It's not terribly often that a Boeing vice president discusses her maternal instincts in public, but the charming Marsha Bell (pic below), VP first officer program(me) at Boeing's Alteon training division was doing just that in London today. Let me explain...
Alteon is currently hard at work devising a programme to train pilots to obtain the newly developed ICAO-approved Multi-Crew Pilot Licence (MPL). This is a licence for which pilots would be trained from scratch to be qualified airliner pilots so long as they fly in a multi-crew aircraft - which of course they all do anyway. It's a very big deal in China and India because it could enable them to produce the staggering number of pilots that they will need over the next 20 years quicker than is currently possible. We've written about it in the magazine and will be doing so again a lot I suspect.
One oddity of the MPL is that there is no ICAO requirement for the pilot ever to fly solo. And, as a large part of the whole idea is to cut training time, Alteon don't really intend that their curriculum - which is still under development - will include a solo flight. Although their customers could request it of course.
Alteon are going to use the Diamond DA40 four-seat trainer for the early part of the course, intending that on each sortie there will be on board: an instructor, the primary student acting as pilot-flying, a student acting as pilot-monitoring, and a student observing. Arranging for a true solo would obviously be an interruption.
However Ms Bell concedes that individual airlines may well decide that the value of the solo is worth a little extra cost, and individual regulators may conclude that they'd be happier if everyone goes through that "rite of passage". She sympathises with them, commenting: "Maybe it is the maternal instinct in me but I want these guys to have a first solo and cut their ties. But people who are perhaps less emotionally engaged always explain to me that it is just not necessary."
And she reflects, that maybe actual flight-time is truly overated, saying: "I have been around simulators for about 20 years and there are plenty of times that pilots emerge soaked in sweat from the simulator with a renewed appreciation of what can go wrong."
Alteon's first MPL course will be run in Brisbane and, as it happens, the Australian regulatory authority - CASA - is still thinking about whether it wants true solos or not. Perhaps you've got a view on that - leave a comment.
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