Sen. Tammy Duckworth on Thursday blasted a proposal being pushed by Sen. Kyrsten Sinema that could alter how much training a pilot needs to fly a commercial aircraft, saying lawmakers will have “blood on your hands” if they support the changes she is seeking.
“Now is not the time to put corporate profits ahead of the lives of our constituents who may want to board a commercial flight in the future,” said Duckworth (D-Ill.), an Army veteran helicopter pilot who chairs the Senate subcommittee in charge of aviation. “A vote to [change the training rules] for pilots will mean blood on your hands when the inevitable accident occurs as a result of an inadequately trained flight crew.”
This is from Irie Sentner, “‘Blood on your hands’: Duckworth blasts Sinema for pilot training proposal,” Politico, June 15, 2023.
Actually, Senator Duckworth has it exactly wrong. If she and her colleagues in the Senate stop this change, they will be the ones with figuratively blood on their hands.
To understand why, we need to look at the proposed change.
Christian Britschgi of Reason nicely lays out some of the facts in this June 16 article. Before a 2009 Colgan Air crash in upstate New York, which was blamed on pilot error, killed 50 people, aspiring pilots had to log 250 hours of flight time. After that crash Congress six-tupled the requirement, raising it to 1,500 hours.
Britschgi writes:
Safety regulators haven’t found any relationship between the hour cap and safety. Airlines say the 1,500-hour rule is contributing to a worsening pilot shortage.
Remember how dangerous it was to fly before 2009? Me neither.
Flying is one of the safest things we do and it was one of the safest things we did before 2009. When I tell someone I’m flying somewhere and get the almost-inevitable “Have a safe flight,” I reply, “That’s the safest thing I’ll do that day.”
The proposal that Senator Sinema backs would not repeal the 1,500-hour requirement. Rather, it would allow aspiring pilots to count up to 250 hours of simulator training toward the 1,500 hours. The current number that can be applied is only 100 hours.
This change will make things safer. The reason is that simulator training is so much more effective than simply flying.
When pilots fly, really bad things rarely happen and so they don’t know much about how to react. They could easily go 1,500 hours without any really bad thing happening. When they train on a simulator, by contrast, they get hit with situations to which they have to react. That’s the whole point of a simulator.
A friend of a friend is a retired Boeing 747 pilot who trains pilots on simulators. He recently told my friend that he has pilots who come to Miami, where he is, on Alitalia and other airlines and on the simulator, they quickly fly it into the ground. He gives them a bad thing to respond to in each training session and they learn how to respond. So substituting 150 hours on a simulator is worth way more than the foregone 150 hours on an actual flight. QED.
So it’s people like Tammy Duckworth who are trying to block this change who will have blood on their hands.
READER COMMENTS
Mark Barbieri
Jun 21 2023 at 9:40am
To a significant extent, changes that make flying cheaper than driving improves safety by switching driving trips to safer flying trips. Conversely, raising the costs to airlines and their customers pushes more people to drive instead of fly. Where is the evidence that 1,500 hours is the optimum balance?
David Henderson
Jun 21 2023 at 10:53am
Good point. It’s one I made in an earlier draft of this post. But then I went to do a back-of-the-envelope estimate. I assumed that keeping the stricter requirement would cause 10% of the people who would have flown short distances to drive instead. What I got for one year was an increase in deaths by about 2.
I was about to scrub the piece until I talked to my friend whose friend is the Boeing and 747 pilot. That’s what led to this version of the post.
Richard W Fulmer
Jun 21 2023 at 12:30pm
Hyperbolic statements like Duckworth’s are terribly destructive. They engender reflexive, angry reactions, reducing the chances for reasonable discussions. Even if Sinema responded with substantive arguments such as Dr. Henderson’s, Duckworth’s initial over-the-top attack would make it difficult and embarrassing for her to back away from her accusation.
Unfortunately, CSPAN cameras and social media encourage such outbursts. Duckworth can use video clips of her feigned outrage to garner campaign contributions and votes. The “success” of such behavior engenders more of the same, making reasoned debate less likely.
Top-down directives take decisions out of the hands of individuals who understand local conditions, who can quickly respond to feedback, and who will pay a price if they choose poorly and place them in the hands of central planners who have limited knowledge and imperfect feedback mechanisms, and who pay no price for being wrong. Under even the best of circumstances, this is a recipe for failure. But when top-down decisions are based, not on fact and reason, but on mugging for the camera, they are a recipe for disaster.
steve
Jun 21 2023 at 5:52pm
In the 1990s we averaged US airline fatalities in the low hundreds per year. Link shows deaths since 2000. We had a couple hundred between 2000-2009. Since 2009 we have had 2. No idea how much of that is due to plane improvements vs pilot. The numbers end up being so low out of so many people traveling its hard to get meaningful stats. So, just knowing the positive effects of simulation in my own field I would prefer the increase in sim hours.
https://www.airlines.org/dataset/safety-record-of-u-s-air-carriers/
Steve
Jon Murphy
Jun 21 2023 at 7:04pm
My brother, who is a pilot for Southwest and studies aviation accidents, would probably agree with you. We had a conversation a few months ago, and I remember him saying the cause of most accidents is precisely that pilots do not know how to react when things go wrong. They panic, overcompensate, etc.
Mark M
Jun 24 2023 at 11:22am
The two most important factors for arriving alive at the destination are competency of the pilots to respond to a vast array of threat scenarios and very well-maintained aircraft. While we often hear “practice makes perfect,” it’s really “perfect practice makes perfect.” Experience (flight hours) is only as good as the quality of the experience. Regular simulator training creates higher quality experience under many difficult and demanding situations to provide pilots faster recognition of problems and faster application of the right solutions to safely land the aircraft at the best destination available, ideally what’s on the passenger’s ticket.
I don’t know the best way to decide how many hours are needed in simulator and in air to get to the lowest acceptable success rate and maintain or increase that. But I have observed that increasing hours is often a barrier to entry in many fields of service, sometimes supported by schools, sometimes by industry, and sometimes by the public.
At the bottom of almost every political debate is the question of whose pocket is supporting the politician. That generally explains her position.
Gregory Coyne
Jul 2 2023 at 4:42pm
And yet, the air safety record of US carriers appears significantly improved, under the current training rules enacted since 2009, than it was previously.
Comments are closed.