August 2011 Archives

The last time British Airways offered wannabe pilots the chance to train for a job with the company was before 9/11.

Between now and 2016, says BA head of recruitment Robin Glover, the airline needs 800 new pilots, about half of which will be newly trained. The balance will come from other carriers and the military.

This time BA is not laying out a penny toward the trainees' courses in its Future Pilot Programme, but it will guarantee their loans for training, which means they will definitely be able to get finance. Glover says that, since the credit crunch, only rich students have been able to raise finance, so the airlines have been fishing in a small pond. This move widens the field.

Of course the risk to BA of guaranteeing a loan is practically zero, because by the time the airline provides the guarantee the student will have gone through aptitude tests and begun the course, and the flying training organisation (FTO) can tell pretty early on which trainees are the right stuff and which will struggle.

BA also requires the student to pay for his/her own type rating on the aircraft s/he will fly in service, and does not pay the trainee during it. In Glover's words, that cost is "part of the training package" for which the finance is raised. But, he says, BA's type rating is charged at cost, and as soon as the pilot successfully completes it, the pay cheque arrives. 

While BA's offer doesn't exactly sound like a testament to its belief in investing in its future employees, it's a better deal than the shoddy way that Ryanair and Easyjet recruit. They flaunt the prospect of a job, but it's not a promise; the FTO helps the student find finance, the student pays for the type rating at a commercial (rather than cost) rate, then the recruit works the line unpaid until line acceptance checks are complete. If flying's slow, that can be six months or more.

The arrival of BA back on the scene means the others will be fishing in a smaller pool, and they can guarantee they won't be the destination of choice any more in the UK market, so they will get more of the strugglers.

In the next few years we are going to see what market forces do to pilot recruitment mores. Airlines are expanding slowly but relentlessly, and the world fleet likewise. Even a relatively desirable employer like BA may struggle to get the combination of numbers and quality it has always assumed was its birthright.

After all, when they join the line, BA recruits will be paying back their university loan (£30,000 maybe?), and their £100,000-odd pilot training loan, so how much of their pay will be left for living? Does that sound like a choice that large numbers of bright young people will be making?

Let's watch the market forces at work.

 

Honestly, what is the world coming to? When I was an instructor there we used to train them for British Airways...

No roaring reheat at this air show. More of a Keatsian rural idyll. 

The runways are grass, and the only sound that disturbs the rustling of the surrounding copses is the sputtering of an ancient aero engine. Occasionally.

A summer air show at Old Warden aerodrome is as quintessentially English as the Henley Regatta, but more peaceful. Both feel as if time has left them behind. At Henley  some people dress in Edwardian style (1901-1910) to celebrate this; at Old Warden people don't dress for the occasion; just the aeroplanes are Edwardian.

I was there last Saturday, and during the afternoon watched flying displays by aeroplanes from the Sopwith Pup and Bristol Fighter to the Hawkers Hart* and Hurricane.

But as the afternoon turned into evening, the breeze and the windsock dropped, and we watched as the Shuttleworth crews, with tender reverence, quietly rolled out the oldest flying machines that can still heave themselves aloft on their own power; fragile machines almost as light as air, their delicate structures visible like the veins in a dragonfly's wings.

 First the Avro Triplane chattered into the evening air. This, like the Bristol Boxkite, which I'll show you in a moment, is a faithful replica of the original, both built for the film "Those Magnificent Men in their Flying Machines" in the 1960s. So even these replicas are no longer spring chickens.

Here's the Boxkite, on a wing and a prayer:

 But wait, here's an aeroplane that first lifted off the grass in 1910. It's 101 years old and still flying. Sort of. The Deperdussin, a Bleriot-type monoplane with a pilot sitting on it like Snoopy atop his kennel.

Will it fly? Really?...

The excitement at Old Warden is not about speed and power, it's like: can it still scramble into the air? Can it stay there? Will it land safely without crumpling or being overturned by the merest zephyr?

It's getting dark. Will she get airborne?... 

Yayy! The pilot's done it! But can he stay airborne?... the precariousness is palpable...

Okay so far ...oh my God!...he's losing height...

...oh thank God... he's landed further along the runway! I thought for just a moment...

 

Here he is, taxiing in, a member of the faithful Shuttleworth team running alongside to grab the tail if the Deperdussin needs guidance, a steadying hand, or just to be slowed down. The engine may be at its most hesitant, puttering idle, but the pilot has no brakes to slow the machine down.

Now gently back to the warm hangar, awaiting another outing when the air is calm and friendly.

I was one of the guests at Old Warden of Clyde & Co, the aviation law firm. Tim Brymer, a Clyde partner, insists on maintaining a grass-roots connection with aviation. You can't get closer to the roots than this.

When Biggin's air show shut for business after last year's brilliant farewell displays, Tim shifted Clyde's civilised aviation picnic to Old Warden. Great move, Tim. For me, this was a reintroduction after about 30 years of absence, and the Shuttleworth Collection is finer than ever. 

*See Dave's comment after this post

In December 1983, about three years before the A320 first flew, I made a visit to Toulouse to fly the A300 that had been kitted out with a sidestick for the left hand seat pilot. This was wired up to the same fly-by-wire computer systems that the A320 was about to get.

Chief engineer and test pilot Bernard Ziegler gave me a five minute briefing before getting airborne, and I hadn't seen any manuals. The briefing about the flight envelope protection, particularly stall protection, was the easy part to understand, and it felt equally logical when we tried it out when airborne.

What I found more difficult to get my head around was what, exactly, I was commanding the aircraft to do when I released the stick to neutral, and how it did that without the need for me to trim the aircraft in pitch. I understood in theory, but I had still not got my head around the relationship between my elevator inputs and the auto-trim that drove the stabiliser, even by the time we returned to land. If you are conventionally trained and haven't done the type rating course it's simply not what you are used to.

The seductive, and slightly surreal thing about the new control system was that it was so easy. All the inputs required were intuitive, but... But what? I needed more time to think about it.

I then strolled over to Aeroformation, the name (at the time) of Airbus' on-site training centre, and spoke to its boss Jean Pinet. I asked him if pilots converting to the revolutionary A320 were going to get a bit more time than pilots converting from conventional-to-conventional. He said he wished they would, because the control philosophy is different, and he believed it would be good to give pilots more time to get their heads around what the system did, how it did it and - almost more importantly - what it would NOT do for you.

Unfortunately, he admitted, they would not get more time. The airlines had been told by the sales team that the A320 was so easy to fly that they (sales) had, unwittingly, created an expection of less training time and thus reduced costs. Pinet had, he said, prevailed upon them successfully not actually to reduce conversion time, but more time was out of the question. 

This tension between training needs and training cost has always been there, and it still is. Since it is not possible to train for every eventuality all the time, there has to be a set of priorities which is relevant to the airline and the individuals being trained. I related the above story to illustrate my special needs at the time: I didn't need to be taught to fly, I didn't need to practice engine failure at V1, I needed to understand my relationship with the aeroplane.

Until the regulators update the statutory type and recurrent training exercises airlines to make them more relevant to modern flying, the next best alternative is an approved training regime determined by the airlines and approved by the regulator. After all, the airline knows better than anybody else what its pilots are good and bad at, especially in the era of flight data monitoring.

Known in America as the advanced training and qualification programme this system is only as good as the airline that runs it, and only a minor proportion of the airlines run it anyway.

Which is another reason why updating the statutory exercises is vital.

By the time pilots win a licence they are competent to fly when everything's going right.

After that, training is about keeping the skills you've got, and how you cope when things go wrong.

So the question is, what will take modern pilots by surprise?

Stalling did in the case of AF447, the Colgan Air Q400 crew at Buffalo, and the Pinnacle CRJ200 in 2004. Colgan was at low level, but the other two were more or less at the upper height limit.

And what else does the data suggest pilots haven't got their heads around? Train for it. 

 

  

 

 

There's been a lot of interest in my previous blog entry "AF 447 and the loss-of-control epidemic". People pointed out that there had been nine fatal LOC airline accidents since 2000, not just the seven I'd mentioned. I've since added them to the list.

One of my regular correspondents, David Connolly - who flies 747s - says I am talking rubbish when I ascribe the primary blame for the loss of piloting skills to the national aviation authorities who set the requirements for the training exercises that airlines must provide for their pilots.

He says the airlines are to blame, and he's right.

But so am I as well.

The exercises airlines are required to make their pilots practice in recurrent training are heavily loaded with engine and systems failure exercises, based on the problems airliners of the 1950s could be expected to face. These have very little relevance to modern aeroplanes where mechanical failure is rare, and much more easily managed when it does occur.

Modern aeroplanes are full of computers which, as everyone knows, are pretty reliable most of the time, but when they fail they do not necessarily do so transparently, and can leave you confused. In the Air France 447 case, the computers disengaged because they knew they were being fed incorrect airspeed data, and computers can only work when they are being fed data that's worthy of processing.

But the regulators do not require pilots to practice managing the results of subtle, computer-related failures.

And when failures do happen in the air, the airlines want the pilots, if possible, to leave the autopilot, autothrottle and flight director engaged.

Come on, guys, recurrent training is done in a simulator, it's safe to try things out there! Chop all the automatics, kill the flight director, and let the pilots practice directing the aeroplane by using their brains, hands and feet. That's the practice they are never going to get unless you give it to them!

Of course Connolly's right, the airlines could do all this as well as providing the out-of-date statutory box-ticking exercises they are compelled by law to practice, but doing more would put up the costs of those who did compared with those who didn't bother.

I don't like regulating everything, but regulation has one undeniable benefit: it levels the playing field. Airlines will always base their training around the statutory minima because they know their competitors are doing that. So if the statutory pilot training minima are wrong for today's highly automated airlines, the airlines argue they have no choice but to provide this irrelevant training at the expense of what's really needed.

The AF447 crew was not prepared for what happened. Whose fault was that? The pilots, the airline, or the guys who make the rules about how the airlines must train their pilots?

Let's hear from you.  

 

Including Air France flight 447, there have been twelve fatal loss-of-control airline accidents since the year 2000.

 

Altogether, they have killed 1,394 people.

 

The common factor in all of them was pilot inability to recognise what was happening and to do something effective about it in time to save the aircraft.

 

So what we're looking at here is an issue of human cognition.

 

Since the release of the cockpit voice transcript by the investigators of Air France 447,  the fact that the pilots were totally at a loss to understand what was happening to their aircraft has become distressingly clear.

 

Before I start digging down into the immensely complex human aspects of this accident, I must make clear that, even when the BEA's final report comes out, we'll still be guessing at what was going on in the heads of the three pilots in charge of Air France 447.

 

But even if, after the final report, we are left guessing about what was actually going on in the pilots' heads, that does not absolve us from the responsibility of attempting to understand it.

 

Because unless we do understand, we can't work out intelligent ways to deal with these problems of pilot cognition and lack of situational awareness.

 

In Air France 447 the pilots were confronted with a situation they clearly didn't recognise,

 

or didn't believe,

 

or didn't understand.

 

They never appeared to come close to appreciating what they could do to save the aircraft, because they didn't understand what they were seeing.

 

The essential question is: how can that be? These pilots were fully qualified to operate this aircraft, and the same was true of the pilots in charge of the 11 other cases of loss of control since the year 2000.

 

I said before, understanding these events necessitates an understanding of human cognitive processes, and of how they are sustained.

 

Cognition has many components. Let's go back to those three words I mentioned, which describe what pilots have to be able to do when they look at an aircraft's instrument panel: recognise, believe, understand.

 

If the Air France 447 crew had recognised what the flight and engine instruments were telling them, had believed the information the displays were supplying,  and had understood the whole picture conveyed by the numerous sources of data, they could have recovered that aircraft to safe flight at any point in the trajectory, except the final minute or so of flight.

 

What is in danger of happening following AF447, is that the industry reacts to this accident by trying to design the pilots totally out of the loop and to replace them with automation.

 

But the irony of that course of action would be that, in the case of Air France 447,  the fatal sequence of events started with the automation disconnecting because it could not cope, leaving the pilots to fly the aircraft without it.

 

 

The problems for this crew started when the autopilot and autothrottle tripped out,  and the aircraft's control system shifted out of normal law into alternate law.

 

In normal law, the crew have full, automatic flight-envelope protection.

In alternate law, the pilots themselves are entirely responsible for keeping the aircraft's flight within its safe performance envelope. Just like the old days.

 

Just, in fact, like most airliners still flying today.

 

The reason the automation tripped out is the GIGO principle that applies to all computing: Garbage In, Garbage Out.

 

An aircraft's automatics are designed to trip out when they recognise they're being fed unreliable data. Because if computers are fed incorrect data, their output will be incorrect, and this could lead to disaster.

 

So they hand over control to the pilots.

 

In Air France 447 this is where a minor technical problem became a major one, because of the pilots' misapprehension of what was going on and why.

 

That misapprehension was certainly not inevitable, but it was - and remains - a likely product of the way aeroplanes have changed, while airline pilot recurrent training has not evolved to take account of the differences in the modern flying task.

 

I maintain that what happened here is a symptom of the fact that the aviation system itself has already taken airline pilots out of the loop.

 

It didn't intend to, but that has been the effect.

 

When aeroplanes didn't have flight management systems, pilots had to work out their navigation and aircraft performance on paper. Planning a complex descent in difficult terrain while flying on instruments  would require a combination of mental arithmetic and the use of pages of tables in the flight manual, or the use of a circular slide rule, or both.

 

The effect of doing these things with raw data meant that the pilots were more mentally engaged in the aircraft's trajectory planning than they are now.

 

With the old system, they could still make mistakes, and many lost their lives through their mistakes, but they didn't come to grief by losing control of their aeroplanes.

 

Air France 447 was a loss of control, or lack of control accident. The acronym LOC covers them both, and the result is the same.

 

LOC is becoming a modern phenomenon. Before Air France 447, it had already become the biggest killer accident category.

 

Why?

 

Pilots have no need to do their detailed calculations and trajectory planning any more because the FMS computers are more accurate than anything they could do.

 

One effect of this is that pilots become passive recipients of  pre-packaged information, which is both accurate and intuitively presented, and thus seductively credible.

 

If it were ever to lie to you, it would lie so beautifully you would believe it.

 

The trouble is that, although pilots are given initial training in the mental skills needed to fly without automation,  modern flying on the line does not give them any practice at using these skills.

 

And because recurrent training doesn't provide the practice either, the mental skills atrophy, and so does the knowledge and awareness that practice confers.

 

It wouldn't matter that such skills should atrophy if an aircraft's automatics could be guaranteed never to fail or, as in the case of Air France 447, never to withdraw their services for good reason.

 

Unfortunately, computers will occasionally fail.

 

The task the airline industry faces is rebuilding the pilot skills that automation takes away from them.

 

Contrary to a lot of comment you will hear, this is not a function of the atrophying of manual motor skills, it is brain skills and awareness that is being lost.

 

I would qualify that statement about loss of manual skills by saying that flying on instruments is a skill that needs frequent practice, because it requires sophisticated cognitive skills.

 

But even in instrument flying, it is not the loss of motor skills that's the killer, it's the loss of that ability to recognise, believe, and understand what the instruments are telling you.

 

But the loss of these skills is being covered up by the cleverness and reliability of flight management systems and the autopilot/autothrottle systems that they direct.

 

Even the pilots don't know whether they've lost these skills or not.

 

They don't find out unless the automatics fail. And with the stress of a systems failure reducing your brain's capacity to take good decisions, that's a bad time to find out you no longer have the skills to cope.

 

Just a simple analogy for you about the loss of skills: I recently discovered I had forgotten how to do long division. I don't need that skill any more because my calculator has rendered it redundant.

 

But my life and the lives of those around me do not depend on these atrophied skills of mine.

 

Whereas a pilot's cognition of what's going on, gleaned from raw data sources when that's all there is left, is essential for survival.

 

The training regime pilots are required to undergo is the underlying cause of Air France 447.

 

The training regime is not set by the airlines, it is set by the world's civil aviation authorities. They have failed to update pilot training requirements to take account of the massive changes in the nature of an airline pilot's job with the arrival of modern, highly automated aircraft.

 

So it's the world's civil aviation authorities who, above all others, shoulder the responsibility for Air France 447, and for the eleven other loss-of-control flights since 2000.

 

Let me list them. And remember these have been the cause of 1,384 unnecessary deaths:

 

2010 Afriqiyah Airways A330-200, Tripoli airport approach, Libya

2010 Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-800, in the Mediterranean Sea near Beirut

2009 Yemenia Airbus A310-200, in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros Islands

2009 Air France A330-300, South Atlantic

2009 Caspian Airlines Tu-154M, Iran

2009 Colgan Air Dash 8 Q400, Buffalo, NY, USA

2008 Aeroflot Nord 737-500, Perm, Russia

2007 Adam Air Boeing 737-400, Java Sea near Sulawesi

2006 Armavia Airbus A320-200, Black Sea near Sochi 

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

2000 Gulf Air A320-200, Arabian Gulf near Bahrain 

2000 Crossair Saab 340B, Nr Zurich, Switzerland

This has to stop, and a modernised system of training for pilots that recognises how automation is causing essential skills to atrophy, is the only way of doing it.

 

 

 

 

EASA has just called a Loss of Control (LOC) conference in Cologne for 4-5 October.

 

Definitely better late than never. The Air France 447 accident suggests that no airline can consider itself free of the risk of loss of control if circumstances combine to confuse their pilots.

 

Meanwhile the French investigator (BEA) of the AF447 crash has shed new light on flight deck activity by publishing a transcript of flight deck conversation during the last few minutes. Tomorrow it will publish an English translation, but here is my understanding of it until they do.

 

The fact that AF447 crashed following a transient airspeed reading anomaly in an otherwise healthy aeroplane has always appeared to suggest the pilots failed to comprehend fully - and therefore to control - what was going on. The transcript reveals their total bewilderment about what was happening following autopilot/autothrottle disconnect.

 

When the captain departed the flight deck for his rest period, he did not give instructions as to the roles of the two copilots, according to the BEA. The copilot who remained in the right hand seat (RHS) took the role of pilot flying (PF) without actually making it explicit. The BEA notes that this lack of clarity about the roles of PF and pilot not flying (PNF) under these circumstances is unacceptable.

 

In the cruise, however, the PF was adjusting his weather radar range to identify storm clouds they would need to avoid, and discussing anti-icing precautions to apply in their vicinity. These are standard preoccupations for pilots in the inter-tropical convergence zone, and the action the pilots were taking shows they were awake despite the fact things were quiet and the time was 02:00h.

 

Then the speed sensor disparity, triggered by ice crystals in the pitot tubes, caused the autopilot/autothrottle to disconnect, and the calm was shattered. The control system shifted into alternate law, in which the aircraft loses its stall protection (but not stall warning). The PF said: "I have the controls."

 

The PF's initial reaction was to pull the stick back, putting the aircraft into a climb. Five seconds later there was a system-generated verbal warning of "stall, stall". The PF reacted with "What's that?" and the PNF replied "Stall". The PF's response was: "We haven't got a good...not a good...speed reading."

 

Moments later the PNF said: "We have lost the, the, the speeds then, autothrust engine lever thrust".

 

Meanwhile the aircraft was still climbing, the PF's stick still held back, the speed well below stalling speed, the throttles in the Climb detent, and power increasing to 100%.

 

The PNF then says: "We are losing...Wing anti-ice." He switched the anti-ice on, and two seconds later exclaimed - twice: "Pay attention to your speed", to which the PF replied: "Okay okay okay I will descend again," but in the next 15s or so the two pilots exchanged words indicating confusion about whether they were still climbing or had achieved descent.

 

But the aircraft was still, indeed, climbing, and the PF, despite temporarily relaxing the stick-back input, had resumed it.

 

Some 25s elapsed between the PNF warning the PF to "watch his speed" and the time that the aircraft starts to descend. But when it does, the aircraft's attitude is still between 6deg and 13deg nose-up, and at that vertical-speed reversal point the "stall, stall" warning returns, this time with the "cricket" sound as well. Five seconds later the crew moves the throttle levers from the Climb detent into TOGA (take-off/go-around) position to obtain full power.

 

No words are spoken by either of them for about 10s, the descent rate is increasing, and then the PNF says: "Above all avoid applying lateral [roll] control", to which the PF replies: "I'm in TOGA, eh?" and 18s later the PNF says: "We have the power, so what's going on?"

 

Nobody has mentioned the aircraft attitude so far. In fact no-one ever mentions it in a substantive way. The attitude is actually about 18deg nose up, which is the reason the engine power is not producing the results the crew expect to see. Vertical speed (descent) is still increasing dramatically, and the speed the pilots see is varying between 130kt and 160kt.

 

The PF says: "I don't have control of the aeroplane here. I have absolutely no control of the aeroplane." His stick input is on the nose-up and full-left stops. The attitude is nearly 15deg nose up and the roll angle is varying between 16deg right and 40deg right.

 

The PNF says: "Control to the left", and he takes control. He puts the stick fully left, then nearly full nose up. The Nos 1 and 2 angle of attack sensors have entered the "invalid" range, and the No 3 reads 33deg. The PF says: "I have the impression of high speed."

 

Probably slipstream noise.

 

At that moment the captain re-enters the flightdeck, and says: "What are you doing. What's going on? I don't know I don't know what's going on."

 

The stall warning sounds again, with the cricket sound.

 

The power levers are placed in the idle detent. The vertical speed is increasing through 14,800ft/min.

 

The airbrakes are deployed. 

 

For the remainder of the descent to impact with the sea, the verbal exchanges continued to indicate that none of the three pilots on the flight deck could understand what was going on sufficiently well to take effective recovery action. They appeared to be experimenting with different control positions, including introducing rudder inputs, but none of the pitch inputs to the sticks were nose-down except momentarily.

 

When the impact came, the sidestick on the left side had a nose-down and right-roll input, the right hand sidestick was on the nose-up stop with neutral roll input.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Here's a date for your diary: 8-9 September 2011. Flight International is running its Flight Safety Conference in London, and it's booking up fast with delegates and speakers from all over the globe.

The theme is improving operational risk management and the methods by which it can be achieved.

This includes everything from iPads on Alaskan flightdecks to the legendary Don Bateman on loss of control/lack of control, a subject that needed attention before AF447, but a risk from which no airline can assume it is immune since that accident.

And you get a chance to grill EASA on what it's currently working on.

And lots more: check the programme here.

This is the Flight Safety Conference that reaches the parts other operations seminars cannot reach.