“Let’s face it , some of the items on the checklist are written in blood,” our sim instructor says. It is day three of recurrent training. My training partner and I sit up straight. These words compel us to think carefully about why we are there and what we are doing. It means that accidents, once investigated, have led to changed and augmented checklists. This is a painful, iterative process.
Proving that recurrent training in any aircraft type prevents accidents is a statistical challenge. Accidents are infrequent enough, thank God, that it is hard to prove that this type of prevention works. We know that pilots who have received training and are current die in airplane crashes. Not often, but it happens. We also know that pilots who are poorly trained end up dying in accidents. We see the ads that tout the value of training, as reported by pilots who have survived inflight emergencies and credit their training with saving their lives. But these are anecdotal reports; they don’t really prove that recurrent training saves lives.
