Originally Posted by
forgot to bid
We could move the MD11 sim up there and still rent it out to FedEx, maybe?
The A320/330 airspeed anomaly issues are maintenance/engineering to figure out... with the help of the NTSB and every OEM who touched it.
But as far as pilots, seems to me in the QF and NWA case it was basic airmanship that dealt with the ASI issues that would be no different than the 777s issues or any of the other airplanes.
Basically, if someone said that all of the instructors have this gouge from the line pilots that says touch that button, then that one, turn that knob 4 times left and 3 times right and hit the master caution light three times in two seconds and that solves all problems, then that's one thing.
But honestly some of my best instructors and even checkrides have been done with IPs with 0 time in type, sometimes 0 time at Delta or Part 121 too. My last checkride was a former Eastern pilot who I'm not sure ever flew here, commutes too, I'd love to be as sharp as he was at his young age.
I value what you learn from an SLI and I think we should have more of them or at least even non-SLI but simple line pilots early on in training to sit in the FTDs to assist pilots is a good thing. A mentoring program really. But training is to be a controlled environment that once mastered then the real world life on the line can be introduced and its far less of a difference these days between the schoolhouses and real world then when I started.
In light of the Air France accident we did SPOT training on one of the last recurrents on the 320. They setup a similar scenario, and it is impressive how difficult it would be to recover from what they (probably) were dealing with.
The biggest problem is not with airmanship, but with quickly and accurately identifying the problem. With the airspeed instruments lying to you, one of your major clues is providing bad information.
After demonstrating what a Charlie Foxtrot it would be, the instructor beamed us back to the beginning of the failure and briefed two simple items - Pitch and Power. 2.5 degrees Nose Up and 85-90% N1. It works in any airplane and almost any altitude, but we're apparently (as an industry) not teaching this very well.
It sounds simple and like something every pilot should already know, but it's very difficult to block out the airspeed information when your pilot brain is programmed to "airspeed is life." I came out of the sim with a completely new respect for what the Air France crew was confronted with.
That was a long way of saying our instructors DO provide a wealth of information and experience. Sometimes it's not what they teach, but how they teach that's important. I know I'll carry the pitch/power thing with me for the rest of my career and will draw on it immediately if I'm ever confronted with an instrument failure/confusion. I think he was a DGS guy too
