Quotes of the Day

Liu Chang isn't your typical airline pilot. The 24-year-old from Harbin, in northeast China, trained in biology, doesn't have a driver's license, and cannot legally fly a small Cessna. But in November he'll be qualified as first officer on a Boeing 737.

Chang, who likes to be called Stanley, had never even flown as a passenger when he saw an ad seeking trainee pilots for Xiamen Airlines. A bit bored by biology and lured by the prospect of a big pay rise, he applied for the job. Eyesight was the strictest test he needed to pass. "Experience," he recalls, "was not important."

The experience is coming today in Brisbane, Australia, where Stanley and five other trainees from Xiamen and China Eastern airlines are part of a trial that Boeing, through its pilot-training subsidiary Alteon, thinks could change the way pilots are trained worldwide.

The radical idea is to teach novices to fly a modern jet airliner in a little over a year. Unlike the traditional route to the cockpit, this course places limited emphasis on flying real planes; instead it focuses on training in simulators and teamwork. "Each person finds different things difficult," Stanley says of the challenge of handling the switches, knobs and screens in front of him and the responsibility for a hundred lives behind. "For some it will be memory, for others it will be handling skill. I had never driven a car, so motor skills — handling skills — were not very good. The first landing [of a propeller plane] was hard, but after practice I can do it."

The trial is being closely watched by the international airline industry, which is expected to add more than 29,000 planes in the next two decades. Alteon says that will require 18,000 new pilots. While the U.S. has a pilot surplus, most other countries — and especially China and India — are struggling to keep up with demand.

The big question is, is it safe? Historically, someone wanting to pilot a passenger jet tended to start on small planes and move up, a process that might take two or three years, perhaps longer. The Air Transport Pilot's Licence needed to captain a passenger jet requires extensive flying experience: at least 1,500 hours in countries like the U.S. and Australia.

Programmed Emergencies
alteon claims pilots from this course — which can train a novice in 13-15 months — will be more competent than their conventionally trained peers. Stanley and the others have had 95 hours in a single-engine plane (14.5 hours solo) and will have done 260 hours in simulators by graduation. They won't qualify to fly small planes, but once they satisfy their airlines with a dozen take-offs and landings in real 737s, they will be licensed as first officers in passenger jets. "To train to be a commercial airline pilot, you don't need to cross the country on your own in a little propeller plane," argues Roei Ganzarski, Alteon's sales chief. "All those hours flying alone don't necessarily prepare you to be a better airline pilot, to work in a crew environment with a large, fast jet."

It's a philosophy reflected in the International Civil Aviation Organization's multi-crew pilot's license (MPL). Introduced in 2006, this was the first major change to licensing since 1948. It requires some training in small piston-engined planes — as little as 10 hours solo — but the bulk of the required 240 hours' flying is done in simulators where emergencies like engine trouble and storms can be programmed in.

Not everyone is convinced. "We have concerns about how individuals would react in an emergency," says Lawrie Cox, industrial manager at the Australian Federation of Air Pilots. "It's easy to do in a simulator, but when you are confronted with it, it's an entirely different situation. You don't have a depth of feeling." Simulator training, he says, "is a short-cut process because of the world-wide shortage of pilots ... and the view we have is you can't beat experience."

Qantas is also wary. Chief pilot Captain Chris Manning sounds unenthusiastic, saying the airline sees "no advantage" in the MPL. Manning's view disappoints Captain Ray Heiniger, a former Qantas chief pilot and director of training. "This is specialised training," says Heiniger, who now works with Alteon and helped train the Chinese students on Diamond-40 propeller planes. "We train them specifically for the right-hand seat of an airliner from day one. They are taught multi-crew skills so they operate as a team. In the end, it will produce a better-trained pilot."

Passengers won't know who is flying the plane. But Alteon says command of all planes is held by the captain, who must have an ATPL. The company also says the MPL pilots will be able to qualify for the more senior license once they log the required hours, since they have already passed the same theoretical exams.

While the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration has yet to embrace the new license, Australia's Civil Aviation Safety Authority backs it and plans to approve it for Australia if the Brisbane trial succeeds. CASA says passengers have nothing to worry about. "Flying experience alone can be a crude measure of capability," says spokeswoman Michelle Harris. Many pilots already join airlines with only basic qualifications and experience, she notes, and while some first officers in Australia have an ATPL, they don't legally need one. "The difference between an MPL graduate and a traditionally trained pilot will be the hours of dedicated, multi-crew operating experience, with the MPL having significantly more," Harris says.

Part of the argument for the new license is that the traditional training path can teach bad habits. According to this view, individualism and seat-of-the-pants flying might breed great crop-duster pilots, but these qualities aren't needed in an airliner cockpit. MPL supporters add that automation has made planes safer, and that crashes are often due to pilot error. That means training should focus more on how to manage and monitor what are essentially flying computers — and ensure that pilots work together to prevent mistakes.

Alteon, with 20 centers worldwide, says the new approach is the way of the future, especially in Asia. "You've seen six cadets from one of the toughest markets in terms of training, and we're able to turn them into excellent first officers," says sales chief Ganzarski. "If we're able to do that we believe we can take the course worldwide."

Designer Weather
the crucial components are the multi-million-dollar simulators, which bestow godlike powers on instructors like Captain Allan Menzies. When TIME visits, he has the trainees flying into a snowbound Canberra. Suddenly the former Singapore Airlines captain decides the cloud cover isn't to his liking. "I think I'll make it little bit lower," he announces.

It's a small change. Part of the course deals with "upset recovery," where the plane is unexpectedly put in dangerous situations, like a steep climb with low power. Menzies could push a button and invoke a thunderstorm or wind shear as the Boeing 737 prepares to land. But the lesson for trainee pilots Stanley and Sun "Solar" Yin, a 26-year-old from Qingdao, is about handling ice on the wings, so low cloud is enough.

This is the type of training backers of the MPL say is much more useful than flying solo in good weather in a small plane. The students are surrounded by a daunting array of computer screens, switches and knobs. Menzies jokes that all planes are basically the same — "you pull back and the houses get smaller" — but there's obviously a huge difference between flying a Cessna and a 737 or Airbus A320.

The Chinese students have had to prove they can handle churning stomachs and dizziness in steep turns and stalls in the small-plane training. As for the 737, they know how to take off but haven't yet come to grips with landing. "Most of the time, if you left them alone, they would fly it into the ground — it's automatic landings at the moment," Menzies says. But he adds that the simulators, with their jolts, noise and motion, will teach them.

The cadets are confident they'll be good pilots. They also embrace the course's philosophy of shared responsibility. That is likely to bring about a major culture shift in the cockpit, where many airline captains assume that their word is law. "In some countries the captain has the highest priority and the first officer has to do anything [he is told] even if he doubts it," says Yang Jie, a 25-year-old biologist from Tianjin who calls himself William. "This is the main reason for accidents. He can't say, Don't do this! So you are training a crew to operate together because it's the responsibility of both to fly the aircraft safely — it doesn't matter who will lead and who will follow."

William is confident the course will work. "I believe I can fly the aeroplane as well as my instructor," he says. "I work hard and I think I am qualified." Stanley agrees. "Based on technical knowledge, I don't think there will be a problem," he says. "But simulators and real aircraft are different. So maybe the first time, we will never forget it."

• Roy Eccleston/Brisbane