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Pilot lock-out

By
David Learmount
 on May 19, 2013 12:07 PM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
As soon as I had written the two previous entries about the push toward single-pilot flightdecks, the story broke about the Air India captain being locked of the cockpit by a faulty door. The copilot diverted the aircraft and landed safely.

Can you imagine what the skipper felt like? He was still the aircraft commander, even though confined to the cabin.

The Beeb story also contains the allegation that another Air India crew left an A321 cockpit  (both of them, according to the story), allowing cabin crew to take the pilot seats. Apparently the cabin crew accidentally tripped the autopilot out, scaring the pilots back to the seats they shouldn't have left. Air India denies the story as told, but hints that the pilots did not act as they should have done.

It would have been interesting if that cockpit door had jammed in that case.

There is more that one moral to this story.

Single-pilot flightdeck - the answer to flightcrew shortage?

By
David Learmount
 on May 15, 2013 1:37 PM | | Comments (8) | TrackBacks (0)
"They" have been talking for some time about single pilots flying widebody freighters. But all of a sudden the talk is no longer restricted to cargo aircraft.

The theory was this: 

Technology could easily make single-pilot airliners possible, but the industry needs a non-controversial way of slipping the idea into the system. Freighters could provide a proof-of-concept trial while plying their commercial trade.

Anyway, the time has clearly come to remind ourselves of why, at the moment, we insist on two pilots for almost all commercial flights, and work out whether they are both still needed, or whether more advanced technology could replace the second pilot..

What function does the second pilot perform? Here we go:
  • to monitor the actions of the other pilot and ensure that the results of his/her actions are as intended
  • to intervene if the results of the other pilot's actions are not as intended
  • to cooperate with the other pilot, particularly when the workload is high
  • to take over if the other pilot is incapacitated
So, if new technology can carry out all those functions, we don't need a second pilot. Not in the aeroplane anyway. But s/he could be on the ground with a full piloting interface, like drone pilots, working remotely, monitoring remotely, taking over remotely.

But there is another question, even if its importance is more for the long-term: where will the aircraft commanders of the future come from if they have no apprenticeship as first officers? Can new pilots go straight to command? 

Would you mind if the only pilot on your A380 was a 23y-old recent piloting graduate with no copilot time? Well, actually, the seniority list would kick in and you'd have the older guys and gals flying the widebodies, but that still means the first day at work for your lonely 23y-old is likely to be on a 737 or A320.

But the world will inevitably go this way. Is this the latest trick to ensure that the perennially forecast pilot shortage - which has been receding for the last 20 years every time it threatens - will recede yet again?

There's a lot to take in, and a lot to discuss.

Single-pilot jumbo jets just around the corner

By
David Learmount
 on May 15, 2013 11:34 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)
It's official: the industry is working toward an airline flight deck that can safely be operated by a single pilot.

And if it's extended long-haul, an augmented crew would be two pilots: one on the flight deck and the other resting.

A team led by Thales Avionics, consisting of many other high-profile European companies plus Boeing and Jeppesen from the USA, is working toward an advanced airliner cockpit that can be managed by a single pilot backed up by high quality communications links with ground support. In other words, your copilot, if you need one, is on the ground.

Still doubt this? The research is being funded by the European Union.

We all knew it was coming eventually, but maybe not quite this fast.

More detail on Flightglobal shortly.

Pilot mercenaries

By
David Learmount
 on May 14, 2013 11:36 AM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)
There's definitely a place in the industry for contract crews, whether they are pilots or maintenance engineers.

But when an airline requires its permanent, home-based pilots to be self-employed and uses an agency to carry out the rather vestigial remaining Human Resources function, it is reasonable to ask what kind of a relationship the pilots have with their de facto employer, and whether it's a healthy one.

This is what happens at Ryanair and Norwegian Air Shuttle, both very commercially successful low-cost carriers. Passengers like their low prices and flock to fly with them. Maybe this is the employment model of the future.

About a year ago several Ryanair crews declared full "mayday" fuel emergencies in Spanish airspace when the weather got marginal and diversions were necessary. The event was a bonanza for both the local and international media, and parliamentary questions were asked in Spain. It was not a good time for Ryanair.

But nobody had been hurt, and Ryanair had complied with operational obligations. In the legal sense, the airline was watertight, and it took successful legal action against some media organisations for their reporting of the events.

Then time passed, the press lost interest, and any passengers that had begun to doubt Ryanair's priorities forgot about it and went gratefully back to cheap flying again.

The reason I mention the Spain incidents is that the questions that were asked - by the press and investigators - about Ryanair allegedly putting pressure on its pilots not to carry contingency fuel - provided an insight into the relationship the media have with the low cost carriers, but particularly with Ryanair.

The media activity surrounding Ryanair at that time is nothing compared with what would happen if - heaven forbid - the airline had a serious accident and people got hurt. The scrutiny of Ryanair's relationship with its pilots would go much deeper, and not just by the press.

Ryanair's CEO Michael O'Leary does not cut corners on aircraft maintenance, crew recurrent training, or operational discipline, but he - and his Norwegian counterpart - are pushing their luck on human factors when they employ pilots like a warlord employs mercenaries.

Just because you can get away with doing something doesn't make it a good system.

The question, Michael, is this: 

Is it worth it? 

EZY's ash cache

By
David Learmount
 on May 9, 2013 3:00 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

EasyJet has just airfreighted - to a test centre at Airbus Toulouse - a tonne of Icelandic volcanic ash, collected by the Institute of Earth Sciences, Reykjavik. 

The ash, with a consistency like fine talcum powder - but very harmful to airframes and jet engines - will be used in an airborne experiment planned for August. It was actually gathered from Eyjafjallajokull, the volcano that grounded all Europe's airlines for a week in April 2010, and here's a video of the team gathering it.

For nearly three years now, EasyJet, Airbus and Nicarnica Aviation of Norway, have been developing and testing an airborne sensor that will be able to "see" atmospheric volcanic ash, enabling pilots to avoid it. I reported on one of the earlier trials in this blog about 18 months ago.

This trial will involve two Airbus aircraft, one of which injects the ash into the atmosphere, creating a real ash cloud, and an A330 fitted with an AVOID infra-red ash sensor in a wingtip pod to enable the crew to detect and avoid it

The ash cloud will be monitored by satellite imaging, to gauge the accuracy and effectiveness of the AVOID trial.

"We hope this system will contribute towards three-dimensional, dynamic mapping tools to allow the airlines to take  decisions for safe flight with the full knowledge of the current location of ash clouds," says Manfred Birnfeld, senior flight-test engineer for Airbus.

EasyJet likens the AVOID system to "a weather radar for ash". Created by Dr Fred Prata, chief technology officer at Nicarnica Aviation, the pod-mounted infra-red sensor supplies images to pilots, and potentially to airline operations centres. The plots can "see" an ash cloud up to 100km ahead at altitudes between 5,000ft and 50,000ft, enabling them to make small adjustments to the flight path to choose airspace that's free of ash.

"This will be the perfect science experiment," says Prata. "We will know exactly how much ash we have placed in the atmosphere, and also its concentration and composition. AVOID will then measure it and demonstrate the technology."

EasyJet's venture into volcanic ash tracking technology development shows impressive lateral thinking. Not, in fact, the kind of thinking normally associated with the low cost carrier stereotype.

If you doubt that assertion, test it by trying to imagine Ryanair investing time and money in a system that would potentially benefit the industry as a whole. For all the raucous protesting by Ryanair chief executive Michael O'Leary  when his airline was grounded in April 2010 because of airborne ash, investing in a system that would not deliver specific advantage to Ryanair is not his style. But, to be fair, IAG's CEO Willie Walsh - then chief of British Airways - protested just as loudly at the time, but has not shown this kind of imagination either.

As with all experimental systems, AVOID is not guaranteed to be a total success. So there is financial risk, and airlines at present are probably at their most risk-averse in aviation history. 

So why is EasyJet, with Airbus and Nicarnica Aviation, taking the risk?

Well, volcanic ash will definitely affect European airspace in the future, the only question is when. 

With some of its aircraft fitted with Avoid, EasyJet may be airborne with 100% load factors of zero-discount (but grateful) passengers when its competition is grounded.

But actually - and EasyJet knows this - aircraft-mounted AVOID will play its part, along with other sensor technologies - space-based  and ground-based - in mapping ash in the the skies to make the airspace usable for all carriers.

UK pilot trainees to get student loans

By
David Learmount
 on May 2, 2013 4:20 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
Starting in September, aspiring UK commercial pilots will be able to apply for student loans up to £14,500 a year for their three-stage ab-initio pilot training course. 

If that sounds too good to be true, you can find the details at the Aviation Skills Partnership website.

The course, which will take place at any accredited UK aviation training organisation, will follow the existing academic and flight training syllabus and take about three years. But rather than just getting a licence, graduation will be recognised by the award of a BSc (Hons) degree in Professional Aviation Pilot Practice, awarded the day the graduates start work with their employer airline. 

Middlesex University oversees the courses and awards the degree.

This massive change in attitudes  is the result of government acceptance of the concept of pilot training as a Higher Apprenticeship, and therefore agreeing to provide backing for student loans toward tuition fees and maintenance costs. These are obtainable through the same Student Loans Company system used by undergraduates accepted for any other degree. It is part of a broader government decision to support, through student loans, the development of high level skills that translate direct into the workplace.

Students can apply through UCAS, the standard access agency for higher education places. The course is known as the Higher Apprenticeship in Professional Aviation Pilot Practice (HAPAPP).

The new scheme has been under development for several years led by Simon Witts, the chief executive of the Aviation Skills Partnership (ASP) working with the airlines, SEMTA (Sector Skills Council for Science, Engineering and Advanced Manufacturing), and People First. He says he intends to extend the system to cover all the high level skills associated with the aviation industry, including air traffic control, airline operations management, engineering and maintenance, and airport operations. 

Witts says all the airlines are backing the scheme, and the three aviation training organisations accredited so far are CTC, CAE Oxford Aviation Academy, and Flying Time at Shoreham.

The scheme will be open to pilots no matter which of the licences they train for: CPL/ATPL or MPL/ATPL.

The airlines, says Witts, all welcome the scheme as a way of opening up the pilot profession to candidates who may not otherwise have been able to raise the cost of training. As in the case of other degree courses, those with restricted means can also apply for a grant.

UK CAA catches up with Learmount

By
David Learmount
 on April 22, 2013 5:33 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)
To be fair, it didn't take them long, and they must have been working on it already.


Two blog entries before this one (starting with "...all the way to impact") deal with the subject directly, and many of the earlier posts deal with the consequences of failure by the non-flying pilot to monitor - critically and with intervention if necessary - whether the pilot flying is actually delivering the flight trajectory you would expect at any given stage of the flight.

Here is a list of accidents that could have been prevented by the monitoring pilot:

  • 2010 Afriqiyah Airways A330-200, Tripoli, Libya (103 killed)
  • 2010 Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800, Nr Beirut (90)
  • 2009 Yemenia Airbus A310-200, Comoros Islands (152)
  • 2009 Air France A330-300, South Atlantic (228)
  • 2009 Caspian Airlines Tu-154M, Iran (168)
  • 2009 Colgan Air Dash 8 Q400, Buffalo, NY, USA (49)
  • 2008 Aeroflot Nord 737-500, Perm, Russia (88)
  • 2007 Adam Air Boeing 737-400, Java Sea near Sulawesi (102)
  • 2006 Armavia Airbus A320-200, Sochi (113)
  • 2005 West Caribbean, MD-82, Venezuela (160)
  • 2004 Pinnacle Airlines, CRJ200, Jefferson City, USA (2)
  • 2004 Flash Airlines 737-300, Sharm el-Sheikh (148)
  • 2000 Gulf Air A320-200, Bahrain (143)
  • 2000 Crossair Saab 340B, Nr Zurich, Switzerland (10)
  • 1996 Aero Peru, 757, Lima (70 killed)
  • 1995 Birgenair/Alas Nacionales, 757, Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic (189)


Monitoring followed, where necessary, by intervention, could have saved 1,815 lives.
And this list is by no means exhaustive.

The A320 series: how time flies

By
David Learmount
 on April 5, 2013 1:19 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It's 25 years since the Airbus A320 entered service, and it has done for Airbus what the iPod did for Apple. 


In honour of the occasion, I dug this picture (below) out of my archives. It records what, for me, was the most historic moment in my flying career.

You can tell from the little you can see of the cockpit that this is not an A320. 

It's an A300 actually, but it has a sidestick. It was the A300 testbed for the A320's fly-by-wire system. 


Flying the sidestick A300.jpg
Sitting beside me in the right hand seat (taking the picture) was Airbus' chief engineer and test pilot Bernard Ziegler, one of the Airbus original team. In front of him was a traditional control yoke which was conventionally connected to the control surfaces. 

My sidestick, on the other hand, was sending electrical signals to a bank of computers, mounted behind me in the cabin, that would vet my demands and pass them on to the control actuators. My demands would remain unmodified unless I made a demand that would take the aircraft outside its flight envelope.

Incidentally if Ziegler had had his way, Airbus' first product - the A300 - would have been FBW-controlled, but (probably wisely) the rest of the team thought it best to arrive on the scene with something uncontroversial, because the A300 already had a unique selling point: it was the world's first widebody twinjet.

When this photograph was taken - in December 1983 -we were flying over south-western France at 18,000ft. The look of concentration on my face is the result of Ziegler's instruction to me. He had just told me to try and stall the aircraft. 

I tried, but it wouldn't let me. The rest is history.

During the couple of days I spent in Toulouse at that time, investigating Airbus' plans for the service entry of this revolutionary airliner, I was fascinated with the implications for commercial air transport of the A320's control philosophy. Here is an account of that visit and the answers to some of the questions I asked then, all of which are still relevant now.

...all the way to impact....

By
David Learmount
 on March 20, 2013 6:52 PM | | Comments (1) | TrackBacks (0)

Why two pilots on the flightdeck? 

Because it works? 

Actually it often doesn't.

One of the most frequently-cited examples of the failure of the multi-crew monitoring concept is the Eastern Airlines Lockheed TriStar accident back in 1972. On a night approach to Miami there was a problem with the landing gear indication, and the crew of three (two pilots and a flight engineer) fixated on that while the aircraft quietly descended into the Everglades, killing 5 crew and 94 passengers.

The theory, of course, is that while one pilot is flying an aircraft, the other pilot is watching to make sure he flies right.

In theory! But it often doesn't work that way.

As Boeing's Capt Philip Adrian described it at the Royal Aeronautical Society last week, the Eastern accident - and many others like it since then - was a case of three pairs of eyes "monitoring all the way to impact".

You have to be sure you are monitoring the things that really matter.

I'm having a look again at the monitoring issue because statistics show that, unless two pilots in a crew have a really well-coordinated working relationship, there might as well be only one.

Unless a pilot has been trained via the (relatively new) MPL route, s/he was trained to fly as an individual, without any help, and without being trained (or tested) in people management skills (for which read crew management skills). 

The reward for the individualistic training system is a CPL, which becomes an ATPL just by accumulating airborne time.

If you are on your own in charge of an aeroplane, life may get busy sometimes, but at least you are definitely in charge; there's no-one there to confuse you. And flying is pretty simple anyway...

Pre-flight checks.jpg

So, why two pilots? Well, if we want to understand where we are, it helps to understand where we came from.

From about 1930 to 1980 it was like this: the Captain knew what He was doing, and the copilot would do what he was told. The copilot wasn't actually much use, he was just doing apprenticeship time.

When aeroplanes got bigger and more complex, the Flight Engineer was added the crew. The Captain and Fight Engineer talked, and heeded each other's advice. 

While the Captain was doing the flying, the copilot did what he was told and quietly got on with tasks he hoped might be useful. 

When the copilot was doing the flying, the Captain's job was to give him a hard time and make a man of him (heaven help the few female copilots in the business at the time).

In the 1970s Flight Engineers were gradually made redundant by automated technology, and the Captain suddenly found himself quite busy in his fast, complex jet aeroplane. It gradually dawned on Him that He still had someone to shout at but no-one to talk to. 

In the same decade, crew resource management (CRM) was invented to try to make the Captain use the copilot's skills, despite the fact that the Captain knew perfectly well that the copilot didn't have any. 

So CRM largely failed until the Traditional Captains began to retire. Even then, CRM had a bit of an experimental feel about it, and in some airlines it still does.

In theory, whichever pilot is doing the flying, the other one assists with simple tasks like selecting gear or flaps, and making radio calls, but mainly his/her task is monitoring the PF's  actions, the results of those actions on the flight path, and comparing what is happening with what is intended. 

As I argued in the previous blog, monitoring is a core piloting task, but it remains an underrated one. Good monitoring could have prevented countless fatal airline accidents in the last 20 years. And in most of them, the captain was doing the flying and the copilot was failing either to monitor effectively, or to intervene effectively, or both. 

One of the most oft-repeated truths at the RAeS conference was that monitoring without an intervention strategy is pointless. 

The monitoring pilot must be able to challenge what is happening, and be heeded even if s/he happens to be the junior pilot. Ultimately, for the captain to say "I have control" is not a problem, but for a copilot to say it is culturally fraught with complexity, even though it should not be.

This subject needs the scrutiny it is now being given.

Not so humble: the Pilot Monitoring

By
David Learmount
 on March 19, 2013 6:03 PM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)
The "pilot not flying" (PNF) is not such a humble role, according to developing wisdom. Even when it's being carried out by the copilot.

Besides which, PNF is now out of favour as a role description, replaced by PM (pilot monitoring). 

In the USA the latter has been common currency for a while, but it is now crossing the Atlantic eastward.

Right now the Royal Aeronautical Society is running a two-day conference on the task of the Pilot Monitoring, on the grounds that so many serious recent accidents (let alone iconic accidents back in the 1970s and earlier could have been prevented if the role was carried out effectively. The Monitoring theme has been adopted for the RAeS's second conference on Preparing the Aircraft Commander for the 21st Century.

But we were never taught how to monitor effectively, were we? It was just one of those things it was assumed you could do. Or, like that mysterious quality known as good airmanship, it was assumed you either had it or you didn't.

One thing that's always been said is that humans are okay at doing things, but hopeless at monitoring them. Is that inevitably true?

There is no industry best practice for the art of being a good PM. But a lot of people - ops people, trainers, academics, psychologists - are gathered at the RAeS trying to work out whether there could be, and what the learn-able components of good monitoring might be.

Just listening to the presentations on the first day (today), being a good PM is a very complex task, and is often busier than that of the PF.

My favourite quote of the day came from Prof Helena Reidemar, a human factors specialist at the University of Central Missouri working in its Aviation Safety Masters Degree programme. She is also a Boeing 767 First Officer at Delta and Director of Human Factors at ALPA.

She said: "Monitoring is a core piloting skill as much as stick and rudder skills are".

Well, we'd better get better at it then.

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