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What makes a good pilot a better pilot?

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Old 1st Jan 2009, 23:34
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What makes a good pilot a better pilot?

I am interested in comparing the professional cultures in aviation and medicine (and am waiting for a copy of Helmreich's book). Aspects of aviation safety culture are being translated to specialties such as anaesthesia - such as CRM training in simulated crises, incident reporting systems, etc..

Medical culture has a strong continuous professional development orientation and I was curious as to whether this exists in aviation. In short, how can a good pilot become a better pilot? Is it through acquiring more knowledge, gaining skills through simulation or experience, reviewing performance after each flight, and is it largely innate or learned?

Curiosity killed the cat.

ps. Moderator - please relocate if you feel a different forum more appropriate
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 06:15
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what makes a good pilot a better pilot

I think that the good pilot has to decide to become better. Then he/she has to do great deal of work to become one. Reading a lot of material to help learn from the mistakes and errors of others, to read investigation reports of accidents and incidents , to undergo training to horne the skills, and to be in the right environment.. But fore most is the genuine desire to become a better pilot.. I am myself trying to be one , and anyone with decent tips pls let me benefit from them..I am currently flying a F-50 in the tropics..
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 07:57
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A good start to being a better pilot is to read "Re-Defining Airmanship" by Tony Kern and when you're done with that read "Flight Discipline" by the same bloke. Both good reads.

Regards,
BH.
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 07:59
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A willingness to keep learning.
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 08:27
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point8six +1
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 09:39
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The best learning resource for improving flight safety . . .

Reading airline incident/accident reports. Vivid reality of what can go wrong and what has gone wrong.
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 17:03
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Gasman1-
I've often wondered the same thing myself. If you look at the medical industry, professionals are required to receive continuing education (on an annual basis?) to maintain their credentials. In addition, there is pressure to participate in research (publish or perish). During my limited exposure to the airline inustry, I have no seen any similar requirements. And if you think about it, most surgeries are videotaped, with many observed as learning opportunities while there has been a great resistance to the same in aviation (medicine is a "public" activity; piloting is private). It seems to me that for the most part, they are completely different cultures with different definitions of professionalism.
J.
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 17:26
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jolly girl,

Pilots do go through continuous training/testing - usually over 2 days every 6 months plus a plethora of other times. Your credentials have to be renewed at specific intervals - the licence, the type rating, the medical, security training, safety equipment training, CRM training, etc.

External agencies (e.g. the CAA) can and do conduct audits/checks on airlines too.

I wholeheartedly disagree with your assertion that there is a resistance to use recurrent training/simulation/actual flights as learning tools - the aviation industry constantly updates it's philosophy/procedures as and when things come up.

Most airlines bombard their crews with new information/procedures, etc. literally every week. The manuals are constantly being updated.

B&S
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 19:56
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Jolly Girl - perhaps you can let the uninformed (aviation workers) know what licensing renewal requirements are obligatory for the medical profession, such as 6-monthly simulator checks, annual operational checks, medical checks, CRM courses etc. etc.? not to mention continuous FDR and CVR downloads. I have an opinion of the medical profession that you seem to have of the flight crew profession and I'd be very interested to know that we are both wrong!
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 21:36
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Gasman, just in case you haven't seen it, there was a special human factors issue of the Bulletin of the Royal College of Anaesthetists (Issue 31, Sep 08).

The guest editorial was entitled "Why anaesthesia patient safety has lagged behind aviation safety".

From your mention of anaesthesia, I think you may have seen this, but maybe not.
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 22:02
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I think there's a reason why them medical profession is adopting standards and processes used in the aviation industry and not the other way round...

As for professional re-validation, docs aren't expected to demonstrate that they're safe and competent to do their job to an external agency every 6 months. There's currently an immense amount of wrangling of precisely how, when, and to whom docs should demonstrate their fitness to practice. To be fair, part of the problem also seems to be that docs are so rammed with work that no-one knows who's going to carry the can on re-validation days!

The videotaping of consultations- I suspect you mean for the training purposes of juniors hoping to become fully qualified GP's. I don't think (although I could be wrong) that trained up GP's submit themselves to the same thing. I KNOW that hospital docs in the UK don't!

Openeness in medicine is a fairly new concept that's still bedding in. After all, we've all seen what happens to NHS "whistle-blowers" professionally, even if they turn out to be right! Even as recently as 10 years ago, medicine was as much a closed shop as, oh, the legal profession?

I remember a few years (5 or 6) ago when working in Coventry, it was decided that junior docs should not be allowed to drive home after an on-call, as they would be a danger on the roads... So, 1 hour ago, life or death decision. Now, not fit to drive... Really!?

It's only been recently that the wisdom of having more senior (and therfore better trained) docs around more often to possibly reduce errors has been realised. Before that, during the night, all bets were off.

The aviation equivalent to the way medicine has been practised up until relatively recently would be to man aircraft with 2 low hours FO's with a captain at the end of the radio, making them do back to back sectors until their eyes were crossed, and then getting upset with them for any errors they made.

I think if someone took overwork, under-rest and high stress in medicine, and related it to quality of work (or lack of) as far back in the day as the aviation industry seems to have made the connection, there'd have been a lot less high profile medical disasters in recent years.

Rant over. Terribly sorry for thread creep. Mods please forgive me! But to the implied statement "Doctors are more professional than pilots" I just had to respond...
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 23:25
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"It seems to me that for the most part, they are completely different cultures with different definitions of professionalism."

Note I used the word "definition" not "standards"....

Touchy Touchy
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Old 2nd Jan 2009, 23:47
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Note I used the word "definition" not "standards"....
Which would be fair enough, except that in the rest of your post you definitely imply that docs are in some way more responsible professionally than pilots. Which frankly I don't think is true.

And yes I am touchy, I truly believe that medicine in general has only started living up to it's own hype in the last 10-15 years, and even then in some cases only by being dragged kicking and screaming forwards. And even THEN there are situations when I wonder what century I'm in!

That isn't to say of course that there aren't wonderfully professional doctors out there. Because of course there are.

Medicine is learning a lot from aviation. Not the other way round. Sad fact, but fact nonetheless.

Regards

JR
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 00:23
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JG,

Not touchy at all - just letting you know that pilots do go through significant continuous training/checking each year.

B&S
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 01:25
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Thank you, B&S, for the sporting response.
(I see you caught I used the word "different" not "better")

I submitted my original post in this string in part because I've always been surprised that more pilots are not involved in the R&D side of things. But then I got to thinking, there's not really a "research" track for flight crew, at least while actively flying. It seems to me a squandering of an incredible subject matter expert/knowledge pool.
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 01:40
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For those who have not read some of Jolly Girl's other threads, I will simply point out that I'm pretty sure she is familiar with recurrent training requirements.

I think both she and JohnRaynor make two valid points, which together may define the issue. The medical profession is learning a great deal from aviation in the context of threat and error management, communication, and so forth. Hopefully, their concept of the impact fatigue has on human performance will eventually normalize with everyone else's (perhaps they can grab the FAA by the arm on the way by).

However, it is worth considering a couple of other aspects. First, an M.D. is an advanced degree in a science discipline. Because a bachelor's degree generally doesn't require you to do independent, published research, it often doesn't convey a real sense of continuing education. Many people understand this anyway, but a requirement to either defend original research or at least make judgments based on original research goes a long way, I think, toward developing lifelong habits of continued education.

Second, the medical community has, over the past several hundred years, generally convinced the public that medicine is not perfect. It is possible for the doctor to do everything correctly and still lose the patient (notwithstanding contemporary litigation trends). Patients will still come to the doctor because there is hope, indeed a good chance, of success.

That argument won't wash in aviation. In order to get anyone on the airplane in the first place, we had to convince the public that we were perfect. Doing everything right and still losing the airplane doesn't quite cut it...the public won't be back for another try. Unfortunately, like most people, we tend to believe our own BS. Thus, a significant number of pilots will learn incrementally from experience (which they can easily interpret incorrectly) and tend to reject learning from more advanced research. The airline will only provide the absolute minimum of training, and is loathe to provide information beyond that which it can defend in court. Brief forays into advanced training, such as CRM or upset recovery, occur but within a few years tend to devolve to regulatory minimums.

In the end, you can't have a better pilot. This is the same argument we get into vis-a-vis seniority versus merit promotion. We are all rated and qualified to the same standard. There is no way to measure any standard above that. We can't tell the public that John Q. is a better pilot that Joe P., because the public would want to know why we even let Joe P. in the cockpit. We all know that both are more than competent, or maybe not, but we have no metric we could possibly use to define it beyond the ATP, first class medical and the six month check.

Therefore, it takes extraordinary effort on the pilot's part to educate himself. His company won't provide the material, and few books are published that address the profession in a meaningful way (not since Davies' Handling the Big Jets). The manufacturers actually provide a lot of very useful material, but the line pilot generally doesn't have access to it. The next problem is that, once he has gone outside and studied various issues to an advanced level, how does the pilot cope with his company's SOPs when they do not conform with the best practices? After all, compliance is an essential part of TEM, but when the SOP is marginal and you know it, what to do?

I suspect that a lot of pilots decide that it is better to spend more time on the boat and let the company tell them what they need to know. I don't agree with that, but the older I get, the more I understand it.
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 03:21
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Hi gasman1,

Got to thinking,

Since you are already getting in to Helmreich/Hofstede, there are at least two articles where cultural dimensions were correlated with accident data:
(Commercial Accidents) Citation: Russell, P.D. (1993) Crew Factor Accidents: Regional Perspective, Proceedings of the IATA 22nd Technical Conference of the IATA on Human Factors in Aviation, Montreal, Canada, 45-61
(NATO Accidents) Citation: Soeters, J.M.M.L., & Boer, P. (2000). Culture and flight safety in military aviation. International Journal of Aviation Psychology, 10, 111-133.

Also, not sure what you have in mind but it might be interesting to look at the intrinsic/extrinsic (motivational) support/controls (as studied in education, health care and sport domains by Deci, Ryan & colleagues) present in both groups. (Very dense reading, if you need a quick review let me know and I'll send it on.)

And organizational culture/climate are categories in the HFACS model (Shappell & Weigmann, www.hfacs.com). They’ve done some extensive analysis in the aviation domain (it's an interesting exercise to compare ther reports on 121 and 135 to GA to HEMS), not sure if anyone’s tried it in medicine. I would expect the model could transfer to any domain with a human element.

Good versus better pilots is an interesting question… What are the preferred behaviors? Attitudes? How do you define “good” performance on a flight? Adherence to canonical task paths? Communication models? A successful landing at destination? Or are we looking at judgement? Effective decision-making processes? Or handling skills? What makes one course of action “better” than others? Which was more important to Captain Haynes that day as he approached Iowa, his skill (because he was a very skilled pilot) or his luck (to have the one pilot in the world who had hundreds of simulator hours of practice using differential thrust in high-energy jets as one of his passengers)?

Sorry my earlier comments got folks on a tangent. Perhaps you were able to glean/measure some cultural traits and continuing education requirements in the responses.

All the best,
Jolly.
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 08:19
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Sincere thanks for all your interesting replies. My initial thoughts were that aviation and medicine had different learning cultures to suit different purposes. The aphorism is people learn to pass the tests. Aviation seems to have robust methods of maintaining standards, whilst perhaps less formal professional development available to exceed these. Medicine has the polar opposite situation - and as yet it is unknown whether all this continuous professional development translates into practice. Horses for courses?

The reason I asked the question was that I am currently working for an aeromedical team and was keen to institute some kind of case review process involving all members of the team. This has been tried before with limited success. Partially this is due to the difficulty of getting shift-workers in the same room at the same time. However, I was wondering whether pilots and aircrew would be likely to find the process unhelpful or alien.

gasman1

ps. jollygirl - you are right on the money with the Deci, Ryan & colleagues angle. Could you send me the full reference please - and if you have a quick review available yes pleeaase !
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 10:18
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A bigger watch

Joking aside, the skills required by a pilot change as his / her career progresses: in simple terms at the beginning of an airline career he / she has to be able to recognise that with 200hrs they know the square root of three-fifths of five-eights .. and that every trip is a training flight. If they begin with a degree of humility and a desire to get better they have the right attitude to improving the skill set.

Once they about 18 months - 2yrs and 1500hrs the danger that "I know everything" and they start "experimenting" creeps in: once they have had their fingers rapped the desire to try out their own ideas is suppressed - for the time being.

Then they get their first command after maybe 5yrs and 3000 - 4000hrs: during the upgrade training they will be warned - "Don't experiment, don't try to rewrite the book, don't let a new FO put you in a situation beyond your ability to recover": at some point they will ignore that advice and get themselves in a situation which will scare them witless and they will never go there again.

Eventually they come to realise that as Captains their role is to manage the operation: it is tacitly understood that they have the handling skills.

Ultimately they will come to realise that the better pilot is one who applies his / her superior skills and judgement to avoid getting themselves into situations which would require them to use their superior skills and judgement.
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Old 3rd Jan 2009, 10:54
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A bit late with this but here goes...

Woke up in the middle of the night with HFACS and culture on the brain (rust never sleeps)… At the 2008 ISASI conference the Japanese Ministry of Transport presented a paper discussing their application of the HFACS model. While the American analysis attributed most (if not all) accidents to errors committed at the individual level, the root causes identified by the Japanese occurred primarily at the organizational and supervisory levels. (Perhaps reflections of variations in individualism/collectivism between the cultures?) Combining this with Mansfield’s observations on the airline industry it has me wondering: how much of what makes a pilot good/better is based on individual attributes and initiative, and how much of it is based on organizational/group norms and supports? Is there an interaction between the two?
Hmmmmmm....

gasman, I will get you a reference list later in the day.
J.

Last edited by jolly girl; 3rd Jan 2009 at 11:42.
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