November 2010 Archives

UK-headquartered flight training organisation CTC Aviation reports a considerable surge in demand for graduate CPLs and it predicts that this will be sustained.

2010, it says, has been a record year for airline placements for its graduates, and - extremely unusually - CTC feels able to predict already that all its students who graduate this winter will find airline positions immediately.

For full details check Flight International next Tuesday, and flightglobal.com meanwhile. As a result of an ongoing cyber-crime attack on our site right now (which we're countering with a fair degree of success), the paper version comes back into its own!

I'll let the poster speak for itself.

Except to say that this PhD was a triple first, and the information it has uncovered and put into the public domain has the power to change the lives of people whose health has been ruined by contaminated cabin air, and their families, and to motivate industry to put more vigour into seeking a solution

Airbus described the situation the QF32 crew faced after the uncontained engine failure as "dynamic". That's accurate insofar as it goes, but rather an understatement.

The obvious and immediate effects, like asymmetric thrust and aerodynamic damage, were dealt with by the autopilot, which remained engaged and the Qantas A380 crew elected to keep it that way until short final approach at Singapore. Tha't helps, but over time an autopilot can mask the consequences of problems like growing fuel imbalance owing to the pierced left wing tank.

But the biggest psychological problem they had was the plethora of warnings and the mass of systems information provided by the electronic centralised aircraft monitor (ECAM), and the cacophony of associated audible alerts.

If you design a computer-controlled systems monitoring device to tell the pilots when things go wrong, you can't blame it for providing 54 warnings when 54 problems crop up over a period of about 2min.

But that doesn't make life easy for the pilots. They have to get their heads around the macro-problem they face very quickly, and avoid being distracted by the micro problems.  

Easier said than done. Each failure on the ECAM has an associated drill that - psychologically - clamours to be performed. 54 drills take a while.

It's mischievous - but irresistible - to wonder, since this event ended happily, whether Capt Richard Champion de Crespigny who on this flight was undergoing an annual check by another trainer whose checking was in turn being checked, wondered for a millisecond whether this was all a set-up.   

The ECAM design acknowledges that multiple failures can occur, and it prioritises resulting alerts with fire at the top of the list and flight control system failures next. But there is a powerful temptation for the crew to fixate on all that information and inadvertently lose track of its ultimate set of priorities: to aviate, navigate, communicate, in that order.

This crew didn't make that mistake. It probably helped that the crew was augmented by the check pilots since there was so much to do, but a big crew takes a lot of coordinating.

The full analysis of what happened in this immensely complex event will take a while to complete. It is a unique opportunity for the aviation community to carry out an assessment of human factors engineering as well as the inevitable questions about whether design for systems damage tolerance could be any better.  

First Officer Victoria Auld of Flybe has become the first pilot in UK to be presented with a Multi-crew Pilot Licence.

Holding the first UK MPL

On 12 November 2010, the Civil Aviation Authority's Head of Approved Training Organisations, Licencing and Training Roy Burden delivered the first six UK Multi-Crew Pilot Licences to Flybe for presentation to newly graduated Bombardier Q400 First Officers.

Roy Burden has handed over the first six MPLs to Andrew Strong, Flybe's Chief Operating Officer

MPLs are light blue. There's no particular significance in that, but for the record CPLs are dark blue. When Victoria has 1,500h in her log book she will get an ATPL (dark green), just as she would have done if she had qualified as an airline pilot by the traditional CPL route.

Following Victoria - the first presentee by virtue of alphabetical order - her five fellow graduate First Officers received their light blue licences

L to R: First Officers Michael Holmes, Jamie Orr, Claire Jones, Warren McCullough, Victoria Auld and John Batten

Unlike CPLs, before these student pilots qualified for their MPL all six had to complete not only an approved flying training course and the associated academic work, they also had to carry out their type rating training on the Q400, then perform their base training.

The flying training consisted of 14 months with Flight Training Europe, which they completed in August. After that they joined Flybe for 17 days groundschool followed by type rating training in a Flybe Q400 full flight simulator, and carried out base training at Exeter airport.

On Monday the new First Officers will be working in the right hand seat of a Q400 on scheduled passenger service, and undergoing their line acceptance checks.

But back to the ceremony.

It wasn't only the student pilots who earned recognition. Bob Pooley, founder and managing director of Pooley's Flight Equipment, presented Peter Sadler, managing director of FTE, with a Pooley Sword of Merit to recognise the FTO's work.

Peter Sadler (L) receives the Pooley Sword of Merit from Bob Pooley (Flybe's Chief Pilot Ian Baston in the background)

Sadler didn't keep the Sword very long. He presented it to this course's Best Student, Claire Jones

Sadler presents the Sword of Merit to First Officer Claire Jones

So that's it. A little piece of aviation history performed in Flybe's New Walker Hangar at its Exeter airport headquarters.

And this is just the beginning: There are already six more Flybe MPLs in the pipeline undergoing training at Oxford Aviation Academy's Kidlington base. 

Susan Michaelis was a BAe 146 pilot in her native Australia a decade ago.

But she lost her aircrew medical category through neurological damage, the result of repeated exposure to organophosphates from oil that got into the engine bleed air feeding the cabin air conditioning and pressurisation system.

She lost her job, and the industry she had worked in abandoned her.

Symptoms of her illness were frequent sickness and a numbing, permanent tiredness. These still affect her a decade later.

Yesterday she was awarded a PhD in Safety Science: 'Health and Flight Implications From Exposure to Contaminated Air in Aircraft' by the University of New South Wales. Not an ordinary PhD, but with the highest possible marks. Originally she had begun a Masters Degree course, but the University said her research into contaminated cabin air in aviation was so good she should push on for a PhD.

Meanwhile she had become head of research for the voluntary Global Cabin Air Quality Executive. The GCAQE's co-chairman Tristan Loraine, himself a former Boeing 757 pilot with BA who lost his health and job the same way as Susan did, said this about her achievement:

"Her 975 page thesis uncovers a lot of new data going back to the early 1950s showing just how much was known of the risks of exposing people to contaminated air. Susan has worked tirelessly for many years to help crews around the world and to help resolve these issues. Susan is a tribute and example to us all, of human perseverance for justice."

Tristan, also a phoenix, has set up a fim production company Factnotfiction Films.

(Any crew or passengers who believe they might be suffering from the same condition that affected Susan and Tristan should visit the Aerotoxic Association's website.)

A draft FAA study into the relationship of pilots with today's airliner flightdecks - specifically the automated systems in the cockpits - provides the hard data to prove that pilots are not properly trained for modern cockpits. The result has been serious accidents that did not need to happen.

I have been arguing for ages that airline pilot recurrent training needs a serious review. Now, courtesy of Dr Kathy Abbott's FAA team, it looks as if it might get one. This is good news.

At the same event - last week's Flight Safety Foundation International Aviation Safety Seminar in Milan, Italy - at which Abbott outlined the initial results of her studies, three seriously big industry guns spoke at length on stall recovery, and one of similar calibre presented on go-arounds. Stall recovery was addressed by Boeing's Dave Carbaugh, Airbus's Claude LeLaie, and ALPA's top human factors expert Capt David McKenney. Air France corporate safety manager Bertrand de Courville addressed the art of safe go-arounds.

These are two subjects so fundamental to basic pilot competence that the need to cover them in such detail is a symptom of the fact that current training is not addressing the basics. And Abbott, of course, has now revealed that today's training is not covering advanced automation either.

So what is recurrent airline training achieving, then? It's a bit of an oversimplification of the many things she said, but the hard evidence suggests that pilots concentrate on programming the automation at the expense of monitoring the flight path.

Is anyone actually surprised by this? Hadn't you actually observed it yourself? Hasn't there been sufficient anecdotal evidence of this for a while to make you worried?  Well now Abbott's team is on hand to provide the data to back up the anecdotes.

Don't expect change tomorrow, but big changes will come. They must come.

Capt Chris Smith, BA's most experienced 757 captain

(All pictures by Nick Morrish/British Airways)

It's Saturday 30 October, about 1715 local time on the ramp at London Heathrow, and Capt Chris Smith is taking a picture of the aeroplane he's just about to fly to Edinburgh and back.

He's in charge of the very last British Airways Boeing 757 schedule in revenue service. When the aircraft, G-CPET, noses up to the stand back at Heathrow again in about four hours' time it will never fly passengers again.

Most of  the passengers today don't know until they get on board that the flight's a special one. Then the crew tells them. A few get excited. Most say: "That's nice". They haven't noticed that the aircraft had been painted in the livery that 757s used to wear in 1983 when the first of them arrived on the line at BA.

At the end of the flight all passengers are presented with a retro-design certificate, like this one (below) that Capt Smith is holding. Remember paper airline tickets?

Smith's copilot is SFO Rich Ablewhite (below centre), but Captain John Monks (right), Flight Training Manager 757/767 fleet, is flying supernumerary, occupying the jump seat. 

The cabin crew on the trip are CSD Sean Orsini with Sy Nyland, Nicki Hampson, Michelle Kearns, and Maria Conde Gutierrez. Unfortunately BA doesn't supply them with a mini bottle of Taittinger for each passenger to celebrate, which would have been another nice retro touch. 

During the cruise, Capt Monks carries out another routine which, these days, also has a retro feel about it: he visited the cabin to talk to the passengers (Below)

Here's proof that I am on the flight with Eve Learmount (Below). I am naturally enthusiastic about the celebratory full-power take-offs and steep climbs that the crew provided for us out of LHR and EDI.

Eve can't see what the fuss is about. But if you've lived with a pilot since 1970, it all gets a bit repetitive.   

Of course the aeroplane is pretty light on both legs, so a full-power take-off delivers a very short run and an exhilaratingly steep climb angle.

Here's CPET taking a sip of fuel on the pan at EDI before her last and final leg to LHR. She pushes back at 1932 (3min early) and noses up to the ramp two minutes ahead of the 2100 ETA. On the way up she's been just ahead of time as well, so she finishes her spell at BA in dutiful fashion.

The Negus and Negus livery was not my favourite BA paint scheme, but I do miss the old Speedbird motifs that you can see on CPET's eyebrows here.

Well done PET. Goodbye, Godspeed and have a good time at FedEx Express.