Captain Philip Adrian
Chief Executive Officer, MPS
Captain Philip Adrian is the Chief Executive Officer for MPS, the leading Fixed Base Simulator manufacturer for A320 and B737 series. He leads two factories, one in the Netherlands and one in Germany, and an innovation team in the Netherlands. MPS partners with airlines, training organizations, OEMs and TDMs to provide tailored and innovative solutions for all training needs.
Philip started at the MPS CEO in May 2018 after 11 years at Boeing, where he fulfilled multiple roles, lastly as Chief Pilot Regulatory Strategy. He joined Boeing as an airplane instructor in August 2007, and further served as Boeing’s 737/737 MAX Chief Technical Pilot, Assistant Chief Pilot, and Chief Pilot Regulatory Affairs. He was responsible for training and regulatory EIS support of new Boeing airplanes such as 787, 737 MAX and 777X.
Before coming to Boeing, Philip was a 737 Captain and TRI/TRE, and served as Head of Training, as well as in other management positions for Transavia Airlines (the Netherlands) for 15 years.
Philip’s career started in the Royal Netherlands Air Force, where he went through Officers and Flight training, and he was a Flight Instructor prior to joining Transavia Airlines in 1992.
During his entire career, he has served as a member on a number of rulemaking groups in the aviation industry, including FAA Aviation Rulemaking Committees, EASA Working Groups, Runway Safety Teams, Emergency Response Management Teams, LOC teams and boards regarding Flight Safety, Aviation Security and Crew Resource management. Philip co-chaired the FAA ARC regarding UPRT, and chaired the ICAO LOCART initiative and EASA RMT on UPRT. He currently chairs the EASA RMT .0599 regarding EBT and Performance Based Rulemaking.
He is considered a Subject Matter Expert on Operational Suitability, EBT/CBT, UPRT and world-wide operational regulatory affairs, and speaks on these issues regularly at multiple forums.
Philip holds 737, 777 and 787 Type Ratings, and has instructed on all those types. In his career Philip has operated, flight tested and instructed for over 13,000 flight hours.
“The King is Dead, Long Live the …”?
Although times right now seem bleak there will be a future for aviation and training past this crisis. For the past 30 years traditional training techniques and FFS have dominated and, if this pandemic has taught leaders anything, it’s that picking up exactly where we left off before the crisis is no longer the way forward. A perfect storm is brewing in the commercial airline transport flight training sector and the training methods, regulations and technology are going to be at its epicenter.
Even if the predicted “training bubble” materialises, it will likely be short lived. Many airlines train at locations away from their (main) base, but current travel restrictions emphasize that travelling to train is not something that can be maintained. The use of Compliance Based Training and Testing (tick-the-box) and the stringent restrictions placed by regulations worldwide stifle new and better training. In the current situation, where training according to the old-fashioned paradigm is not possible, we see a need for change to assess pilot competency in other ways.
Recently, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) announced that they have been drafting a Notice of Proposed Amendment to the FSTD regulations and Parts FCL, ORO, ORA and ARA expressing type rating and recurrent training tasks in terms of 12 defined simulation features and 4 fidelity levels, the so called FSTD Capability Signature (FCS). The implication of this being that rather than Tool-to-Task, industry can now identify the training task and objectives and match the FCS to identify the correct tool, so Task-to-Tool.
The Covid-pandemic and the pressure on airlines to reduce costs is potentially going to provide an unexpected impetus to this initiative; However, we cannot stop at what we know and use right now, and new regulations need to be adaptable to emerging technology as well.
ICAO, IATA, global regulatory agencies and all interested groups must now work together to review the current training paradigm in professional aviation so that when the next crisis is at the forefront, we are better prepared than ever to train better, cheaper and with a lower carbon footprint to ensure aviation training is a viable option for our high school and college graduates whom we so desperately need as the next generation of aviation professionals.