Piloting has been described as countless hours of boredom spiked with seconds of sheer terror. It's those seconds of terror, or at least confusion, that CAE is harvesting for its simulator training courses.
Under a new program called RealCase study training, the simulator and training provider is giving pilots a "jump-seat view" of emergency situations faced by their peers to make training more apropos to the real world.
"There's nothing that puts a pilot on the edge of his seat like something that happened on his aircraft," says Bob Tyler, CAE's chief training officer.
Tyler says the normal two-day ground school program includes aircraft performance problems, meteorology, normal and abnormal procedures for key systems, and emergency procedures. "The class will then sometimes share war stories," says Tyler. "Sometimes there's dead air, but other times a crew will share with us something that happened to them within the past year."
Those recent "war stories" were the seed that spawned the new program, with case studies coming from CAE's safety team, national regulators, aircraft manufacturers, operators and safety agencies like the US National Transportation Safety Board.
CAE is starting the program with five aircraft types - Cessna Citation 550 models and Citation X, Dassault Falcon 7X, Embraer Phenom 300 and Beechjet 400.
In one example that shows the practicality of the program, Tyler says one operator of Citation Xs asked CAE to discuss two recent incidents where crews performed emergency descents before considering traffic and fuel burn implications after windscreen outer plies had failed. In both cases, procedures called for continuing the flight as there was no danger of an explosive decompression.
Case studies are being used at CAE's training centers in Dallas, Texas, and Morristown, New Jersey. The company plans to extend the program to all aircraft types in its training portfolio.
Source: Flight Daily News
