December 2008 Archives

At a time when being an airline pilot is as demanding as it has ever been, the image of the job is going down the tubes.

Among the biggest culprits are a number of the world's most influential pilot associations, including the British BALPA, America's ALPA, and France's SNPL, but pilot mass wingeing on global flightcrew forums doesn't put out good messages either.

The Unions (let's call them that, not associations) do not attempt to engage with airline management in a positive way that's good for the business, and are gradually weakening the safety role they used to take so seriously. Of course the unions have an industrial role, but they lead their membership so badly they are not even effective in that. They are merely destructive.

Airline management, farther separated from pilots than it has ever been, sees pilots only as a cost centre, not as the face of their airline, alongside the cabin crew, and the custodians of their most expensive assets.

Of course the security-locked cockpit doors have exacerbated this separation of pilots from their customers, which has an effect on pilot attitudes to their job, and the public's attitude to pilots - they don't see them any more.

The fact that modern aeroplanes are more automated than they have ever been does not make them easier to manage in today's skies, because navigation in busy airspace has to be far more accurate than was required previously. There may be less artisanship required because there is less manual flying to do, but physical artisanship is arguably not a white-collar skill anyway. Sea captains do not handle the wheel, they command their crew and the operation of the entire vessel.

There was always a massive difference between mediocre piloting and the skillful command of an aeroplane, and that remains as true now as it ever was. A modern airliner is more complex than aeroplanes have ever been, and good pilots know much more than just how to fly them. They are there to manage the crew, the passengers, the freight, and their very clever machine that can go wrong too, like the old ones did - if less often. And frequently, like sea captains, they have to do all this in unfriendly weather that will require fine judgements.

The knowledge base required of an airline pilot, by the time he/she is ready for command today, is also as demanding as it has ever been. Astro may have been replaced by GPS and a good multiple IRS, but a good, fully comprehensive pilot training course remains a bachelor's degree equivalent, and by the time a pilot is ready for command the knowledge base has advanced to master's degree level.

But these factors have not been acknowledged, partly because a first officer's licence can be won with less than that, and a captaincy with less than the Master's equivalent. The airlines that are content to hire pilots who scrape through on minimums are the worst culprits of all in turning piloting into a blue collar job.

In the end, the blue collar/white collar distinction is not just about skills and passing tests, it's about an attitude to the profession. Many airlines are killing the desire for excellence through the low standards they will accept.

To use a musicianship analogy, anybody can bash out a tune like "chopsticks" on the piano with one hand only and get the notes right, but to play a Beethoven sonata well enough to enthrall an audience is in a different league. Aeroplanes, like musical instruments, can be "played" adequately or brilliantly.

Airlines pay the price for this downgrading of a profession that, at its best, is a noble one. They pay the price not just in lowered safety standards, but also in poor performance that costs them money every day in lost fuel, lost time, and additional maintenance. And remedial training.

Piloting best practice and how to ensure your airline enjoys the benefits of it is the theme of the Flight International Crew Management Conference in London on 30 November-1 December 2009. 

Airlines are looking for the right personality in their trainee pilots, and women are more likely to have it than men.

Don't take it from me. This is from Europe's largest pilot training organisation, the Oxford Aviation Academy.

OAA's group managing director for ab-initio training, Anthony Petteford, says: "Many of the skills needed now are things that girls are good at." He explains that operating in the latest generation flightdecks changes the the way a crew works together compared with relationships in classic "clockwork" cockpits. In the new ones the traditional "female" skills have become more important.

"In an Airbus cockpit, there is a much shallower authority gradient," says Petteford, referring to the relationship between the captain and the copilot. Of course the Airbus sidestick  completely removes the need for physical strength from the equation, but Petteford is really referring to the way information is presented and managed, which could equally apply to a Boeing 737NG.

The change has come about, he says, because although both pilots have always been presented with the same data by their instruments, now that flight and navigational information is provided more graphically, they have the same pictures to work with. In the old round-dial days, both pilots had to form a picture in their heads of what the three-dimensional flight situation was, which created the risk that there would be two different pictures with no way of comparing them.

In that situation, the more experienced pilot - usually the captain - theoretically had a better chance of having the more accurate (or more complete) situational awareness but - even more important to the crew relationship - he (it usually was a him) was always given the benefit of the doubt when uncertainty arose. Hence the naturally steeper authority gradient. Crew resource management (CRM) was originally created to overcome this potential inequity of  situational awareness by improving inter-pilot communication and crosschecking.

So can women handle modern flghtdecks better than men? Or are they just more equal on a modern flightdeck than they used to be on the classics? Assuming the basic aptitudes are there, Petteford insists,  "the key issue is personality". The key skills include team working and concentration, both natural to most young women and not as often to young men. Petteford didn't actually mention the characteristic which has, for some years been claimed by women as something men simply can't do but females can: multi-tasking.

Strange and wonderful things are happening.

Ryanair is saying nice things about its pilots (some of). Has the company's CEO, Michael O'Leary, been walking the road to Damascus recently?

Thinking back to O'Leary quotations about his pilot workforce only about three years ago, adjectives like "overpaid" were juxtaposed with words like "wingeing" and "workshy". Suddenly descriptions of his pilots include words like "skilled" and "valuable". But why? Especially about the crew that was in charge when this (below) happened.

Ah, yes. The results of the 10 November birdstrike on final approach to Rome Ciampino. Despite the Boeing 737-800's crunched left main gear and damaged belly, you can see from that previous blog on the subject that Ryanair's pilots are a pretty competent bunch, so they must have faced a real problem. More of that later.

Anyway, O'Leary sent his best wishes, and a team of senior staff, to Ryanair's Frankfurt Hahn base to congratulate the pilots and cabin crew for a job well done. I don't have the names of the two cabin crew in the picture below, but the others are (L to R) First Officer Alexander Vet, the airline's chief pilot Ray Conway (in civvies), Ryanair's director of safety Michael Horgan, and the flight's commander Capt Frederic Colson.  

 It was Horgan who issued the congratulations:

"After more than 50 years in the industry I know that there is no substitute for reality and we are proud that this emergency situation, shortly before landing in Rome,  brought all our crew's skill, professionalism and training successfully into practice. To bring the aircraft to a safe landing following a major loss of power on both engines required a level of composure and skill that is a credit to both Frederic and  Alexander and underscores  the exceptional flying standards that have always been the hallmark of  Ryanair's safety and training operations."

I'm still flummoxed about how fluffy O'Leary seems to have become. But maybe he hasn't. Maybe he sent Conway and Horgan because he would not have been able to get the words past his gritted teeth. Somehow I prefer to continue thinking of him that way than to admit that Conway and Horgan at least had been given his blessing when they congratulated the worthy crew.

But what did the pilots face? A "murmuration of starlings" is the true answer. Ryanair sent me a descriptive definition of this phenomenon that the crew first saw about 25sec before touchdown, where they attempted to initiate a go-around and then abandoned it because of a dramatic loss of power. Here's the description:

"A starling flock is called a murmuration, a word that perfectly describes the rustle of thousands of pairs of wings. Starling murmurations are one of the most dazzling displays in the natural world, as the flock changes shape, one minute like a colossal wisp of smoke, the next a tornado, the next a thundercloud blocking the light."