Emirates: New "Acid" test after Recurrent SIM!
 

Ladies and Gentlemen

STANDARDS ON THE LINE

You will be aware that we have experienced some poorly managed events on the line over the last few months; unfortunately we experienced another one last week. In Training we promote the fact that we are driven by evidence, well the evidence indicates that that these events can no longer be viewed as isolated events, therefore it is imperative action is taken to stop the onset of a potential trend. We need to raise the levels of airmanship, awareness, suspicion and professionalism across our pilot community. Let me state that we are of the firm belief that the vast majority of our pilots are professional, proficient, efficient and effective. Unfortunately, the evidence indicates there is still work to be done to bring a small minority of pilots to this standard. The acid test, as always is, if following any training/checking session you would not be confident with the pilot flying your loved ones into some of the demanding destinations, terrain, weather and ATC environments which we operate into, then you have to flag those concerns to Training Management by accurately grading and reporting your observations.

In reviewing the events of the last few months we have asked ourselves what are we doing wrong? What are we missing? What’s the root cause? Why is our training and checking not able to identify those pilots who underperform on the line? Whilst the PFs and PMs in each case demonstrated failures in one or more of the pilot competencies, it was the loss of Situation Awareness and ineffective Pilot monitoring which were so concerning; we therefore need to enhance our training with regards to both. We have already started this in the current round of RTGS, where we present the Flight Data Monitoring playbacks from some of the events in question and then facilitate a discussion on what went wrong and what could have been done to prevent the situation from developing. However it is obvious that we need to do more, therefore in cooperation with Fleet we have decided to introduce the following changes:

· Trainers are to re-emphasize the importance of Pilot Monitoring duties during all Training and Checking events; this is to happen with immediate effect.
· Recurrent training to include a manually flown (Auto Pilot/Auto Throttle off) short sector, focusing on SA and Monitoring. We already cover this on Day 3 on the A380 using NCE; Boeing will introduce something similar on Day 2, this will be effective from 1 Oct this year. Emphasis is to be placed on the Pilot Monitoring making timely exceedance calls and demonstrating a satisfactory level of monitoring throughout the session. Please continue to insert ‘distractors’ during your sessions to mirror the distractions encountered on the line. The PM is to prioritise his workload to ensure his own SA and the safety of the aircraft are never compromised.
· We have re-written the word pictures for the Communication and the Leadership, Teamwork and Support PAMs to include more focus on PM skills. The FCI detailing these changes will be published shortly and will be effective immediately on receipt.
· During a training/checking session should a pilot miss a number of radio or SOP calls which might jeopardise the safety of the flight, or if their attitude or professionalism is called into question then the pilot is to be graded a ‘1’ for Leadership, Teamwork and Support. I accept this is subjective and whilst I would not expect to see a trainee fail because of a ‘few’ missed calls, several missed radio and/or SOP calls could be indicative of capacity or SA issues, so additional training is entirely appropriate.
· Any commander who is graded a ‘1’ or a ‘2’ for any competency during Day 1 or 2 of their recurrent simulator session will continue with their remaining simulator sessions, unless they are removed by a Training Manager. However, on completion of their recurrent training sessions a review of their performance will be conducted by Training/Fleet management prior to the commander being released back to the line; this is effective immediately.
· We will develop learning modules to improve knowledge and understanding of Auto Flight Systems modes. In the interim it is vital that you not only train Automation awareness but also the understanding of the modes.
· 25% of line checks will be planned as ‘No Notice’, this will be effective from the next planned roster. If you are rostered for one of these No Notice line checks, it is important you do not make the rostered crew aware – we are trying to get better visibility over our crews’ standards and level of preparedness – a true No Notice line check will give us that.
· Safety will provide Training with a list of our most challenging destinations and where possible Line Checks will be planned to these destinations going forward.
· There will be an additional 1-week ground school introduced for all new conversion courses to enhance/refresh fundamental ATPL knowledge; date for implementation TBD.
· Starting 1 Feb 2018, Day 3 of the recurrent PPC will be separated from Day 1 and 2. This will give trainees more regular exposure throughout the year to manual flight in the simulator as well as the opportunity to practise their monitoring skills. This initiative will also address the negative feedback we have received relating to 3 x deep night duties in a row and the limited training value gained from the 3rd night.
· We will be working with a third party research team to trial ‘eye tracking’ functionality in the simulator. We will use the results of the trial in the following RTGS phase to demonstrate the effectiveness, or not, of some crews’ scanning techniques during various stages of the flight.

In conclusion, the recent spate of poorly managed events on the line is deeply disappointing. Inaction on our part was simply not an option; as a result I hope you understand why these actions are being taken. It is vital that as trainers we lead by example and we demonstrate the standards others wish to aspire to. We recognise that ‘change’ can lead to uncertainty, especially if that change is introduced quickly. Therefore, if you are faced with a situation during your training and checking sessions over the coming weeks and are unsure of what is expected of you, please call your training management team who will be happy to assist.

As always thank you for your continued support.


SVP Flight Training

I dont suppose it has anything to do with driving off your experienced crew, fatigue and stress culture? Oh, and the primary factor.. Greed.

What's going on and on? More and more pressure on pilots by all this coming? Did you see also the captain roster who was involved in DME?
All of us flying too much since months with jetlag and accumulating of fatigue. Please lighten the hours per month,this will NOT work on a long term basis...the human body can just not cope with such an amount of work and stress(fear factor reinforced by the company ). I think I am an average pilot,not top notch but for sure safe from A to B in all the different environment EK flies to and prepared enough for each flight,try to be rested as much as I can, prepared for line and sim checks but that goes too far!!!

777747 ME forum perhaps?

I think this is relevant to all of us as a whole, to compare and contrast the hands we're dealt. It's certainly worrying that EK are taking this line.

It flies in the face of an open safety culture where individuals feel comfortable to admit mistakes so that an airline can monitor trends and train them out. Blaming pilots rather than looking at all the factors involved is merely laying the foundations for the next accident.

This email will serve to increase stress levels, push mistakes to be covered up and make for a worse place to work. It's arse covering of the higher order, managers threatening pilots so they can report to those above that they've 'dealt' with the issue. It's merely compounded an existing issue.

I feel for the guys involved as no one makes mistakes on purpose or sets out to have a bad day. Being PM and monitoring effectively is hard enough when fully alert, but when flying through the night becomes that much harder. Add to this now the complete b******s in the email above, the stressors are heightened.

Waht's an "ACID" test?

LSD :eek: :D

Aah, that's what I expected:O

gearlever

Forgive me if you know this but just in case... "acid test" is a colloquialism (vernacular) used in English to describe what test/decider you are using, above all others, to decide the result of something..

e.g. Following a check ride: "Never mind that he flew the instrument rating within the numerical limits, the acid test here is would be you be happy with this individual flying your family from A to B in bad weather?"

Hence the comment in the original post-

'Acid test' - the meaning and origin of this phrase

A test to show presence of gold.

This is a rather interesting letter and speaks volumes on the company (the caveat applies: if it is genuine).

The incident is a few days old and certainly not yet investigated, but already they are springing to action. Not by asking questions both to the crewmembers and to the organisation behind them, but by increasing pressure on the crews and maybe most shockingly also introducing a non-equal treatment of crew members. The assignment of surprise line checks that only 25% of the crews are subjected to will likely not increase trust and confidence in the group of pilots. Such a policy may be a powerful weapon for the company to weed out people it considers unwanted, seeing that the fail quota will necessarily be higher than with openly rostered line checks.

Or am I misunderstanding this? Does such an unannounced line check come with a different, less harsh failure policy?

thx wiggy :ok:

The End of TRAINING in the Airline...

Can anyone vouch for the authenticity of this ?

I muss say it would be extremely concerning if true.

Gone are the days when a recurrent was a "fun" exercise to brush up on procedures not done routinely on the line. Whilst i agree with as much manual flying practise as can be accommadated, what is being done to find the route causes of recent incidences. As correctly stated, fatigue must come near the top. What about the selection process? What about training? Are the pilots happy? An unhappy, stressed and fatiqued pilot will make more errors in operating including judgment, as anyone with any signicant experience will be aware.

So you are called upon to rat on a fellow aviator. Sums it up.

EK will never get it

Why are you posting this on pprune and not an internal memo ?!

I did not get such an email "STANDARDS ONTHE LINE". Is that a joke or did you wrote that?@777747

Surely this is a wind up, right? Would be massive warning flag if not.

When it got to the "No Notice' line checks I gave it up as a well written spoof, it is a wind up, I believe. The No Notice check of 25% would be similar to a CAA inspector check, not looking for individual performance, more looking for team work all carried out SOP, more a standardisation check for the company.

I don't know how EK management can have a meeting, the room must surely be full of elephants!

Fake me thinks.

The email was only sent to instructors apparently.


For some strange reason, this thread is getting bumped down to the 2nd page of threads due to inaccurate post date & time stamp.

Fatigue is cumulative. Of course it catches up eventually. You can mitigate it with experience for awhile, but if there isn't as much experience as there once was...er...emm...

never mind.

Architects of their own demise. Same as it ever was. :ugh:

It is real and was sent to instructors only. It was out on whatsapp under an hour later. Yet another big stick to save face and nothing else.

A source (inside EK) tells me that Training Department communication (sent to the Instructors) is NOT a spoof. Oh how the mighty fall and one does have to wonder how they ever got themselves into such a precarious place?! :ooh:

Everyone knows how this point was reached. It's been mentioned for 7+ yrs, just never taken seriously.

Shocking! A total embarrassment to aviation! They just don't get it. This has been created entirely by the people at the top. Fear Fear Fear! Experienced levels at an all time low in every role! Rule with the iron fist. When will anyone at the top realise that they themselves are creating the next smoking hole! lets train! Be allowed to train! Have a student ask questions and help them. I get fed up with people stating they learn more on the line than during training. The fear of being graded a 2 for asking the instructor to explain something that is not understood! It is a complete joke!! Is there any other airline that operates like this. WE all came from somewhere before. Open training. Support the student! Help the student! Im fed up with this place! If i only I could leave!!!! Well done Emirates!!!!! Well done for destroying many careers and destroying the love of a what should be a great job. Well Done!!

The wheels have really, well and truely, fallen off now. Reading between the lines, it seems to me, they are looking even harder for scapegoats now. Anything to prevent them having to admit what has caused this huge fcuking mess in the first place. What the hell has happened to a once great airline?

Al of us on here knows where this could be heading....but those on the third and ninth floor continue to do nothing...but blame the 'lazy' pilots, yet again.:ugh::ugh:

Bonuses need to be protected minions...! Compliant sycophants was what someone said about the mis-management. Couldn't agree more...

Where's the problem? You should be able to pass a line check on any of your line flights... If you only pass because you prepare more than for a normal flight, you should not be in the hot seat anyways.

What goes up, be careful, I was shot at point blank range on another thread for suggesting the same.

:O I am prepared to take the heat. But I stand my point. If you specifically need to prepare for a Line Check, which is nothing more than a regular Line Flight, you should not be in an operational role.

True. But I think the point is that all this will create is an added level of undue pressure, causing stress levels to be increased which will in turn increase the likelihood of mistakes being made, missed calls etc etc. They will then turn round and condem you on the back of this.
You're right at any stage, day or night we should be able to go into a sim and fly any procedure, deal with any emergency and have a successful outcome. With zero prep. This scenario doesn't mirror that and they are very very wrong if they think it does.
If someone was to go and sit next to a receptionist and tell her that "today if you make a singal spelling mistake in any of your typing, you're fired. And I'm going to sit here and watch everything you type." What's going to happen? They'll make a spelling mistake in the first sentence they write. Does this prove they are incompetent and totally unsuitable? No. It demonstrates a perfectly normal human psychological reaction to being put under that level of scrutiny without notice. A 'startle effect' of sorts if you will.
Once again they have an opportunity for change, to make things better and again it would seem they're going to f this up too.

Yes and no. To fail a check it needs more than just a "hic up" (or a spelling error as in your example). There might be things to discuss but that doesn't mean to fail. A fail does not nean you are fired either. But quite obviously there is something to be looked at and, maybe, re-trained. There have been several examples, even recently, of pilots being re-trained.
If an unannounced check increases the level of pressure as such that you cannot perform properly anymore, one might have to think about if the chosen profession is the right one. There seems to be a problem that we have pilots that do not perform up to the required standards (and I don't want to point fingers at the colleagues in DME, as we don't know enough to judge). I believe this is an appropriate mean to filter them out and give them the chance to improve with training.

Agree 100%, however, in the recent past years, the vast majority was proud of the famous ¨no spoon fed¨training system. So, things happens and now people wants to rethink and disagree with a system that everyone knew was not the best?
Again, agree, but hard to swallow guys. With all due respect.

Bad Apple Theory?
 

Let's assume this missive is true. Then EK's training department believe the company has a problem and the cause is a few "bad apples". And if it wasn't for these few bad apples these events would not have happened. The cause we are told is because these people have poor situational awareness and are ineffective in monitoring the pilot flying. There also appears to be a lack of understanding of the automation.

So the proposed solution is to do spot checks on "No notice" line checks, make people pay attention, grass up your colleagues and to be more rigorous when training i.e. all pilots are now flying under the company's safety cosh. So presumably once the bad apples have been identified and disposed of, safety will be restored and the management will be able to sleep soundly knowing everything has been fixed.

If only the real world was as simple as the solution proposed. I'll suggest management nightmares will shortly start. Nastily little reports will be posted by disgruntled, small minded individuals. The check and training staff will be viewed as executioners, normally solid and reliable pilots will start under-performing and training be viewed as a threat rather than an opportunity to learn. This will result in the wrong people being flung out and absolutely no improvement in safety in fact possible the opposite.

So what might be the real problem? The first and most obvious is that the wrong people have and are probably still being recruited. Whilst many obviously have the "right stuff" there are still too many who might be regarded as below standard. I know of some are not left alone whilst their colleagues take a comfort break. And does the company's demands of residency in the Emirates dissuade many people who be regarded as the right stuff from joining and those with experience from leaving. After all, I don't know if any other company in the world with a leaving list. Then we have the way this company trains and operates. The assumption is that the SOP's are perfect and if crew's stick to this, respond to every R/T call and "pay more attention" then all will be fine. But just how will their training improve their crew's situational awareness? And are they actually up to the task of training flight crew from all around the world (Just shout louder at these bloody foreigners)? And is the culture at EK part if the problem? I don't know of any proper company that encourages staff to "dob their mates in" yet this note requests just that. Nobody likes a grass all this will achieve is a truly poisonous atmosphere. And of course we come to the interesting aspect of rostering and rest. Could this possibly be a contributor to EK's recent spate of incidents?

Who ever wrote "Standards on the Line" has almost certainly stopped the real root cause of EK's incidents from coming to light if for no other reason than it ignores the basic fact that aircraft are flown by Mk I human beings. Apart from doing virtually every thing right, they occasionally do things wrong. You reduce the number and severity of things going wrong by training, encouraging and supporting everybody. Trapping, punishing and humiliating those who commit errors will certainly stop some things from going wrong but will never, ever stop all of them. But by creating a poisonous environment both on the line and in the sim. EK's training department will cut off the supply of real information it desperately needs in order to fix the real underlying faults that exist in its operations; FDM data is pretty useless in supplying the human story behind the numbers.

If I were EK management I would check out your insurance cover and seek out some strong sleeping medication. I think you will need both after the training department had terrorised your pilot corps.

PM

Professor Sidney Dekker on Why Things Go Wrong... wouldn't you just love this guy to do an audit on the culture within EK (and over FZ too) ?... and he's pilot as well (B737 rated) !

We've had unannounced line checks in the U.S. for decades in my experience. Sometimes you know you are due for a line check (every two years for the PIC in an FAA AQP program) or can see an extra body on the flight crew list in the computer when you take a look at your jumpseat riders. Other times you are doing the departure paperwork when the 'friendly stranger' approaches you and announces that you are being checked.

Usually the line check with U.S. carriers is cordial and instructive unless you are not doing your job and something goes wrong during the flight. Don't know the failure rate but where I've worked, they are not out to get you in my opinion. I had a line check with a low fuel weather divert a few years ago and I put the check airman to work looking up alternates and communicating with dispatch. He was very pleased with the CRM and so was I. :ok:

I was suspicious when I first read the email and when this whole thread was seemingly deleted I was pretty sure it was a hoax. But, it looks like it is real. :eek:

EKs ‘acid’ test
 

The real acid test is would you want to put your loved ones on an airline that has a training department that thinks like that.

Baled out of EK last year. Never looked back... exept in disgust.

Maybe it's the same root cause behind malls and terminals flooding, marina walls bursting, three-storey aquariums cracking, high-rises catching fire (multiple times), incomplete terminals collapsing, dry-docks opening unannounced on workers, and even sections of cladding or windows falling out of EK buildings and striking employees, some of which events killed and/or injured people.

They could have a very, very safe airline if they wanted but instead everything needs to be the biggest, longest, fastest, tallest, shiniest, most profitable, etc. And it has to be now. TODAY.

If you look up "cultural hubris", Dubai is riddled with examples. That's okay, they are a shallow culture so no one expects anything different but when they add "cheapest" into the equation things begin to fall apart.

This latest event is no surprise. The letter is no surprise. Nothing is any longer a surprise. It is a testament to the stiffness of their upper lips that management can stand behind a letter like this without blinking.

I'd say the "root cause" is the hubris, greed, ready means and lack of any semblance of restraint, whatsoever, of the people in charge.