If you guys know who the rouges are, why isn't there anything done about it?

 

1. My comment was rogues in general at any airline, not necessarily pinnacle.

2. I told the guy I'd be happy to sit in on his APD giving another oral to see if I thought it was fair. That's doing something about it.

3. I'm only familiar with the -200 side guys.

4. Never said we knew who the rogues were, just that the industry has them.

 

It should be easy to evaluate all of the APD's and find those who's failure rate falls outside of the standard median.

I'm sure they would refrain from pulling shenanigans when they are being observed, but maybe a better debriefing of failed pilots could be done by a third party to figure out why people are failing and if there are things that training could focus on, or to allow pilots to express the perceived unfairness they received without being further penalized.

 

Easy fix. At the start of your oral exam, just get on your knees and say you're ready.

 

there really aren't any out of whack failure stats by any one APD. I've looked. the few failures that have been recently are all spread around them. Plus, for some that have busted, the examiner may have sensed that they are unwilling to spray chemtrails or would run to the media with classified chemtrail info that only ATP's are allowed to know....

 

Yes, but you have to be EXTREMELY careful and constantly reassess if you are actually asking within the standards. If they start to get flustered because you are asking questions outside what is required, that causes stress and ends up not being fair. It's often hard to put yourself in the shoes of an applicant that studied, was told one thing was most important, looked at the standards, thought he met them all, and then when asked an off-the-wall question, not only is he trying to answer that question, he's trying to understand why it's being asked, if what he knows is wrong, if he was taught wrong, if he should guess, if he should stand up to the examiner (rare), and so on. It creates a snowball effect often that is hard to understand from just the examiner's point of view. I totally agree with questions that actually probe knowledge, understanding, and correlating various systems and scenarios, as long as they make sense. It reminds me of one instructor that attempted to ask scenario questions for EVERY single subject area of any test. He had some highly evolved scenario for each area that had a specific goal and conclusion at the end, but the problem is there are too many opportunities to "branch off", and then you feel like the student didn't meet the standard because he didn't see your scenario the same way you did, or it's so obvious to you because you thought it up, but to the applicant it's not.

The other big problem is that you may think you know a system, but there's always a principle of it that an applicant may know better, so with your highly thought-out scenario, it's possible to trip yourself up. I can't remember how many times an instructor didn't really understand electron flow and grounding, so they really look like an idiot when they try to have some stupid "trace out the electron flow" exercise as part of an oral or check.

The "off the wall" questions must be handled very carefully, and it's likely you can be doing one of the above things without even realizing it.

 

I kinda agree and kinda disagree with your post.

If I guy gets flustered, that can be an indication of what kind of captain he would be (I haven't looked at the PTS in a dozen years, so I don't know if it addresses this, but every FAA checkride I took had something about command of the aircraft was never in doubt).

As a Captain, one is often put into situations we never trained for, and for which there isn't a clear solution. For example, engine fire and brake failure... where do you land, close short runway without fire fighters or distant long runway with firefighter. There isn't a clear answer, but if one can support his answer with good reasons, that shows good judgement (even if his answer isn't mine).

Forget why it is being asked. One is given a failure, work with it. Forget about why the examiner is asking the question, just make a decision. Funny thing is, it is often easier to recover from a bad decision than no decision at all.

If the applicant was taught wrong, it is unfortunate that he got a sub par instructor. But if he learned wrong, Even If It IS the Instructor, his knowledge is insufficient to be a Captain. So, he should not get the rating. It sucks that it may not be fault, but that's life. I want a fully qualified airplane driver up front when I am dozing in the back.

Maybe, the feds should mandate a minimum pass rating for instructors to maintain their instructor status (if you can't teach 'em enough to pass, you shouldn't be a teacher), but until that happens Caveat Emptor.

An ATP is a measure of one's flying skills and judgement to be an Airline Captain. It is a test to determine if one has a certain level of piloting skills and decision making skills.

 

To an extent, I agree.

As long as it's valid questions that are stressing him out, that's fine. How does this regulation apply to?, why might you get this annunciator? Can you land with this weather? These can have several follow up questions and absolutely be good scenarios that "test" the individual, and they should. But remember, even though it IS going to be stressful, even though there SHOULD be questions that challenge the applicant, it's not a "stress test" to find out where they break either.

Hopefully that applicant is there because the company already thinks they have what it takes to be a captain. Hopefully they were hired with the idea that they could eventually make it as a captain.

The engine fire and brake questions is a great example. The good examiner like you say is looking for a well thought out and justified answer that makes sense. They aren't looking for a specific answer necessarily, because there is no "right" answer and they realize it. The poor examiner is going to have their mind made up already on what the correct answer is, not realizing they have more information in their mind to make that decision than the applicant has, and the applicant may still be answering well within the standards, it's just that it's not the answer the examiner was expecting and wants to hear. Sometimes those examiners will start to "hold it against" the applicant, and it all goes downhill from there. It shouldn't be a "hmm, he's answering these questions easily, so I need to ask harder questions".

I'm not saying this is overly prevalent, it's just an area where examiners have to be very careful to not get caught up. It's easy to say these things on paper, but often more challenging actually doing them as an examiner.

 

The candidates in question are not going to be Airline Captains however. Without a full upgrade training class none of the pilots will ever be airline captains. If you want to fluster potential ATP candidates then put them through the whole upgrade training stamp and fluster to your heart's content. That is the whole point of this thread, the pilots are getting left over sim scraps (less than an hour) for training, for the highest rating a pilot can earn. How can you hold these pilots to the same standards as pilots who have trained full time for 2 full months?

 

at least get the facts right....the PC takes 2 hours, leaving 3 hours for practice sim time for the ATP. You should be able to polish up you V1 cuts and missed approaches in an hour, the rest of the ride is normal procedures you should already know because you should be using them daily. And if they aren't ready, they don't get signed off. very few bust the ride part, the majority is on the oral.