Pros and cons of the cosmopolitan cockpit

The rapid growth of some airlines, combined with the lay-offs elsewhere, has led to some cockpits becoming increasingly cosmopolitan.

Nowhere is this more apparent than at Emirates Airline, whose 3,200-plus pilots are drawn from no fewer than 89 different countries. Just 7.5% are Emiratis, while 53% come from English-speaking nations and a further 24% from other European countries.

In ‘Training for Command in a Multi-Cultural Environment’ the carrier’s senior vice-president, flight training, Captain Martin Mahoney talked of the challenges involved in creating a coherent cadre of aircrew from such a wide range of national, professional and organisational cultures.

“From Emirates’ perspective, we can’t afford to have different outcomes because of different cultures,” he said.

Longstanding psychological research had shown differences between nationalities. Some Asian nationalities were more comfortable with a clear hierarchy in the cockpit. Others (such as British and Scandinavians) had a more relaxed, egalitarian attitude and were less rigid about following standard operating procedures.

The latter trait among pilots need not be a fault, said Mahoney. They were frequently pragmatic individuals and would not, for example, slavishly follow automated warnings from instruments if they could see that the warnings diverged from what they were experiencing.

However, although pilot culture tended to be more muted than national culture, Emirates was still careful about rostering certain nationalities together. For example, a Brazilian captain would tend regularly to remind a first officer that he was in charge. Combine him with a Norwegian co-pilot with a more relaxed attitude to hierarchies and “That could give you a cockpit gradient pretty near vertical”.

In general, pilot culture tended towards the individualistic, said Mahoney; Emirates’ workforce accentuated that characteristic because most of its pilots were expatriates who, by definition, had been prepared to give up their native lands, friends and perhaps even spouses to take a job in the Gulf.

Differing cultures were not the only challenges facing Emirates’ new captains. They had to handle not only multi-national crews but flying to six continents, with some destinations suffering from what could politely be described as inconsistent air traffic control.

Among facets of training for commanders at Emirates was intervention training, which aimed to show it need not be a negative experience to take the controls from a first officer. Emirates was also reducing the amount of ‘distance training’ it undertook in favour of more classroom learning. “We don’t want [pilots] to tick boxes and recurrent training questions get compromised quite quickly. We want to look them in the eye and check that they’ve understood what we’re teaching them.”

Mahoney had some strong words for an ICAO representative at the conference on the subject of standards of spoken English among some nationalities. Under ICAO rules, pilots are not allowed to fly commercially on international routes unless they have achieved a minimum ICAO Level 4 in language training (Level 6 is the highest.) Mahoney said Emirates had tested some Mexican pilots who showed the airline ICAO Level 6 documentation. “I don’t know where they bought them from,” said Mahoney, but their communication standards had been so poor that “We had to send them straight home.”

Similarly, Emirates had put a batch of pilots from a “recently-failed European charter airline” through simulator testing and failed 50% of them “because we couldn’t understand them”.