Three academies will teach the approach as an energy problem

Rift Aviation Academy in Nairobi, with partner schools in Johannesburg and Accra, will start the next cadet intake on an approach module that treats speed and vertical profile as one account. The old module taught them as neighbors. The incidents the schools studied treated them as a couple that had stopped speaking.

The syllabus is not a new aircraft and not a new regulator’s invention. It is a rearrangement of evidence the industry already has: unstable approaches that were stable at one gate and nowhere near it at the next, because a crew fixed the speed and donated the problem to the glide. Instructors will fail a ride for a correction that solves the wrong variable, which is a stricter standard than some of the airlines hiring these cadets currently use.

“We are not training for the oral exam,” said Wanjiku Kariuki, head of training at Rift. “We are training for the minute in which the aircraft is high, fast, and still legally allowed to continue. That minute is where the judgment lives.”

Airlines in the region have been offered the same module as a recurrent day for first officers in their second year. Two have accepted. A third said it will watch the cadet results before it rewrites a day its own instructors already think they teach. Kariuki said that is a fair test, provided someone writes down what the recurrent day currently contains. In two of the three manuals she asked for, the approach chapter was last touched when the fleet still had a different wing.