The sad part of course is when the pilot was otherwise a good person. They would have made a great bank teller or car salesman, but they made their career choice and suffered for it. The rest of us, we weren't trying to be super-pilots. We weren't Chuck Yeager wannabes. We worked harder at our job for one simple reason- we didn't want to end up on that hillside. Scared straight.
Today, the process is different. Newbies get computerized training, a lot of classroom smarts and shortcuts and before you know it they're in a cockpit without a clue. I see them all the time. At Ameriflight they had a deal with this organization that allowed Korean pilots, fresh out of initial training in Florida, to fly as copilot on Ameriflight aircraft. A few were not too bad. Most were an accident looking for a place to happen, with only you between them and eternity. Typical was one guy I'll call Jason. Couldn't hardly speak English. It was bad enough that, I kid you not, Charlotte ground control wouldn't even answer him on the radio. I had to do all the communicating when he was on board. One day we were flying along and I decided to quiz him a little. You're flying along, straight and level, all trimmed up, autopilot off. You reduce the power. What happens and why? Blank stare. A couple of whispered guesses, wrong of course. It was apparent very quickly that he had no clue what was going on, aerodynamically speaking. To be fair, he wasn't the only pilot I'd met who was clueless.
When I worked at FlightSafety we once had a student show up in a regional airline class. This young man was different alright- he had tourettes syndrome. Another star for Human Resources. And it was not the good kind either. On the first day his teacher came down to the Director of Training's office. I was there and listened to her explain the issue. When the subject was easy, he only cursed a little bit. When she'd get in to details, he'd curse more. When the subject got hard, it got, well, ugly. She went back upstairs and discovered him in a confrontation with some other students. "You're disrupting the class!" "I have every right to be here!" She had to break it up as they were about to get physical. Well, we figured he might get through basic indoc, maybe even through systems class, but probably wouldn't make it through the simulator phase. Too hard to make the required calls. After a week he came in and resigned. We all felt bad for him. After all, he just had the same dream each of us had, and we each knew the pain of being left behind. The real problem was that someone told him there was nothing he couldn't do, he was as good as everyone else. Maybe, but they never told him that some things, like being an airline pilot, just aren't going to happen. Would have saved him a lot of disappointment and heartache if they'd been more honest.
Then there are the ones who are just bad, plain and simple. So long as we try to convince ourselves that computer savvy is a substitute for experience and basic piloting skills, years of learning aviation common sense, well these pilots will be a burden for the rest of us to bear. You see, if he's hired in a small plane and works his way up, he has a chance to learn in a simpler environment over time. Throw him right into an extremely complex machine though, and he will be quickly overwhelmed. Now put him at night in bad weather... How do you teach someone in that kind of situation? He has no previous experience to draw on. It's a single pilot operation with a handicap in the right seat. Sadly, good pilots die all the time at the hands of bad pilots. Sadly, sometimes two bad pilots end up on your next airline flight. Up, up and away!
