There is one prominent issue in the national media following the accident of Asiana 214 (AAR 214): pilot qualification. Several articles, TV news shows, and diaries here at Daily Kos have taken issue with the 43 hours of flying time logged in the 777 by the flying pilot (PF), a captain (CA) in transition training to the 777. Commenter mention the nearly 10,000 hours he had logged in other aircraft almost in passing but the obvious story is the question of why a pilot with such a low time in type would ever be allowed to fly an international airline jet with 307 souls on board.
Why indeed? I think the average person might reasonably ask himself how 43 hours of flying time in a technological marvel like the 777 could possibly be adequate experience for the pilot at the controls of a flight from Seoul, South Korea, to San Francisco, SFO. Were it only 43 hours I might agree to being concerned. Two things stand in the way of me holding such a concern: the aforementioned 10k hours and the hoops this pilot had leap through to find himself in the left seat of a 777. Lets look at that road.
10,000 hours of flying experience is over one year of time in the cockpit of various types of aircraft over many years of a life. It says nothing of the countless hours and hard work spent qualifying to fly the several different types of aircraft he must have flown before the 777. Some of the time is certainly at the controls, some is in command while some is in a more junior position, much of it is on the autopilot but all of it is experience that counts towards becoming a safe pilot. My 23, 000 hours took roughly 38 years to accumulate. Capt. Lee's may have come faster or slower but I suspect he had been flying more than ten years. During that time he had successfully completed a training program for each of the aircraft he was qualified to operate and passed government required demonstrations of his knowledge of the aircraft, company procedures, and aviation regulations, demonstrated his ability to operated the aircraft under normal and emergency conditions in a simulator, and again in the aircraft in normal line operations. He was jumping through that last hoop for the 777 when this tragedy happened. No pilot gets to where he was without having been thoroughly trained, tested, and examined dozens of times.
I do not know the specifics of the Asiana training program or the Korean government regulations and requirements governing that program so it may be different in specifics from what we do in the US. I suspect it is not all that different because Asiana was our code share partner in the early '90s. One of our very senior 747-400 instructors and check airmen retired early at my company's request, with a very nice retirement pay accommodation, to start up Asiaina's747-400 training program. I understood from later discussions with him that their program was close to ours although it had a longer foot print. The additional time was intended to mitigate a previously hideous safety record at several Asian airlines. His comments also pointed to poor English language proficiency and cultural barriers to effective cockpit crew management (CRM) as being problematic. Remember that this was in the early '90s which says nothing about Asiana today. I do, however, expect to see this prominently addressed in the accident investigation and subsequent report.
To get some idea of how a youngster who loves everything to do with flying to an airline pilot with 10k hours lets look at something I do know, my career. Mine is typical of someone who comes up through the military to an air carrier. The civilian track is much more common these days due to the severely limited number of pilots who are military trained as opposed to my beginnings in the early '70s. The civilian track is more varied and has a wider range of quality of instruction. I won't say it is a lesser track but only that is is different. In my experience the military aviator and the civilian are almost indistinguishable in how well they do their job once each has a couple years of airline flying under their belt.
I was a USAF pilot. My path started with 35 hours of flying in a flight screening program at my university during my senior year. The FSP is intended to weed out those who do not have the aptitude, have physiological aversions to flight, or are not able to progress on a strict timeline. That strict timeline only gets tighter as a pilot continues down the road.
The USAF training for pilots is the Undergraduate Training Program (UPT). It has changed since I went through it and later taught at it but it still runs about a year with somewhere around 250 hours of flying time. It is intense. The student is constantly under the gun to perform to rigid standards. Every activity is graded and must be passed in the alotted time. There are about a dozen academic subjects with tests that require 80% to pass, four check rides in the primary trainer, and four check rides in the follow on aircraft which is either a multi-pilot crewed aircraft or a single pilot aircraft. Before they ever get to a check ride they have to pass each block of instruction that builds on the one before it. An average day requires 12 hours of duty, often six or seven days a week. The only reason it is only 12 hours is that the student has to be back on duty 12 hours after the training day ends. That 250 hours is the equivalent of more than a thousand of most civilian flying. One good friend used to say he did more in an hour twenty minute UPT sortie than he did in a month of airline flying. I agree.
Follow on training to UPT is a mixed bag that can be divided into single pilot training for those going to fighters, muti-pilot crew training for those going to tankers and transports, and the dreaded selection to teach at UPT. That's right a new young 2LT who was a know nothing student gets wings and is teaching a now nothing student within four months of UPT graduation. Talk about a challenge.
Pilots in the heavy track get another far less intense training program for the aircraft they will fly. The academics, simulator, and flying are still graded and time limited for meeting standards. The fighter track pilots get few flying hours but the one they get are high intensity and require pilots who have the ability to climb steep learning curves quickly. They also have to meet the academics, simulator, and flying standards to complete the course. Every conversion to a new aircraft requires starting all over again with that aircraft training program only the pilot has more experience on which to draw but I don't think it ever gets easy or fun due to the scrutiny.
The one common thread in all of the training and line flying is standards. A pilot who demonstrates that he meets the standards has proven he is qualified to operate that aircraft. The number of hours he has flown in it is then rendered moot. Qualified is qualified. I might mention that the same goes for the OE instructor. Their future qualification is in question.
Airline flying is only different in the details of the training events. There are still strict standards to meet but often less hand holding is offered because the pilot is supposed to be a professional with lots of experience. Nowadays the systems academics is often a computer based multimedia course with little or no human instructor assistance. Replacing a human instructor with a DVD is meant to save money which always seems to be a top priority. I never found airline training to be more difficult or intense than the military but I did find the new technology a challenge to understand and master in the beginning. The qualification hoops include a system validation, SV, (exam with an 80% passing standard), a maneuvers validation, MV, (2 hour plus simulator check ride testing the basic handling of the jet and some emergency procedures in the simulator), a Line Oriented Evaluation, LOE, (type rating ride for initial student and a continuing qualification requirement every six to twelve months in the simulator ), followed by Operating Experience, OE, (up to 50 hours riding with an OE qualified check captain in line operations in the airplane with passengers), and finally a Line Check (LC) by the OE captain or with an FAA Inspector if it is his first ever air carrier captain checkout. That is a horribly tortured sentence but you read it correctly if you noticed that the first time the student flies the aircraft is with passengers on a revenue flight.
For those of you who fly frequently I'll bet most of you would have no idea and would never be able to tell if the landing was the pilot's first or his 5000th. Or maybe the autopilot landed the aircraft. That is because the system works nearly every time. The pilots are well trained, highly experienced (most of the time), well vetted, and have skin in the game. When the system fails it is because several parts of it failed. Most of the time dozens of errors have to be made by lots of people and/or several equipment failures have to occur and/or several bad circumstances have to align for an AAR 214 type event.
I have no idea what else is going to come out about this flight or what the investigation will determine but I know it will be thorough with no stone unturned to determine what happened so we can learn how to mitigate the risk of a repeat.
Before I get asked the question, let me predict where the investigators will focus:
- Pilot training, qualification, and actions during the flight
- OE Captain's qualification and actions during the flight
- CRM - How did three experienced pilots let this happen?
- Automation awareness of the crew - There may be both crew and aircraft alerting issues with respect to the autothrottles as well as something I am not aware of that may have effected crew or aircraft performance.
- SFO arrival procedures - Noise sensitivity and severely constrained airport facilities with respect to the huge amount of traffic have stretched the margins of safe operation in my opinion. The arrivals can be challenging and I expect the NTSB to take issue with how SFO ATC and the FAA airspace managers do business.
- Survivability - Possibly positive attention. It looks like the main landing gear touched down in the water and ran up and over the boulders of the sea wall but only two fatalities. (I don't to use like only but it could/should have been far worse.)
I'm sure there may be more but I can't think what they might be right now. Feel free to talk about it below.