Europe and Asian airlines grow whilst standards fall

[in my last airline]

Experience levels must be at an all time low with incidents and accidents coming in daily (as predicted a decade ago). Most of the incidents and accidents bear the haulmarks of inexperience and or poor training. It is time to review the policies of airlines exploiting the 'free' co-pilots who have a never ending string of rookies paying for a couple of hundred hours in order to start their careers off. These airlines obviously have no intention of running safe operations as it is paying total disregard to one of the most important safety tools which is experience!

It is imperative that the regulators find a way of mandating certain minimum standards that force airlines to retain and consolidate flight crew experience.

In addition the following recommendations;

1. Limit the amount of Type ratings airlines can run relative to their projected growth.

2. Regulate 3rd party Flight Crew providers

3. Publish a ratings and grading table for TRTO's

It is certainly a worrying time for passengers who deserve more protection from their regulators.

[paulg]

Yes, regulation is necessary. But maybe publication of basic stats eg average age and hours of flight crew on various named carriers would also be powerful and could be consumer driven rather than by regulators. We already have seat guru for consumers to access. Why not have expanded data available regarding crew experience? If a particular airline did not want to provide this information, then this could be stated in the published information, and intending passengers left to draw their own conclusions.

[Avman]

paulg, surely crew experience will vary from day-to-day and flight-to-flight. In one airline alone you will have an entire spectrum of ages for say Captains with a whole range of flight hours on all sorts of different types. Or do I misunderstand your meaning?

[Beafis]

Experience doesn't say everything about someone qualities and skills as a pilot.

Many major cariers like BA, Lufthansa, Airfrance and KLM with good safety records prefer to hire young unexperienced pilots straight from (often their own or/and prefered) flightschool to the right seat of a jet. They have been doing this for decades.

These flightschools have no problems finding students. They have the toughest selection criteria and are regulated by these airlines and authorities. The students are often trained by experienced guys who also have a career at one of these major airlines.

[Boingboingdriver]

in my last airline...

Please enlighten us with your career path...Flight instructor with 200 hours?
Or would you prefer all pilots to fly cargo until reaching the 1500 hours mark?Hope the cargo market picks up then.....in europe at least.:eek:
Do you believe a 1500 hour cargo pilot is of a better standard then a 200 hour greener than green?Sometimes yes sometimes no.
Your mission is impossible...
It is the CAA which signs off Commercial pilot licenses not the airlines, it is their duty to make sure a pilot is competent enough or not.
The airline should make sure their new f/o pilots 200 hours or 5000 hours ones
are up to the job via the interview sim check,the type rating and line training.

[flash8]

Do you believe a 1500 hour cargo pilot is of a better standard then a 200 hour greener than green?Sometimes yes sometimes no.

In most cases but not all, yes. With all due respect you can take that argument to the extreme. Is a 10K TT Pilot necessarily better than a 200 hrs freshly minted CPL/IR? Sometimes that experience might not show until the **** hits the fan.

[paulg]

Avman
Yes you are of course correct. There will be substantial variations from flight to flight, day to day and between a/c types.

Perhaps seat guru was a misleading example. I used it merely to show how consumers might exercise some overall power.

What I am suggesting is that it may be possible to find an overall safety standard for comparison between airlines. This could cover many common potential safety factors including crew qualns. and training standards. Crew qualns. for comparison might include average total time for both captains and fos. Time on type might also be a factor. Maybe various factors could be included and all weighted to produce a simple 1 to 10 scale. I hope this is not too far fetched as a concept. This would be consumer driven and would hopefuly excert some subtle pressure on airline managers.

I also think flight professionals have a great part to play in promoting safety as something to be valued by consumers. At present safety is taken for granted by the public, many of whom look primarily at cost. Guess what? Airlines respond to this public demand for economy. Maybe pilots and maybe also cabin crew need to do something as a group to promote air safety as an issue for the flying public. At present we have only negative news stories following accidents and incidents, flight delays etc. Not much positive stuff out there about the primary focus put on safety by flight professionals. Of course pilots have been in a relatively poor negotiating position with employers in recent years. This needs to change before T&Cs will improve. What about promoting safety, including better training and experience, as a public issue as a first step in regaining better conditions for all?
Paul

[in my last airline]

BBD

Hi, no not an instructor in GA but more than 15k hours B737 time and now corporate.

Don't get me wrong, I am happy to see the low houred pilots getting airborne and wouldn't want to see this route cut out all together, just regulated better. There are some very shoddy TRTO's out there turning out poorly prepared airline pilots, these pilots then may end up in marginal carriers (whose countries and carriers feature here regularly) and end up being a liability for several years. My recommendation is simply to try and persuade the purse string pullers and bean counters that good training and retention will be rewarded by lower insurance premiums, less loss of face, customer loyalty and less fatal accidents.

Obviously my recommendations will slow the throughput of new type ratings but that is my price for enhanced safety in an industry that is not looking too clever on the passenger fatality side of things.

The regulator decides who has achieved the standard for holding a CPL but they don't care about the suitability of that individual to actually operate as an airline pilot, that is down to the selection process of the airlines which, when they get an FO for free is negligible (most of the time). Do you see the conflict of interest here BBD?

[foresight]

Do you see the conflict of interest here
I have,in the past, had my eyes opened to what can happen when an airline has a close relationship with a TRTO company. I was acting as safety pilot for a guy who,to put it mildly, was struggling and whose english was simply not up to understanding anything on the radio. OK there were two experienced captains on the flight deck but this guy was a total menace and should not have been released to operate on a public transport flight. I won’t go into the details of that day but it was appalling. It appeared that the money he was paying completely outweighed the ethics - safety was being severely compromised for financial gain in the most cynical manner. As a captain, I did not normally act as safety pilot but ,talking to others, mine was not an isolated case. The training captain involved was very uncomfortable but was ‘following orders’. It was my last flight with that company.

The vast majority of low hours guys are, in my experience, pretty capable and some are outstanding. However the system will continue to stink without more stringent oversight. I would suggest at least an independent assessment in the sim prior to release to line training. Safety can be compromised and unsuitable people are being taken for a ride for financial gain.

Luckily I am of an age where, once I had my CPL, I never had to pay for any type rating or training myself. In other words, I had to prove myself to my employer. Those were the days.

[Otto Throttle]

To be able to offer any kind of meaningful information to the travelling public, you would have to have an unneccessarily complicated set of criteria to determine 'experience'.

Do you really think somebody with 1000hrs TT spent chugging around in a light single piston, VFR in good weather is equally experienced as somebody else with the same time, but spent flying multi-crew on medium jets in a demanding commercial environment?

The numbers are the same, but the 'experience' vastly different.

[boofhead]

When I first moved to the left seat, many years ago, I was hard-pressed to keep my skill and knowledge higher than the First Officers, who were younger, more recently out of training, had the latest ideas and information and so on. They could also fly the airplane well, in many cases better than I could. My edge was that I had more experience and got more money.
When I finished my airline career my skills were not as good as they had been, and with airplane changes, the degradation in standards needed to hold a rating (we had to be able to draw the electrical system from memory when I started out, now it is printed on the panel), but hardly any of the FOs I flew with were worth employing. They could not fly, knew nothing, and were arrogant as hell. Of course a lot of it was my perceptions, and sour grapes as my career came to an end (I missed the age 65 lottery), but if you knew me you would know that I was always supportive of the younger pilots and still spend most of my time teaching and mentoring.
Technology has saved us by becoming better as pilot standards have been dropping. Even now, 5 years after being forced out of the airline business, I know I can fly a two engine out raw data ILS to CAT3 minimas without an auto pilot, or do a manual, raw data circling approach from an NDB in any of the Boeing airplanes. Most of the FOs I flew with during the later period of my careeer never could come close.
Company policy makes this the case, since it is perceived to be safer if all aids are always used. I still read pilots on these forums who are convinced that a visual approach can only be flown using the ILS, PAPI, GPS etc. With guys like that in control, what chance does a FO have to learn what he really needs? If the FO is even allowed to fly a sector, and if he/she goes outside the parameters of the FOQA the PIC will panic and take over, or insist that the FO use the auto pilot at all times. How can he/she ever reach the standards of flying skill we old timers used to have? Will the electronics always work and monkeys always be able to cope?

[757_Driver]

here we go again! :rolleyes:

Better not fly any flag carriers then, as they all have 200 hour (actually more like 150 hour on an integrated course) cadets in the right hand seat.

Of course the 15000 hour ex milatary captains flying are much safer aren't they. Or did that Turkish 737 just magically fall out of the sky?

There is a lot of factors that contribute to flight safety, experience is one of them, certainly not the most significant and certainly not 'absolute'. Its a combination of the right type of experience and the individuals attidute and ability - how do propose to put that in a league table?

[A-3TWENTY]

I am not against a 200 hour pilot in a flag career but I am against :

- Young pilots who have no conditions to be pilots but are allowed to proceed in the company;

-Instructors who have to be nice guys and approve any stupid or unskilled pilot in order not to go against company interests;

-Young pilots who don`t know anything and don`t want to know and to make things worst , are arrogant.Poor attitude.

-Companies which doesn`t have a tough instruction , not with bad intentions , but to keep standards high.

I have seen Capts. flying around that I wouldn`y put my family into his plane for the simple reason that they weren`t proficient even as a co-pilot.
Sometimes is not their fault ,they just haven`t had a good training through out his life.
This is very normal nowadays when the costs are controled to the penny.

I have an interesting story: When I got my first job (I was 19) I used to fly with a Captain of 63. He told me one think that I never forgot. Aviation is a big more or less.I never forgot that because life has proven me that he was absolutely correct.

Money controls everything and I believe that the system is not really worried with passenger`s safety ,despite the system spreads this idea.Economical interests are well above the life of some anonymous passengers.

:mad::mad::mad:

[misd-agin]

You might find 200 hr copilots in the international major carriers. That is not the case in the U.S. Commuters/regional airlines? Yes. Majors? No.

[in my last airline]

So have the JAA failed when it comes to raising or at least maintaining 'the standard?' Personally, overall, I think it has fallen. Some countries have achieved their Approval to JAR OPS standard that are quite miraculous, Turkey for a start. The 'self assessment/auditing process that allow individual airlines to self govern, is being taken advantage of by the unscrupulous airlines of which there are many.

It is quite true that the majority of airline pilots are no longer capable of flying without flight directors and most couldn't fly a raw data NDB approach to save their grannies let alone a hand flown CAT III with all engines never mind with one or two engines out.

Accidents are on the increase, loss of control is the biggest killer, and airlines are still reducing the number of hours spent in training and checking is now a politically correct process geared up to make sure the numbers of crews to a/c are never compromised, never.

Regulation needs to revert to the country and those countries with poor records must be helped further to ensure their operators come up to speed. Temporary bans on those countries will focus their minds but they must be monitored over long periods to avoid relapse.

[point8six]

in my last airline - while I sympathise with your views on "button-pushers" v "stick-and-rudder types" in today's training philosophy, can you enlighten me as to which a/c type + airline + licensing authority allows "hand-flown cat 3 approaches with one or two engines out", please? I am about to book a flight and wish to avoid the above! -or was it said to emphasise your points?
Whether or not your co-pilot has 250 hrs TT or 10,000hrsTT, he/she still needs supervision. That's where the Captain either helps or hinders the co-pilots' progression. No airline is going to reverse it's training policy unless dictated to by the relevant authority and cost-cutting is here to stay.
Actually, in my last airline, I suggested that spare simulator (B744) time be used to put new (250-300 hrs ex-cadets) through a structured programme designed to improve their handling, monitoring and recovery skills. I think that after my retirement, that idea was binned due to cost. Ah well.:hmm:

[downwindabeam]

point8six: That airline would be Horizon Airlines (regional in the US) and there are actually a growing number of those airlines doing it with the aid of an HGS (Heads up guidance) system. Ofcourse it's a "mare" CAT IIIA, no B or C allowed.

It is true tho that flying skills now days are down the drain completely. W/O Flight directors some people are just utterly lost.

I flew with a guy who got cleared for an approach we didn't plan on, about 50 miles out of the airport. He couldn't figure out why he needs to manually switch to raw data needles and twist his own OBS to the course of the Loc. Can you believe that? I'm the guy who doesn't get to sign paper work.

[in my last airline]

.86, thanks for your post, exactly, 'no training dept will increase it's training program unless forced to etc.. ' So I am advocating a major change to regulatory oversight and some changes to best practice re FOs flying for free and the agencies that put them there and the airlines that hire them.
It is a rotten concept from a flight safety point of view and I am sure (hopefully) that the EU regulator will ultimately put a cease to it.

[notceststupid]

@BoofHead - I'm in my mid 20's and I agree with you...from around 12 years old I went in the cockpit a few times, one time on Flying Colours, I recited all the instruments and knew a few airport codes...
I started Flightsims from 1995 till now...Always did ILS Landings manually...Never wanted to ever let the autopilot land...I started doing my PPL in Florida 2 years ago and the instructor was amazed how quickly i got things done...Except for the exams...I could fly very well thanks to the flightsim...My one point is the flying school saying "you can complete your PPL in 3 weeks" no JAA groundschool given and in any case you are knackered after 4 hours flying because yesterday had Tech probs or weather...you know...I would love a 2 year course in PPL or 1 year I guess...