FLIGHT TRAINING CURRICULUM AND EFFECTIVENESS

Boeing.com

The objective of any training curriculum is to enhance learning and develop individuals to attain greater proficiency  in whatever they do. The curriculum encompasses all that is required to bring one to speed with dealing with eventualities by drawing on the knowledge and the skills practiced and do so in more pressure situations which could encompass other environmental factors and so on, to which the crew have not been subjected during training.



 In addition to training crew to face every possible malfunction that could be envisioned, event based introduction of malfunctions from flight safety through FOQA, or AQP, have helped crew benefit from such training in exercising good decision making skills  and enhance safety.


 While training curriculum do incorporate the air data computer failures now more on LOFT scenarios or training sessions in the aftermath of Air France 447 accident, there always remains an endless possibility of an aircraft getting involved in a malfunction which at that point could overwhelm the crew and possibly affect their judgement and decision making. Is the event based training consolidation good enough to equip our crews with the ability to deal with any surprises?? Or do we need to overhaul the curriculum in any other way to avoid our crews falling trap to the event that we didnt train for ??

 " The emergencies you train for almost never happen. Its the one you can't train for that kills you. "        ------ Ernest Gann, 1989 

 Perhaps, we would benefit more from a training curriculum that ups the ante on the crew knowledge levels and equips them with a broader procedural outline and also teaches them to deal with unusual situations presented by exercising the broader tenets of CRM, decision making, workload management, prioritisation of tasks, and so on . Across the industry, flight training needs to make a paradigm shift from  generally being a reactive based approach to envisioning the training and training quality needs, to depart from the current practices.


 Send in your take on this and what best you think could be done to ensure training effectiveness.