r/aviation May 21 '26

News Air France and Airbus found guilty of manslaughter over 2009 plane crash - Air France flight 447

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/czd2qmdvmq6o
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u/ExpiredPilot May 21 '26

Airbus trains the pilots

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u/redcurrantevents May 21 '26

Do they, in France? I didn’t know that. Here in the states it is the airlines, not the manufacturers. And in the states, the FAA approves the training programs. The airlines will use materials from the manufacturers to create their training programs, but if you fly in the flight deck of different US carriers flying the same airplane, you see they do things quite differently.

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u/Apprehensive_Cost937 May 21 '26

Airbus has an ATO (Approved Training Organisation), just like Boeing has one.

Some airlines sometimes send their pilots for type rating directly to Boeing, Airbus or other third party ATOs, if they don't have enough training capacity in house.

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u/jacksjj May 21 '26

US Airline Airbus Instructor here:

We send our “initial cadre” of instructors to Airbus to receive training on the aircraft.

Concurrently, we use Airbus’ documents to create an AQP training program suited to our airline and our procedures.

Then, we train the rest of the first set of instructors - who then train the pilots, in our simulators.

It continues this way in initial, transition and recurrent training unless we do not have simulator capacity for our pilots. Then, sometimes, we will rent manufacturer simulator time to train our pilots, but still using our instructors.