Been reading up on the 737 max 8 news, and a few have mentioned that pilots were only given 1 hours training on an iPad to be qualified to fly the new plane (if they were already qualified to fly the current 737).
Is this common or at least precedented?
I know they specifically designed the plane so pilots wouldn’t need any additional training, but even so that seems pretty light to me. (Especially with all the hours it takes to get certified in a new type rating).
I have tried to find the answer, but had no luck. Trying to find factual information about a hot news topic is almost impossible anymore with search engines all adopting the ‘more hits = better results’ approach. Especially when there’s no unambiguous way to phrase your question.
Yep, completely normal. It’s called “differences training” and is based on the assumption that the aircraft are nearly identical. My training to go from the original A320 CEO to the A321 NEO (direct competitor to the B737 MAX) was a short computer based course followed by an open book exam. I’m not even sure that any training was legally required.
Whether a short course is actually enough depends on what the differences are.
It’s a bit like getting a new car. You had a Subaru Outback and then you get a new one and maybe it has automatic wipers and lights and a push button park brake, but apart from that it drives just like the old car. You don’t need a three week course to learn your new car that is nearly identical to the old car.
That was the goal of the MAX training. Whether that type of training was sufficient for the MAX is obviously a topic of debate.
The whole differences training thing and what constitutes a different variant is not very well defined as far as I can tell.
When I was flying the BAe146, the differences between various versions were sometimes quite significant, but there was no requirement for any training at all. They had difference cockpit layouts, autopilot capabilities, flight management computers, limiting speeds, limiting altitudes, some had auto trim systems some didn’t, but because they were all officially one type I could fly any one of them.
Then I go from A320 CEO to A321 NEO and the differences are very minor. An extra button to push during a start, an FMC that is nearly identical to the old one but has slight variations in how you execute navigation commands. The training was mainly focussed on the NEO aspect, the new engine, but the biggest difference was really the fact that our NEOs are A321s which are significantly longer and heavier than A320s. But there’s not much training you can do for that, you just go fly it and get a feel for it (on a revenue flight with passengers who probably have no idea that the two pilots have perhaps 2 or 3 sectors on that particular variant.)
I guess the deal is that if the differences are genuinely minor then a short differences course is appropriate.
Missed the edit.
My employer identified that the biggest threat with operating the new type, the A321 NEO, was that they were so similar in all the piloty bits, the bits you touch and look at, that the pilots might forget what type of aircraft they were flying and accidentally land overweight or something. A lot of the risk mitigation was around positively identifying the aircraft type during cockpit prep prior to each flight. I’ll repeat that for emphasis. The biggest threat with flying the new aircraft is that it is so similar to the old one that the pilots might forget what type they are flying.