PILOT TRAINING WITHOUT BORDERS

THE HUNGARIAN PHAPA METHOD COULD REVOLUTIONIZE PILOT TRAINING

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Thanks to a unique physiological diagnostic test, students who complete their flight training at the PHARMAFLIGHT Aviation Academy in Debrecen, Hungary's second largest city with a rich historical past, can take their pilot's license exam in less time than usual. Aviation World spoke with Mr. Gyula Győri, Associate Professor and Founder/Owner of PHARMAFLIGHT Aviation Academy, who developed the program, about this promising and scientifically interesting statement and much more. Excerpts...

How can the training time for future pilots be reduced without compromising their knowledge and ensuring that they acquire the skills that will lay the foundation for their entire career?

Life led me to obtain my commercial pilot license only in my forties. I experienced firsthand how much more exhausting module-based, long-term training becomes with advancing age, and how flying itself takes more and more out of you. Later, as an airline pilot and then as Hungary's Director General of Civil Aviation, I was increasingly confronted with one of the biggest problems of our time, stress-induced fatigue and in the worst cases, burnout, which is the subject of much discussion among legislators. But there was no methodology for its objective measurement and examination that would allow a relatively quick, noninvasive method, taking only a few minutes, to provide an accurate picture of a person.

It struck me that in my former life as a professional athlete in the early 1980s, when we wanted to optimize weightlifting training with measurements, we had set similar goals as members of the scientific group I first joined as an athlete. I tried to apply this experience to the world of aviation when I visited the leader of my old sport scientific team and we began to develop the tool and methodology that we have now presented under the name PHAPA Aviation.