Keeping airline pilot training relevant while flightdeck technology advances apace - and while airspace management demands ever greater flight trajectory accuracy - is a task that will end only when airliners no longer have flightdecks.
The end of flightdecks, most experts agree, is in the distant future - even if the single-pilot flightdeck is looking feasible within the next decade or so, starting with freighters. For, there has long been, and still is, a conservative belief among many senior people in the industry that traditional pilot skills, and less tangible qualities like airmanship, are immutable absolutes.
Certainly these basic qualities are still an essential part of what makes a good pilot, but aircraft have changed massively, so has the airspace environment, the means of navigation, and the means of traffic separation and flow management. Expectations of safety standards are far higher than they used to be, and young recruits to the piloting profession have been raised and educated in a different era.
For three decades after the first digital avionics and flight control systems began to be introduced in the early 1980s, neither ab-initio nor recurrent airline pilot training was modified accordingly. As cockpit technology continued its rapid advance, although accidents rates were reducing, when they did occur it was increasingly because the pilots found themselves unable to cope if faced with an unexpected occurrence that called for independent decision-making.
Evidence that training philosophy and technique has not prepared pilots well for today’s fourth-generation cockpits has been the elephant in the flight simulator for a long time. The most obvious evidence is the distressingly regular incidence of loss of control in flight (LOC-I) involving aircraft that were actually controllable. As a statistic – given the number of flights that take place globally – LOC-I crashes do not represent a high risk, but their regularity over the years since 2000 is unacceptable, and no-one at present can claim confidently that they will not continue to happen.
The very existence today of an EASA advisory body called the Airline Training Policy Group (ATPG) is testimony to the fact that the present day ab initio pilot training system frequently does not produce the finished product airlines need, and that more needs to be done to correct this.
The ATPG is made up of training experts from the airlines, the training industry, the aircraft manufacturers and EASA. They are addressing the fact that many pilots with commercial pilot licences who present themselves for jobs at airlines are just not good enough to fly today’s jet airliners safely. EasyJet puts the figure at up to 90% of applicants, while adding that graduates from consolidated training courses are usually good.
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But even when those pilots who do pass the airlines’ acceptance tests get onto the line, evidence from incidents, accidents and flight data monitoring (FDM) suggests the recurrent training does not advance their knowledge and skills the way it should. At many airlines, recurrent training is mis-named because it is still more about recurrent checking. And since the reliability of today’s aircraft is such that it deprives the crews of experience of dealing with real failures or anomalies, recurrent training is needed more than ever to advance pilot knowledge, resilience and confidence.
Capt Chris Warton, director of customer training in Europe for Bombardier Business Aircraft, said his company no longer reports on recurrent training sessions simply as pass or fail; it grades individual performance. The old pass/fail system did not encourage progress, said Warton, nor allow progress to be monitored.
Ryanair’s head of training Capt Andy O’Shea, who is on the ATPG, summarises what is missing in pilot graduates from the ab initio system. He says they lack – to a greater or lesser degree – knowledge and understanding, flight path management skills, crew resource management ability, and what he calls “maturity and attitude”. The ATPG’s answer to the deficit is effectively a course extension to the commercial pilot licence/instrument training (CPL/IR) training course, adding high quality multi-crew-cooperation (MCC) and jet orientation courses (JOC). Unlike off-the-peg MCC/JOC, this includes simulator instruction in the style of line-oriented flight training (LOFT), plus advanced knowledge consolidation ground-school. The result is a course dubbed the Airline Pilot Certificate Course, which Ryanair requires all its own new recruits to go through.
This is an admission that the present system, as designed, does not work well enough for airlines which expect pilots with licences to arrive on the line completely trained.
Although improving the effectiveness of pilot ab initio and recurrent training has been much discussed at forums like the Royal Aeronautical Society’s annual International Flight Crew Training conference (IFCTC) over the last decade, until recently the focus has continued to be directed at making “better pilots” in the traditional sense, and on reacting to the kind of accidents that continue to happen, rather than on preparing pilots to be experts in understanding and manipulating the high-technology cockpit tools with which pilots manage flights today.
But this year’s conference (25-26 September) plans to home in on the human interface with technology, and on competency-based training. As national aviation authorities move toward “performance based regulation” rather than the traditional prescriptive kind of rulemaking, it will also be taking a look at training quality oversight.
Even aircraft with fourth-generation highly automated flightdecks need pilots with traditional skills because, as the notorious example of Air France flight 447 (LOC-I over the South Atlantic, June 2009) demonstrated, the automation is programmed to trip out if the system recognises it is being provided with faulty sensor data. And that will inevitably happen from time to time.
Thus, for more than two decades now, the commercial air transport industry has been confronted with a dilemma regarding pilot training policy, but it seems the changes needed are still under development.
The advent of the digital flightdeck brought with it improved avionics capability and reliability at the same time as higher design and engineering standards reduced failure rates for airframe and engine hardware. The result was that accident figures reduced significantly.
Meanwhile, in the early days of digital cockpits, the new smart flightdeck avionics were marketed as lowering pilots’ workload. In fact they did not lower the workload, they simply changed its nature. It became less physical and more cerebral. It demanded knowledge of the sophisticated flight management equipment and its capabilities, but it did not take away the need for crew planning and decision-making, and pilots still needed to exercise trajectory management and monitoring skills.
Nevertheless, the combination of reduced serious accident statistics and the illusion of lower pilot workloads provided the airlines with what they saw as an opportunity to trim pilot training cost.
As it became clear that LOC-I was here to stay, one solution to it was seen as being upset recovery training. Over the years, however, Airbus argued long and hard that it was better to train pilots to prevent upsets than to recover from them. Buried in the Airbus argument is the belief that the shortcomings in skills and knowledge that allowed licensed pilots to get the aeroplane into an upset were the real problem, not their failure to recover from a situation they had played their part in creating.
As the entry into service of Airbus’ A350 series was approaching, the manufacturer’s training policy experts engaged in a bold programme of rethinking the way pilots were prepared for the state-of-the-art digital flightdeck on a new aircraft type. Airbus called the new approach “learning by discovery”, or learning by doing. Boeing has adopted a similar approach and calls it “active learning”.
This starts with the concept that nobody nowadays reads a manual before operating a new tablet computer or smartphone. They know what the device is designed to do, and what they want to do with it, so they switch it on and experiment to discover how this particular product produces the results they want.
According to the new Airbus training philosophy, the crew are presented with a full-flight simulator for the aircraft on which they are going to do their type rating course, and told to “fly” it. After all the aircraft, however advanced, is an aeroplane like any other, and it will fly like any other. The pilots are told they can work out themselves how to start it, taxi it, line it up for take-off, but they are not allowed to engage the autopilot or flight director. They are encouraged to find out how it behaves in standard flight scenarios, and finally they land. This exercise also includes “learning by failing”, by being permitted to find out what does not work; this approach is the diametric opposite of the “don’t touch anything until you have learned all about it” attitude.
The psychology of this approach is sound. The rules of aerodynamics have not been altered just because this is a state of the art fly-by-wire machine. And after a couple of practical sessions flying the simulator, the ground-school classes will feel more relevant to the pilots, and the more traditional process of learning details about the new type can begin.
Pilots need to be re-introduced to the fact that their complex machine, with all its automation, is just an aeroplane, and it still flies like one. If a pilot loses sight of this basic fact, the traditional “get out of trouble” mantra that tells pilots to “Aviate, navigate, and communicate – in that order” does not mean very much. These reminders need to be provided not only when they begin their type rating training but also in their recurrent training.
Jacqui Suren, head of regulation and training development at L3 Commercial Training Solutions talks of new teaching/learning processes using virtual reality and “gamification” of the learning process, which she says relates ground-school more closely to flying.
Regulators like the US FAA and Europe’s EASA have always known that innovation brings risk as well as reward, especially during the introduction of new equipment or capabilities, but they also acknowledge that technical advances tend to bring net benefits. Modern flight instrument and navigation displays may have a graphic clarity that improves pilot situational awareness, but the flight management computers (FMC), with their multiple capabilities, also introduced the potential for mode confusion, and FMS can take the pilot out of the cognitive loop by being so accurate and reliable that his/her critical faculties become comatose.
Training changes – like evidence-based and competency-based training – designed to correct this situation have only begun to be adopted in the last three years or so, but at least the process is beginning in some parts of the air transport industry. There is, however, a long way to go, and technology will still keep advancing, so the training goalposts will keep moving, so the new instructional methodologies have to have flexibility built-in.
The principal change that is making recurrent training more relevant now is the gradual adoption of evidence-based training (EBT). Data provides the evidence of what pilots are getting wrong – or not getting quite right – whether through individual aircraft FDM, or “big data” assembled by organisations like the International Air Transport Association (IATA). The possession of this evidence enables airlines to identify where their training challenges lie as an operator, but also enables a fully-capable in-house training department to tailor training to individual pilot needs.
In Europe EBT will be implemented as policy fully in early 2019 by EASA. The agency’s executive director Patrick Ky observes that the capacity of this carefully-mined data to maximise the effectiveness of an EBT session works best when airlines carry out their training in-house. This is so, he says, because the specific lessons are naturally brought together with the airline’s own standard operating procedures.
Achieving this with the use of third party training organisations is much more difficult, he points out, suggesting the full advantage that EBT should be able to deliver can only be provided by third party trainers if they work extremely closely with the airline. Global third party training provider CAE commented at the 2017 IFCTC that “airline-focussed” flight training provision is increasing as a proportion of the market, and generic third party training is reducing. CAE points out that an airline can provide a third party training supplier with FDM data so as to tailor the training to the airline’s needs.
Ky insists that syllabus-based or generic training is not adequate for the task when flight deck technology is advancing fast, and when some risks are declining and others are increasing. Pilot training now, says Ky, has to be aimed at coping with identified risks, and providing pilots with the knowledge and skills to use cockpit technology to its best advantage. The old adage that the crew should always be ahead of the aircraft contains the implication that today’s pilots must now be ahead of the flight management system.
Asked whether, in these days of performance-based oversight, close training standards inspection by regulators still needs to be exercised, Ky observed that airlines are always looking for training economies, and if they start cutting corners “it immediately shows”. That sounds like a “yes”.
Finally Dr Georgina Fletcher, principal consultant at analyst Frazer Nash, was given the task of taking a look at training systems from a UK perspective and making recommendations to ensure the maintenance of quality pilot training. She presented her findings at the 2017 IFCTC, and recommended that training quality would benefit if all parts of the industry were to take “collective ownership” of the task. That means the end-user – the airlines – should work closely with the Civil Aviation Authority, the flight training organisations, educational establishments and with what is now the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills. There should, said Fletcher, be a Training Needs Analysis, and training policy should be based on its findings. Unfortunately airline representation was thin on the ground at the 2017 IFCTC, which tends to validate Fletcher’s recommendation.
Now EBT is to be formally implemented, and because there is a growing awareness of the need to train and improve crews in simulator sessions rather than just checking, it looks as if recurrent training has the potential to address skill needs far better than it has been doing. The product of ab-initio flight training organisations, however, remains hugely variable and even the top quality still seems to fall short of expectations. But that problem can only be solved if the airlines will invest in improvement.
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Source: FlightGlobal.com
