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If you test for average pilots, then you've still got approx 50% of pilots who aren't capable. Whatever happened to testing for the lowest common denominator - especially in life and death situations?
How about we take below-average pilots, have them run the test right after their normal full shift ends without any rest in between, and give them a glass of whisky for encouragement?
The primary design objective of the 737 max was to avoid pilot retraining. Until that stops being a major economic driver in aviation no problem was solved here. Changing MCAS another dozen times and updating the manuals does nothing to prevent this from happening in new future system design.
There’s a tension between progress (some of which offers fuel [and ecological] savings) and cost. If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically. Certification is incre…
Surely there are only two types of pilots? * Pilots * Dead / disqualified pilots
If you test for average pilots, then you've still got approx 50% of pilots who aren't capable. Whatever happened to testing for the lowest common denominator - especially in life and death situations?
How about we take below-average pilots, have them run the test right after their normal full shift ends without any rest in between, and give them a glass of whisky for encouragement?
In fact, this is a similar technique some actors use to make sure they know their lines cold -- no matter how well they can recite them with full concentration, can they still recite them while playing an intense video game? Because things will be so different on stage/set, it will be equivalently distracting.
The primary design objective of the 737 max was to avoid pilot retraining. Until that stops being a major economic driver in aviation no problem was solved here. Changing MCAS another dozen times and updating the manuals does nothing to prevent this from happening in new future system design.
There's a lot of safety value in not having to be retrained, too.
Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.
Turns out, when he's placed in a life-or-death situation, he finds some focus and skill, and is no longer the minimum man. So they have some ways to counter that tendency....
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don’t know what you think ‘average’ means. Median is an average.
Most commonly it is used for the mean though...
Life expectancy for example is calculated via median. Median income is generally used over average etc.
The primary design objective of the 737 max was to avoid pilot retraining. Until that stops being a major economic driver in aviation no problem was solved here. Changing MCAS another dozen times and updating the manuals does nothing to prevent this from happening in new future system design.
There’s a tension between progress (some of which offers fuel [and ecological] savings) and cost. If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically. Certification is incre…
Eg. A newly certified plane type can be produced for 15 years before requiring recertification to new standards.
In effect, this forces Boeing to come up with new designs, since the chances of old designs meeting new standards are low. It'll give them a big incentive to find ways to get the cost of certifications down.
Up to them if they choose to evolve the plane with the standards, or do a ground-up redesign every 15 years.
I'm not sure the criteria for determining an 'average' pilot but if becoming a test pilot is a big incentive for trying to be the best you can wouldn't this drag the average pilot quality down?
There's a role for test pilots in aircraft development, and certification pilots, used in rating an aircraft for commercial use. You'll want the good ones for that first task.
The reality is probably more like for developers, some of the best developers in terms of achievements are not people you'd want to work with on a daily basis. In the same way that an F1 driver wouldn't necessarily be the world's best bus driver.
I'm sure the intentions are good but shouldn't the goal here be to use the least qualified, but still qualified pilots for testing? After all if the average pilots are passing the test but the least qualified, but still qualified pilots do not then it is a matter of time before the next crash. Boeing sells their planes all over the globe and I suspect that the average and the mean could be quite a ways apart and that the least good but still qualified pilot still sits comfortably below either.