For reasons I'll explain, I have thought for a while that professional pilots, once they have been practising their trade for a couple of years after ab-initio training, should undergo advanced training. A bit like following up a Bachelors degree with a Masters, but it doesn't need to take that long.
The reason is simple. The Colgan Q400 accident at Buffalo proved a lot of things, but one of them is how fragile a pilot's understanding of the basics can be when s/he emerges from training. If it is not consolidated quickly, knowledge can been lost, and experience on the line is not the answer. It's possible to win a licence and get a job despite some important gaps of understanding, because your learning, when you sit the written exams, is so recent that you can spout the answer by rote. And a final handling test can never test the full range of skills an aviator needs.
Ab initio courses don't contain any spare time; as soon as you have just grasped a basic piece of knowledge you're pushed onward into the next learning phase. You can enter line flying not only with gaps in your knowledge, but with actual misperceptions which might consolidate into bad habits.
Re-entering training once flying has become familiar means the trainee has the spare brain capacity for more advanced learning and consolidation of knowledge. My realisation of this came when, after a tour of duty on C-130s, the RAF sent me to its Central Flying School to learn to be a Qualified Flying Instructor.
The course takes you back to basics, but with a view to enabling you to explain the details of, say, Bernoulli's theorem, clearly to other people, rather than just believing you understand it well enough to make practical use of what it reveals. You cannot explain things properly to someone else unless you understand the subject matter well and completely, and there were many areas of knowledge in which I found, to my surprise, that my understanding was thoroughly imperfect. The upside was that, now that I was being re-introduced to the subject matter as a fairly confident aviator rather than a struggling student, I was quickly able to grasp the whole truth.
The point is that aviators should seek, early in their careers, any forms of advanced training they can lay their hands on, and their employers would be wise not only to back this, but to insist on it. A command course for a SFO would be an opportunity - it should, after all, be more than a course in CRM as practised from the left hand seat.
I have eulogised about Bombardier's Safety Standdown before: the instruction is free and amazingly good.
Meanwhile distance learning can help too. And operational bulletins, when they are good, can be very very good.
A superb example of the latter is a training leaflet just issued by the European Helicopter Safety Team (EHEST) innocently called "Safety Considerations". It says its purpose is to provide "methods to improve helicopter pilots' capabilities." It re-introduces rotary wing pilots to some of the most intractable and complex problems they can encounter: vortex ring state, loss of tail rotor effectiveness, static and dynamic rollover, and inadvertent entry into a degraded visual environment.
I urge all helo pilots to read it. It does not talk down to you, and I bet it tells you some stuff you'd forgotten, and even more that you didn't know you didn't know.
on October 16, 2010 4:07 PM | Reply
Ah yes, the known unknowns, vs, the unknown unknowns via NavyAviator former SOD Don Rumsfeld, I suspect he would concur.
I just completed LCK=Line Check from ZBAA-RJAA and back,3.1 and 3.3 block hours respectively on CA-925/926 respectively. The 5 year plan CPC Beijing party conference had me on the evening fringe.Hector O' Pascal was sitting in a relative hefty posture @ RJAA=1019@19C 78% humidity few@4000. ZBAA=1022@13C@68% humidity few@4500.
Still, the points are pertanint. To wit : knowledge is vital by rote or understanding, ideally understanding under rote.Understanding is vital to make what is rote,become learned and understandable. I have always recognised this gap, between knowledge and understanding, which is why via Learmount's Blog privilege, I am allowed to spout ad-nauseum. For example a daily mental exercise is the altimetry difference between ,QNE-Queen's Normal Elevation and QNH-Queen's Normal Height.
For example in ZBAA, the Trans Level is FL118, the Trans Alt is 9850', but when Hector has pressure-weight issues, it is 10830 ft@1031 hPa or above and 8860 ft@979hPa or below.
Hector has chosen his own pressure level. For human intellectual understanding of our aneroid gravitational world, consider the Air Data Computer/ADC aneroid to be squeezed to raise it's altitude higher. High pressure or low temp has the same result in effect.Low temp corrections need to be added on the FMC's legs page accordingly, below -10C ambient. Think, low temp=high pressure=squeeze the aneroid to push "indicated" altitude than higher.
Always equate numerical value performance within the real world, without religious non-mathematical levitation to infinity of improbability. After all, the privilige of religious leaders is their non-religious pilots ferrying them in an ISA world to their religious destination of pontification upon the payment of the hapless taxpayer. QED !
on October 20, 2010 3:36 AM | Reply
Excellent article David. You clearly know more about education than some of the people who run universities. The parallels with surgery are perfect - basic training followed by some practice, a period of teaching anatomy to new medical students then a return to advanced training for specialist practice and eventually a commitment to training specialists and new students. Becoming a trainer after a period of practice was, for me, both insightful and enjoyable. Re-engaging with the basics when your brain is not fully occupied trying to assimilate the basics is undoubtedly illuminating.
In medicine there is a mantra which says that your learning continues until the day you retire. Perhaps for both aviation and medicine that should be turned around to say that the day you stop learning is the day you should (be made to) retire.
As usual I am overshadowed by the demi-god from the pointy end. (An interesting use of language since most aircraft, like most fish and for similar aero/hydro-dynamic reasons, are more pointed at the tail than the nose. However if David Connolly is offended by being referred to as a demi-god he can, with some justification, assume that I am talking about the APU.)
If I were marking an examination script by David he might not get too many marks for clarity of expression but, as usual, he does have most of the right words and he puts them in a more or less appropriate order. His comments about understanding and knowledge are spot on.
on October 21, 2010 12:11 AM | Reply
Yawning time and non intellectual-gap greetings to Peter via David.
Peter, many thanks for your gracious and thoughtful compliments. An appreciated surprise on my APU pointed end was gratefully recieved,(no Peter Burkill puns intended). I need more of your therapy. I have read what you have written subsequent to my contribution on the BA-038 B-777, but I did not comment further on your pertinent points. This was not of any Demi-DOG -(Dyslexic agnostic-me), but for the simple reasons of being that I think I and the Blogmaster Learmount addressed them adequately previously. Peter Burkill's only error,was resigning after the fact and predictable negative red top media-(ocrity) coverage, happily he is apparently on short finals back to BA.
Your appreciation of coke-bottle area ruling via APU fish tail observation, now evolved to cone and blade tails is clearly what makes you the professional you are to the benefit of all within your scalpel radius of action, in
On Oct 24, I mark my 44th chronological arrival and am going to Cork with my Mrs,Teru, my social worker, being Japanese, and to put up with me, she was clearly a camp guard on the Burma railway in her previous incarnation.
Coincidentally, my brother Denis, is mooting a baptism around then of a safe arrival of twin boys on May 21 last. As he has excommunicated himself from the Church of Rome, like most gravity-minded people, I was astounded to be invited to such an event. I said, "If, dreadfully,your your children suffered from haemophilia, would you employ Count Dracula for a remedy ?"
Clearly, macro-conviction has yielded to micro-convention and tradition has yielded the spoiled child of bad habit in perpetuity, as it will be again,by definition. Religion requires study, humanity requires faith. I'll put my faith in Peter's scalpel rather than Papa Benny Joe's infallibility,any day of the perpetual Sabbath.
But at least I am free of the obligation of being a Godfather, Demi or otherwise. I live in an ISA world, which trumps a flat earth, any day of the Sabbath. Clearly as mud, the more we know, the less we understand, which is why understanding under knowledge is our ultimate intellectual Alpha Floor, to paraphrase Airbus, diverging from my esoteric Boeing C*U B-777 PFC FBW law.
I would like to refer you to an ancient, yet IT recent link below of a Shamrock B-747 flight from EIDW-KJFK in 1975, it is to my knowledge, perhaps my original point of aspiration to being an aerosexual, that I am today. The narrative commander is the late-great Aidan A. Quigley,retired 1981, deceased circa 2005, wife, Feb 2010. I met in Aidan in EICK/Cork on the strata-Q cancelled airshow Italian-Tricolari on August 18 1985, thanks to my pornographic memory. So I mention the best till last and he will always best me as a Demi-God. He was the PIC of the Shamrock ship that flew God's rep, JPII from EINN-KBOS on Oct 1 1979.
I would be grateful of your historic feedback.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1E-iMDMz8HM