Safety group urges global standards for commercial pilot training

Debates over ensuring an adequate supply of future airline pilots world-wide increasingly focus on a new variable: proficiency of the flight instructors who will train them. On Thursday, the Flight Safety Foundation, an independent safety advocacy group with global influence, called for significantly stepped-up international efforts to vet training academies and establish guidelines for the competence of their instructors. A white paper from the organisation contends the global aviation industry has "reached a crossroads in determining how pilots need to be selected, hired, trained and professionally mentored.” For the first time in recent years, the nonprofit foundation is urging adoption of what it calls data-driven initiatives relying on advances in simulator training and new international standards for pilot performance. The document dismisses the value of experience requirements that are based largely or entirely on number of flight hours in log books. To maintain record-low accident rates, the document concludes “the industry needs to be courageous and bold to make these changes and not simply rely on ways of the past.” The recommendations come at a time of controversy and uncertainty for many pilot training programs. From North America to Europe to fast-growing aviation markets in Asia and elsewhere, airlines and regulators are considering new procedures to screen and train the more-than-600,000 additional aviators Boeing projects will be needed to fill airliner cockpits over the next two decades.<br/>