But a clever new class of small aircraft offers a way out—and getting a about half as many hours of training—roughly 20 hours—which also the only one designed to take off from water—a boon for people with a helicopter, yet is designed to be easier to fly, according to e-volo, Most Popular Articles.
Table of contents
- World's Premier Independent Aviation News Resource
- Bidders for helicopters used to train British military pilots revealed
- Flight Training and How to Survive the Learning Plateau
In theory, the minimum education required to become a pilot is five GCSEs, and you can apply before your 18th birthday.
World's Premier Independent Aviation News Resource
In practice, instructors prefer rather more, if only because A-levels, for instance, give applicants a taste of just how much self-discipline and application are going to be involved. There is an online psychometric test. No full medical at this stage, but basic height and weight ratios must be fulfilled. The next step is a day at CAE, undergoing tests — of mental arithmetic, for instance, and hand-eye coordination — the latter with a screen full of horizon-lines and green numbers, and a joystick, every tiny movement of which causes a disturbingly large reaction.
For Amy Williams, 35, a keen, infectiously upbeat cadet, the fact that she was a woman applying to fly commercial jets was far less worrying than the fact of her age. CAE also tests spatial awareness, memory and instructability, verbal reasoning, pattern-matching and decision-making — often all at once, a test of nerves under pressure, but also a reasonable recreation of what a working pilot will have to do. Cool, calm and collected all still apply — and were exhibited by Henkey, in spades, when he braked at 90mph, brought the plane to a standstill, then oversaw its evacuation on to the Last Vegas runway.
They should be good listeners and good socialisers. They should be able to learn proper decision-making and be able to lead a crew. Above all, flight academies look for motivation, a yen for flying indistinguishable from vocation. After a string of personal bankruptcies among recently qualified cadets which she says have now peaked , Wendy Pursey, head of membership and career services at Balpa, wrote a pamphlet, Becoming A Pilot: Some student loans are available, but they do not cover the whole course, so the options are bank loans or family.
Every cadet I spoke to was being supported by parental loans, though CAE insists that having to pay for your own training has had less effect on the background of trainees than one might think. Eighteen pairs of eyes stare, curious: Hulmes thumps his briefcase on the table, gets out his notes, rearranges a hunk of propeller sitting on his desk. CAE trains cadets from all over the world — France, Denmark, Italy, Turkey, the Emirates, Singapore, Finland, Montenegro — a new set of 20 or so, from up to 26 nationalities, coming through every three weeks.
If anyone is going to drop out, it will be during these six months, when cadets study everything from meteorology to human performance, radio navigation to air law, with two sets of seven exams, at three months and at six. You can almost feel the mental effort in the room. Kevin Beale, 30, has just been promoted to chief flight instructor at CAE in Phoenix, Arizona, where, because the weather is predictable and the airspace largely empty, cadets spend 22 weeks working towards their target of flight hours.
But for the moment he is still here, and giving me my first ever flight briefing. Unlike the grizzled ex-RAF men who seem to make up most of the instructing staff, Beale is young, earnest, Tintin-smiley, but still a veteran — if only of the vicissitudes of latter-day aviation.
He began as a trainee navigator in the RAF, but was laid off; went to Netjets Europe as a cadet, but its training programme was cancelled in the financial crisis. I is for illness. Cadets cannot even begin training without passing a class one medical, the most rigorous medical there is; they will be required to repeat this at frequent intervals for the rest of their careers. While these medicals include questions about mental health, they do not require full-scale psychiatric evaluations, and it is thought that these may be one likely outcome of the Germanwings investigation. M is for medication.
No self-medication of any type, including over-the-counter. S is for stress. But they are also shift-workers, their offices cramped flight decks 35,ft in the air. And many stresses have increased. When Applegarth began flying, airlines had mixed fleets on short-haul routes: The ideal route into work for a new pilot is with a short-haul carrier: Most, however, graduate into the hardest part of their careers: Since the financial crash of , there is a growing trend in America and Europe for pilots to be on call at all times, but paid only when they are in the air — effectively working zero-hours contracts.
Smith cites a crash in upstate New York in which the pilots misread their instruments and stalled. She was also heard sneezing on the recorder, and asking the captain if they could descend early to ease the pressure on her ears. A is for alcohol, which is self-explanatory, although Bor points out there used to be a far higher tolerance for it as a stress-reliever than there is now; until, that is, a study found alcohol had an influence in nearly a third of aviation accidents and airlines suddenly started paying attention.
Many now require a minimum eight-hour break between consumption and flight, though Bor notes that drink can in fact still impair pilot performance 48 hours later. In August, an airBaltic co-pilot was jailed for six months for turning up for work seven times over the legal limit.
- Taschenbuch der Algorithmen (eXamen.press) (German Edition).
- The Ultimate Guide to Weight Training for Baseball: Maximize Your Athletic Potential on the Diamond!.
- Free Advice;
- Airfield Profile: Dunkeswell!
- Useful links.
- Flight Training and How to Survive the Learning Plateau?
- Sky high: who'd be an airline pilot today?.
But this is very rare: F is for fatigue. He was taking a nap when his inexperienced co-pilot responded to the plane stalling by putting its nose up instead of down. Droog says several colleagues have reported an increase in pilots looking for counselling. Having said which, pilots are famously defensive patients, according to Bor, a psychologist and pilot — with good reason, because the fear, until quite recently, has been that any evidence of neuroses or possible self-destructiveness will automatically lead to denial of certification and loss of licence.
A sense of vocation might be a prerequisite for good piloting; it would also make the loss of that career particularly devastating. This view is increasingly being reflected in practice: In that time, pilots were grounded, of whom were subsequently granted medical approval to return to flying. Sometimes, the learning rate pauses to catch its breath, producing an overwhelming sense that nothing is happening.
Welcome to a learning plateau, a distressing waypoint on the learning curve. The learning curve is a performance chart for the human brain. It represents how students typically progress when learning complex behaviors. At the introduction of any complex skill, learning often proceeds rapidly. As each educational component is added to a previous building block, learning becomes more and more complex.
In many cases, depending on the complexity of the skill being learned, progress temporarily tapers off before resuming an upward climb. Coping with a plateau begins with an understanding of how learning occurs, followed by recognizing and dealing with the symptoms of frustration experienced when skill development takes a vacation. Simple learning tasks often occur without plateaus. Phobias are stellar examples of these learning events.
In some instances, the development of a phobia can result from a one-trial learning experience. Some folks, bitten a single time by a spider, need no further reinforcement to be frightened by anything with more than two legs. The learning curve in this instance is vertical, shooting straight up the chart. The cornerstone of stall prevention is education. We know that ground study and flight training in stall awareness reduce stall accidents. No earthshaking revelation here. But these accidents occur with disturbing regularity, despite an education that supposedly inoculates us against them.
Learning to fly an airplane , however, is anything but a simple learning task. Each building block of knowledge must be processed, correlated and connected with previously learned skills for the necessary insights to occur. Collecting, connecting and conveying is what our subconscious mind does best, but it does so at a cost.
The assembling of complex ideas and the formation of insights are paid for in the currency of time. Aviation is full of plateaus so you better get used to them.
Bidders for helicopters used to train British military pilots revealed
A student pilot looking proud in Photo by Stuart Mike , used under license CC 2. Like the Ninja, it often sneaks up on its victim to deliver punishing bouts of frustration. Sometimes they experience all three stages; at other times they experience only one stage. The first step in surviving a learning plateau is to recognize any one or more of these three stages as symptoms of the plateau, then doing something to move past it.
In this stage, you seldom become angry at your instructor.
Your anger is often directed toward yourself. For instance, if a student starts a lesson with a neck and, later on in that lesson, that neck is no longer visible to the instructor, then his shoulder muscles are way too tense. No neck is no good.
Flight Training and How to Survive the Learning Plateau
It can also be a sign of frustration. If you are stuck on a learning plateau, you might find that your frustration and anger stem from a perceived inability to please your instructor. Learning is not an all or none game. You need to know it, too. If you were perfect, then your CFI might feel guilty about taking your money OK, at least theoretically.
Mistakes, after all, are what the CFI sees most. Surviving the plateau means taking responsibility and attempting to neutralize your frustration and the resulting anger. If you are unsure of how an instructor perceives your performance, then ask for an evaluation. On the other hand, I know you can fly. The tea leaves told me so. They look like little strings of overcooked pasta tossed onto an airplane seat. Personally, I prefer my students al dente, because going limp is an extreme form of resignation.