Co-Pilots May Sim Instead of Fly To Train

CyberLord Seven writes "The Washington Post has up an article on a proposed new standard that would allow co-pilots, and co-pilots only, to gain most of their flight experience through flight simulators rather than through actual flight on smaller planes." From the article: "The move is designed to allow foreign airlines, especially those in Asia and the Middle East that face shortages of pilots, to more quickly train and hire flight crews. The United States isn't expected to adopt the new rules anytime soon, but international pilots trained under the new standards will be allowed to fly into and out of the country. The change is generating some controversy. Safety experts and pilot groups question whether simulators -- which have long been hailed as an important training tool -- are good enough to replace critical early flight experience." It should be pointed out this isn't just Microsoft Flight Simulator they are playing. These are motion-controlled capsules that simulate the realities of an aircraft's movement.

Why not?

[Realistic_Dragon]

There isn't a great deal in common between a Cesna and an A380. In the latter the computer translates your input into something that is safe for the plane - which it can do just as well with a virtual world and a virtual plane. There is no particular need to have great experience with small planes that, even if you could disconnect all of the fly by wire kit, handle in a matter so different that you might as well suggest that we train for driving big rigs on a bicycle.

It's also worth pointing out that a lot of this technology has been risk reduced on military aircraft programs, and in general it has made things safer by giving pilots more realistic training before they even get into the cockpit of a high energy death machine. If I owned a multi-million dollar super jumbo I know I wouldn't feel too happy whenever a pilot sat at the controls for the first time, but I might be a little bit less concerned if they had already flown several hundred hours in a representative simulation.

Re:Why not?

[stoolpigeon]

i see your point but i can think of a couple things that might come into play.
 
the first is, i would want a pilot with experience flying. period. i really don't care what he flew, but good, safe aviation involves a mindset that will not be attained sitting safely on the ground. it is easy to stay calm and collected when you are on the ground.
 
the second is, is it that much cheaper to use a simulator than small craft? i'm not sure what the slowdown is there. unless maybe a single instructor can watch over more than one student at a time in simulators. if the pros think this training is important, i would give that a lot of weight.

Re:Why not?

[sheetsda]

the second is, is it that much cheaper to use a simulator than small craft? i'm not sure what the slowdown is there. unless maybe a single instructor can watch over more than one student at a time in simulators.

Where I rent planes the cost of the instructor's time is dwarfed by the cost of renting the plane. $35 per hour for the instructor, $110 per hour for a Cessna 172R. See also $100 Hamburger [wikipedia.org].

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

There isn't a great deal in common between a Cessna and an A380.

It may appear to be that way on the surface, but there's a lot more in common between a C-172 and an A380 than there is between a big rig and a bicycle, as you put it. The four fundamental forces of flight don't change when you fly a different type of airplane. Nor does the relationship between pitch, power, airspeed, and vertical speed; the relationship between stall speed, loading, and bank; the proper procedures for communicating with ATC; the relationship between turn radius, bank, and airspeed; and about a billion other things. It might surprise you to learn that Cessnas and airliners use the same systems to land in bad weather.

Re:Why not?

[Anonymous Coward]

There are many skills essential to flying that are better learned in a small single engine airplane than in a sim. A pilot "learns the ropes" by making real go/no-go decisions based on weather and equipment, dealing with air traffic control in busy airspace, negotiating clearances and routing with ATC, and in general learning how to be the "Pilot in Command".

The pressure involved in doing it "for real" when you and a few passengers (possibly family members) are in the air can't be duplicated in a sim. Simulators are great tools for practicing emergency procedures and systems management on complex jets but I wouldn't rely on them for building the kind of judgment and command experience that a captain of a passenger jet must possess.

Better than real

[linuxwrangler]

I only fly small planes and gliders but I have several friends who are airline pilots/captains and read a lot on the subject. Many think that the simulator is actually better than the real thing for several reasons:

1. Better emergency training. The simulator operator can throw all sorts of things at you that you would never risk in a real airplane like, say, critical engine flameout with full load, gusty crosswinds and high density-altitude. And even if you were willing to take such risks on a real plane, you would have to wait for the right circumstances and would still spend most of your time flying to get ready for the next exercise. In a sim, a push of the button and you're back at the end of the runway waiting for the next disaster to be hurled at you by the torturer, er, instructor.

2. Emphasis on critical phases of flight. You can repeatedly train for tough instrument approaches, difficult holding patterns, etc. without wasting time boring holes in the sky.

3. Fly anywhere. Flying international? How about training for the hellish approach to the Hong Kong airport (well, the old one anyway, should be better now) in the sim?

I remember reading a story about a 747 crew grumbling about the treatment they received in the sim when the instructor threw a series of near-impossible scenarios at them. Shortly thereafter they had something similar to the above happen. Full load, hot day, hill off the departure end of the runway and the gusty crosswinds flamed an engine at rotation. Instantly training kicked in and the engineer threw the dump switches, pilot configured for the situation. They disappeared over the hill and the tower alerted rescue but then they reappeared as they came back for the emergency landing. They missed crashing on the hill by a few feet.

While I think that training in a real aircraft should still be in the curriculum, I would personally step on a plane piloted by a crew with 1500 hours of rigorous sim time before I would get on one piloted by a crew who got the required hours teaching kids in a 152 and then took a type-rating course. I'm not suggesting that the latter are not competant - but the former will be better trained for airline operations.

Re:Why not?

[Starker_Kull]

"You can't feel the wind bouncing you around" You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either (not at least on a distinguishable manner from that on the simulator).

This is quite untrue - a real wake encounter or a highly variable crosswind is completely different in the real thing than a simulator. Most simulators are limited by physics to a small fraction of a gee of acceleration, and because of the nature of how they are affixed to the ground, they simulate the sensation of yaw very badly.

"You can't feel the resistance in the stick to know that you must trim the aircraft" You can't feel it on a big Airbus or Boing either, unless using force-feedback in exactly the same manner a simulator would do.

Wrong, at least in the case of a BoEing 737, 757, or 767. They use hydraulic feedback for roll and yaw, and actual control cabling for pitch.

"You can't look around out of the windows and scan for traffic" You can hardly do it on a big Airbus or Boing either.

Yes, but when you do, it's pretty damned important, and scanning for traffic is a skill than is learned over time, and it's one where simulators simply do not have the visual resolution to accurately simulate it.

"Overall, it just isn't the same"

Overall, "flying" an Airbus 360 simulator is much much (as in orders of magnitud that much) "the real thing" than flying a real Cessna.

Since there is no such thing as an Airbus 360 aircraft, I suspect flying a simulator of one would be somewhat useless. And if the real Cessna you refer to is a Citation X, I'd say you really don't know much about aircraft.

"IMHO the safest way to train a pilot to fly large planes is the tried and true method of having them start on the smaller stuff, and then work their way up a step at a time to flying the big stuff."

I don't think anybody thinks otherwise. Probably hiring the pilot that were through all the process *and* had war-time fighter experience is even better but, you know, not everytime you can get the best you'd ask for. The point is if you can use simulators *more* without critically compromising security and in a more cost-effective fashion.

That's not really true - heavy transport mil flyers are considered to have the most relevant and useful experience. And the majority of time in airline training, most of the flight time is already in a sim. Frequently, the first flight in the actual aircraft a new F/O does is with a planeload of paying customers. But it's been found that the more training done in a sim, the longer the new F/O has to be in the IOE process - flying with a 'special' Captain, who is training them at the same time as they are flying the line. There are limits to what simulators can do. Not surprisingly, this process is being championed by third-world airlines who want to cut costs or don't pay good wages so they can't attract enough qualified applicants. They may not be the most impartial judges of what is safe and what is not.

Re:Bad idea

[Starker_Kull]

The fidelity of simulators nowadays are excellent, especially the common airliners that keep getting cranked out. Knowing the "feel" of the big jets isn't nearly as important these days as learning proper cockpit managment.

And that is EXACTLY what simulators are the worst at doing. Proper cockpit management is impossible to get in a simulator, because something is always going wrong, because that's what you'll be tested on, and that's what you come to expect in a simulator. You go through engine failures RIGHT at v1, single engine approaches with a missed (because the weather mysteriously just got a little worse than the atis right at mins), etc., etc. In real life, you don't have engine failures every day - you have them once a career, if you are unlucky. These aren't the things killing people any more. Misunderstanding a landing clearance, setting up for the wrong approach, dealing with fast moving line of thunderstorms, and doing all this while you are TIRED or distracted or simply not expecting something does. Look up what the last ten commercial transport accidents have been about.

Just a few weeks ago, a 757 landed in EWR on a taxiway parellel to a runway. It vanished from the news quickly because no other airplanes happened to be on that taxiway. If there was, 200+ people would have been smoked, and you would still be hearing about it, along with all sorts of great ideas how to make sure it never happens again - but the crew happened to be lucky that day. There are actually quite a long list of reasons why it occured, which nobody had ever trained for before, because it was a unlikely set of circumstances. The F/O had been in the aircraft less than a year, and it was the Captain's first flight off IOE. Lack of experience in the aircraft, the REAL aircraft, definitely was a contributing factor there. Proper cockpit management is not an easy, programmatic thing, because it's all about trying to allow not only for the unexpected, but for your own, inevitable mistakes. The only way to get experience in making mistakes is to have lots of time to make them, in an environment where you are not expecting to make them. In other words, in day-to-day flying. I think that the fidelity of the simulators doesn't matter much where this kind of experience is concerned.