The Great Escape

摘要

I've had a few jobs where one of my primary duties was to teach others how to fly internationally. I usually ended these training sessions with a favorite saying of mine: "The art of international flight operations includes the science of knowing how to pick up the pieces when they fall." And there are usually pieces to pick up on even the most routine ocean crossings. When things go very badly, we need to know how to escape the confines of an oceanic track and head to the nearest alternate. Of course, we devote a fair amount of time at international procedures courses talking about these things. If we are especially prudent, we also cover many of these same topics during our aircraft recurrent sessions. The problem is that the theories for the first set of courses don't work well with the theories from the second. And in both cases, you can argue that theory falls short of reality. You can fix this problem, but you have to know where it lies before you can fix anything.