Catching up with Tilly Watts, Oriana Pepper Flying High Scholarship Winner
Our 2025 BWPA Oriana Pepper Flying High Scholarship winner Tilly Watts used her scholarship money to help complete her commercial flight training. The funding went towards her APS MCC (Airline Pilot Standards Multi-Crew Cooperation) course, which she tells us all about below.
‘I was fortunate enough to be awarded the 2025 BWPA Oriana Pepper Flying High Scholarship, which I put towards my APS MCC course at Simtech Aviation in Dublin. Up to this point, all of my training had been as a ‘single pilot’ flying light aircraft. The aim of the MCC course is to take students from single pilots to members of a multi-pilot crew, which initially felt like a whole different world!
The course started with 4 days of ground school, including 2 days of Human Factors theory, 1 day of B737 technical study and 1 day of operational factors. The Human Factors subjects included Situational Awareness, Decision-making, Automation, Stress Management, Fatigue, Leadership, Startle and Surprise. It was interesting to discuss these subjects in an airline context, as each would feature heavily in our subsequent simulator sessions. The operational aspect was based largely on the standard operating procedures (SOPs) that we would be expected to use whilst flying.
After a couple of days off (including a mandatory trip to the Guinness storehouse of course!) we started 10 days straight of 5.5 hour simulator sessions (fatigue certainly came into play by the end, with half of our sessions finishing at 2.30am!). The first few sims focused on aircraft handling, including take-offs, landings, stalling, steep turns and engine failures. We also covered pilot incapacitation, sudden de-pressurisation, traffic resolution advisories, ground proximity and windshear warnings. Each of these scenarios had to be dealt with as a team, with one pilot as Pilot Flying (PF) and the other as Pilot Monitoring (PM) – a previously alien concept to me and something that requires standardised phraseology / procedures to ensure that each pilot has an understanding of their responsibilities. Good crew resource management (CRM) is essential in a multi crew environment and was one of the main focuses of the course – poor CRM has led to many aircraft accidents in the past.
The second half of the sim sessions were based around flying routes (such as Dublin to Manchester). These included diversions and emergencies, which had to be considered in a calm and methodical way using decision making models such as TDODAR (Time, Diagnose, Options, Decide, Assign and Review). We also learnt how to give detailed, interactive briefs focusing on the ‘what’, ‘how’ and any threats anticipated. This built up our joint mental models and prompted the mitigation of threats where possible. The final assessment sim involved a flight from Dublin to Heathrow – whilst PF I had to deal with storms, TCAS alerts, and a couple of failures that left me with one power source (I chose to divert to Manchester!).
Overall it was a really enjoyable course, and certainly a highlight of my flight training – I now feel ready for my first flying job! A massive thank you to Simtech, the BWPA and Oriana Pepper’s family for supporting the final stage of my commercial flight training.’
