Pierre Zielinsky

Biography

After a long initial career as a military pilot, Pierre Zielinsky is now an airline pilot. For nineteen years, he flew mainly in the French Air Force, more specifically in the government and presidential airlift squadron 60 at Vélizy-Villacoublay. A graduate of the 1998 Général Heurtaux class at the Salon-de-Provence air academy, he began his career as a co-pilot, then captain and instructor on the Dassault Falcon 50, 900 and Airbus A330. In addition to his speciality as a pilot, Pierre has also taken on important responsibilities: Falcon chief pilot from 2008 to 2010, seconded to the Air Force headquarters in 2010-2012, chief of operations in 2012-2014, then squadron commander between 2015 and 2017, responsible for 150 people, 5 different aircraft fleets and thousands of flight hours with first-class passengers completed annually without incident. Throughout his career, flight safety, excellence of service and quality of training have been at the heart of his concerns. Today, Pierre works for Air France on the Airbus A320.

Conference: Is time the aviator’s enemy?

Time critical: 208 seconds. That’s the time, both long and dizzyingly short, that Captain Chesley Sullenberger and his crew had to take the measure of a situation that would lead them to ditch their plane on the Hudson in 2009. In aeronautics, today as always, the race against time is everywhere: technology, maintenance, application of procedures, military operations, but also and above all in the exercise of aviators’ cognitive functions. Pilot training, which focuses on improving these skills rather than on sterile repetition of maneuvers, aims to take better account of the time factor when exercising leadership and managing the workload in the cockpit of an aircraft, whether single-pilot or crewed. This factor quickly appears to be an inescapable and stressful obstacle for the aviator, even in normal situations. But on closer inspection, isn’t time ultimately a safety weapon and a pilot’s ally?