Industry Debate Focuses On Flightcrew Training

The traditional career path to becoming a professional pilot starts at a local flight school, an aeronautical college or in the military. After obtaining required licenses and certifications, the candidate builds the flight time required for an airline job by instructing or working for small commuter or night-cargo operators. In the days of three-person cockpits, the new-hire would start as a flight engineer and spend several years gaining experience while graduating to the right seat as first officer, then to the prized left seat of captain.

This method has worked well. "The fact that the U.S.'s safety record, the best in the world, is as good as it has been I attribute to the quality of training that is present in the airline business," notes NTSB Member Robert Sumwalt, who has logged about 24,000 hr. in his 24-year career as an airline pilot. In 2008, scheduled and nonscheduled U.S. airlines carried 753 million passengers on more than 10.8 million flights without a fatality. And the total accident rate for Part 121 scheduled carriers was 0.107 per/100,000 flight hours and 0.189 per 100,000 departures.

However, "it's a different world now - and we are not training for it," stresses Flight Safety Foundation President and CEO William R. Voss. Learning to handle rare events, such as engine failure at V1 takeoff-decision speed, still dominates training. What's needed are methods that reflect real-world operations in real-world, automated cockpits. "When you fundamentally reinvent the cockpit, you introduce new failure modes," says Voss.

"What a life-or-death emergency looks like now isn't a scene from a Clark Gable movie - a flaming engine and a macho pilot in the left seat with a cigar hanging out of his mouth," says Voss. "It's about what happens when all the displays go dark in the middle of the night and you don't know what to do," emphasizing that current training does not provide the skills needed to deal with the challenges of automation (see p. 57).