From Healy's Training Principles to Training Specifications: The Case of the Comprehensive LOFT

Alice Healy has dedicated much of her work to questions of skill acquisition, retention, and transfer. In the process, she has come to identify numerous training principles that have been shown to promote the acquisition, retention, and transfer of knowledge and skills in laboratory studies. The goal of this article is to translate some of the training principles offered by Healy and her colleagues (Healy, Schneider, & Bourne, 2012) into real-world, practical training specifications for the particular context of pilot training at the airline level. The training approach described here suggests structuring all of airline pilot training as line-oriented flight training (LOFT), where the notion of "line" refers to the air-line drawn on a map between a departure airport and a destination airport.