Replacing Retiring Pilots Could Force Airlines Into Flying Blind : Aviation: The military has been the traditional source of new personnel, but that supply is drying up. Who will be in the cockpit?

Passengers aboard United Flight 232 could hardly consider themselves lucky. An engine explosion had knocked out the jumbo jet’s flight controls; it drifted through the sky like a rudderless boat.

But there was one bit of good fortune aboard the crippled DC-10: a seasoned crew with 70 years of combined military and civilian flight experience.

Using what pilots call “air sense” gained over thousands of flight hours, the crew improvised, using engine controls to wrestle the plane to a crash landing in Sioux City, Iowa.

Although 112 died in the 1989 crash, another 184 lived. The National Transportation Safety Board credited the flight crew’s “exquisite” performance with saving lives.

But the flight experience seen that day is fading fast in U.S. airline cockpits.

In one of the biggest transitions in U.S. civil aviation history, about 23,000 airline pilots--nearly a third of those now flying--will retire over the next 10 years. Another 4,500 new pilots could be needed each year when the industry climbs out of its current slump.

The huge turnover is further complicated by another factor: The military--once a major supplier of experienced pilots--no longer is training the numbers needed.

Where the new pilots will come from and what type of training they will receive is the question now looming before industry and government officials.

“The airlines have been spoiled,” said John Sheehan, vice president of Phaneuf Associates Inc., a Washington-based aviation consulting firm.

“They’ve had all these great trained people coming to them,” Sheehan said. “Come 1996 or 1997, the things that caused them to be spoiled--experienced pilots--will go away.”

Sheehan’s firm advises a special panel mandated by Congress to look into the anticipated shortage of pilots and aircraft technicians. The collection of military, government and industry representatives is set to submit proposals next month.

The group faces some daunting roadblocks: a rapidly diminishing pool of military-trained fliers, a new generation of younger pilots with myriad training backgrounds, a drop in flight experience among commercial crews, and new technologies that require pilots to be more computer nerd and less Top Gun.

“We have to take a good look at how we train and how we put experience on the pilots in the future,” said Kenneth Tallman, a former Air Force general who heads the panel. “It would have been nice if we thought of it way far back, but there was no pressure on the airlines to get serious about it.”

Even today, there seems little incentive to worry. The failure of Eastern, Pan Am and Midway airlines, combined with cutbacks at other carriers, left about 7,000 experienced pilots looking for work.

But the inevitable march of demographics is taking hold.

The huge group of post-Korea and Vietnam-era pilots that joined the commercial ranks in the 1960s as airlines expanded rapidly into jetliners now is bumping into the mandatory retirement age of 60.

Over the next 10 years, an average of 2,400 airline pilots will retire or quit each year.

As the rate of retirement escalates, the percentage of military-trained pilots drops rapidly. A few years ago, 85% of airline crews learned to fly in the military; by decade’s end, only a third will have done so.

Although civilian flight schools produce enough pilots to fill the spots, a military background offers bonuses--a rigorous selection process, $1 million worth of training, and experience averaging 3,000 hours flight time.

Today’s commercial pilot candidate is typically a commuter airline pilot with 1,500 flight hours, a mix of experience earned over a longer period for a variety of employers.

Airline executives see this system of private instruction and internship with a commuter airline as an economical way of harvesting pilots.

The trade-off, however, will be pilots with less experience.

“The number of flight hours will start shrinking,” conceded John Kern, vice president for Northwest’s flight operations. “The old school would say if you don’t have the seasoning, you’re probably not a good risk. But as we recognize we’re getting high-quality people, the value of flight hours will diminish.”

Not everyone feels comfortable with the trend.

“The question is not whether there will be enough bodies out there, but will we have the ability to train this raw material properly and get them to the requisite level of experience?” Sheehan said.

Gaps in experience and training have been key factors in several fatal air accidents investigated by the NTSB:

* In the Jan. 13, 1982, crash of an Air Florida airliner during a snowstorm in Washington, D.C., board investigators blamed inexperience for the crew’s failure to follow through on crucial de-icing procedures. Seventy-eight people died.

* Two people died on Sept. 20, 1989, when an aborted takeoff sent USAir 5050 skidding into the water at New York’s LaGuardia Airport. The captain had 140 hours commanding a Boeing 737; the first officer had only nine hours in the aircraft, with just two takeoffs and landings. Investigators blamed miscues between the two for the accident.

* In the 1987 crash of a Continental DC-9 during a snowstorm at Denver’s Stapleton Airport, investigators found the newly hired co-pilot’s takeoff was too steep, worsening an icing problem. Twenty-eight people died. The 26-year-old co-pilot had only 36 hours’ experience in the DC-9, the pilot just 136 hours. Investigators discovered the co-pilot was fired by a Houston air carrier for failing flight tests before he joined Continental.

These and similar incidents led to an NTSB recommendation that airlines pay closer attention to the combined level of crew experience.

“Repeated accidents over several years have shown current federal regulations on air carrier crew operating experience to be inadequate,” the board said in one report. The Federal Aviation Administration is considering a rule that would require a higher number of combined flight hours for crews.

Similar problems are catalogued in the Aviation Safety Reporting System, a NASA-run hot line for commercial aviation. Over the last five years, the system has received 1,200 reports of lags in experience and training.

Many involve little more than minor technical glitches and procedural goofs, but some describe dangerous situations. To assure anonymity, the safety system omits specifics from its reports, including names, times and specific dates:

* The pilot of a trans-Pacific flight reported a wild landing at Los Angeles International when confusion sent his plane meandering between the glide paths of two different runways. He blamed glare, confused instructions and his co-pilot’s limited experience in landing the big jet.

“Assign new pilots to one month . . . of line training to build experience,” he wrote. “The 180 hours and three landings this pilot was able to get isn’t good.”

* A cockpit computer on a large jet leaving Orange County, Calif., lost routing information, requiring the captain to fly a noise-abatement route using landmarks. In the confusion, he took the plane out of its assigned altitude. Both crew members had less than 60 hours’ experience in the aircraft.

“Although I don’t know if this was (a) contributing factor, perhaps a more experienced crew could have reacted faster,” wrote the co-pilot, who noted the captain had told schedulers about the lack of cockpit experience.

“He was assured it was legal,” the co-pilot wrote, “but in my opinion it was not safe.”

* Approaching Denver’s Stapleton Airport, a captain noticed his new co-pilot’s shaky flying skills. She failed to respond to his commands to correct too sharp an approach and brought the plane down hard on the runway.

The pilot noted that new co-pilots get good training of complex aircraft systems and emergency procedures, but added, “I believe our training of inexperienced first officers new to large jets is inadequate. Too little time is spent on basic physical flying skills, with zero training in a real aircraft until initial operating experience.”

This concentrated training on rapidly evolving high-tech cockpits is seen as further aggravating the generational transition from older to younger pilots. More and more airliners have “glass cockpits,” where crew rely on computers to do the flying.

“It’s gone from a situation where the pilot was hands-on, to where the pilot is more a monitor of computer functions, which can be a tedious job,” said Bill Traub, vice president for training at United Airlines.

This change means new pilots received different training than the senior crew members whose proficiency came from years of flying, not months of computer simulation.

John Odegard, dean of aerospace sciences at the University of North Dakota Grand Forks, believes such simulation, as offered by his school, is a good alternative to real flight hours. But he worries about the next few years, when young computer jocks join old fighter jocks in the cockpit.

“There will be a 55-year-old pilot who’s afraid to turn on his kid’s computer at home sitting next to a 25-year-old computer whiz with supersonic fingers,” Odegard said. “You’ll have people from two different cultures, and there’s no question there’s going to be problems.”