CALLING ALL pilots, aircraft design engineers and civil aviation regulators! Is there anyone out there who has noticed the irony of aviation’s technological advances over the last 107 years of powered flight?
There is no doubt that innovative engineering and technological advances have increased aviation efficiency and safety at a higher rate than any of the other sciences, but how we are actually directing the benefits of this technology gain, should be a concern to all.
Regulators likewise, have over the years, exercised their mandate in directing safety conventions in accordance with existing knowledge and experience. Are we facing a revolution in technological affairs which is beyond the scope of current regulators’ understanding? Within the pilot community worldwide, a general concern prevails at the lack of basic situational awareness and handling capabilities appearing in the cockpits. In several accident cases, the causes could be traced back to pilots’ inadequate “hands-on” abilities or loss of situational awareness operating the latest generation aircraft. It is no secret that engineers seized upon the fickleness of pilot judgement to deliberately design “pilot error” out of the cockpit. The universally accepted 72% of accidents attributed to MAN, spurred engineers on to introduce automation technology into the cockpit to ameliorate pilot handling and judgement inadequacies.
Is automation error going to be the new human factors contribution to accident statistics? The problem stems from the fact that smart avionics, smart aerodynamics and smart flight control systems have made modern aircraft a lot easier to fly and consequently pilot workload has decreased significantly to the extent that the “pilot out of the loop” philosophy increasingly poses a decaying threat to piloting skills. Engineers have led pilots to a point where a trust in technology has overwhelmed a faith in the ability of the pilots to recover from a bad situations and, to a certain extent, the pilots themselves are complicit in this situation. The luxury of automation is turning pilots into “better informed” passengers with inadequate physical cues to handle emergency situations in some cases.
Very little seems to made of the fact that engineers have not yet succeeded in designing zero defect equipment and their backup of quadruple redundancies statistically reducing failure to better than 10-9, have not lived up to expectations in the real world. The loss of the Air France Flight 447 Airbus over the Atlantic in 2009 saw over a time span of four minutes, a series of 24 ACARS messages sent automatically, indicating among other speed measurement inconsistencies, the disconnection of the autopilot and the aircraft going into “alternate law” flight control mode which happens when multiple failures of redundant systems occur.
In all, 228 people died. The loss of major systems left the pilots with information overload but no real option to control the aircraft manually under the adverse weather conditions prevailing at the time. The simple failure of a radio altimeter led to the delayed attempts at stall recovery of the Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 Flight 951 in which the investigators’ preliminary report confirmed that the pilots allowed the automatic systems to decelerate the aircraft to a dangerously low speed as it approached Schiphol Airport. Very late detection and pilot response at 450 feet agl, left the pilots scrambling to accelerate out of the stall before it crashed to the ground, killing the three flight deck crew and six others on board.
The radio altimeter had “informed“ the automatic flight system that the aircraft was eight feet below the surface when it was still nearly 2 000 feet in the air which caused the auto-throttle to pull back the power to idle, as if the plane were touching down.
The Amsterdam incident was at least the fourth in 13 months in which “pilot error” caused an airliner to stall and crash. The accident findings intensified the debate over the dangers of pilots losing their basic flying skills as a result of relying on the sophisticated electronics that control airliners through most of their flights.
Boeing was prompted to issue an unusual world-wide alert covering procedures that already should be second nature to aviators: “to carefully monitor primary flight instruments during critical phases of flight” such as takeoffs and landings.
Coupled to the technological threat from engineering, the emphasis for “paper licences” by civil aviation authorities, without an equivalent focus on handling skills and decision-making by the transfer of such knowledge from classroom to cockpit, has led many “old hands” to question the future of manned aviation. The removal of stalling and spinning from the basic flying training syllabus as a mandatory basic handling requirement, has been debated for many years and is being accepted by civil aviation authorities in some cases. Engineers, offering an improvement to aviation accident safety statistics through stall- and spin-free handling qualities in their latest products, are, in fact, indirectly producing handling-deficient pilots. The result is pilots with a lack of recognition of high angle of attack characteristics and low confidence in handling aircraft at high angles of attack resulting in accidents that should never have occurred.
A recent FAA study found serious flaws in pilot training for handling automation suggesting that flight crews have never been properly trained for operating highly automated aircraft and that for many of the problems they have to deal with, there are no checklists, leaving the pilots to manage a crisis using only ingenuity and airmanship. Inadequate crew knowledge of automated systems was a factor in more than 40% of accidents and 30% of serious incidents between 2001 and 2009. Presenting progress in her research, FAA human factors specialist, Dr Kathy Abbott, catalogued the evidence of disharmony between crews and their highly automated aircraft. Among the recurring handling problems pilots demonstrated included lack of recognition of autopilot/auto-throttle disconnect; lack of monitoring and failure to maintain energy/speed; incorrect upset recovery and inappropriate control inputs. Abbot delivered the judgement: “Failure assessment is difficult, failure recovery is difficult and the failure modes were not anticipated by the designers.” The threat is real. Engineers are getting ahead of, and out of, synch with the pilot’s abilities and regulator knowledge. Advanced technologies instituted to ameliorate human deficiencies could turn out to be a bigger threat to safety than the pilot unless methods of reconciliation can be found between pilots, engineers and regulators.
