galaxy flyer

Sims were fairly common in the ‘80s. The one I took at EAL in a DC-9 was pretty straightforward—take-off, fly a bit, hold for a turn or two, fly an ILS. IIRC, they threw in a simulated emergency justvto have you talk thru your planning for an engine failure, but approach was normal. I flew it with the MIAFO Chief Pilot. I asked him what was the point. His answer was, “see if you can fly a jet and see if you can fly and answer a few questions like I asked”. He said a few candidates took off and crashed in the weather and several were so focused they couldn’t “walk and chew gum”. We had a similar eval after the engineer check, too.

I’d guess sims weed out the truly inept and verify experience—if you claim to have 3,000 hours of jet experience you should fly like it. But, OTOH, you don’t have much jet time, flopping around in a sim may not prove you’ve overcome five check ride busts.

GF

tmontana6

Maybe I'm old school but seeing a guy flying in a simulator, seeing how he coordinates, how communicates, how interact with the other pilot, how reacts in a emergency, how choose and made decisions will tell much more about real life flying skills and trainability than a bunch of rides in general aviation.

I saw failures in GA because a 2 pound error in a weight and balance, because applicant forget exactly how many PSI have the landing gear system, because didn't know size of the propeller, speeding on the taxi, etc and also some pilots went all the way with not failures despite they were horrible pilots.

I heard from a DPE that there is a non write rule about fail 9 of 10 CFI applicants. There was CFI in the area that failed 6 times the initial CFI and he got gold seal on his 10 first applicants. Came on...!

Europe doesn't have the PRIA records system, you either don't have access to the applicant training record, driver records, etc and statistics in accidents/incidents in airlines are quite lower than in the US.

rickair7777

Actually this is not the case at all, the Europeans are not quite as safe as US airlines. If you look at comparable operations (ie compare regionals to regionals, international to international).

There are blatant examples of things which would probably not have happened in the US: Flying a stalled widebody into the ocean with full aft stick deflection. Germanwings dude, whose mental and other health records were protected from his employer and regulators by european privacy laws. Two TCAS equipped airliners collide because a center controller was taking a nap, illegally but tolerated by the private contractor who employed him.

But of course they are much safer than any of the rest of the world other than the US, by a large margin.

ItnStln

When did the two TCAS equipped airliners collide?

Excargodog

Yeah, but the thought process might have been something like this:

I'm going to HAVE to hire this guy/gal anyway, just because the applicant pool is so damn shallow and we simply have to putt butts in seats, so why spend money up front to buy a sim session for him/her when I really have no choice but to hire them anyway?

And Lord knows I am going to have to buy extra sim sessions anyway to get many of these people through their training. Think of all the sim sessions we'll save by not doing them on the ones that will wash out and never make it into the sims anyway.

You may be confusing cause and effect....

dera

Uberlingen, 2002.
The final straw was that the other plane followed the RA, and other followed ATC instructions.

tmontana6

I think there is messy accidents in both continents (AA587, NW225, ValueJet 592, etc)....

About Germanwings.... in Europe you need to pass an 4 hours a hard psychiatric and physiologic interview to get you class 1 cert. Some companies even use polygraph Here in the US, the medical is a really joke... I heard a month ago that a guy in the US crash his Citation in his wife's home after pass a night on jail because a dispute.

Air France and Lufthansa have one of best instruction center WW... with a very elevated high standards. Have you heard about the tests that you need to pass to get hired in Germany aviation? take a look... please and compare it.

btw, Quantas (European model company) never had crash, Easyjet never had crash, Ryanair never had a crash.... British had only was crash in 1985. I dont know from where is coming that European companies are worst that US in accidents...

Anyway, coming again to the point... how many of that accidents are related to primary training issues, or checkride failures...
Air France, Germanwings pilots have a pristine training clean record. btw, KTM Tenerife's captain that cause the worst accident in aviation history had the best training record in KLM history....

Is there a real correlation about checkride failures and accidents?
Colgan accident was the one that opened Pandora's box about records, and big percent of the aftermath political decisions was caused because Beverly Eckert died on that crash.

Failures in GA, you're trusting DPE criteria and judgement, and after what I saw for many years I found lot of this designees with more issues in judgement than the applicants. Of course there is good professionals but delegating the examination authority and allow a dirty black market (700$ average per checkride, cash money) was a horrible idea.

I truly believe that a test that is going to impact all life employment applicant history should be administered by a federal worker without involving cash money.

galaxy flyer

How would three AF hull losses between 2000 and 2009 fit into your thesis? Add in Uberlingen, German Wings and you have five air carrier hull losses to AA567 in 2001. As to QF’s record, look up the BKK report.

I would agree with your checkride position if you then didn’t add that LH training requires loads of testing to be accepted. Why are written exams any more dispositive than checkrides? The EU authorities love written exams on arcane subjects, which isn’t very useful in daily flight operations.

GF

rickair7777

I didn't say cause and effect, to be clear there were a lot of things going on in the training dept at the time (I was there) and we were told training is now the filter, not the interview. Interview was just part of it.

But yes, I think they go to the "have" to hire point.

ItnStln

Thanks, I wasn’t aware of this.