Captain JC Tan
Maintaining Pilot Competency During the Recovery
The Effect of the Pandemic on Air Transport Demand
Since the onset of Covid-19 in January 2020, the dropping of flights worldwide was fast and furious. SIA A380 operation quickly came to a complete stop by end of March 2020. Despite the continuous operation of the A350, B777 and B787 aircraft, the load factor in 2020 was just around 10%. The impact on air transport worldwide was unprecedently caused by countries border control rather than market force.
The Challenge on Maintaining Pilot Competency
The unknown nature of this pandemic had caused difficulty in predicting the timeline for the recovery of long haul operations. As such maintaining competency for pilots sitting on the ground became a great challenge. In preparation for a long recovery road, SIA has adopted the following strategy.
- Continue to maintain regulatory qualification and EBT program
- Continuous refresher program to keep the pilots warm
- For A380, a restart program 3 months before the aircraft return to service.
On 18 November 2021 after 19 months of grounding, the A380 successfully returned to the sky with first long haul flight from Singapore to London.
Session 2 – Recurrent & Refresher Training
1530-1610 (Korea Standard Time)
