Why Do You Want to Be an Airline Pilot

The Silkair Boeing 737-300 was being radar vectored for an ILS approach at Singapore’s runway 20L. The weather was over caste at 2000 feet but visibility was severely reduced due to smoke haze. This was common in Singapore this time of the year, when fires in Indonesia, lit by farmers to clear their land of forests, are raging. In the cockpit, I was monitoring the performance of my trainee First Officer, John. He had performed well on the trip from Jakarta but I felt that the approach and landing under these conditions would test him. At the half way point in his line training, I was paying close attention to his performance for good reason, he was inconsistent in his progress. However, he lined up on the ILS precisely and commenced descent on the glide slope. At 1000 feet above the ground we became visual with Runway 20 left appearing out of the dust and smoke haze. John had lined up perfectly on runway 20L centreline. A ship steaming up the channel between the runway and Pulau Ubin to the north was crossing our path and made an impressive sight, but my attention was fully involved in monitoring the performance of F/O John. At 500 feet I called “visual, runway straight ahead” and John went from flying on instruments to flying visually. That was when things started to go wrong. We had a slight crosswind from the left and to compensate for the sideways drift, the aircraft had been turned a few degrees to the left to maintain the ILS centreline. This meant that the runway appeared, through the windscreen, off to the right. Normal practice, when becoming visual under these conditions, is to maintain the same heading unless the wind changes. John, noting the runway off to the right turned towards it but, as the wind was still coming from the left, the result was that the aircraft started drifting to the right. He also started to rise above the glideslope. After several calls from me he corrected, we crossed the threshold and he flared and touched down in not too gentle manner. We were just slightly right of the centreline and a little long. Approaching the high speed taxiway I stowed the speed brake, which was the signal for the First Officer to commence the after landing checks. He busied himself with the checks while I taxied the aircraft to our allocated aerobridge. I was based in Singapore flying for Silkair, the regional wing of Singapore Airlines, and in fact was one of the original pilots employed to start up the new carrier in 1990. With my previous training experience, and the rapid expansion of the airline, it was only a short time before I was pitched into the hectic life of training pilots who were recruited from all over the world. We were truly an international band of aviators. The original seven came from Australia, as did the next eight when the second aircraft arrived. However, in the third year of the airline, pilots started arriving from India, Great Britain, USA, New Zealand and Yugoslavia, the last group having fled after their country was fractured by war and their national airline ceased to operate. After the Australians, the Yugoslavs were the second largest group and comprised both Croats and Serbs. Eventually, nationalistic pride meant that the Singaporeans were to be given a go, and a fairly determined drive instituted to increase the local content of the pilot numbers. Initially these pilots were taken from the Singapore Air Force, but this source proved inadequate because the locals would much sooner fly for big brother Singapore Airlines with their Boeing 747’s and worldwide routes, than for Silkair, which had confined their choice of aircraft to the much smaller Boeing 737 and the shorter routes to immediate Asian ports. The next logical step therefore was to recruit local pilots with limited flying experience. In a small country like Singapore this source also was limited, particularly as any young Chinese man (75% are Chinese in Singapore) would much sooner go into business, especially finance, with the chance of big money, than into aviation with its relatively low remuneration in the early stages of a career. The final step was to take young men, with no flying experience, straight off the street via walk in interviews. That was at the heart of why, sitting in the aircraft on the tarmac in Singapore, I was perplexed at that moment. John was a very pleasant young man and seemed reasonably intelligent. In fact my initial thoughts on meeting him were that he would probably make a reasonable pilot. It is both a big task and a big ask to take a young man with no flying experience, teach him to fly on light aircraft and, within a short time and minimal flying hours experience, put him into a high speed and relatively heavy jet aeroplane. I had seen the problems that these young men faced before. Some had struggled and made it while others had fallen by the wayside. Initially I thought that John would be OK. He had gone through the first phase, which was mainly back up duties, learning the systems operation and showed reasonable skill levels. He was now into the second phase of his training where he actually operated the controls to the point of doing take offs and landings, and it was in this stage that I began to wonder. About a week earlier I had become slightly concerned about his progress. Initially he had advanced normally, but now seemed to be stagnating. It is normal for training of this type to go in peaks and troughs, but I was starting to query his motivation and so, after one trip and at the debriefing I asked him “Why do you want to be an airline pilot?”