Left: My notes on the overhead panel picture. Good bit of the same attitude in Texas, except for the accent (waaal, Gallic shrug and an exclamation "It ees Automatique!" And we got a
At Toulouse, when pilots tried toĭelve into the inner workings of systems, they were often met with a In other words, operationally oriented rather than Least fix it" to "since no one can fix much while the airplane isįlying, the pilot does not need to know much beyond which button to Junior mechanic and needs to be able to build the airplane, or at By this time, theĪirline had changed its training philosophy from "the pilot is a
#Otto matic pilot airplane simulator
The simulator training was equally intense. Right: The somewhat simpler layout of the 757 flight deck. Left: The A-300-600 simulator at the Flight Academy in Texas. My weekends at the schoolhouse instead of going home, to stay up with Had it not beenįor my long experience with complex airplanes in the military I might Kicked out the FO, promoting the FE to a window seat. In the Airbus, they more or less moved the FE panel up overhead and In the 767 the FE was carefully and thoughtfullyĮliminated, pretty much vanished in an engineering disappearing act. Minutiae, in stark contrast to the relative simplicity of the 757/767įlight deck. The cockpit of the A-300 isįestooned with buttons, switches, knobs, dials, and other assorted Lockheed products and both the result of the same sort of thinking on In this the Airbus resembles the C-141 and C-5, both Nit-noy collections of relays, solenoids, subsystems and all manner ofĬomplexities. The systems are sophisticated, and replete with The Airbus was and is a very complex airplane, in terms of systemsĪnd cockpit layout. Left: Later on at the hotel, going quietly nuts over the complicated systems! Was shocking, and my only comfort came from the fact that my partner Same day in the computer course! And had already forgotten it. With the reminder that yes indeed, we had encountered it earlier that The instructor was "we haven't studied that yet", only to be rebuked Many's the time my response to a question from Something I had not anticipated that is, that CBT gained knowledge isĮxtremely volatile.
#Otto matic pilot airplane full size
Trainer, although these were done up with full size instrument panel To facilitate this review, the room wasĮquipped with what we called a "wooden Indian" - that is, a paper Of us in any given "class") for review of what we had supposedly Gathered with an instructor in a small room (there were only a handful The fleet classrooms had been replaced by a large open area withĭozens of CBT carrels, capable of running any of the programs on anyĪfter watching these programs in the morning, we ate lunch and then
All of the systems and procedures were taught this way. Would today be considered PowerPoint presentations with embedded Systems trainers like the ones I had always seen since I startedįlying, the Airbus school had been computerized, and consistedĮntirely of what we now call computer based training (CBT), with what The C-5 school had consisted of classroom work with large mechanical Things had changed considerably in the intervening years. The joystick, form a military surplus store, reflects an inadequate understanding Myself in 1990 headed not to Toulouse, sadly, but to Arlington Texasįor my first new airplane school since C-5 school in 1984.
Since most of our operationĪt JFK involved the A-300, one of the chiefs at New York, usually the Was more than the 777-200 could take in a three class layout, to say To take advantage of its high passenger capacity (in the two classĬonfiguration we used, it had a capacity of over 250 passengers, which Operation, since we primarily used the airplane on the Caribbean runs JFK, at the time, was more or less the nexus of our A-300 I got trained on the A-300 considerably out of seniority, as aĭirect result of having gone back into "the office" as Chief Pilot at Including junkets all over Europe, and I always regretted having The pilots who had gone the Toulouse route were the stuff of dreams, This was all history by the time that I got there, and I trained at Subjected to one month of training crammed into three months! Sadly, While the AA schoolhouse in Texas wasīeing set up with an A-300 division, a few hundred AA pilots (someĪccompanied by their wives and even families) were wined, dined, and They all trained in Toulouse France, at the Airbus headquarters, whereĪ school had been established. Must surely be the greatest boondoggle in the history of aviation. The initial cadre of our pilots for the Airbus was treated to what