Several accidents in recent years have caused many to wonder if the basics of flying learned in primary training are still being taught. Stalls, poor speed control, and absent pitch/power skills are showing up in accidents flown by airline pilots with thousands of hours. What’s the root cause? Is it the training?
To me, the most egregious example of forgotten or perhaps unlearned airmanship is the July 2013 Asiana Boeing 777 crash at San Francisco International Airport (SFO), where three pilots—one a company check airman—flew a dangerously slow approach in daylight conditions with clear skies and calm winds. The crew assumed the autothrottles were managing the speed on the approach, but the fact that the airplane got 34 knots slow is pretty damning proof that nobody was minding the store.
In a post-accident interview, one of the pilots confessed that he was “very concerned” to find out the glideslope for Runway 28L at SFO was out of service. What has become of flight training if pilots possessing thousands of hours are concerned about flying a visual approach backed up with only a localizer?
The answer partially lies in the systemic deconstruction of general aviation around the world. It’s not just Korean pilots; they happened to be put under the microscope because of the accident. Here in the United States, we can go to a local airport and plop down some money and learn to fly in a real airplane. In the majority of countries around the world, general aviation has been mostly regulated out of the sky or is cost prohibitive. If someone wants to fly for the airlines, for example, there’s a high likelihood they will do all of their training in a simulator. In fact, it’s not unusual for a pilot’s first flight in a real airplane to be with paying passengers on board, with a company check airman.
Because flight training is so expensive, pilot candidates in foreign countries are carefully vetted for the skills required to learn mountains of manuals as well as psychological requirements desired of any particular airline. The result, is that most of these pilots are very intelligent, psychologically stable, and quick learners.
But as we all know from school, some people are book smart, some are common-sense smart, and others are both. Some of the book-smart people make it all the way through pilot training and are the types who can diagram an Airbus electrical system from memory but can’t fly a visual pattern to a landing in the touchdown zone.
Following the Asiana crash, an extensively circulated email from an anonymous expatriot U.S. flight instructor training Koreans for Asiana and Korean Air was not surprised at all by the accident. He wrote, “requiring them to fly a visual approach literally struck fear in their hearts.” The instructor praised the Koreans for being very intelligent and quick learners, but he was “shocked and surprised by the lack of basic piloting skills shown by most of the pilots.”
You can read the account online. I have no doubt that most pilots learning to fly this way have the right stuff required to fly by the seat of their pants while looking out the windshield, they simply haven’t been exposed to it because they are trained in simulators and greatly encouraged to use automation rather than hand-fly. They have become computer programmers, not pilots. And I don’t care how much reliability Boeing and Airbus build into their systems, sometimes they do fail. And when they do, it’s the pilots’ job to get the airplane on the ground safely any way they can.
I would wager that putting these carefully vetted candidates in a 10- to 20-hour series of flights in light airplanes focused on basic airmanship would allow them to learn these maneuvers that many of us take for granted. And it wouldn’t hurt if all airlines required pilots to get a few hours in a basic airplane on occasion to reconnect with seat-of-the-pants flying. It’s becoming progressively rare to meet an airline pilot who flies recreationally these days, so an occasional romp in a light airplane may not be such a bad thing.
Perhaps it’s time for governments around the world to rethink the results of regulating general aviation into oblivion. I have hundreds of hours in various advanced simulators and can tell you with certainty that there is no simulator that can truly replicate the sight, feel, and sound that we humans use to guide airplanes in and out of the air with nothing but a windshield for an instrument. While flight simulators are a beneficial and necessary tool for advanced flight training, there’s no doubt to me that learning to fly in a real airplane teaches you skills that cannot be simulated. So if you’re learning to fly in a real airplane, consider yourself lucky. And if you’re reading this in a country that still has an active general aviation industry, be thankful that you live in a place that still allows its citizens the freedom to learn to fly. It’s worth protecting for many reasons, among them to teach future airline pilots the basics.
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