January 2010 Archives

Despite all the recent talk in this blog, at the FAA, at Airbus, and now at US ALPA about loss of piloting skills as a result of operating with high levels of automation for a long time, there is a danger that some people are getting confused between the loss of hand-flying skills and the loss of mental skills.

Hand flying skill rarely gets terminally rusty, and if it does you can pick it up again fast. Once you've learned to ride a bike you never lose that ability.

It's the mental ability to fly and to navigate using raw flight and navigation data that gets lost if it is not used. If you have to hand-fly the aircraft at the same time as using raw flight and navigation data when you are not used to either, that's quite a workload.

That mental ability can also be restored quite quickly with a bit of training, but its return is not instant.

Raw-data handling is manual flying without the flight director. It's having to choose a pitch attitude and a bank angle that will provide the performance you want at the power setting you have selected, instead of having both of those chosen for you. If you unquestioningly follow the crossbars out of sheer habit, you may stop noticing what your pitch and bank actually are, or at least not with any precision.

All pilots learn early on that a chosen flight path is the result of a combination of a selected pitch attitude, bank angle (or wings level) and power setting. If you stop having to choose the attitudes and power settings that give you the result you want because you can choose the performance directly by dialling the numbers into the autopilot, that is not flying, it's trajectory management. So if, one day, you have to go back to flying when the autopilot trips out because two or more air data computers disagree and so do your airspeed indicators, you are not in practice for the situation you face.

So the recurrent training today's pilots need to be given must entail a couple of hours with the autopilot, authothrottle and the flight director tripped out, and compass rose mode selected on both navigation displays.

All pilots can do this. They wouldn't have their licence if they couldn't. But they can't do it well if they never practice it.

Does it matter? Yes it does. The FAA-quoted Colgan accident is not the only example of why it does.

With the loss of the Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800 offshore from Beirut on 25 January, the phenomenon of fundamentally serviceable aircraft - and all their passengers - being lost over the sea at night is becoming frightening.

I have put this issue under the spotlight before.

Here's a list of the main airline losses in this category since 2000. There have been seven such accidents, and together they have killed 976 people:

2010 Ethiopian Airlines 737-800, Mediterranean Sea near Beirut

2009 Yemenia Airbus A310-300, Indian Ocean near the Comoros Islands

2009 Air France A330-200, South Atlantic

2007 Adam Air 737-400, Java Sea near Sulawesi

2006 Armavia A320, Black Sea near Sochi 

2004 Flash Airlines 737-300, Red Sea near Sharm el-Sheikh

2000 Gulf Air A320, Arabian Gulf near Bahrain 

In some of them the cause has been established officially.  Gulf Air, Armavia, Flash and Adam Air were all caused by a combination of total or partial pilot disorientation followed by a failure to control an aircraft that could have been controlled.

Yemenia is known to have hit the sea having stalled at quite low level during an attempted circling approach at night, so that could be put in the loss of control/loss of situational awareness category.

Air France was known to have suffered some specific technical anomalies, but in the absence of new information indicating the the aircraft was physically uncontrollable, the crew should have been able to maintain control but failed to do so.

And now Ethiopian Airlines. It sounds distressingly like several of the others, particularly the Flash Airlines event. In the latter, the captain was carrying out a slow turn over the sea at night, and from what he said to the copilot, he clearly had the "leans". The aircraft went into a spiral descent and crashed. The copilot could see what was happening but left intervention too late.

We have learned from Beirut air traffic control that the aircraft was on a northerly heading soon after take-off from runway 21. We believe it was heading to a coastal way point north of Beirut, possibly with the intent of crossing Lebanon eastward, bound for Syrian airspace. There it would, presumably, have turned south toward its destination, Addis Ababa.

But the flight, still in its early northward climb, was told to turn left onto 270deg to avoid traffic inbound to land on 16. The aircraft's left turn continued through 270deg around to 140deg, despite warnings from ATC. The crew did not respond, and radar contact was lost.

There were thunderstorms in the area, and this may turn out to be a contributory factor in what happened. But right now it looks terribly like another case of pilot disorientation over the sea at night.

This is an undeniable phenomenon now, but no-one is recognising it as such. Whenever it is finally recognised, determining more appropriate pilot training would be a priority internationally. Maybe the aviation insurance industry should start lobbying, but it's a pity they should need to.