The Second Pillar
While embodying a humble attitude is the corner stone of a great pilot, there is more to the story.
Across a pilot’s career, safety is a primary concern and the overarching focus.
Today, our national carriers here in the United States, regularly operate aircraft that are 20-30 or even 40 years old. Despite the age of these aircraft, our safety record is far superior to when they first started to fly. How come? High quality pilot training is the reason aviation has become the safest method of transportation in the world. To better illustrate how safe travel has become, consider this: if the aviation industry was to have one major crash per million flights, there would be several major crashes every year.
Pilot training has to be structured and safe from the start. Across a pilot’s career, safety is a primary concern and the overarching focus. As the individual progresses through the ranks and acquires more capable licenses and ratings, the standards of training go up as well. They culminate with the Airline Transport Pilot (ATP) license, where individuals must perform to a high standard on a theoretical exam, oral exam, and practical (flight) exam.
Earning the federal privilege (not a right) of operating as an Airline Transport Pilot is just the first step in a lifelong career. Consider this, veterans of the industry have accrued anywhere from 20,000 to over 30,000 flight hours and have been flying from 30 to over 40 years! As you can see, the +1,000 hours needed to earn the ATP license is truly just the beginning.
In order to create high quality pilot training for commercial aviation, safety programs must be heavily data driven. Once the regulating agency (company or FAA) has accrued enough data pointing to a specific problem area, safety programs can then be designed around the weak areas in order to improve the safety record. Ideally, all this happens before problems escalate to life threatening.
As a final note, here is my approach to flight training:
1. What you do not know, can kill you. You must learn with a strong conviction that the knowledge being acquired will be necessary in a live flight. Your life depends on it.
2. No matter how hard training gets, it will always be easy, compared to a real-world emergency at the wrong time, with the wrong crew. Here is my standard:
Imagine this scenario: You are the Captain, and your First Officer is brand new. You will be operating a maximum duty day (14-16 hours of work), operating several flights and flying almost 8 hours in a single day. There is a line of thunderstorms approaching your destination, which is surrounded by mountains for your evening arrival. You have extremely complicated single engine operational restrictions due to single engine performance limitations at high elevation. You are tired. At that perfectly inappropriate moment in time, one engine catches on fire. You are the Captain, and the lives of everyone aboard your ship are in your hands. Good luck, we are all counting on you.