Here are a few recent aviation stories that relate to old blog or Web site postings of mine…
A 25-year-old Air India Boeing 737 pilot pushed his seat back, inadvertently shoved the yoke forward (probably disengaged the autopilot), and then panicked, unable to consider the idea of pulling the nose back up to a normal attitude (story). The 39-year-old captain was on a bathroom break and the plane lost 7,000′ of altitude and allegedly nosed down 26 degrees before the captain was able to recover. This ties into my December 2009 “Foreign Airline Safety versus U.S. Major Airlines” in which the different paths to the right seat of a Boeing 737 are charted. Air India should be able to find an unlimited number of very qualified pilots from the U.K., Australia, the U.S., France, etc., but instead prefers to recruit and train Indian nationals with no flying experience. If nothing goes wrong, such folks are able to learn how to push enough buttons to persuade the B737 to fly itself from runway to runway, but it would appear that there is no substitute for some stick and rudder time.
By contrast, the Australian Transport Safety Bureau has released a preliminary report (click to the right to grab the full PDF) on the Airbus A380 that suffered an uncontained engine failure that damaged some electrical and hydraulic systems. The obvious action to take in this case would have been to dump fuel and return to land, but the fancy computer systems were indicating “fuel jettison fault”. They ran at least a dozen checklists, calculated how to land the airplane overweight and with compromised hydraulics and reverse thrust. The final approach speed was 166 knots, which isn’t atypical for military fighter jets, but is faster than usual for an airliner (the CRJ that I flew approached at 145 knots; Boeing 737s and Airbus A320s can be as slow as 120-130 knots). Once on the ground they could not shut down the #1 engine, despite having pushed the fire switches that are supposed to disconnected everything at the firewall. The first officer of the plane had 11,280 hours total time and, if typical, would have had significant flying experience before joining Qantas.
Air traffic controllers in Spain have shut down the country, upset that their $450,000/year average salaries might be reduced (in January I linked to a story about how some Spanish controllers were earning over $1 million per year). The average working Spaniard earns $26,500 per year.
>>>Air traffic controllers in Spain have shut down the country, upset that their $450,000/year average salaries might be reduced<<<
Pigs get fat, boys. Hogs get slaughtered.
Philip: Air India does hire contract pilots from outside the country. The pilot that flew the 737 off the tabletop runway in Mangalore was a Serbian, citizen of/resident in Britain.
With that said, Air India is politically compelled to hire locally and fire expats first. The problem is that with the booming aviation sector, the cream of the local crop is probably hired off by private airlines.
Also, surely the natives can be taught to fly planes the right way and many do, without just pushing buttons to persuade a plane to go from runway to runway… or are good piloting skills a generic trait of people from western countries alone?
Jagadeesh: If you read http://philip.greenspun.com/flying/foreign-airline-safety you’ll see that there are indeed some people who believe that good flying skills are a genetic or cultural trait. I prefer to use Occam’s Razor and assume that a person with 1500 hours of experience, mostly as pilot-in-command and/or as an instructor, (the typical new-hire at an American regional carrier), or a person with 10,000 hours of experience, half as pilot-in-command (the typical new-hire at an American major carrier), is going to have better skills than a person with 250 hours of training, almost none as pilot-in-command (the typical new-hire at a lot of foreign airlines).
Could India “teach natives” to “fly the right way”? Probably not. There are a lot of things that one learns as pilot-in-command, when one is forced to make most of the decisions, that can’t be learned as a student. So even if Air India wanted to pay for 1500 hours of instruction rather than 200 or 250, the result wouldn’t be the same as a person who had 1500 hours of experience as an instructor.
http://www1.folha.uol.com.br/mercado/844808-anac-propoe-regra-que-acelera-e-barateia-a-formacao-de-pilotos.shtml
This news has immediately reminded me of your “foreign-airline-safety” article.
If you read Portuguese you would be “glad” to know that Brazilian agency for civil aviation is promoting changes to substitute “real flight hours” for “hours in the simulator” in order to accelerate and make it cheaper to graduate airlines pilots due to the lack of pilots in the steadily growing Brazilian aviation market.