Despite the statistics suggesting that flying is as safe as it has ever been, it feels increasingly fragile with every passing accident.

Setting aside the violent shootdown of Malaysia Airlines flight MH17 and the surreal disappearance of MH370 last year – which are enough on their own to unsettle many air travellers – the airlines’ fragility is showing up mostly in their pilots.

According to another set of equally valid statistics, these square-jawed, steely-eyed alpha males and females are increasingly unable to handle the routine upsets they are there to deal with: events their forebears managed without fuss in the days not so long ago when machinery was much less reliable.

It is hard to imagine the Taiwan Aviation Safety Council finding the TransAsia ATR 72-600 crash to have been caused by something other than the crew, by mistake, shutting down the good engine when the other one failed. The nation’s civil aviation authority has ordered pilot testing and retraining accordingly.

Because the 112 years since the first powered flight is, in human evolutionary terms, of zero significance, Charles Darwin might suggest the reason why modern pilots often fail is related to a changing environment. He’d be half right: things are changing, mostly for the better, but it is today’s failure to train pilots to resilience instead of to licence minimums that is the problem.

Source: Flight International

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