FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1963
1963 - 2029.PDF
FLIGHT International, 21 November 1963 AIR COMMERCE... TALKING SAFETY More Summaries from the Symposium Last week we published three of the papers presented at the Flight Safety Committee's London symposium on air safety on October 31. Here are three more; others will follow in subsequent issues. AN AIRCRAFT MANUFACTURER'S VIEW By D. Keith-Lucas, MA, MIMechE, FRAeS* THE manufacturer's prime responsibility is to produce a reliable and safe aeroplane. Unfortunately, fail-safe techniques such as the duplication of services, while contributing to greater safety, tend to degrade reliability. The manufacturer must strive to make every single piece as reliable as possible but with the complexity of modern aircraft this is a major task. On the design side the solution probably lies in greater specializ ation including the appointment of reliability engineers. The biggest source of unreliability is, however, in the equipment. The tendency today is for the aircraft manufacturer to take a more active respons ibility for the equipment and to write detailed specifications for the design and testing of each component. One of the greatest problems is that the manufacturer is one stage removed from operational experience of his products and has to rely on feed-back of information from the operator. The operator on the other hand cannot always know which facts are of importance to the manufacturer. There is therefore a case for a compulsory, all-embracing defect reporting system. But there are drawbacks: it is cumbersome and hides important facts in a mass of irrelevancies. Mere statistics of failure rates are of little help to the manufacturer. He must have an analysis of the causes if he is to put matters right. In the military field the position is very unsatisfactory and a complete overhaul of the system is wanted. It is suggested that when a new type enters service, a "de-bugging" contract should be placed on the manufacturer allowing him, with the station engineer officer, to rectify the mechanical faults which are bound to occur and to re-order spares up to a certain financial limit. It is essential that the manufacturer and operator should willingly share the responsibility and the blame. It is impossible to achieve safety by a system of passing the buck. This spirit of co-operation can be fostered by the sharing of experience as is done by the Flight Safety Committee. Focus is the means of sharing that experience more widely. We all want Focus to give us more details on our own subjects and less on everybody else's. It is up to us, the readers, to tell the editor what we want and to provide him with material. Finally, we must recognize that there is a conflict between safety and economics and between safety and progress. If the early Pioneers had thought only of safety there would have been no aviation. We must still be pioneers and if we take no risks there will be no future for aviation. Surely it is our duty never to subject Pilot or passengers to an unnecessary risk but, equally, we must never shirk a necessary one. A FLIGHT DECK ]—By Capt D. J. Turner VIEW ^R TRAFFIC CONTROL exists to avoid collisions jtand to xpedite and maintain an orderly flow of traffic. At peak periods at on Airport delays may exceed an hour, and thus it seems na ble to'seek ways of streamlining procedures. Wnical Director, Short Bros & Harland Ltd. 831 The Air Information Service briefing room at London contains three wall charts covering the UK, America and Europe. Here are displayed warnings of military activities hazardous to civil aircraft— as many as 300 of them—some of which ignore the presence of civil airways. Civil flying and military exercises should be rigidly separated, or the onus for safety placed solely on the military authority—not on the civil pilot. In the UK there are 11 danger areas that infringe airways or advisory routes, and another 12 adjoin without a safety buffer area between. Notams and Bulletins are contained in no less than 39 trays, advices of work in progress at airports and unserviceability of modern airports, and any hazardous obstruction is radioed to the pilot by the controller. Thus briefing advices should be kept to a minimum commensurate with air safety, with the greater oppor tunity for the pilot to remember them. Before departure the controller radios the pilot his flight clearance in full, which is then repeated back by the pilot. As the initial routes are common to most flights, standard departure clearances should be used. The pilot receives a copy of numbered standard routes; his clearance is then reduced to "Route Number One or Two Flight Level One Eight Zero," allowing controllers more time to specify non-standard routes. Our airways and associated procedures should be modernized, so that a pilot does not have to report his position—as frequently happens—every 5min. Radio aids should identify every reporting point, and if these must be over sea, the pilot should have an area- coverage navigation aid so that he knows where he is, not merely where he has been and where he is going to. Data transfer systems could keep the controller advised of the progress of each aircraft, and reduce the numerous radio exchanges between controllers and pilot, and return surveillance radar to its correct role of safety monitor. It is also over used as a means of collision avoidance, when an airborne system would ensure such warning was always available to the pilots, especially in regions beyond radar coverage. There should be international agreement on civil airways, on flying rules and the responsibilities of controllers; weather broad casts should be in the form most convenient for pilots; approach procedures should be simplified and standardized. In all these things air safety depends upon the ability of the average pilot to follow safely the procedures laid down. No longer is the pilot the paramount figure in aviation, and the initiative for its development now lies largely in the hands of the administrator and scientist. Indeed the average pilot is seldom encouraged to express an opinion, yet there is a duty to all of us engaged in civil aviation to encourage everyone to take a full interest and play his part in the constant effort to maintain the maximum safety by every means. 2—By Capt D. F. O'Sullivan AVIATION risk criteria are decided by experimental and mathe matical means. Once such criteria are determined a risk level can be determined which can be enforced by regulation. Any action which subsequently provides an operation below the established risk level can be regarded as unsafe. Many actions which produce operations at a lower safety level than the regulated criterion are not carried out with the deliberate intention of producing anything unsafe but for motives which appear at the time to be worthy ones. They become unworthy when subjected to a clinical examination and can often be shown to be no more than an extension of normal personality deficiencies. Per sonality deficiencies in normal business may be defensible but where they cause a dilution of flight safety they must be recognized and eradicated. A rational approach must be made to accident pre vention, not a rationalized excuse for accident cause. Some actions, apart from errors of judgment, are mistakes. Mistakes on the flight deck, either the wild and inexplicable mistake or the wrong reaction to stimulus, can be disastrous. There is a need for research into the psychological reasons for the freak error and a more definite approach to the error produced by poor cockpit design or inefficient training. The cockpit is a clearing house for information. Using this information pilots perform tasks. The nature of the performance is directly related to the quality of the information provided. The quality of some of the information that pilots have to use is appal lingly bad. Perhaps the largest single area where improvement must come is in ground-based navigational aids. The situation is
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
