Blank piece of paper - LPC/OPC from today
 

If you were given a clean sheet of paper and told to design an LPC/OPC simulator session designed to deal with today’s issues and can completely ignore the old fashioned/irrelevant system of checking what would you do?

Have the dude lose all his assets, have him stay at home for almost a year with no flying and no knowledge of when he would be flying again, have his wife scream the s*** out of her lungs everyday at breakfast, have him on stand by duty all night, checking his availablity every 30 minutes so he can't catch any sleep, and then call him at 0500 tell him that the briefing for his OPC is in 20 minutes and he should be moving his a** to the sim in full uniform immediately.

I would focus on training/evaluating pilote core competencies that I would clearly define by means of Line oriented scenarios. Let's keep this idea between us! ;-)

Kidding aside, I think the competencies based training is as of today the closest concept to what could be considered "ideal" training keeping in mind that one of the most important crm training elements that is "surprise and startle" will always have loads of limitations in terms of exposure in the SIM, because anytime a pilot steps in the magic box, then said pilot knows there's going to be a lot of action so the concept of surprise and startle loses some grip.

Just to emphasize how broken the system is. Decade ago, did a recurrent. Examiner had things going on."why don't you guys get started with profile, need to take this call". Flew the first 45 minutes of the 1:30 ride from memory (stalls/steep turns/circling approach/go around) before he said a word. Had done it 20+ time, so...

Wish I could find the article I read. Guy would do SIM sessions and not fail anything. Student would come out swearing, sweating, confused, no idea what they did wrong. If you are in the sim, you know something will fail, if you fly the line you know nothing will happen. Until it does.

Absolutely.

We actually did that kind of “experiment” in my company a few years ago. We organized volunteered sim sessions of approx 1 hour per crew with a quick line oriented flight. No failures at all, no special threats. In the debriefing the majority of the crew thought they had completely missed some failures and they would “fail” (it wasn’t even graded) and came up with all sort of “ah now I remember we should have done this and that” when in fact the debriefing from the instructor was “thank you very much good job!”. So as You say we expect all sort of action in the sim because it is expensive to run and it is intended to be used for what can’t be done in the actual aircraft, and we don’t expect much of anything on the line because aircrafts are reliable and fly thousands of hours every year without a hitch. And then surprise and startle kicks in when things do actually happen.

For a while during the worst part of the pandemic we did line checks in the sim for some people. I didn’t have to do one but those who did said it was a weird experience just flying a 30min normal sector with no problems (well, no problems that weren’t of their own making!)

As far as the OP’s question, I think where we’re going with ATQP/EBT is a good start. Also, IMO, just more training would help; I needed several recency sims this year as the work was a bit sporadic and there were a lot of heavy trips because of eFTLs that left you out of landing recency. To be honest, I’ve never felt more confident in LH about aircraft handling, EFATOs, etc. as I do at the moment, simply because I asked to do a lot of nasty failures, visual circuits, limiting crosswinds and the like while I was in the box for my three T/Os and landings. I think we train to the bare minimum normally due to cost constraints and it’s nice to to do several of something to know you’ve cracked it as opposed to fluking it once, the instructor going “Great! Next!” and you thinking it actually wasn’t all that great.

As to the syllabus I would suggest for a blue-sky regime, I’m not sure. Some of the biggest issues at the moment are detailed in iggy’s post second from the top which are either present or not present, but not easily simulated. Our Flight Management and Training are trying to look forward at the moment and admit that it’s the unknown unknowns which are likely going to be the source of significant problems in the future. The last two years prove that.

Thanks god! I was starting to doubt my abilities to convey messages in a pedagogical way.

Does people feel that they come away from sim sessions having learnt anything? Apart from the training that FullWings has mentioned which sound great.

I mean two, four hours sessions twice a year and what can one say they have really learnt? Or practised to perfection?

I recall doing a session where we had to practise using v/s in climb and descent and see how it reaches a certain vertical speed in the climb and speed will decay and reaches a certain vertical speed in descent and speed will increase because of one incident where a pilot had a low speed scenario using a high vertical speed selected.... Using a million dollar training asset for that was not so efficient.

How about starting a session with all briefings of approach done in the classroom as they are a real waste of time in the STD and begin the flight at cruise level with nothing wrong and reasonably clear skies? Let the crew relax and settle in for ten minutes so they get a sense of normality and then introduce a warm up failure to practise crew co-ordination?

Sonic, et al, Re ‘surprise and startle’; see comment #5 in BD99s thread; https://www.pprune.org/safety-crm-qa...-whistles.html

If the need is for real experience … remember that simulation is not real.

That is a significant part of the problem. Even conversion courses, where you’d think you’d get more of a chance to practice, have been reduced to the bare minimum. There are so many boxes to tick on the official form that this need starts taking over from structured learning; if you need a night landing, a single engine circuit, a hydraulic problem and a visual approach, the trend is to do them all in one, just to expedite the process. Get the paperwork sorted, then they can learn about the aircraft on the line, seems to be the unsaid objective.

I would like to see more time allocated to “free form” training/practice, as often the mandatories and pre-programmed exercises take up most of the detail. Being told there are 10mins left and asked if you’d like to do something at the end of a concentrated session often gets the reply: “yes, go home”, which is fair if the last 3hrs and 50mins have been chock full of action and there is little capacity left for learning. There is also the issue of when is anything you do in the sim non-jeopardy?

I always take advantage of a few spare minutes at the end of any session but make clear with the examiner/instructor that a) the session as required is over and b) this is now free flight. If (and no-one ever has) say it's still monitored then I'd pass and think very poorly of such an attitude.

I think the issue with the sim/'training' is that the point is now ticking boxes and filling in forms and getting back on the line. The point is not to actually train or learn anything despite what training departments might pretend to be is the case. For example if you learned a lot but didn't have time to complete every manoeuvre outlined in the profile you would come out of it a better pilot but you would have failed to complete the task according to the regulator/training dept. However if you bashed through the items, passed everything with no learning whatsoever then you'd be the same pilot as before but have successfully completed your LPC/OPC. A bit of cart before the horse methinks.

It's a shame because it's all a very expensive and time-consuming process for everyone involved.