Alexander Burton, CFI

Pacific Rim Aviation Academy Inc.

Pitt Meadows Regional Airport

393-11465 Baynes Road

Pitt Meadows, BC V3Y 2B4

--Winston Churchill--

When I was in university, an older acquaintance of mine, then serving as an infantry

officer in the US Army, was promoted and sent to advanced officer training prior to being

deployed to Viet Nam for his second tour. Being a curious type, I asked him what exactly

they taught him during his training. His reply: Korea.

It seems we humans all share the fixation of applying previous experience to new

situations until long after that is proven inadequate. As Marshall McLuhan wrote, “We

look at the present through a rear-view mirror. We march backwards into the future.” I’m

sure we can all think of specific examples.

To our credit, our current flight training program is excellent and is the product of years

and years of close study and reflection. It is grounded on a sound and well studied body

of experience and has served us well. Projecting it into the future, however, may be

something we will have to examine carefully. As a friend of mine said to me the other

day, “We have an excellent program for training bush pilots”

The training model we have inherited and have been using successfully for years is based

on a linear developmental model: we start at Alpha and work steadily and sequentially

toward Zulu: PPL, CPL, Multi, IFR. First, we train pilots to fly light, single engine

aircraft in VFR conditions. Then, to paraphrase Yogi Berra, we come to a fork in the road

and take it. We train budding pilots to fly aircraft with more than one engine or one on

floats. Following close behind, we train them to fly aircraft with reference to instruments

in preparation for flight in IMC, perhaps as a second pilot. During their apprentice period

flying as second pilot, they will have an opportunity to receive further training and

experience to qualify them to sit in the left seat of complex, modern aircraft.

We expect and anticipate a new pilot to follow some variation on the traditional career

path: either instructor or bush pilot, charter pilot, regional or small carrier pilot and then,

at long last, airline pilot. A linear progression through the ranks of aviation. Of course,

many if not most pilots will drop out along the way for the variety of reasons we all

know: money, time, boredom, lack of commitment, fear, failure to develop the required

skills. It is a linear, sequential, analog model that has worked and made sense to us for

several generations.

Sadly or fortunately—an assessment dependant on our age and temperament—our world

has moved decidedly from a linear, sequential, analog reality to a non-linear, nonsequential

digital reality. What comes next no longer necessarily connects with what

came before.

Our world of aviation, too, is experiencing an accelerating rate of change. The technology

of flight has advanced in an exponential curve rather than a linear manner and, if we are

not to find ourselves far, far behind the curve, some investigation and consideration of

what exactly we are training people for and what that training should encompass will

have to be undertaken.

It is now possible to fly a large aircraft from Vancouver to Singapore while sipping

coffee sitting in your office in Toronto or Winnipeg, or Regina or; heaven forbid,

Topeka, Kansas. Most air travelers are probably not quite ready for the “pilot-less”

aircraft, but that is a psychological and social barrier not a technological one. The

technology is there and being used; the most significant performance barriers in military

fighter aircraft are the limitations imposed by the physiology of pilots.

The actual “job” of modern airline pilots is moving rapidly toward being present to

monitor the complex, computer systems that actually control the big machine.

Even smaller, GA aircraft are moving in the same direction. I had an opportunity to fly

with a friend in his new Columbia the other day and it reminded me more of a TV studio

than what I am used to as an aircraft. There were flashing screens, virtual dials and a soft,

female voice reporting traffic and proximity alerts all during the flight. Once the machine

is airborne, as long as you’ve told it where to go, it will simply take you there by the

route you have pre-selected. If we’d had the nerves to do it, I’m sure we could have set an

alarm to wake us up just prior to touch down, necessary only because the machine was

not equipped with auto-land.

For good reasons, aviation is a very conservative endeavour. Very few people are willing

to fly the “A” model of anything or change a routine, procedure or pattern that has proven

itself successful and our system of training pilots follows that same, conservative pattern.

It may be, however, that that pattern will no longer serve us well into the future.

When I was in high school, we spent hours learning how to use a slide rule or log tables

to calculate problems in chemistry and physics. Students can now solve much more

complex problems in a small fraction of the time with the use of software and computers

and never actually have to understand the underlying process involved. They plug the

right inputs into the right machine in the approved manner and arrive at the correct

would have been a familiar piece of equipment to Christopher Columbus, to make maps.

Contemporary cartographers use satellite and aerial imaging and computers to create

maps accurate to within millimetres.

We older folk can put all the moral spin we choose to this change; yet, there it is. And it

appears to be working with great success.

It may well be time to begin phasing out the program of the past, at least for advanced

piloting programs, and begin substituting in the real skills that are involved in conducting

the process of flight in modern machines, at least for those destined or selected to conduct

such machines.

It may be that the interim period, the next decade or so, will have to face the reality of a

two-tiered flight training system: one for those who will continue to fly the out-dated, toy

flying machines we have inherited from the past and one for those who will enter the

world of aviation in the future. I will leave the details to those who will move into that

future, but I can certainly see it on the near horizon.

For today, however, as I write this the sun in shining and my little Citabria waits.