Simulation Trains Pilots for Disasters
It was a tough day in the cockpit. First, the two-man crew lost an engine on takeoff and had to make a shaky, stomach-turning go-round for an emergency landing. The second time up, it was an engine fire. Then, on landing, their plane was nailed by deadly wind shear.
Quite a day for a crew that never left the ground.
The travails suffered by the pilots at the American Airlines flight academy illustrate the reliance air carriers put on flight simulation for training their crews.
Sophisticated simulators not only give crews experience with instrumentation, they provide the look and feel of near disaster. Set on mechanical stilts that pitch and yaw, the simulator cockpits plunge and buck as if a plane is in turbulence.
Computers generate images on the wind screen so realistic that pilots practice in the busy haze of Los Angeles International and see Chicago’s Hancock Tower as they take off from O’Hare.
The possibilities are infinite.
“Want to feel a different runway?” asks an instructor, who dials in New York’s La Guardia. The smooth taxi along the simulated O’Hare runway immediately gives way to a bumpy ride.
“In the simulator, a guy has the opportunity to see all these different situations,” said Capt. Lee Schumacher, American’s head of training. “We can give him experience for almost anything that can happen to him out on the line.”
The pilots training in the simulator agree. John Albury, who was practicing for the second seat in a Boeing 757, said simulators give crews the chance to experience emergencies they could never risk when flying a real airliner.
“You just concentrate to get everything right and get the airplane to perform right,” Albury said.
Most U.S. airlines stopped training in real airplanes by the early 1980s. Today a pilot new to a certain type of aircraft usually gets his first try at the controls with a planeload of passengers aboard.
Now there is talk of using the sophisticated simulators to further tailor training.
American and other airlines are designing training programs for Federal Aviation Administration approval that would eschew certain general requirements in favor of a system better suited for individual airline needs.
“Right now, there’s a certain amount of hours the FAA says you teach,” Schumacher said. “Under the new program, we may be able to cut down that number of hours and take advantage of the special equipment and the individual proficiency of a certain pilot that we can’t take advantage of today.”
But Kenneth Tallman, a retired Air Force general who heads a commission looking into a projected shortage of pilots, said some training programs rely too heavily on ground-based practice. “They don’t get a whole lot of experience,” he said. “But what is enough?”
