And there's you all thinking I've not managed to find one yet !! Not quite - after a fair bit of dicking about getting the thing organised, a single pilot CRM course took place at Cabair's Elstree offices on 26th June. There were three fixed wing attendees, and four rotary people there - I know for a cert that all the fling wings are PPRuNers cos that's how they found out about the course !
Laurie Benn, of London Metropolitan University, was the instructor on the day. Laurie's background is ex-RAF multi-engine, but as a saving grace he's got 30 hours on helicopters.
First off, there was a quick review of HPL - an "honorary pass" was awarded to all, even those who'd answered the questions just before Laurie shouted out the correct answer.
The rest of the day was taken up with the CRM side. The basics of the human information processing system's workings, a short disccusion on error chains and stress and stress coping strategies was followed by a video of an F28 accident in Canada. Discussion afterwards about "where would you have stopped it" shows the multiple opportunities the crew had to prevent the accident, but didn't.
CRM was defined into four major areas - Leadership/teamwork, Communication, Situational awareness and Decision-making.
A longer case study of an accident to a Saudia L1011 in 1980 followed. A video (World in Action drama-documentary) and a synopsis of the accident report highlighted some major failings of the crew to meet any of the four main areas in CRM.
After this case study, each of the four main CRM areas was covered in detail. Then followed another case study - this time Kegworth (BMI 737-400 which ended up on the M1). I must admit, the analysis changed my mind - I thought the crew were short-changed by their training and the aircraft design, but now I think they could have done better. But hey, I wasn't there at the time !
The last item of the day was about a decision making process called "GRADE". Here goes :
- G - Gather ALL available information.
- R - Review the information
- A - Analyse the alternatives, determine which are safe
- D - Decide and DO
- E - Evaluate the outcome, i.e. start the process over again
To me that was the most important thing I got out of the day - a take-away personal decision making tool which I'll try to employ ! If you read about me in an accident report, you know it hasn't worked too well.
We (the r/w group) were lucky - the course was £90 per person as we shared the cost with Cabair. If you find a course, then it may well differ from that. Although the course material was biased towards a multi-crew fixed wing environment, the only difference in a single crew rotary situation is that you're responsible for checking your thought processes - if you can be scrupulously honest with yourself and pedantic about process and procedure then you stand a good chance of applying CRM principles with a degree of success, and as far as I'm concerned that is as simple as staying alive.
Lastly, check out
the UK CAA's CAP 737 - apparently it's rare because it's published by the CAA but still useful !