FAA Recommends Better Pilot Training in Wake of 737 Max Crashes
FAA Recommends Better Pilot Training in Wake of 737 Max Crashes
(Bloomberg) -- American aviation regulators are urging their counterparts around the world do more to ensure that airline pilots are trained in manual emergency procedures that could have prevented two deadly crashes of Boeing Co. 737 Max airliners.
The Federal Aviation Administration is presenting a paper this week it wrote in conjunction with Canada and other nations urging the International Civil Aviation Organization, an arm of the United Nations, to study training needs and how to improve minimum standards.
The paper, which is being considered at the ICAO’s 40th Assembly this week in Montreal, doesn’t mention the crashes that led to the grounding of the 737 Max in March. But newly installed FAA Administrator Steve Dickson has made the connection.
While the agency is examining design issues on the plane that helped contribute to the crashes, “we also need to take a look at how the pilots interacted with the machine,” Dickson said in a Sept. 19 interview.
“We think it’s in everyone’s interest, including the manufacturers and the operators, to make sure that the bar is as high as it can be,” he said. “We’ve got a lot of growth going on around the world, a lot of new people coming into aviation. We need to make sure that they have the skills and expertise to be able to operate successfully in the 21st century aviation environment.”
The paper cites studies showing a high percentage of crashes around the world were due at least in part to manual-flight errors and those mistakes tend to occur as a result of inadequate training.
The FAA and other nations have identified types of simulator training that could help, but haven’t been included in ICAO standards, the paper said. As a result, “there may be a high level of variation in the approach utilized by individual states,” it said.
Investigations into the crashes off the coast of Indonesia and in Ethiopia haven’t been completed, but pilots in both cases made a series of missteps in how they responded to nearly identical malfunctions, according to preliminary reports.
The crashes killed a total of 346 people.
To contact the reporter on this story: Alan Levin in Washington at alevin24@bloomberg.net
To contact the editors responsible for this story: Jon Morgan at jmorgan97@bloomberg.net, John Harney
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