Necessary, but not Sufficient: What Flight Training Organisations Teach is No Longer Adequate for a Demanding Market that Needs ‘Captains Out-of-the-Box\u27

Early 2017 one of the fastest growing low-cost Asian airlines posed a problem to the Aerudite™ consultancy. “We are expanding faster than we can mature our first officers to command. We have no choice but to distil the command knowledge and maturity, traditionally attained through ten years of right-seat osmosis, into three years flat! We don’t plan to recruit MPL first officers. We plan to recruit CIWs - Captains-In-Waiting. And we want you to devise a training course - right now.” To enjoy (or to suffer) such a rate of expansion, this airline ‘sticks to its knitting’ and outsources whatever it can, including self-sponsored pilot training. Aerudite™ provisionally accepted this challenge and convened a team of six consultants ranging from a D.Psych to a test pilot tutor. The conclusion was that ‘captaincy’ is a mindset - not a skillset and that if philosophy can be taught, so can ‘captaincy.\u27 Definitions and KPI’s were established, and Aerudite™ worked with a Flight Training Organisation (FTO) and a Type Rating Training Organisation (TRTO) to develop an extramural curriculum linked with national legislative requirements to create a ‘zero-to-hero’ solution which added a month to total training time. The training sequence is PPL/CPL/IR/Type Rating. ‘Command thinking’ commences pre-PPL with threat and error management training. Single crew CRM is employed throughout the PPL where stalls become ‘undesired states’ - with minimal rudder recoveries. All Aerudite™ ‘training plug ins’ are now being beta tested on students to be ready for submission to NTAS in July 2017