CASA has addressed flying instructor training and standards as part of the GA Safeskies Australia seminar at the recent Avalon Airshow.
CASA’s Manager, Flying Standards Branch, Operations Division, Roger Weeks, used the Safeskies seminar to emphasise that flying instructors are critical to the foundation of aviation safety.
“Flying instructors set the safety foundations in terms of the standard and quality of training they deliver,” Weeks explained.
“But more importantly, what they are doing is setting the safety behaviours that we want graduating pilots to carry with them into their career, or, for private pilots, into their recreational pursuits.”
Weeks also reiterated the necessity for flying instructors to be good teachers.
“We know that instructors must be practioners, but we want them to focus on their role as an educator,” he continued. “They are the teacher [and] we want to see a holistic approach with how they’re doing things.
“For instructors, the law of primacy is fundamental. To get good ab initio training – teach it right the first time. It’s very difficult to try and unlearn bad habits.”
Admitting that as a regulator CASA, “probably haven’t been overtly involved with the flying training sector to the degree we should have for some years”, Weeks also discussed the work CASA is doing to strengthen the role of instructors via the introduction of flight training and testing offices (FTTO).
“We recognise that, as a regulator we probably took our eye off the ball for a while in terms of safety intervention and safety education,” Weeks said.
“So how do we further strengthen the role of the instructor in terms of building safety foundations for the future? Clearly, we see this as a shared responsibility.”
Since introducing its FTTO, Weeks said CASA and flying schools, through collaborative efforts, have lowered the aggregated fail rate for Grade 3 Instructor tests from 57 per cent in October 2008 to 25 per cent in January 2011. Weeks credits this turnaround to flying schools implementing improvements to their training and what he called a, “really pleasant” attitude from the training industry.
With one of the most common fail areas during Grade 3 Instructor tests being general aeronautical knowledge, Weeks says CASA is campaigning for instructors to rediscover airmanship.
“The main issues were in 70 per cent of the cases the examiner didn’t even step foot into the aeroplane before failing the student, because their theory knowledge was insignificant,” Weeks explained.
“One of the things we felt might have been missing is airmanship – the basics, the simple things that make a pilot proud to be a pilot, that makes particularly an instructor go above and beyond what they’ve got to do to pass their test. That’s a culture that we need to reinstill into our instructors.”
Continuing to engage with the training industry to improve training standards, in the coming months CASA will release for draft public comment its Civil Aviation Advisory Publication (CAAP) on instructor training.
“This CAAP is comprehensive and has been written to translate into being an acceptable means of compliance under our new regulations, so it’s incredibly detailed,” Weeks said. “We look forward to those that have an interest in instructor training making their comments.”
