Haven't read all the posts, but many of them. So I apologize if this has been stated before....

My 2 cents:

1 cent: Compensation package. The reason many of us, myself included, are now flying overseas is compensation. The pay, schedule, time at home and whole package has gone down the crapper over the past several years. There are a few exceptions to the previous rule, but in general, the compensation package for pilot services in the USA sucks!

2 cent: Experience. This is a tough one. What is experience? Is a 8000 hour Captain who has flown for a 121 regional airline in North America since he/she had 500 hours of 172 time more experienced then a 4000 co-pilot who flew world-wide since he/she had 500 hours in a 172. Depends on what your version of experience is?

I know I only said 2 cents, but one last thought...there are good pilots and bad pilots....just like good and bad lawyers, it's part of the profession. 20,000 hours doesn't make you a good captain, nor does 1500 hours.

just my 2 1/2 cents

•Your 1st cent ... it's not so much that I think MPL will be "a savior" to the industry, but I DO think that, if there is a need for pilots that outstrips the available pilot candidates that have the experience and training that we all would like to see, the MPL may be a very good alternative to rely upon.
•Your 2nd cent ... Contrary to a lot of beliefs, MPL is NOT a generic approach to pilot training. There are 4 phases described under the ICAO developed program. Depending on what you've heard and who you talk to, the 4th phase is to be conducted for a specific airplane and a specific airline. There are some who have interpreted MPL as getting to this specific airplane/airline issue at the start of the 3rd phase. Certainly the 1st and 2nd phases are more "general," and, therefore, generic. But, after that, things are designed to get a lot more specific - as I indicated above. In either version, the design of the program was to provide that when an applicant successfully completed the 4th phase, that person was to be fully capable of stepping into the right seat of a specific airplane for a specific airline and operate as a fully functional, fully safe, first officer.

The Beta Testing of which I am aware (specifically it included Chinese students in training in Australia under a Boeing-conducted, live MPL training program) wound up taking considerably more time than the minimum described in the ICAO documents (which describe a minimum of 240 hours of training - some airplane and a lot of simulation). This Australian-Boeing-Chinese effort took between 380 and 420 hours of training (with only about 50-60 in an airplane, by the way - and it was approximately 7-9 months in duration from the start of phase 1 through the completion of phase 4) ... but the good news is that when completed, the captains interviewed about their "new first officers" flying revenue trips on the line, there wasn't one complaint - and in fact, the comments were surprisingly positive.

There are many really good instructors out there - no doubt! However, there are some who are only instructing to build hours. It's not the student that is the highest on his/her priority list. Are these the majority of instructors out there? Certainly not ... but they do exist - and in numbers far greater than I was aware ... until I saw it with my own eyes ... and it is these so-called instructors that I believe don't make the best of airline pilot candidates.

when I was an instructor, I used it to build hours. but I also was a damn good instructor.

the two are not mutually exclusive.

so, why not just treat pilots well? MONEY.

and that's that. train them well, evaluate them thoroughly, and always do right

From your lips to the ears of those in charge of airlines today. Those folks used to be former "throttle jockies" ... but alas, today, the preponderance of those decision makers are fugitives from (and, no, I don't mean real fugitives) places like Bank of America, Citicorp, JP Morgan, etc. From their perspective the easiest place to exercise the descision of when, where, how, and how much regarding their expenditure of funds is how much they pay their employees. IF I had the answer, I'd be lolling on the shores of some pristine sand beach, not holed up in some hotel room ... Hmmmm ... now that I think of it, I'm going to suggest that each hotel paint their names and the city on the ceilings above the beds. That way we'll all know where we are the first thing in the morning - afternoon - evening - night ... ah ... well, you know what I mean.

It's Tuesday. This must be Bangkok.

or,

It's Bangkok. This must either be Christmas or my kid's birthday.

FAA Administrator urges professionalism, use of SMS
 

FAA Administrator urges professionalism, use of SMS | Pilotbug Babbitt, the FAA Administrator, stressed more cockpit professionalism in the drive for more safety and fewer accidents at US airlines. In a speech to the International Safety Forum today, Mr. Babbitt stated that the difference between the outcomes of the US Airways Flight 1549 and Colgan Flight 3407 was one of “textbook greatness, the other a complete inattention to basic details.”
The Administrator was referring to the contrast between the two flights. The January 15th US Airways flight, which an Airbus 320 was struck by Canada geese after departure from New York’s Laguardia airport was followed by a successful ditching in the Hudson river. The other was the February 13th fatal crash of a Colgan DeHavilland Q400 in Buffalo, NY, in which pilot error was largely determined to be the cause.
Babbitt indicated that in addition to a more professional culture, the airlines should better utilize tools and concepts like the Safety Management System (SMS), a set of guidelines and risk management processes designed to increase the safety decision making process. Last month the FAA issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (PDF) concerning the SMS for the airline industry and other aviation operators to adopt.

This guy is full of stuff politicians are made of.

Of course there was "a complete inattention to basic details", but how could appeal to professionalism help pilots who lost basic self-preservation instinct? For late mr Renslow and late ms Shaw applied stall recovery procedures contrary to any known one which doesn't include inverted flight (and no half-assed comments on tailplane stalls, please - they don't go together with stickshakers). If they consistently pulled off such a feats they would never, ever be allowed to go solo, let alone be issued with any kind of pilot's licence. It wasn't about experience, it was about being dead tired to the point of incapacitation.

I would take mr Babbit more seriously if he used Pinnacle 3701 to illustrate dangers of being unprofessional. As it i is I'm afraid that while in principle his stressing of importance of being experienced professional is praiseworthy, his real motive is to obscure the systemic causes of Colgan 3407 accident. What needs to be done to prevent another similar mishap is: pay crews sufficiently so they can afford decent accommodation near their base, ban reporting to duty directly after commuting and then really enforce the ban, set rosters in a way that enables crews to safely commute. Of course it won't be done, because (or at least that's what we're told) it would be ruinous for entire airline industry. Seemingly the chosen alternative is to pursue cheaper but ineffective solutions and hope good luck will see us through.... at least till the end of the term.

Just to add to Bealzeub's excellent post about dangers of complacency. Donnie Williams, F-4 instructor, was chosen for USAF instructor of the year in 1985. which shows that he was really among the finest aviators. However, ten years later, the peak in Colombia, named El Deluvio, couldn't care less about his or his captain's experience as hopelessly lost B757 flew through the night towards it. Most of you know that there's no "They lived happily ever after" at the end of this story.

If adopted, it will do absolutely nothing to enhance airline safety...what it will do however, is formulate another department with which to throw funding at a supposed problem, thereby increasing costs, with absolutely no tangable results.
Put this in the same bin as some of the enhanced CRM psycho-babble baloney that was used in the past.

Nevertheless, it's a rotten situation, but...we intend to make the best of it, anyway.:E

if you don't have basic airsense then it does not matter how much time you have most pilots have been trained by several instructors and companies but they know in the back of their minds what's really bad and what's ok and while they might behave in one way in order to please the examiner but they know that there's no chance of that maneuver being successful in real life

10000 hrs of doing the wrong thing does not make it right. The captain of the Colgan flight was also trained that recovery is done with power [not withstanding the false preconceptions he had about tailplane stall wrt his type]

his method most likely worked in the sim wrt to stick shaker indication because increased power does lower the AoA, but a CFI with perhaps 40 hrs of instructing would instinctively lower the nose along with power to decrease height loss and most likely have survived, fatigued or not!

it not even necessarily that the pilot's have little experience---you can be trained to push buttons on anything,... I worry more about the abilities of the people training them who may not be the most knowledgeable characters for without a good background the naivety of the low hour/ low experience trainees causes them basically defenseless against improper training :ugh:It would be a different story if pilots were more proactive/ less passive wrt to aeronautical knowledge and training but the trend today is just get through it as fast as possible and go earn your peanuts so you can impress the ground people:rolleyes:


WR to SMS well if we continue with a blame culture instead of a safety culture then it will fail or be abused and become dangerous but it is now a basic fact of life hopefully it will be used ethically---though I have doubts

PA

Donnie in the Cali Columbia crash was an international pilot that flew to Europe and was not familiar with Cali approaches. Procedures then before GPS was to back everything up with raw data. Unfortunately in the process of doing that both pilots lost track of where they were because they were tuning in NDB's etc. but selected the same NDB as Bogota, Columbia which the FMC sent them east instead of south. R was the NDB for both airports for the FMC. Why both of them let this happen? I don't know. I flew that trip for many months after the crash and never saw a problem. Complacency was my guess for the cause. I learned never to start thinking about what you are doing after landing until the parking brake is set.

Yeah they were worried about the flight attendants not getting legal rest and delaying the next day's departure.

Some other lessons from that one:

1. One guy only on the FMS. Resist the urge to watch what the other guy does.

2. Never ever ask for direct at night in South America. You can never be in that much of a hurry. Fly the airways as long as you can.

3. My personal policy: 250 below 12k, 220 below 10k down there also.

The most incredible comment I ever heard at my retirement soiree' was several young whippersnappers get up and say that since I stopped flying, the nose of every aircraft in the fleet was 6 miles shorter.

That each and every one of them was flying, effortlessly, at that moment, something pondered and planned for 6 miles back. That I had instilled that in them.

One of them said he planned his amourous activities later that evening, in the crew van, while still 6 miles from the hotel because of his time spent flying with me.

The point here.... if you stay ahead of the airplane, surprises are simply an opportunity to execute a previously discussed plan.

What method?

Drill for "approach to stall recovery" on Q400 is to add power, release the backpressure and level the wings at the onset of the stickshaker. Applied timely it is guaranteed to work in real world. It absolutely doesn't include items such as: "pull the nose up from 10° ANU to 31°" or "fight the stickpusher" or "retract the flaps below Vfri".

I feel that your worry might be somewhat misplaced; not that there is no need to worry about pilots being misled by bad training but your notion that only low hour/low experience pilots are vulnerable is somewhat at odds with the real life. Late Mr Molin was quite experienced and yet he failed to apprehend that AAAMP's recommendation about using rudder with ailerons to increase roll rate is applicable only to high bank/high AoA upsets. Used while dealing with relatively small disturbance at modest AoA it turned out to be lethal.

Defense against the purveyors of dangerous ideas in aviation is the real knowledge. It comes cheaper if it's based on someone else's experience than your own. And there are some folks who are unable to buy it with thousands of their hours.

And the captain? Aren't two pilots on the flightdeck supposed to give some redundancy? What's the significance anyway? That you can get away with anything over flat terrain? When the crew set Romeo instead of Rozo as fly-to waypoint, the aeroplane made almost ninety degrees turn to the left - instead of flying south towards the airport, it turned east. Whether in USA, Russia, China, Kyrgyzstan or Luxembourg, people who make a fraction of such a navigation blunder on skill test are not issued instrument rating and have to redo it. Now you see why.

Now I'll put my capt. Obvious hat on: when under procedural control, never ask for or accept direct routing. Cases when it's completely safe to do so are so few and far apart that they're not worth the risk. Also treat radar controls of suspicious quality as if they were procedural.

this issue starts way back in flight schools where they train FOR the CPl/IR test. There is no extra capacity, they know the route, they know the now 'in house' examiner and what is expected. Therefore, they pass the test. There is very little 'testing' outside the normal on the type rating and then people are launched into real life.... If nothing goes wrong they are in the left seat:eek:

ANU what's weight and balance got to do with it:}

seriously, not Approach to stall; I mean stall

PA

Yes Clandestino, we are all subject unfortunately to Brain in the Butt syndrome---I just stopped calling the Cirrus' Avidyne Entegra system the Garmin G-1000 because I was very very lazy and passive while flying with the FBO's 'checkout' instructor---but couple brain in butt with lack of knowledge or experience with perhaps physiological stress and it's a bad recipe---no, I'm still not allowed to fly alone in the Cirrus :O

PA