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Airlines in most nations are now required to carry out at least a modicum of upset recovery training (UPRT) in flight simulators. Unfortunately simulators are not good at reproducing sustained acceleration forces, so realism is lacking. The European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), aware of both the essential part simulators play in pilot training and of their limitations, is working with simulator manufacturers to upgrade their performance fidelity at the edges of the flight envelope to improve UPRT. The manufacturers have been struggling with EASA deadlines for meeting the performance targets and the effort is ongoing.
What seems to be needed is a way of inculcating in pilots, despite the limitations of UPRT in simulators, an acute awareness that acceleration in flight brings with it the risk of disorientation, and therefore of emphasising the need to ignore all other sensory inputs except the visual picture provided by the flight instruments. This “effective instrument scan” would enable the pilot to control the aircraft attitude and power accordingly. //
Loss of control in flight (LOC-I) has, since the late 1990s, been the biggest killer accident category for airlines. LOC-I linked to somatogravic illusion has frequently occurred, two of the most dramatic recent examples being the March 2016 FlyDubai Boeing 737-800 crash at Rostov-on-Don, Russia, and the August 2000 Gulf Air Airbus A320 crash at Bahrain International airport. Both occurred at night; both involved a go-around. //
there is a general uneasiness with the perception that recurrent training does not attempt to compensate for the insidious effect on pilot cognitive and manual skills of operating with high levels of automation almost all the time.
In the USA the Air Carrier Safety and Pilot Training Aviation Rulemaking Committee recommends that airlines, in their flight manuals, indicate when and where, on revenue flights, manual flying may be carried out by pilots to help maintain their handling skills. In Europe, however, with its denser airspace and stricter rules on where visual flight rules flying may be carried out, manual “flying” practice is basically only available in simulators or base training. //
Until about 20 years ago, the commercially trained and military trained groups had some basic training experiences in common; they both did their early flying in simple aircraft with primitive flight and navigation instruments. Since then, however, the airline sector has grown massively and the military has shrunk, both in relative and in absolute terms. Although there are still military trained pilots in the airlines, their numbers and influence are reducing rapidly.
This change matters, because civil airliners have been designed by their manufacturers according to assumptions about pilot performance that were set in the 1950s and 1960s. In fact, an industry-wide debate about the issue of pilot performance expectations has been reignited recently by the final report on the Lion Air Boeing 737 Max crash near Jakarta, Indonesia.