Category: Flying

2016 and the Future for Pilots

Posted on by Eon de Vos in Air Crashes, Airline Ops, Aviation, Flying, History, Pilot Training, Pilots, Safety

Elon Musk predicts that in a couple of years, we will only be driving cars for recreation – transport will be automated.

The RAeS (Royal Aeronautical Society) recently held an interesting debate in London about the future of pilots in aviation. I followed this with great interest and the proposal that we will have pilotless cockpits within forty years was carried with a large majority.

Read any commentary on the current state of commercial aviation, and while it is acknowledged that it is safer than ever before, the general consensus is that pilots have been lulled into complacency by automation and have lost their basic flying skills.

As we kick off 2016, there we have three propositions which, effectively, indicate that we – pilots – are an endangered species. Add to these the advent of drones, which, especially in the military environment can be controlled from thousands of miles away to devastating effect.

Commercial Aviation is safe. In fact, the recently published annual statistics by ASN (Aviation Safety Network) indicate that 2015 was the safest year ever for airliners.

A decade or so ago the major causal factor in commercial aviation accidents was CFIT (Controlled Flight into Terrain). Training and the advent of Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems (EGPWS) countered that trend. During the last decade the major causal factor in airline accidents has proved to be Loss of Control in Flight (LOCI), a fact which supports the contention that pilots are losing their stick and rudder skills.

And now we see a new, worrying trend emerging – the 2015 statistics show that most fatalities were a result of only two accidents. 150 people died in the Germanwings disaster on the 24th March 2015 and on the 31st October last year 224 people died when the Metrojet A320 was shot down over Egypt. Both caused by human depravity – not the usual “pilot error” or mechanical failure. The previous year’s Malaysian disasters fit this trend as well – the one shot down and the other still a mystery, but probably downed by dark intentions.

About the shooting down of civilian airliners not much can be said. It is terrorism and depravity of the worst kind. But what about the deliberate crashing of an airliner by the very people who should ensure its safety?

About LOCI we can do something. We can enhance high altitude handling training, we can up the required standards, we can add extra warning systems.

But what can we do about the insidious potential danger of a pilot “losing it” and endangering the aircraft, passengers and fellow crew members?

There lies the challenge for airline managers and their HR departments – the days are gone where pilots would come up through the ranks via the Air Force or contract or charter flying – this would act as a natural sifting process and only the dedicated and flying fit would make it through.

My concern is that modern aviation trends would tend to allow pilots who lack experience or the required resilience into cockpits – perhaps causing more trauma than we would like to imagine.

Unless we can solve this new-found dilemma, the RAeS debate’s outcome could become our future reality.

But would you like to be a passenger on a pilotless aircraft?

One has to question whether a computer would have made the decision to land in the Hudson river, saving all on board. In the case of QF32, where the pilots had to land their overweight and crippled A380 on too short a runway the computers were so confused that they were providing false information.

Despite the fact that Artificial Intelligence is being developed apace, my prediction for 2016 is that we will not see that pilotless flight this year – and frankly, I would hope not for many a year!

Jet Upset: Not a Good Tabloid Headline…

Posted on by Eon de Vos in Air Crashes, Airline Ops, Aviation, Flying, Pilot Training, Pilots, Safety

wwi_plane_in_a_tree_small_poster

I think its time again to haul out this sad picture, which hangs in just about every flight school or ops office and which has served to warn generations of new pilots about the perils of flying with the wrong attitude.

The recent loss of an AirAsia Airbus A320 serves as an example: The accident investigation board cited a solder crack in a circuit board as a causal factor – it did indeed set off a number of events which clearly caught the pilots unaware, but the major cause was the pilots’ inability to recognise their aircraft’s departure from the intended flight path – and their “incapacity” to recover from that upset, potentially due to a mixture of “carelessness and neglect”.

Flight path management is the pilots’ primary task. There are obviously other tasks to be accomplished (navigation, weather avoidance, radio work and a myriad others) but controlling the aircraft’s current and projected trajectory by way of energy management remains the most important.

What the recent AirAsia crash and that of Air France 447 a while ago clearly illustrate, is that we need a different training approach to avoid pilots losing control in flight. LOCI (Loss of Control in Flight) has become the major cause of aircraft accidents. (Review the below graphic from Boeing’s latest annual Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Aircraft):

CRM Acc Stats 15

It tells me that pilots would rather leave the flying to computers and autopilots, while they fiddle with circuit breakers and try to figure out “what this thing is doing now”.

It would appear that the captain of AirAsia 8501 was out of his seat to pull circuit breakers without consideration of the consequences and when the Airbus went into “alternate law” the FO could not accomplish the basic recovery from a stall event at altitude. (The same problem the pilots of AF447 had over the Atlantic Ocean).

High altitude flying comes with its own set of problems. I won’t bore you with the definitions of “coffin corner”, but at high altitude aircraft have three possible limitations: Certified altitude, Thrust Limit Altitude, and Buffet or Maneuvre Margin.

On the B738 I fly, thrust is usually the most limiting factor, as at altitude you may find that you have insufficient thrust for anything but relatively minor maneuvering. The Boeing FCTM (Flight Crew Training Manual) clearly states: “Flight crews intending to operate at or near the maximum operating altitude should be familiar with the performance characteristics of the airplane in these conditions.” 

The fancy FMC (Flight Management Computer) will provide you with a limited bank angle which won’t exceed the current available thrust limit, only if you’re operating in LNAV (Lateral Navigation) mode. In any other mode – and this is what many pilots miss – you need to maintain your own speed at least 10kts above the lower buffet limit and use a maximum of 10 degrees of bank. Should you run into the thrust limit, you can only reduce bank angle, increase thrust to max continuous, or descend (or all three).

Which all goes to show that at those altitudes the potential for control loss is very high.

In a recent blog, David Learmount ( http://www.Learmount.com ) stated that in 18 control loss accidents since the year 2000 almost 2000 people lost their lives. That is simply unacceptable. Crashing an aircraft which, despite some technical issues, is fully flyable, is an indictment of our pilots’ level of training and expertise.

It is not the jet that gets upset – it has no emotion in this regard. It is the pilots who should be the last barrier of redundancy, but who are failing by causing the jet upset.