Poor pilot training by airlines raises concerns, captain says

Hoi Ha resident Captain David Newbery has presented a paper at the Royal Aeronautical Society that expressed concern about the pilot-training practices of many airlines, perhaps most.

Dave, a check and training captain at Cathay Pacific, says he is not referring to the best airlines that do invest in quality pilot training (Cathay, Dragonair, Lufthansa, Emirates and many of the “legacy” airlines) but to the many new and rapidly growing airlines that do the minimum they can get away with.

Dave said that after he presented the paper, summarised partially for lay readers below, the RAeS made him a Fellow.

The main points of Dave’s paper:

1. Simulators have largely replaced airborne training of pilots to the extent that some essential skills are being taught poorly or not at all.  Too many pilots are not trained “for the dark dirty night going into Beijing with an inexperienced captain in the left-hand seat.”
2. Dave questions the practice of giving a pilot with an MPL (Multi-Crew Pilot’s Licence, the new, alternative basic licence for air crew) an ATPL (the full licence which enables them to command an airliner) to people after 1500 hours.  This is total experience “without any formal competency-based command training”.  Some airlines are good at the latter, many do hardly any – there is little guidance in the industry for the essential requirements of a command course.
3. The traditional career structure of pilots meant that they had many years of being a co-pilot, observing captains in action, before they became eligible for a command course. However, in rapidly growing airlines, this period of “osmosis” may now be less than two years.  Pilots can find themselves “in command of a large high-performance aircraft only three years after they first started to fly”. “In order to become an effective and safe commander, a pilot needs specific extra skills and competencies as well as exposure to threats in a real-life environment — time in the air.”
4. Dave says regulation gets in the way of training.  Simulator sessions are dominated by the assessment of set exercises, which have not changed for decades, and which have little relevance to the threats faced by the 21st century airline pilot.  Time is wasted on assessing highly unlikely scenarios – “ticking the boxes” for regulators. “You do not make pilots better by testing them; you make pilots better by training them.” 
5. Many airlines train and check pilots according to regulation but go no further.  “These airlines may try to convince themselves and others that they are doing nothing wrong.  However, are these pilots prepared for the threats of the 21st century?”
6. “…Many pilots entering the profession today will never fly anything other than a heavy jet transport aircraft, after an extremely brief encounter with a light piston-engined aircraft at the basic flying stage.” 

In summary, Dave said in his paper that the training and regulatory practices developed in the 1950s need to be replaced by a world-wide single standard of safety, driven by standardised checking and training.  This process can only be driven by ICAO (International Civil Aviation Organisation) guidance material and recommended practices so that the updated licensing and regulatory requirements are imposed in every jurisdiction that hosts an airline.

Dave has 15,000 hours plus as an airline pilot and former RAF fighter pilot flying Tornadoes and Phantoms. A qualified air accident investigator and former President of the Hong Kong Airline Pilots’ Association, he is active in HKALPA and the international version of it, IFALPA.   He has become chair of the Licensing and Regulation Workstream of the International Pilot Training Consortium, an industry-wide body investigating how airline pilots can be best trained to meet the threats of 21st century aviation.