – all well trained and experienced – but they didn’t recover the airplane – and, while I’m not trying fix the blame on those men, in any way, because while they didn’t recover, they didn’t because they were incorrectly trained, and they didn’t know it.
In the operation of any airplane, learning something that “usually” works, but it is required to be performed in a specific way, or in a specific sequence, or at a specific time … if the basic understanding of why “it” works and an understanding of when, where, and how, the controls should be inserted or power is to be added or reduced, isn’t understood completely by the crew members … the likelihood of favorable outcomes on a continuing basis is being reduced … day by day by day.