Jughead

Maybe I missed the point too. I feel like a professional pilot - they still pay me. And I've been doing this since I was 23 (minus the two-year UPT break), but don't really remember ever scaring myself. Maybe I've lived a charmed life.
My goal is to try to avoid scaring myself or anybody else.

Fluglehrer

You didn't get paid during UPT/RTU?!! For two years?!!
...and I thought just having to put up with the "no heat/no cool" months in Mississippi was bad.

sinkrate3278

Maybe some pilots are secretly afraid of flying.

Fluglehrer

I don't think this is a good analysis of what they were reacting to. The Air France pilots were doing what they were trained to do. It's easy to say people are afraid, and reacting to that fear, but I think confusion/channelized attention played a much greater role here than fear...as it does in nearly all aircraft accidents.

I'm in agreement with you that it is about recognizing situations. Merely scaring yourself doesn't necessarily build better recognition of complex situations.

I teach ab initio pilots. The airline I train them for has a very good safety record, and they've been doing the ab initio program for decades. They go through upset training flights here in an aerobatic aircraft, including near-vertical nose high recoveries, inverted diving nose low recoveries, full aft yoke stalls with developing wing rock (90 deg bank left and/or right), cross-controlled stalls (some ending up in near snap rolls), etc. Those limits they see. I think you're talking about being ALONE in the dark of night dealing with nasty weather, icing, engine/avionics/systems problems, or all of the above simultaneously.
I went through an ab initio program myself: military training (UPT). The military has been doing an MPL type of program forever. They graduate a new pilot who goes off to fly as a wingman or sits in the right seat next to an experienced aircraft commander. The by-products of that are generally nothing to complain about. They do see situations at the limit -- and get to see how the flight lead or aircraft commander deals with those situations. They participate in a very real way in those situations, and often in the decision making. It is the best apprenticeship program in flight safety anywhere.

A mishap situation is usually filled with distractions. Fear isn't normally at the top of those distractions, and may not even be present. Maybe you've watched the scene where "Cougar" loses it at the start of Top Gun too many times.

Jughead

Yeah, I was paid. In fact, it was a huge raise from flying Bandeirantes throughout the Ark-La-Tex for Brand X . But I was younger and more resilient then.

I too had the "dinner plates" in my flight suit pits - hit the tweet in Columbus about mid-May.

Std Deviation

We need to train for multiple cascading emergencies and failures. This is going to get worse as the aircraft (and software) gets more complex. In a Piper Cub there's only so much that can go wrong. Now with a myriad of electrons running the show we're seeing unexplained interactions. In most cases the situation has not been anticipated by the designer and/or there's no procedure for it.

Situational awareness is based on perception, comprehension, and projection. The biggest loss of SA occurs during the comprehension phase. The crew fails to understand what's happening to them given the situation and indications. How do you train for unanticipated, random, and improbable situations? By staying right on the top of that Yerkes-Dodson stress curve (before the performance decreases). In other words, I give you multiple competing goals and let you sort it out. This teaches you to be prepared for the unexpected and to balance workload, attention, communication, CRM, etc. And rocket, as you say, it prepares you as best as possible for the real thing.

jungle

Panic? Shock?

A faulty pitot system caused a loss of airspeed indication for a short time, the pilots stalled the aircraft. All three were unable to recover from the stall in what had become a fully functional aircraft.

Not too complex, basic airmanship.

Std Deviation

Agreed, in a conventional mechanical linkage aircraft. However, when taught to do what the computer says and follow the procedure on the ECAM, it seems airmanship falls apart.

Fluglehrer

Nice Monday-morning quarterbacking, but it doesn't explain much. If it wasn't too complex, why were three qualified airline pilots unable to recover from a stall that resulted in a 40,000 ft loss of altitude? Even considering they were French, it is a bit of a stretch to think they forgot so much about basic flying during their careers.

Sydney Dekker has a pretty good metaphor to help understand accidents. He says the problem is that investigators see from "outside the tunnel", able to peer in at any point in the mishap sequence. It is of course plain to us where and when the crew made the mistake, and we can barely comprehend that anyone could be so stupid. This is not helpful.

Here's a paper of his explaining this:
http://www.lusa.lu.se/upload/Trafikf...oAccidents.pdf

From Dekker's Paper:
"From the perspective of the outside and hindsight (typically the investigator's perspective), we can oversee the entire sequence of events—the triggering conditions, its various twists and turns, the outcome, and the true nature of circumstances surrounding the route to trouble. In contrast, the perspective from the inside of the tunnel is the point of view of people in the unfolding situation. To them, the outcome was not known, nor the entirety of surrounding circumstances. They contributed to the direction of the sequence of events on the basis of what they saw on the inside of the unfolding situation. For investigators, however, it is very difficult to attain this perspective. The mechanisms by which hindsight operates on human performance data are mutually reinforcing. Together they continually pull us in the direction of the position of the retrospective outsider.
…To the people caught up in the sequence of events there was perhaps not any compelling reason to re-assess their situation or decide against anything (or else they probably would have) at the point the investigator has now found significant or controversial. They were likely doing what they were doing because they thought they were right; given their understanding of the situation; their pressures.
...Where counterfactuals are used in investigations, even as explanatory proxy, they themselves often require explanations as well. After all, if an exit from the route to trouble stands out so clearly to us, how was it possible for other people to miss it? If there was an opportunity to recover, to not crash, then failing to grab it demands an explanation."

EasternATC

Your point about us not being there is noted; the evidence indicates that it was, in fact, a failure in basic airmanship, exacerbated by elaborate bells and whistles.

I'm sure you're well-educated and professional, yet your posts exhibit some cultural biases, which perhaps are affecting your perspective.