1. So where does it fall apart?
2. Are the "flight schools" not teaching what you were taught?
3. Is it the same as not needing to learn math because we have devices that do it for us?
4. Are they put into the commercial seat too soon?
What is it?
I'll leave it to the site admin folks to leave this here or move it, but to answer your questions as best I can-----
1. Where it falls apart is, as usual, due to multiple factors. Learning to fly is very, very expensive today. Not that it was cheap when I learned, but even accounting for inflation and the changing value of the dollar, it's a very expensive thing to take on. So that eliminates a lot of potentially real good pilots right there.
So far as I know the old GI Bill method of becoming an airline pilot, under which the US government paid for 90 percent of one's flight training after one earned a Private license on their own is long, long gone. And the military, at least in this country, has made it more attractive for pilots to stay in the service with things like pay and other incentives. So the urge to get out and make some real money flying for an airline is not so strong anymore. So the old "join the military, learn to fly, get some experience, leave the military, and get your Private, get your Commercial, Instrument, ATP on the government's dime, and get a great job flying for an airline" no longer works today.
The demand worldwide for pilots is skyrocketing as the demand for air travel is skyrocketing. We currently roll out 42 new 737's a month. Or maybe it's 45 now. I know the target is about 60. The assembly time for a 737 was 11 days a number of years ago when I did the first music video highlighting the then-new 737 moving assembly line. I'm not sure what it is now but it's less. Our backlog for 737s comes to a point at the horizon it's so long. And the same is true of Airbus.
The "system" simply can't turn out pilots fast enough. Some airlines like Emirates have actually started flight training schools where they take students who know zip about flying a plane and take them all the way through to becoming a first officer on a 777, A330, or A380. We've filmed one of these classes at Emirates-- I recall on that day the lecture was about how temperature and pressure change with altitude. Very basic stuff. So even the airlines, or some of them, are taking steps on their own to ensure a continuing supply of pilots.
This varies all over the world, but the combination of a staggering demand and lowering qualification requirements simply to fill the flight decks has resulted in lowering experience requirements for flight crews. This is
NOT a universal trend, but it's a growing one. The flight deck of the Asiana 777 that landed on the riprap at SFO had some fairly inexperienced folks on it. They were all
qualified to be there but that doesn't ensure expertise.
The airlines themselves are making it less attractive to work for them. As with virtually all companies on the planet, the drive is to do more with less. The airline pilots on this forum can correct me, but it's my belief based on conversations with pilots that the days of high pay, great perks, and super-status are sort of gone outside of the senior folks who are grandfathered in.
2. I don't think it's the flight schools' fault. With the exception of GPS and a few other display systems and probably more sophisticated aerodynamic designs and construction materials and techniques the planes used for training today are not unlike the Piper Cherokee's and Cessna 150s that I learned in. There are more license categories than there use to be, particularly at the lower end of the recreational scale with reduced requirements. The reduced requirements bring with them increased restrictions, but this has little to do with the requirements for the airline folks.
3. Technology breeds technology. This is where aviation has, in my opinon, made the greates strides. Sure, we can tweak a wing design or an engine design and eke out a few more mpg from the thing. But the big strides in efficiency and productivity are being made in the airplane's systems.
For example we've developed an iPad app that wirelessly connects to the airplane's flight management system, compares what the airplane is actually doing in terms of performance and fuel burn to what the flight plan said it would do, and then lets the flight crew in real time change paramenters on the iPad to see if any of them will improve the performance and fuel burn. If they do, the crew can make the change in the airplane's flight management system itself or call up ATC and ask for a route, speed, or altitude change to match what their iPad showed them.
And this is just one tiny improvement in the sea of technology that's operating an airplane today.
In a nutshell, although there are existing pilots who might deny this, flight crews are more systems managers than airplane pilots today. Technology is where all the emphasis is, and as you can imagine this technology is mind-numbingly sophisticated and complex. The display and functionality of today's commercial aircraft is simply amazing. I see it all the time in the work I do at this company.
And don't let the TV commercials fool you: when it comes to a human being, there is no such thing as multi-tasking. The systems in today's airplanes can perfom a huge number of tasks simulataneously and this capability is being added to all the time. A human, on the other hand, can still do just one mental calculation at a time. We can do it pretty damn fast, but compared to the systems we are tasked with running these days, we''re working with brains that have the exact same wiring as the folks back in the Stone Age who watched a tree roll down a hill and said, "Hmm..... " You do the math and see how well we're keeping up with our own creations.
4. Hard to answer. In terms of managing the airplane's systems, probably not although probably so in some parts of the world. In terms of what
we think of as experience in flying a plane, probably so. But just as in boating as reflected in the periodic "do we need paper charts anymore" threads, the emphasis in flying a plane is no longer on flying the plane. The things fly themselves..... 99 percent of the time. Punch some buttons, go to London. Punch the buttons again, go to Dubai.
And since the technology in combination with the redundancy is so bloody reliable, it's becoming less and less necessary to know all the subtleties of how to physically fly the plane. And since it's less and less necessary, from the standpoint of an airline that is trying maximize profit why spend the major bucks it takes to train people and give them the time in the right seat needed to build a ton of experience when there's no real need to? Training and experience are expensive. To somebody. In this case, the airline.
The damn planes are becoming automated anyway, so put the money into teaching the "pilots" how to operate the automation. That's where the return on investment is. Not in teaching them all that stick and rudder stuff that they will probably.....
probably.... never need.
And it works. Until the time it doesn't. So the Air France plane hits the Atlantic, the Asiana plane hits the riprap, and the Air Asia plane hits the Java Sea. But.... that's three out of how many flights worldwide every day? Forgetting the value of human life, which seems to be easier every year, those are pretty good odds if one is in the business of carting passengers and freight around in the sky for profit.
But still, accidents are expensive with the lawsuits and bad publicity and whatnot. So it would be good to eliminate them as much as possible. So how do we do that? By training pilots to physically fly the planes better? That's way too expensive anymore. And 99 percent of the time it's totally unnecessary, right? So 99 percent of the time, you've spent that money for nothing.
Why do the planes crash? Generally because the pilots messed up. Either they simply didn't fly good when they should have or they responded incorrectly to an airplane problem and
then they didn't fly good.
So what's the ultimate solution to eliminating the problem of pilots not flying good? Technology, right? Automate the planes. Get rid of humans trying to fly them at all, replace them with people who's entire being is focused on systems management and keeping the computers humming, and be done with it.
We did it with elevators, we're doing it with cars, we'll do it with airplanes. It's inevitable.
