Primary training in a Hi Perf complex acft

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.

--
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