SINGAPORE : The first batch of seven Singapore Airlines pilots
heads to the French city of Toulouse this weekend.
They will be there to start training to fly the world's largest
commercial plane - the A380.
The group is also the world's first commercial pilots to fly the
superjumbo.
Captain Gerard Peacock has been an SIA captain for the last 25
years.
He'll be among the first batch to go to Toulouse for a training
stint.
He and the other chosen pilots who started their training last
month will first have to learn the advanced computer systems in
Singapore.
They will have practice procedures on the Flight Training Device,
an Airbus innovation which SIA is using for the first time.
After that, it's off to Toulouse for training on the
simulator.
An important part of an A380 pilot's training will be at least 40
hours in a flight simulator.
The simulator training is important because the A380 is a new plane
and the simulator will take them through abnormal situations and
how to deal with them.
Pilots will then do about 12 hours of test flights where they get
behind the controls.
Despite all the advances, there are still a lot a pilot will have
to get used to, and it will take at least a month of training to
get him or her A380-ready.
Said Captain Gerard Rene Peacock, an A380 Project Pilot with
Singapore Airlines: "In the past, we had to refer to manuals on
board the plane for our computations and despatch requirements.
Now, it's using a computer instead of flipping through pages of
manuals. So, pilots will have to get used to that.
"It's a little different from the plane I fly now. I am rated on a
747. I realised very quickly I need to be a lot gentler on the
controls."
But Toulouse will not be new for Captain Peacock.
"I was one of two project pilots attached to Toulouse, with Airbus.
I basically constituted the airline input into the training
syllabus so I spent about 12 months there. My colleague spent the
other 12 months there and we alternated every month. We sat down
with Airbus instructors and Airbus design engineers, and looked
into airline requirements for training syllabus," said Captain
Peacock.
More batches of pilots will go to Toulouse every fortnight.
By September, a total of 40 pilots will be trained. - CNA /ls
