Experience, the priceless asset
 

Discussions "in another place" regarding the AirAsia tragedy are spending a lot of energey on debating the issue of possible lack of experience of first officers.

I am very interested in the military view.

First, though, my employer's view as it was when I started in 1955. To be a weather forecaster of the MoD Met. Office, one needed a slack handful of Ordinary Levels, and at least two science A Levels, although many had more, and a fair few had degrees.
The Initial Forecasting Course minimum entry age was 22 years, to be 23 before a period of "sitting by Nelly" with real weather, real customers, and real aircraft. Once let loose on the innocent aircrew, supervision was exerted by a parent Main Met. Office, which laid down a party line for the area, and scrutinised all TAFs issued by the airfield office.

Experience was gained the hard way, by frequent detachments up and down the country. Based at Leeming, I did short stints at Acklington, Linton, Dishforth, Topcliffe, Manby, Wyton and goodness knows where else ..... all in the period 1964-1967.
Given enough ticks in boxes, one went on to the Advanced Forecasting Course, a minimum qualification for promotion to what was then Experimental Officer, later called Higher Scientific Officer. [If it helps, this was said to be EMR Flight Lieutenant when overseas and subject to Air Force Law].

There then followed a MINIMUM of ten years service before eligibility for the next promotion, which would enable the now 35-plus Senior Scientific Officer to be a forecaster at a Main Met. Office. [EMR Squadron Leader]. For my part, I was very glad to have "seen that, done that" up and down England, in Cyprus, and in Germany, before making the grade.

So, getting to the point, how does that sequence of courses and gaining a great deal of experience compare with the customers' career path? I felt that 23 years of age was a bit silly when my fighter pilot customers seemed much younger than that!

Is there a substitute for experience, and, if so, what is it?

Ability


Don't confuse one for the other...

The trick in flying is to learn from other people's fatal experiences, not your own.

Can education act as a substitute for experience?

Depends on the quality of the education.

1)If your instructor has 'been there, done that'
2)If the course was designed to include real world experience, and with an explicit objective of preparing students for the real world, and with feedback from the real world.
3)If it is conducted with the instructors having the authority to vary the instruction depending on the student(s)
Then yes, I think education can substitute for experience.
There must also be support in the early period of productive work in the real world (mentoring).

Given all of that, you can probably knock from a third to a half of the real world experience off the learning process. You can, of course, knock almost nothing off the physical handling/motor action experience. There is no short cut to kinaesthetic learning (although it doesn't all have to be done with the expensive equipment, e.g. aeroplanes, if you have realistic simulators).

Those three If's are very big if's indeed. and those factors are being reduced massively in almost every field of education, from school on up. Instructors who have done the job for real are expensive, and instructors exercising real judgement and authority are anathema to controlling bureaucracies.
I think it makes sense economically for society, and for large organisations, but it often doesn't make sense for individual departments, schools or programs. As soon as you break budgets down and insist on individual departments saving x percent, the holistic effort collapses. If the boss is aiming at promotion, it's better to save money in your department and pass the degraded student's problems on to the next lot.

Throughout my childhood education, I had teachers who insisted on the highest standards, in a supportive atmosphere, and who were genuine innovators. A large majority had done things in the real world. I was very lucky.
I experienced throughout my time in the RAF what was possibly the last generation of very experienced guys as instructors. A1 QFI Lightning pilots doing my IF2 on the Bulldog. Guys who'd bombed Berlin teaching me night flying, etc. I applied that experience when I became an instructor, and then as a school teacher. I made sure those 3 If's were true. For quite a few years, I had colleagues with the same experience, and the results for our students were stunningly successful, but I often had to lie, cheat and otherwise ignore the increasing bureaucracy which wanted me to teach in a standardised way.

People these days have ever increasing numbers of certificates, with apparently ever higher grades, but the quality of the learning is way down on what it used to be.

For that matter, so is the quality of the experience.

Fox3
Very many thanks for taking the time. I concur heartily.

When I was at Bawtry I had [oddly enough, and due more to geography than logic!] responsibility for the standard of teaching of Met. to all RAF aircrew except the chopper fleet. I had reasonable qualifications: 20 years "experience" almost all on RAF airfields, 3 years teaching the Nav. courses at Finningley after an appropriate GIT Course, and three years teaching in our in-house college.

"Distance Learning" [why distance? surely "distant"?] was the current magic bullet. I fought valiantly and ultimately unsuccessfully against it with regard to Met. instruction, on the grounds that, provided real teachers were trained, experienced and happy in their job, the result would be better for the customer than working through books and notes.

I was being ordered to accept responsibility for something that I thought was wrong, so lost that part of my job description. Thereafter my role was undertaken by someone totally unqualified sitting in Bracknell. The saving was about 1/2 a man at each of Leeming, Church Fenton, Linton, Finningley .... the fate of instruction at Cranwell is lost in the mist of time. The loss was incalculable.

My experience of Met instruction on pilot training (early 80's), coupled with a fair bit of sandbagging on early morning met flights and the happily shared time of assorted met men, was excellent. So good, in fact, that when I did my Ocean Yachtmaster and my instructor had to take two weeks off, I was asked to switch from being the student to being the instructor for the world weather section.

Distance Learning can work in certain circumstances - I've done an OU degree - but again, the 3 big if's are usually not being met. As a manager for the Red Cross recently, I've seen our office switch back from online learning to instructor presentation because the online material was effectively useless. The Red Cross deals with disasters, so the real world throws up so many combinations of odd circumstances that an experienced instructor is needed to handle the student questions. It does make one wonder why they ever introduced online stuff in the first place.

Experience is fine as long as it doesn't lead to complacency.

Something I was always conscious of was that there were two peaks in FJ accident rates, one at 400hrs on type and another at around 2000 hrs. The former likely due to pushing the boundaries a bit too much, and the latter was very likely due to your point, thing.

I've always tried to:
1) encourage challenging questions from subordinates/students
2) put myself up for review by my subordinates/students

Initially, it can be a little painful, but it does stop one from becoming complacent. Oddly enough, after a bit, it seems to impress them even more. One makes mistakes, but then self-corrects them before they become serious, and it's recognition and recovery which seems to impress the most.

Same in GA. There are the usual 'death walkers' at around 300 or so hours and then you get guys with squillions of hours who make the most basic of mistakes. Wheels up is usually a good one for the experienced pilot, and if you think warning horns and flashing lights make a difference, take a look at this. Both pilots with several thousand hours each.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5McECUtM8fw

But then as they say if you fly a retractable; there are those that have landed wheels up and those that are going to.

And there, but for God's good grace........

My youngest has just gone through secondary school and is now at college.

Her secondary school used to employ a lot of teachers straight from university because they are cheap. Their future careers are based upon results (and that of the school come to that). Consequently they don't 'teach' any more, they concentrate on passing exams. In her last year, most of her effort was spent on previous exam papers. Whilst her grades were okay, I wonder what she actually learnt because although bright, I don't think she is doing as well as she should be at college because she is missing some of foundations that are needed for the next level of exams.

She is not alone though and I'm sure that it stems from the previous school using so many teachers without any real world experience. Of course they all need to start somewhere, but it seems the teachers are thrown straight in at the deep end and are given little time to develop the skills they should need.

There is a big turn-over of teachers and I'm sure that a lot of them leave the profession because they rarely get the opportunity to actually teach.

Not happened to me yet (or been close) but I've seen other's come within an ace. I've even seen one guy retract his gear on short finals. Bit like opening a sweet and throwing the sweet in the bin and the wrapper in your mouth.


Last time I looked the average time an NQT stayed in teaching was five years.

The insistence on frequent regular testing, as do OfSted inspection criteria, leads to syllabi mapped out for each lesson of the entire year, and is a huge problem.
You also need to bear in mind that, in some subjects like physics, the teachers taking the lesson cannot really teach the subject, because they do not fully understand the material themselves.

All lessons inevitably become 'content delivery', rather than teaching.
The teacher presents knowledge, rather than teaches, so students become demotivated and also learn little of the fundamental principles, especially those with associated misconceptions.

Students therefore are unable to pass tests requiring synthesis of fundamental principles, so firstly exams are made more predictable. This enables teachers to coach students how to answer questions they do not understand. However this coaching reduces teaching time, so it becomes necessary to reduce content in order for student grades to continue to improve. However, the removal of difficult content (usually the first victim), both demotivates the brighter students (and the brighter teachers), and often removes key links between areas of study which, if properly taught, would actually reduce student workload. Next, in order to claim that the exams are just as difficult, the language is deliberately made more complex, thus not actually testing the subject but English comprehension. This is of course a nightmare for students without highly developed vocabulary, such as science types, foreign students....etc. With students demotivated, the Government then decides to 'sex up' the syllabi by asking questions to which the answer is "iPod', 'The internet' or 'Helicopter surveillance like on Mission Impossible'. However, the dinosaurs in both the DfE and the exam boards don't actually understand any of that, so you now also get stupid questions with all wrong answers. You can't teach how to answer these because the science is actually wrong, so now you have to spend even more time drilling the students with practice exams....etc.

This summarises the decline in all UK exams since about 2000, and many since 1983.

The emphasis on practice exams comes because the school leadership place the highest priority on that. It is not exclusive to schools with low experience teachers. The same is true, from my own experience, of some high performing grammar schools.


I would do practice exams for 2 or 3 weeks maximum before GCSE and A levels, with only one mid-year exam (which had 1 lesson's revision & practice). This leaves much more time for teaching properly. Furthermore, I wrote syllabi where the content was delivered in only 2/3 of the teaching time, leaving 1/3 for recaps, and teacher/student interest areas to be developed. I had suggested additional work, carefully pre-planned, for either new teachers to gain confidence or for senior teachers who were in a hurry.
I checked on where my teachers had got to once per term. There was no insistance on sticking to any kind of calendar, though one was provided to guide new teachers.
On some occasions, I did not set 'standard' (i.e. marks out of 10) homework for half a year.
The results were, pretty consistently, among the best in the UK for all abilities of students, at 4 different schools. It also produced exceptionally high proportions of students studying the subject beyond school, and they then achieved exceptionally well both at University and in employment. We set up feedback loops to ensure we knew how they did subsequently, and modified our teaching in order to sustain this.

The system, of course, absolutely hated us.

Original thinking in teaching?! Why would they hate you?...:)


Edit: I did a couple of terms part time at a FE college not a million miles away from me to help out during a staff shortage, ostensibly to teach music. First day there they asked me if I could run a couple of math classes too...luckily for them I could. It's just the sort of thing you would ask an arts teacher though isn't it. They probably have physics teachers doing modern dance.

That's the worst of it - it isn't original at all. It's just what was happening in the better establishments from about 1920 - 1980. If it's one the system can't stand it's being told that all its original ideas were complete b#llocks !


Edit: At least with music you have some understanding of pattern and symmetry. It's the PE teachers taking maths classes one worries about. I've never taught modern dance, though I have done Religious Education, girls' water polo, and Essay Writing (that one at an FE college). Oh, and How to Hotwire Vehicles.

One is intrigued...

I'm told that there are only three types of child prodigy; music, maths and chess.

I've banged on for years at heads who see music provision as just a tick in the box that music and maths are closely interrelated, in a very real physical sense due to the enhancement of spatial-temporal reasoning, often known as the 'Mozart' effect.

I can offer myself as evidence. My first year at Grammar I came bottom of the class in maths (not unexpected). I took up the violin and guitar in that year and was an avid student. In my second year I came top in maths. I have been a musician and have loved maths ever since, and still at my age enjoy picking up a piece of paper and calculating an orbital mechanics problem just for fun. But then look at any Bach fugue and it's almost pure maths written in notation. Coincidence?

Experience is something you get just after you needed it.

Coincidence? Not in my experience. At a school where 2/3 of the students had music lessons, I noted improved learning of physics by students who had just had a violin lesson (whatever their ability). The effect was not clear with any other instrument (including voice), but there may have been an effect from piano and cello.

Hotwiring vehicles (your own, of course!) - a good way to teach electrical circuits. After word got back to parents, despite my protestations, I was told I would not be allowed to use that example next year. Come Speech Day, the Speech was from an Old Girl who had spent a long time in Rock Management. She related the tale of her saving a Bob Marley concert by hotwiring a truck. At the Lunch I approached the Headmistress. She greeted me with "OK, OK, you can teach it!"

:)

I've always liked the two buckets approach to flying. You start off with a full bucket of luck and an empty bucket of experience. The trick being to fill the one before the other runs out...

Nice one. Reminds me of the many musos who are also pretty hot at science subjects. Two that come immediately to mind are Prof Brian Cox of 'Things Can Only Get Better' fame and Doctor Brian May, astrophysicist who has a day job in a band called Queen apparently. Then there are airline pilots Bruce Dickinson and Steve Morse who have day jobs in Iron Maiden and Deep Purple.

Common sense
 

Excuse the slight intrusion here, but something i've personally noticed in my experience is lack of common sense and logical thought in practical things. Now i've always been the kid who after getting a bike, or RC car would have it in bits by boxing day and the same when i started driving, i swapped a camshaft out of a SOHC Golf GTi into my old Audi 80 just for laughs but having made my mistakes on bikes i'd learned enough to avoid basic errors and managed not to destroy the whole thing.

But it dawned on me recently that the people I went to uni with or more recently worked with in logistics companies have real depth of understanding with practical hands on things. Not saying I'm a font of knowledge but more people than ever quote the university of google at me on how to fix their car when i mot it, or say 'on the internet it says.....' when only a few years ago people seemed to have a better grasp of fixing their own cars, wiring plugs or planning the warehouse out.

They just don't seem to want, or be able to figure things out like i was taught to. That said my metalwork teacher also did tech drawing as he'd been with a company working on the TSR2 and Jaguar so i trusted what he said.

In short we need a few more Fred Dibnahs and Guy Martins.

Also apologies for any spelling errors or grammar, writing this on new phone that has a mind of it's own.

Ah, Queen. I saw their final concert. Few people know that John Deacon has a First Class Honours in Electronics and built his own and Brian's amps (Brian building his own guitar of course, which is still marketed) and Roger Taylor has a BSc in Biology.

We used to do the electronics option as part of the Physics A level, for the benefit of the student a year also doing Music.