I was going to do a line by line parsing of his errors here,
but after reading his idiotic statement on medical
simulators, I don't see any point in it. MaxManiac gets my
nomination for Aviation KOTY.

"Mxsmanic" wrote in message
...
John Mazor writes:

And it's possible for crew to fly for 16 hours straight
with
no relief crew or stops, without an accident. Just
because
it can be done doesn't mean that it's desirable, let
alone
optimal.

Where sim-only training is being done, it's being done
because it's economical
and desirable. Why bother with irrelevant experience and
expensive training
if you don't need it?

So the abiity to make an incision and sew it up is pretty
good "proof of concept" that a freshly minted medical
intern
can do brain surgery?

This analogy, if that's what it is, is flawed.

Doctors can and do learn to do certain things in
simulation, or by the book,
or by observation, and the first time they actually do it
themselves, it's on
a live patient. There is no equivalent to flying a
non-revenue flight for
practice, which is a major flaw in your analogy.

Not all surgery is brain surgery, but minor surgery can be
learned as you
describe. Brain surgery is only slightly different from a
surgical
standpoint; most of the require skill relates to knowing
specific
characteristics of the brain, not differences in making
and closing incisions
or other basic surgical procedures.

Bull****. You deleted the following sentence in my
statement: "One sufficiently bad pilot screw up = one
smoking hole." That's the whole point.

Zero tolerance might be a romantic ideal, but that's not
the way aviation
works in real life. In the real world, a certain
threshold of accidents is
tolerated in order to make practical aviation achievable.

In airline accidents, the cause is often not so much a bad
pilot as a pilot
who made the wrong mistakes at the wrong time. Many
pilots who crash have
good records, but for any of several possible reasons,
they messed up once and
died. That happened despite all their experience in tin
cans, their ratings,
their logged hours, and so on.

You're never so experienced that you can afford to be
complacent. Conversely,
if you are very careful, you don't have to have 30 years
of experience.
Personality plays a major role here, as numerous studies
have proved, and the
old saying that there are no old, bold pilots continues to
ring true.

Not when you factor in the costs of accidents caused by
inadequate training.

Less training doesn't mean inadequate training. Much of
current training is
difficult to justify in a practical sense, and doing
without it would have
only a slight impact on accident statistics.

Most accidents involve crews placed in situations that
involve multiple
departures from the norm. The confusion this causes
destroys situational
awareness and crew coordination and leads to accidents.
Part of this can be
improved through training, part of this cannot. Some of
it is human nature,
some of it is personality. It's a complex domain of
study, but it's clear
that many aspects of current training are irrelevant,
whereas other aspects
are needed but missing.

Such as who?

Those who fly as a job, and not as an adventure. They do
what they are
required to do, and that's it. There are pilots who do it
only for the money,
although they are perhaps more common in developing
countries than in
developed countries (developed countries offer more
choices for high-paying
jobs, many with fewer requirements and prerequisites than
piloting).

Well, duh, you can't do them all in a sim or training
flight.

Fortunately, they aren't all necessary, as they
effectively never occur in
real life.

But every year we get any number of emergency scenarios
that
transcend normal training routines.

Yes, but the first one to do it tells everyone else in
line what it will be,
so it hardly comes as a surprise.

That's what separates
the pros from the amateurs - the ability to draw on other
experience and extrapolate to whatever doo-doo has just
hit
your fan.

That is completely uncorrelated with pro vs. amateur. A
professional is
someone who is paid to do something; an amateur is someone
who does it for
fun.

You obviously have not the slightest concept of what goes
on
in the cockpits of airliners every day.

In other words, you disagree. But I might have a much
better idea than you
think.

Yes, the vast
majority of flights are routine or encounter only minor,
easily fixed problems. Be it 99% or 99.9%, it's that
last
"9" that "proves the concept" that on any given day,
somewhere in the entire air transport system, some crew
saves their behinds and those of their passengers by
exercising experience and skills that rise above the
lower
level of what is normally required.

Except that, below a certain probability, it's easy for
pilots to go through
their entire careers without being called upon to handle a
given situation, in
which case training for it is wasted, and those who cannot
handle it are just
as good in their positions as those who can.

And that's what makes
flying on on an airline the safest possible way to get
from
A to B in the U.S.

That's a separate debate that I won't get into here.

Not nearly as often as the real-life situations that are
what I was referring to in my previous paragraph.

But if I'm to believe what you appear to assert, spins
should be practiced
"just in case," and any pilot not familiar with them is
somehow going to
perform worse in his job than one who is.

The Sioux
City accident, where Capt. Al Haynes dealt with a system
failure for which there was no training and marshalled
his
resources, is a classic example of the difference between
a
button-pusher and a real pilot.

It's actually a classic example of multiple heads being
better than one, and
of good crew cooperation.

**** happens like this all the time. Trained-monkey
button
pushers, let alone automated systems, cannot be expected
to
routinely rise to such levels of airmanship.

It doesn't happen all the time. It happens on rare
occasions. Whether
old-school pilots like it or not, flying airliners is
increasingly a matter of
pushing buttons, and this trend will only continue.

Most modern airliners don't require a flight engineer; he
has been replaced by
automation. If something failed in that automation, would
the average airline
pilot today know what to do, even if he had the means to
do it? The answer is
no. And it doesn't matter because the automation is the
only option; there is
no manual override for anything.

Only when nothing really bad happens, see previous cites.

In an increasing and overwhelming majority of cases,
nothing bad happens.

I learned a long time ago never to say never, but by the
time that the technology matures enough to provide
sufficiently reliable automation to do that at a level
that
the public will accept, it also will have given us the
means
to conduct most interpersonal transactions virtually,
thus
eliminating most of the situations that require us to
physically transport ourselves from A to B.

We already have that capability, but many people don't
want to use it. A vast
number of flights every day carry businesspeople to
meetings in person that
could just as easily be carried out electronically.

--
Transpose mxsmanic and gmail to reach me by e-mail.