Discussion
biggest upside was both of lads in the cockpit had hours and hours under their belt including old school stick and rudder time.
it does worry me the new gen of MPL's coming through have relatively low hours before they are released into the right hand seat. could be a non founded worry but id rather have someone up front (ex mil or civvie) who had flown gliders/taildraggers/mil stuff so they had a very rounded experience in variety of airframes.
it does worry me the new gen of MPL's coming through have relatively low hours before they are released into the right hand seat. could be a non founded worry but id rather have someone up front (ex mil or civvie) who had flown gliders/taildraggers/mil stuff so they had a very rounded experience in variety of airframes.
kurt535 said:
biggest upside was both of lads in the cockpit had hours and hours under their belt including old school stick and rudder time.
it does worry me the new gen of MPL's coming through have relatively low hours before they are released into the right hand seat. could be a non founded worry but id rather have someone up front (ex mil or civvie) who had flown gliders/taildraggers/mil stuff so they had a very rounded experience in variety of airframes.
Someone with an MPL has about 40 hours less solo experience than someone with an fATPL. I'd rather have it than not, but it isn't going to make a huge difference. Experience can't be bought, but at some point tooling around in CAVOK in a Cessna is going to give you diminishing returns. In the UK we don't have enough variety of aviation to allow people to gain experience on progressively larger and more complex aircraft before ending up in a medium jet. Military aircrew end up at OCUs with pretty low total hours as well I believe.it does worry me the new gen of MPL's coming through have relatively low hours before they are released into the right hand seat. could be a non founded worry but id rather have someone up front (ex mil or civvie) who had flown gliders/taildraggers/mil stuff so they had a very rounded experience in variety of airframes.
Extract from Cockpit Confdiential
Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was the US Airways captain who guided his suddenly engineless Airbus into the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, after striking a flock of Canada geese. Together with the majority of my colleagues, I have the utmost respect for Captain Sullenberger. But that’s just it: respect. It’s not adoration or a false, media-fattened misunderstanding of what he and his crew faced that day. As the public has come to understand it, Sully saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and superhuman flying skills. The truth isn’t quite so romantic. I was getting a haircut (what’s left of it) one day not long after the accident when Nick the barber asked what I did for a living. As is too often the case, any talk of piloting at some point turns to the saga of Sully-upon-Hudson, and this was no exception. Nick grew starry-eyed. “Man, that was something,” he said. “How did the guy ever land that plane on the water like that?” Nick wasn’t looking for a literal answer, but I gave him one anyway. “Pretty much the same way he’s landed 12,000 other times in his career” was my response. There was silence after that, which I took to mean that Nick was either silently impressed or thinking “what an asshole.” I was exaggerating but eager to make a point: that the nuts and bolts of gliding into water aren’t especially difficult. The common sense of water landings is one of the reasons pilots don’t even train for them in simulators. Another reason is that having to land in water will always be the byproduct of something inherently more serious—a fire, multiple engine failures, or some other catastrophic malfunction. That is the crux of the emergency, not the resultant landing. And nowhere in the public discussion has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged. Specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger’s left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country’s largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a lower altitude (beyond gliding distance to the Hudson), or under more inclement weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent or skill was going to matter. Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble, acknowledging the points I make above. People pooh-pooh this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he’s just being honest. He has also highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. There were two pilots on board, and both needed to rise to the occasion. Nothing they did was easy, and a successful outcome was by no means guaranteed. But they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, presumably, any other crew would have done in that same situation. And let’s not forget the flight attendants, whose actions were no less commendable. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles or heroics, but to less glamorous forces. They are, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill, and technology. There’s little harm in celebrating the unlikely survival of 155 people, but terms like “hero” and “miracle” shouldn’t be thrown around lightly. A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on the river that day can be rationally explained. And a hero, to me, describes a person who accepts a great personal sacrifice, up to and including injury or death, for the benefit of somebody else. I didn’t see heroics; I saw professional execution in the throes of an emergency.
Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger was the US Airways captain who guided his suddenly engineless Airbus into the Hudson River on January 15, 2009, after striking a flock of Canada geese. Together with the majority of my colleagues, I have the utmost respect for Captain Sullenberger. But that’s just it: respect. It’s not adoration or a false, media-fattened misunderstanding of what he and his crew faced that day. As the public has come to understand it, Sully saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and superhuman flying skills. The truth isn’t quite so romantic. I was getting a haircut (what’s left of it) one day not long after the accident when Nick the barber asked what I did for a living. As is too often the case, any talk of piloting at some point turns to the saga of Sully-upon-Hudson, and this was no exception. Nick grew starry-eyed. “Man, that was something,” he said. “How did the guy ever land that plane on the water like that?” Nick wasn’t looking for a literal answer, but I gave him one anyway. “Pretty much the same way he’s landed 12,000 other times in his career” was my response. There was silence after that, which I took to mean that Nick was either silently impressed or thinking “what an asshole.” I was exaggerating but eager to make a point: that the nuts and bolts of gliding into water aren’t especially difficult. The common sense of water landings is one of the reasons pilots don’t even train for them in simulators. Another reason is that having to land in water will always be the byproduct of something inherently more serious—a fire, multiple engine failures, or some other catastrophic malfunction. That is the crux of the emergency, not the resultant landing. And nowhere in the public discussion has the role of luck been adequately acknowledged. Specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger’s left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country’s largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Had the bird-strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a lower altitude (beyond gliding distance to the Hudson), or under more inclement weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent or skill was going to matter. Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble, acknowledging the points I make above. People pooh-pooh this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he’s just being honest. He has also highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. There were two pilots on board, and both needed to rise to the occasion. Nothing they did was easy, and a successful outcome was by no means guaranteed. But they did what they had to do, what they were trained to do, and what, presumably, any other crew would have done in that same situation. And let’s not forget the flight attendants, whose actions were no less commendable. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles or heroics, but to less glamorous forces. They are, in descending order (pardon the pun): luck, professionalism, skill, and technology. There’s little harm in celebrating the unlikely survival of 155 people, but terms like “hero” and “miracle” shouldn’t be thrown around lightly. A miracle describes an outcome that cannot be rationally explained. Everything that happened on the river that day can be rationally explained. And a hero, to me, describes a person who accepts a great personal sacrifice, up to and including injury or death, for the benefit of somebody else. I didn’t see heroics; I saw professional execution in the throes of an emergency.
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