An intense industry debate surrounds the question of whether current training is cultivating vital piloting skills. Is more legislation aimed at developing "fail-safe" flight crews the right answer, or is it time to toss the U.S.centric model and adopt a new global standard?

The traditional career path to becoming a professional pilot starts at a local flight school, an aeronautical college or in the military. After obtaining required licenses and certifications, the candidate builds the flight time required for an airline job by instructing or working for small commuter or night-cargo operators. In the days of three-person cockpits, the new-hire would start as a flight engineer and spend several years gaining experience while graduating to the right seat as first officer, then to the prized left seat of captain.

This method has worked well. "The fact that the U.S.'s safety record, the best in the world, is as good as it has been I attribute to the quality of training that is present in the airline business," notes NTSB Member Robert Sumwalt, who has logged about 24,000 hr. in his 24-year career as an airline pilot. In 2008, scheduled and nonscheduled U.S. airlines carried 753 million passengers on more than 10.8 million flights without a fatality. And the total accident rate for Part 121 scheduled carriers was 0.107 per/100,000 flight hours and 0.189 per 100,000 departures.

However, "it's a different world now - and we are not training for it," stresses Flight Safety Foundation President and CEO William R. Voss. Learning to handle rare events, such as engine failure at V1 takeoff-decision speed, still dominates training. What's needed are methods that reflect real-world operations in real-world, automated cockpits. "When you fundamentally reinvent the cockpit, you introduce new failure modes," says Voss.

"What a life-or-death emergency looks like now isn't a scene from a Clark Gable movie - a flaming engine and a macho pilot in the left seat with a cigar hanging out of his mouth," says Voss. "It's about what happens when all the displays go dark in the middle of the night and you don't know what to do," emphasizing that current training does not provide the skills needed to deal with the challenges of automation (see p. 57).

"There is an overdependence on automation in today's flying environment and pilots are losing airmanship, piloting skills - all the basics," notes National Aerospace Training and Research Center President Dick Leland. The former U.S. Air Force pilot has 25 years' experience as an aerospace physiologist, and was a training course manager for military air crews and civilian pilots.

"Pilots are becoming passive monitors," he says. "And people are terrible monitors - we get bored and stop paying attention. Yet, when the automated system fails, we expect the pilot to jump in, become Steve Canyon and exercise perfect airmanship and judgment. That's a tall order for someone who is ill-prepared for it."

In late 2008, Qantas Airbus A330s were involved in inflight, uncommanded pitchup/pitchdown incidents - one of which caused serious injury to passengers - due to spurious commands from the aircraft's air data inertial reference unit to the flight control system (AW&ST Jan. 12, p. 39).

"As we move toward more of an automated aircraft, we may be losing sight of the fact that we need to teach more of the basic airwork," notes Paul Onorato, president of the Coalition of Air Line Pilots Assns. (CAPA).

An NTSB study cited inadequate training as the probable cause of 169 accidents, mainly in general aviation, during 1985-2004. The safety board continues to see accidents stemming from poor monitoring, notes Sumwalt. On Aug. 27, 2006, the pilots of Comair Flight 5191, after failing to monitor their position on the Blue Grass-Lexington (Ky.) Airport and taxiways, departed from the wrong runway. Their Bombardier CRJ100 collided with a fence, killing 49 of the 50 people on board.