LINE CHECKING
Thanks, Steve,
Great to hear from you after all these years! They were exciting times, even allowing for your missing that first summer at Gatwick, with night charters and the brand new North Terminal. In those early years we were all true volunteers, were we not? We joined the fleet from many others because we wanted to fly cutting-edge technology. I only ever heard of one pilot who was disappointed with his choice.
Re your comments: yes, that was precisely my understanding, and what Pete Looker told me when hiring me for the job as RCC. For about eight months of each year, apart from the occasional contingency, we were ordinary line pilots; the remaining months were spent doing route checks (line checks). Whenever possible, each check was of a pair of pilots, and done from the P3 seat.
The fact that the pilot’s walk-around is no longer part of the line check leads me to conclude that the line-checking pilot, as well as being a trainer, must also be operating in a pilot seat – either as captain or co-pilot. In most cases, (s)he would be unable to observe the candidate’s walk-around. Being able to evaluate the external check is not the only advantage of line checking from the jump seat, as pointed out in my previous post.
For other readers: RCCs were employed in much smaller numbers than the trainers, and were regarded as something of an anomaly. (In BCAL, where I came from, the role hadn’t existed.) The fact that we evaluated pilots only on everyday line operations – every pilot’s bread-and-butter task – inevitably led to resentment in some quarters. It’s a bit like a workmate criticising your driving when you’re giving him a lift! And it wasn’t only line pilots that occasionally objected.
As you know only too well as a trainer, although training captains also had to conduct route checks from time to time on an ad-hoc basis if no RCC was available, it represented only a small part of their relationship with the line pilots. When it happened, the training captain usually did the check from a pilot’s seat. That made for a bond with the candidate, which has its pros and cons. You cannot scrutinise all aspects of a pilot’s performance when you have your own workload.
Mostly, trainers’ work is in conversion training (on the sim and the aircraft) and recurrent simulator checks. No one expects – or is expected – to perform completely flawless sorties in those situations. Most of us are only too ready to accept criticisms and help from trainers, provided they sign us up for another six months! But, on the line, more pride is at stake.
So, to put it bluntly, as I think you’ll agree, trainers were generally more popular than RCCs. That sentiment probably extended to management pilots, whom we also had to evaluate annually. A manager, who might only get one or two flights a month, may not take kindly to receiving banal debrief items they’ve seen RCCs list in fleet summaries. My feeling was that, despite their desk-bound lack of practice on the line, treating management candidates differently would be misleading to the manager and might lead to a decline in fleet standards, as well as being unfair and dishonest.
The demise of the role of the specialist RCC in BA may have been encouraged by the above, but another factor is likely to have been decisive, as always: costs. Checking one pilot at a time means twice the number of line checks. But, if in each case the crew is limited to the minimum crew complement of two, the check costs nothing. The line checks may not be as wide-ranging or objective as a RCC was able to do from the jump seat, but at least the training captains get to fly more often.