kcruzfer

Good Evening,

I am not a Pilot, just a travel counselor and former US Airways employee.
I am looking for pilot's opinion regarding Lufthansa's new Jump project: Lufthansa has taken pilots who were only flying short-haul on Embraer and CRJ and retrained them for long-haul flights on A340.
So basically the cockpit on the affected routes is now manned by two longhaul/A340 newbies. Risky? AF447 comes to mind.

Thanks in advance for your input.

Karen

Riverside

How much flight time did the captain and FO have on AF447?

The Juice

Ab Inito training and the MPL...coming to every European airline, many have it now.

Soon you will long for the days of having two pilots up front, serving as relief pilots, who last flew smaller regional jets.

kcruzfer

Good question, no idea. From what I understand it was the copilot who started messing up. I'm not trying to bash anyone. I'm a fearful flyer and booked LH PHL-FRA. It used to be a straight LH flight but now operated by Cityline with newly trained former shorthaul pilots. I have the choice to fly out of IAD instead with experienced longhaul pilots, it's just not as convenient.
I was just trying to get a professional's input. There has been a lot of debate in LH circles whether using two newly longhaul/airbus trained pilots into the cockpit by themselves constitutes a safety risk.

The Juice

The three pilots for AF447 had close to 22,000 total hours between the two of them. The two First Officers had 9,000 of those hours, with close to 5,000 in the A330. These are not "newby pilots" as you referred to them as being.

Dont like flying and the idea of younger relief pilots making position reports in the dark over the atlantic? Then fly an airline from the States and enjoy a couple of grey hairs up there at the controls.

Dont mistake aircraft size and length of flight as a measuring stick on the difficulty level. Flying a highly automated aircraft across the Atlantic, in my opinion, is nowhere near as mentally tasking as flying a commuter turbo prop in and out of uncontrolled airports, 8-10 times a day, in an aircraft that is less than "advanced" from a technological standpoint.

NEDude

Agreed. My BE1900 days were far more taxing both physically and mentally than I what I do now flying the A320.

That being said I think it is important to emphasise that a highly automated aircraft requires more background knowledge of aircraft systems and logic. Plus AF447 exposed a significant gap in knowledge that many pilots of swept wing aircraft had about high altitude stalls. After AF447 my last airline began high altitude stall training. The initial scenario we would use was similar to the AF447 scenario and surprisingly nearly half of the crews did exactly what the pilots of AF447 did. These were not young guys either, many of these guys had decades of experience and tens of thousands of hours. Nobody had ever trained high altitude stall in a swept wing aircraft and that is a very different animal than a low altitude stall. Recovery takes a lot longer, requires significantly more nose down pitch and requires a very gentle pitch up movement after the initial stall is broken, no more than 1 degree per second or you find yourself in a secondary stall. You also have to accept significant altitude loss in most cases.

My point to all this is that it is not necessarily hours that make a pilot safe. Hours, training, types of flying all play a role. Taking an ERJ or CRJ pilot with 2,000 hours experience and properly training them in an Airbus should be fine. Taking a 15,000 hour BE1900 guy and putting him in Airbus without proper training could be dangerous.

bedrock

THE AF 447 flight consisted of a first officer in the captain's seat and a second officer in the right seat. When the auto pilot failed due to the blocked port, the second officer froze on the sidestick and actually pulled back on the controls. The side stick controllers do not move in unison and the other pilot had no idea this was happening. Basically, they were fighting over the controls. This is what caused the confusion and led to the stall and lack of recovery.

A key difference in US training and that which is going on elsewhere, is the building of experience not just time. Pilots need to build experience as pilot in command--the decison maker, while flying slower more forgiving aircraft and then advancing upward. A pilot who had that kind of experience probably would not have frozen on the controls. Airbus and now Boeing want to automate their aircraft as much as possible to sell to meet Asian demand--where pilots are going to be trained quickly and without much command experience.

Airlines want cheap pilots who do not need a lot of experience or training and can rely on the aircraft's automation to keep them safe. But that isn't working out quite that way. The Asiana 214 which crashed in San Francisco had a check airman in the cockpit and experienced captain with 10,000 hours flying, yet they were unable to safely land in perfect weather during daylight. IMO, going from a 300 hours in training straight into a jet airliner is the problem. The command decsion experience isn't there. So the commuter pilots who transition to long haul are probably better qualified than those who went straight into it. The idea of newbie with newbie would not usually happen, I would think.

RemoveB4flght

There are so many variables besides flight time.

I have flown a mix of regional, narrow body, and wide body aircraft to every continent on the globe except Antarctica. Currently I sit left seat on the 777, and my company employs pilots from over 100 nationalities and backgrounds. I fly with a mix of First Officers, all with their individual plusses and minuses.

Some who come with previous wide body experience have thousands of hours on long haul routes and have only flown big jets, but shockingly few landings as there are many airlines that hardly allow FO's to touch the controls, and many have not taxied a plane since their cessna days. I have those who came from regional and narrow body short haul. They have good RT, and situational awareness on the ground, and if needed could flip off the automation and hand fly a beautiful ILS. They don't however tend to have much experience outside the part of the world they came from. Things like weather planning over a 12-20 hour duty period, fuel planning for ETOPS and reclearance flights, contingency planning over parts of the world shorter range aircraft rarely tread, changes in flying and emergency procedures in different countries airspace... even the proclivities of ATC in various countries. Finally we have our own home grown cadet pilots. Typically they begin on the narrow body, however some were initially placed as "cruise" first officers, only allowed in the seat above FL200. It was found to be counter productive however, as they lacked the general flying experience to provide much more input other than spinning a heading bug or changing a radio frequency. Fortunately that was scrapped as it wasn't beneficial to anyone.

To summarize, whether I'm flying over the north pole to LA, the Southern Indian ocean to Australia, or across Africa and the ITCZ to Brazil... give me a pilot from any of those backgrounds and I'll find the positive experience that he or she has to contribute, but outside of the wet-behind-the-ears low hour cadet, there's no clear case to be made that any one pilot is more suited for wide body than the other.

HercDriver130

what does short haul vs long haul as you put it have to do with anything.... get a freaking grip.

Skyone

Because aircraft, systems, and automation are so reliable there is a new concept being investigated with all regulatory agencies with regard to training....the startle effect. Reliability does lead to complacency.