David Learmount: August 2009 Archives

The following is a US-flavoured comment, but thoughtful and illuminating. It's penned by a senior US airline pilot who posts under the name Seaavi8tor, but he's real alright. Some of you will know him and his views.

You can read what he says here, but the following quote provides a flavour of his subject:

"In terms of inflation adjusted dollars, Airline pilots today earn less than half of what they did 35 years ago. The unit of work can be measured by flight hours, duty hours, hours away from home, Revenue Passenger Miles, Available Seat Miles, or most importantly, revenue generated per pilot."

His argument is that if you pay in peanuts you'll get monkeys, and this is what the airlines are inviting into their flightdecks.

I agree - many of them (not all) are doing just that. Especially American regionals, and look at what's been happening to their safety performance recently. Likewise US air taxis over a long period of time.

You'll find plenty in this blog on a related theme, including:

Don't marry an airline pilot (Part 2)

Piloting is going blue-collar

Spanish investigators have just released more information about the Spanair MD82 take-off accident at Madrid Barajas in August last year. If you remember, the crew attempted take off having omitted to set the flaps, and there was no take-off configuration warning to alert them to their mistake. The aircraft was destroyed and almost all on board were killed.

The new interim factual report makes it clear that three opportunities to prevent the tragedy were missed. Twice the crew were distracted during their pre take-off checks, and then there was a technical anomaly whereby tripping a circuit breaker to overcome a minor fault appears - unbeknown to the crew - to have disabled the take-off configuration warning.

In March we revealed a new NASA study that looked at more than 50 events in which crews had inadvertently taken off without setting flaps, and mostly they got away with it - just. NASA's purpose was to find out why it happened, and they did. In a Comment at the time, Flight International said: "Another of those uncanny studies has been produced. The type that produces a conclusion that - once you have read it - is so obvious that it's suddenly amazing the industry has not noticed why a clearly imperfect way of operating has been allowed to continue - since the Wright Brothers - to permit by default the fatal mistakes it does. Like unintended flapless take-offs."

What they "discovered" was that distractions and interruptions between pushback and take-off are legion. This, they say, should be taken seriously for what it is: a very uncongenial state of affairs during a safety-critical sector of the operation. There is no equivalent of the "sterile cockpit" pre take-off. The only reason why, presumably, we have ignored this fact is that it is far too obvious, and there is very little you can do about the R/T chatter on the ground frequency, that late clearance or departure amendment, the "cabin secure" report, etcetera ad infinitum.

But maybe there is. Just a new level of pilot awareness of the fact that the whole pre-take-off period is a minefield of distractions and - literally - an accident waiting to happen - would be a good start.

This subject is one of many that will be examined at the 2009 Flight International Crew Management Conference in London, 30 November-1 December, at which the theme is Pilot Best Practice .

Airbus is considering automating another pilot function when it introduces the A350.

Highly automated aircraft include all the airline types rolling off all production lines today.

But Airbus, a child of the digital age, is often tagged as being even more automated than Boeing. This perceived difference generates a lot of heat - but very little light - among pilot devotees of one or the other genre.

Aside from the genre issue, there is the pilot ego issue: automation is a tacit decision that the system can do "it" better than the pilot can. So of course it's going to generate heat.

But rather than slagging off one system or the other, maybe line pilots ought to be getting involved in the fundamental debate: is automation ever good? And if it ever is, what is it good for?

The latest Airbus wheeze (sorry if your English is not old fashioned English English) is to set up an automatic, laterally offset emergency descent in the event of a depressurisation to which the pilots do not react.

Remember Helios? Airbus quotes a generic scenario like Helios as justification for this potential system (not yet set in stone, so you have time to tell them what you think). If such a system had existed in that 737, a lot of people who died might be alive today. But, on the other hand, what might go wrong with the system itself?

What do you think?

Meanwhile, let's look at an accident that might have been prevented by automation, and another that looks as if it might have been triggered by it:

Cali: that highly complex American Airlines 757 accident in 1995 might have been avoided in its last seconds if the airbrakes had retracted automatically when the pilots firewalled the throttles. But they didn't retract and the aircraft hit a mountain ridge just below its peak.

Amsterdam Schiphol: according to the investigator's early reports into the Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800 crash, the trigger for the accident was an autothrottle system that "thought" the aeroplane had landed and retarded the throttles during the final approach. The crew didn't notice the airspeed loss until too late. The reason the autothrottle thought the aircraft had landed was that the radio altimeter was faulty, and was reading just below airfield elevation.

On the other hand, the throttles didn't retard when the TAM A320 actually landed at Sao Paulo's Congonhas airport in July 2007, and although there was an audio "retard, retard" alert, the crew didn't close both throttles. The aircraft overran and everybody on board was killed.

To automate, or not to automate? And if you do it selectively, when do you choose to do it?

Loss of control accidents are the world's new big killers since the installation of airborne terrain awareness warning systems (TAWS) dramatically reduced the numbers of controlled flight into terrain crashes.

The US FAA is considering mandating an upset recovery training programme for airline pilots. But what does it think is the best training method?

Right now the agency is looking at expensive airborne training, using Calspan variable-stability, semi-aerobatic Learjets. Airlines will not like the cost, given that, over decades, loss of control (LOC) accidents in which pilots played a part has not been a problem for US carriers.

But there have been a couple of high profile mishandling-induced LOC mishaps in the USA more recently - the Pinnacle Airlines Bombardier CRJ200 mishap in 2004 and the Colgan Air Q400 crash at Buffalo early this year - which have clearly worried the FAA. The fact that LOC might be in the frame as one of the factors in the Air France 447 loss may also be providing some impetus.

About this time last year I suggested reasons why marrying an airline pilot might not bring you the lifestyle you had in mind. Today David Nicholas, who frequently posts comments here, has kindly sent me a link to a human interest story on the BBC website - including a video - which rather backs up my thesis.

Two captains living in a trailer in a car park does not do much for the traditional image of the airline pilot. Maybe that's because the terms and conditions aren't what they once were for, say, a Braniff 747 Classic captain just before deregulation in the States.

But being a commercial airline pilot has never been only about the 1970s "Braniff skipper" sort of job - that was just the cream of the crop.

And there, sitting grinning in his RV (motor home), Capt Bob Poster still says he loves his job (see video in the link above), and is totally realistic about the way things are.

 But you can't say you haven't been warned