I was not at all surprised at what happened off Hainan Island.
Hank speaks of the professionalism of Chinese fighter pilots. One of the
problems about this is that they are chronically not trusted by their own
senior officers. As a consequence in ab initio training and routine patrols
their aircraft are given restricted amounts of fuel in order to reduce the
risk of defection across the Chinese border (and especially to Taiwan).
As we discovered when we had some association with conversion training
programmes for Chinese military pilots who were being moved into the rapidly
growing Chinese airline industry, this produced some very powerful
consequences (which we were better able to understand because of our
Activity Theory orientation).
Chinese fighter pilots had limited navigation skills because they never had
enough fuel in their tanks to do more than fly a straight line from one
point to another in training. (From some airbases they were less than 20
minutes' flying from Taiwan - in such cases they never took off for training
flights with more than 19 minutes' fuel aboard).
They were used to throwing their aircraft around the sky far more violently
and intensively than US or UK military pilots, because generally on any one
flight they only had about 30 minutes to play in the ways in which fighter
pilots like to play.
They were highly frustrated at living with the contradiction between their
conception of what it means to be a 'Top Gun' and the reality of the
operational constraints which the fear of their defection placed on them.
This contributed to their especially emphatic unwillingness to be learners
in any form when placed into a commercial training programme (a
characteristic of fighter pilots in many cultures).
The ones we dealt with were redolent with pent up aggression which appeared
to be generated by the foregoing plus the fact that none of them had ever
reached the point where they had been trusted to undertake active military
duties - such as tracking US spy planes. This led, for example, to a
predisposition to assault their instructors, and to fly off in random
directions when sent on solo cross countries.
Even those that managed to overcome their anger and their contempt for Piper
Senecas and all who flew in them, and pass the basic courses, when they got
into line experience placements on New Zealand domestic commercial aircraft,
many became disruptive of safe professional practice so often that
eventually the programme had to be suspended and line training transferred
to China. These people found it simply impossible to share a flight deck
with another person or obey an ATC instruction.
I do not think that nay of these people were inferior to any other pilots in
their basic technical competencies. But in terms of motivation and affect an
unusually high proportion of them were not suitable for commercial line
flying.
Phillip Capper
WEB Research
PO Box 2855
(Level 9, 142 Featherston Street)
Wellington
New Zealand
Ph: (64) 4 499 8140
Fx: (64) 4 499 8395
-----Original Message-----
From: H.L. Smith [mailto:hank.l.smith@lmco.com]
Sent: Thursday, 12 April 2001 07:23
To: xmca@weber.ucsd.edu
Subject: RE: changing AMerican reading habits
And it wouldn't take much digging to come up with volumes of stories,
especially once Alaska became a state, of the Russian "Bear" aircraft
habitually patrolling our northern borders listening, probing our response
times to "near" incursions into U.S. airspace, etc. The same sort of thing
continues even now with submarine activity; remember the Russian sub tragedy
just a short while ago. Such "games" have existed for quite some time,
rarely, if ever, however, have pilots made them into dangerous
"cat-and-mouse" or "chicken" contests due to the inherent danger surrounding
such encounters. This latest incidence smacks of a lack of professionalism
beyond any consideration of intellectualism or politics.
Hank Smith
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Tue May 01 2001 - 01:01:49 PDT