Guest Opinion: Simulation Comes of Age

On a personal level, I‘ve lost too many friends in such accidents. As an insurance professional, I’ve watched GA become crippled by rising insurance costs, particularly for product liability. And now, if the experts are correct, we could be facing another “hard” property and casualty insurance market making that challenge much worse.

And how do we measure the public relations hit that GA takes every time there is a well-publicized accident? How many expensive new (and often counter-productive) regulations have been implemented to try to stop those accidents? How many people didn’t start flying because they became convinced it was too dangerous? We can all criticize the media’s sensationalizing of our accidents, but that reality is not likely to change.

Fortunately, in recent years I have observed an honest introspection in our community about our accident rate and how we can reform our flight training to stem the bloody tide. The number of people in the “see no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil” camp is dwindling. More leaders are addressing the critical need to transform the way we conduct flight training. Core to that transformation is the concept of “educating aviators” rather than “training pilots.”

The technological development that promises to significantly improve our risk management education is the advent of simple and relatively inexpensive flight simulators.

Having analyzed aircraft accidents for 40 years, I’ve concluded that most are the result of a failure at both ends of the training spectrum. On one end, our fundamentals are weak. Tens of millions of dollars are wasted each year paying for aircraft damage caused by a pilot’s failure to properly maneuver the aircraft around its three axes, especially at slow speeds near the runway.

In my experience, these cases of failure at fundamentals are often because the flight instructor rushed through them too quickly, partly because he or she was bored with them and partly because of a desire to save the trainee money.

At the other end of the training spectrum, weak “higher order” risk management skills are also common and often fatal. In my opinion, the main reason for this is that instructors are largely unaware of the thought processes and external pressures that cause poor risk management.

Even those who do understand the risky scenarios have a very hard time recreating those experiences in flight training in any realistic way. Instead, we create black-and-white scenarios that require no judgment on the part of the trainee. But it’s never that cut and dried in the real world.

A great example is the way we teach instrument approaches. Too often we take a trainee whose fundamentals are already weak and fly them in good weather with a view restricting device. The “hood” allows shadows and other indications of the aircraft’s attitude to leak in. Then, at the missed approach point, we have them take off the hood where they get the impression that finding the airport is always done with great visibility. Anyone who has flown a lot of approaches to minimums knows this is rarely the case.

The use of flight simulators can economically and effectively address both ends of the training spectrum. After the initial capital cost, an effective flight instructor can inexpensively use a flight simulator to introduce concepts, master fundamentals, and introduce scenarios that evidence shows are risky.

Despite the potential of simulators to reduce losses and save trainees money, there’s still resistance to their full implementation for training. The two big obstacles are FARs that give little loggable credit for training in simulators, coupled with the desire of flight instructors to log flight time for future career opportunities. Both of these obstacles can be overcome, but it will require courage and commitment.

As far as logging simulator time, the question a flight school should ask is, “What is your goal here, logging hours or becoming an excellent airman? If it’s the former, maybe our school isn’t for you. If it’s the latter, welcome, you’ll be glad you made that choice.” Of course, the long-term solution is for the FAA to change their regulatory approach to encourage schools to stop “teaching the test” and checking off training boxes and to start focusing on real airmanship.

The instructor issue is where the courage comes in. The owners and managers of simulator-centric schools will have to make sure the emphasis is on educating the customer.

Those instructors who do that well need to be rewarded for that emphasis. They may still go on to other flying jobs, but while they’re teaching they will be educators, not nurse maids.

We have an enormous opportunity in front of us in GA. Never in my 40 years in this industry have I seen such an opportunity for systemic improvement in the way we do business.

Let’s not blow it.