The Third Era of Aviation Training

EVENT BASED TRAINING

It seems to me that there are three eras of training that we have been progressing through in our industry. The first era came early as we realized that training was important and made it mandatory. Training requirements have been defined by the subjects to be covered and the amount of time to be spent in training. Typically, these requirements are defined as part of the regulatory structure. This was the event-based training era. Many of us are still living in this era today. The weakness of this approach is that it does not allow tailoring to pilots' individual abilities and needs.

PROFICIENCY BASED TRAINING

More recently, we recognized that event-based training didn't necessarily provide any assurance that crew members were maintaining proficiency over the long term. To address that, we developed proficiency-based training, which required a formal definition of proficiency standards and developed a process to go with it. Called Advanced Qualification Program (AQP) in the airline training world, it is designed to ensure continuing proficiency throughout the career of an airman. Some of us are now in the middle of the proficiency-based training era. There has been a recent trend to refer to this as competency-based training, but the idea is the same.

With the advent of a systems approach to training development in the 1970's, as embodied in the Instructional Systems Design (ISD) process, this process has enabled the shift from event-based to proficiency-based. This approach allows training designers to optimize training time, media, and budgets based on the actual needs of the target population.

The proficiency-based training era shares a weakness with the event-based training era, however. The weakness is that a single performance standard is used to evaluate proficiency regardless of whether you are on your very first qualification check for a new aircraft or the hundredth recurring check. Neither era provides opportunities for, or expects, professional growth during an airman’s career. Such expectations rely on our professionalism, not the regulatory requirements.

GROWTH BASED TRAINING

I propose that we move toward a new era in training called the growth-based era. In this era, we will not encourage professional growth. We will require it. This brings us full circle back to the basic premise of Tony Kern’s book "Redefining Airmanship". For now, airmen must create their own growth plan, but in the future, those of us in the training department may be tasked with providing support for those efforts.

Fly Safe!
Neil

We Are All Learners

We understand that ...

... we learn in different ways from one another.

... we learn the same way, locally or at a distance.

... we do not learn in a new way because we have a new technology available.

... presenting bad training with a new technology does not make it good training.

We learn best ...

... at the time we need the information.

... when we can directly relate what we are learning to past experience and knowledge.

... when we can set our own learning objectives.

... when we can use our own personal learning strategy.

... when we interact with our peers, not with machines.

... when what we are learning supports our values and beliefs.

... when the learning environment approximates the real world.

We engage in three types of learning:

Facts about things

How things work

How to work things

Each type of learning is best accomplished in a different learning environment:

Facts about things are learned using presentations.

How things work is learned through the use of models.

How to work things is learned using simulations and real world experience.

Fly Safe! 

Neil

Word Allergies

Originally posted February 3, 2007

My years in the aviation industry have been evenly split between time in the cockpit and time behind a desk – over 15 years of each. In my desk-life, I have worked in management for some of the most successful companies in aviation – SimuFlite, FlightSafety International, Bombardier, Raytheon, Hughes Aircraft, and General Dynamics. I not only learned a lot about being a pilot, I learned about business. What I have learned makes me believe that sometimes they are not compatible.

Imagine, for example, sitting in a business meeting with your boss and coworkers. The boss asks if the project you are responsible for will be finished on time. If you answer “No”, the results are not likely to be pleasant. The same is true if you say “You will have to wait.” It seems that in our results-oriented business world, you need to develop an allergy to words such as “no” and “wait”.

At work, these allergies can be the key to success. They help keep things moving and ensure high levels of performance. Once successful business people move to the cockpit, however, those allergies start working against them. Now imagine a passenger asking the businessperson-pilot if they can still get to their destination in the marginal weather they are faced with. Given the behaviors that have made him or her successful at the office, that pilot may have a hard time saying “no, we will wait”. What is necessary for success in industry can be the recipe for disaster in the air.

Last year, AOPA surveyed almost 6,000 adults between the ages of 25 and 60 who were not current pilots or students to determine their interest in learning to fly. What they found was there are more than 3 million Americans in this demographic who answered they would be “very interested” or “somewhat interested”. The most likely individuals are married with children and fall between the ages of 40 and 49. They have an annual income of more than $100,000, they are college educated, and almost a third are self-employed. They are described as take-charge, professionally successful, extroverted, and intelligent. They describe themselves as eager to learn, reliable, independent, and hard working.

You don’t get into the demographic AOPA describes without being successful – in business. Our challenge is to make sure that those word allergies that made them successful in the meeting room don’t get in the way in the cockpit.

Fly Safe,
Neil

On Being a Fan ...

Tonight my beloved Texas Rangers take on the dread Yankees.  Why do I care?  Read this...

“What I do know is that this belonging and caring is what our gamers are all about; this is what we come for. It is foolish and childish, on the face of it, to affiliate ourselves with anything so insignificant and patently contrived and commercially exploitative as a professional sports team, and the amused superiority and icy scorn that the non-fan directs at the sports nut (I know this look — I know it by heart) is understandable and almost unanswerable. Almost. What is left out of this calculation, it seems to me, is the business of caring — caring deeply and passionately, really caring — which is a capacity or an emotion that has almost gone out of our lives. And so it seems possible that we have come to a time when it no longer matters so much what the caring is about, how frail or foolish is the object of that concern, as long as the feeling itself can be saved. Naivete — the infantile and ignoble joy that sends a grown man or woman to dancing and shouting with joy in the middle of the night over the haphazardous flight of a distant ball — seems a small price to pay for such a gift.”

Roger Angell

Fly Safe!
Neil

The Future is Now

Nearly two decades ago I wrote a short scenario describing my vision of the future of flight training.  At the time, technology was far simpler that it is today.  The Internet was still a dream.  Desktop computers were mostly used as glorified typewriters.  Portable computers barely fit into the overhead compartment of an airliner. Mobile phones were the size of a brick and only made phone calls. Here it is without revision:

"The captain arrives in flight operations a little early, as is her habit. Entering the briefing room, she removes a small device from her flight case and flicks it on. Quickly, it displays today's schedule, crew composition, and weather. Driven by a software agent, the device notes from the captain's log that she has not flown in thunderstorms such as those expected today in a long while. The device advises the captain to don a pair of eyephones and launches a mini-lesson on wind shear recovery techniques, including a dynamic 3-D model of the wind flows around rapidly developing super cells and their effects on aircraft performance."

"It has also been almost a year since the pilot last flew the instrument approach expected at the second stop of the day. As a review, the device conducts a short simulation of the arrival at the airport, with the net-conferenced instructor placing particular emphasis on the high terrain underlying the arrival route."

"The agent also notes that the aircraft assigned for today's first leg has a history of unresolved generator trips. It offers a review of generator-out procedures, which the captain accepts. She spends five minutes simulating the cockpit flows for single and dual generator failures. Then, noticing the time on the display, the captain closes the device, returns it to her flight case, and walks to the lounge to brief her crew."

There are still a few aspects of this vision that would require development of new technologies - primarily 3D technology.  But as a trip to the local electronics store proves, these developments are no longer in the distant future. Now that the future has arrived, those of us who are dedicated to aviation training can push forward toward making this vision a reality.

Fly Safe!
Neil

Quote for the Day

When we walk to the edge

of all the light we have 

and take the step into the 

darkness of the unknown, 

we must believe that one of two things will happen.... 

There will be something solid for us to stand on 

or we will be taught to fly. 

Patrick Overton

When the Going Gets Weird ...

Originally posted January 22, 2007

The media recently reported the 25th anniversary of the Air Florida accident in a snow storm at Washington, D.C. in 1982. These reports touted the “sweeping legacy” of this accident and the safety improvements that it spawned.

This accident remains fresh in my mind, partly because I watched the live reports on the then-new CNN as survivors and wreckage were pulled from the icy Potomac River, partly because I used this accident as a case study in Crew Resource Management (CRM) classes in the years since.

As with all accidents, there was a chain of events that led to the end of 73 lives. As with most accidents, the crew had several chances to break the chain of events and avoid the accident. Their last opportunity was as they began the takeoff on KDCA’s runway 36.

15:59:24 TWR "Palm 90 cleared for takeoff."...

15:59:35 [SOUND OF ENGINE SPOOLUP]...

15:59:51 CAM-1 "It’s spooled. Real cold, real cold."
15:59:58 CAM-2 "God, look at that thing. That don’t seem right, does it? Uh, that’s not right."
16:00:09 CAM-1 "Yes it is, there’s eighty."
16:00:10 CAM-2 "Naw, I don’t think that’s right. Ah, maybe it is."
16:00:21 CAM-1 "Hundred and twenty."
16:00:23 CAM-2 "I don’t know."

38 seconds later they impacted the 14th Street Bridge.

During the takeoff roll, the first officer (CAM-2) repeatedly commented on the fact that the engine indications didn’t look right, but the captain (CAM-1) assured him that they were. Neither pilot took any action to resolve the discrepancy.

The NTSB investigation ultimately determined that the engine instruments were displaying faulty readings because the crew decided not to turn on the anti-ice system that keeps the engine sensors clear of ice and snow.

Within days of this anniversary, NTSB released the cockpit voice recorder transcript of last August’s Comair accident in Kentucky. The first officer’s comment “dat is weird with no lights” as they accelerated down a closed runway is eerily reminiscent of the first officer’s concerns on Air Florida.

Like Air Florida 90, Comair 5191 will likely become a CRM classic. There were numerous opportunities for the crew to interrupt the chain of events that was leading toward the deaths of 49 people.

There are several lessons for us in these two tragedies separated by one-fourth of the history of powered flight. The first is that regardless of the technology we bring to bear, the weak link in the system is still the Version 1.0 human being who runs things. Second, just because we have mandated CRM training for airline crews, we didn’t “fix” the human factors failures that lurk within the modern aviation system.

And finally for us pilots, if something seems “weird”, there is probably a reason that needs investigation. If you are on the ground, stop and talk about it. If you are in the air, get away from the ground and into a low workload environment so you can figure it out.

As the old saying goes, “If it doesn’t seem right, it probably isn’t.” Or maybe there should be a new version – “If things seem weird, they are.”

Fly Safe!
Neil