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I have 15 hours in a Cessna 172, I’d be happy to give it a go! But in all seriousness, in no way shape or form should the testing be informed by the skill assessment of the test operator. The analysis should be looking at the tasks that had to be performed during the test, whether they were properly identified by easily selected checklists, and quantitative measurements of the complexity and physical difficulty of th…
In this 1 in a million situation, 90% of tested pilots managed to follow the procedures to recover. Therefore the chance of a fatal crash is 1 in 10 million.
Let the manufacturer decide if they want to make the situation rarer or the training better to reduce the overall crash risk.
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.
Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287 ) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-inv... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889 )
Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287 ) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-inv... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889 )
Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.
Robert Sheckley has a short story called The Minimum Man, which is about precisely this. An unlucky, clumsy, error-prone schlub who gets hired by basically-NASA for testing purposes. 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....
Alcohol?
Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.
Robert Sheckley has a short story called The Minimum Man, which is about precisely this. An unlucky, clumsy, error-prone schlub who gets hired by basically-NASA for testing purposes. 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.
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.
I think trying to think of pilots as being good or bad on some abstract scale is almost certainly an oversimplification. 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.
The principle for pilots is similar.
As to skills assessments, you're right, it's difficult. But you can use some general proxies. Certification pilots should be drawn from a standard pool, not a test-pilot pool. Some sense of performance on some standardised battery of qualification flights or simulator check-flights might be used, with scoring based on success or performance in identifying and addressing conditions encountered.
The fact that a precise quantity cannot be confidently stated doesn't mean that no quantity or range can be given.
And for the sake of the certification pilots, I'm assuming check-out flights would either be in simulators or with a more qualified check pilot assisting.