FlightGlobal.com
Home
Premium
Archive
Video
Images
Forum
Atlas
Blogs
Jobs
Shop
RSS
Email Newsletters
You are in:
Home
Aviation History
1997
1997 - 1488.PDF
MILITARY SAFETY Disregard of procedures led this USAF CT-43A to crash on an approach to Dubrovnik, Croatia ment policy, he reveals, and the USAF has insti tuted what it calls "operational risk-manage ment," which was a concept developed by the US Army (Flight International, 24-20 April 1996, Military flight safety review, P34). The US Army studied the accidents for particular types to determine on what kind of operation and at what stage accidents most often happen. This gave it an ability to assess the level of risk involved in any given operation so that mea sures could be taken to reduce the risk. The sys tem worked for US Army helicopter operations, so it is extending the concept to other areas. Peacock-Edwards points out that the RAF's definition of flight safety is based on the con cept of maximising operational capability by minimising the risk, but that the RAF has not implemented a formal risk-management pro gramme as such. He has, he says, talked to Singapore and the USA about their risk-man agement programmes and, in due course, this will probably lead to an RAF policy. This, he says, is the sort of benefit which international military seminars bring. NEXT STEPS Peacock-Edwards comments that experiences across all the air forces tend to be similar in that they have seen a general downward trend in accident rates, but that the improvement now appears to have "bottomed out" and, since costs are goingup, the significance of individual acci dents is heightened. "We are now focusing our attention on what we can do to get die accident rates to start going down again," he says. CRM is seen increasingly as one of the means of driving accident rates down. Peacock- Edwards prefers to call it TRM, or team resource management, and it is being imple mented by the Australians, Dutch, Norwegians and several of the USAF commands. The RAF has now not only completed its studies on how- to use CRM, but has made it an integral part of its whole training system from the start. Peacock-Edwards comments that "people aren't even aware that they're getting it as such". Martin Henshaw, formerly with the RAF and now a consultant taken on by the RAF to help design CRM into the system, explains why the military have apparently lagged behind the air lines in its implementation. "It is not a question of the RAF" being lag- gardly. Teamwork and leadership have always been very much more a part of air force training than it was in airline training," he says. Peacock- Edwards sees TRM as a means of making peo ple more interactive, so that if an error-chain starts to build up, it becomes more likely that someone will not only see it but act to interrupt the chain. The USAF has reported that in 1996 it suf fered 27 "Class A mishaps", including 20 air craft destroyed, the lowest number ever. A Class A mishap involves fatalities, damage of over $1 million, or destruction of the aircraft. The mishap rate was 1.25 per 100,000 flying hours, the second-best behind the surprising 1.11 rate in 1991, a year which included the Gulf War. In the fighter/attack class, there were 16 Class As and a mishap rate of 2.16, significantly down on 1995's rate of 2.56. In comparison, the USAF Class A mishap total for 1995 was 32, with air craft destroyed in 29 of the cases, and 1995's overall mishap rate was 1.4. In 1996, however, there were several high- visibility aircraft losses, including the CT-43A (military Boeing 737) crash on 3 April, 1996, in Croatia which took 35 lives, the loss of a Lockheed U-2R in Oroville, California, on 7 August 1996, and the crash of a Lockheed Martin C-130H Hercules in Wyoming in which nine were killed. Lockheed Martin F-16s had the most Class A mishaps during 1996, and all were destroyed. Godsev ascribes the high F-16 losses to the fleet size, mission numbers and the single-engine configuration. He says that safety measures put in place include CRM and a leadership safety initiative in which commanders are made accountable for accidents. "People held accountable for their actions will think twice before they allow deviations from rules they are supposed to be following," explains Godsey, who has also initiated an F-16 fleet operational- risk management (ORM) programme to be in place by 1 October 1998. The crash of a Fairchild A-10 attack aircraft based at Davis-Montham AFB, Arizona, in April is not listed on the Class A mishap list for this year. This was an aircraft which had left its formation and disappeared for some weeks, until it was found crashed into a snow-covered mountainside. "That was not an aircraft acci dent," Godsey says. "The evidence we have so far...the change in altitude, the manoeu vring...allows us to stop a safety investigation and open a legal investigation.. .We believe this was an illegal act [on the part of the pilot]. We have highly reliable witnesses who saw the air craft manoeuvring. An unconscious pilot could not have done those things." LESSONS FROM CROATIA Godsey points out that the Croatian CT-43A CFIT accident near Dubrovnik was a lesson in how not to do almost everything, providing a list of errors, including failure to get proper clearance for the flight, inadequate flight-plan ning, inadequate on-board navigational aids, a crew whose instrument flying skills were found wanting, and disregard of basic safety rules about minimum safe altitudes, minimum descent heights and making preparations for a missed-approach. Godsey concludes: "We have rules and regu lations that people are ignoring, and we need to take a new look at instrument training proce dures." The USAF has now commissioned an independent group to examine its instrument training at all levels from basic to biennial recur rent courses. Godsey is a firm believer in pooling knowl edge and exchanging views at all levels. Poor communication, Godsey believes, was a factor in the Dubrovnik accident. The CT-43's oper ating command, USAF (Europe), had not insti tuted a CRM programme at that time. "They have now," says Godsey, emphasising: "If it had been in place it would have helped because it is obvious that the two pilots in the cockpit were not working together." Perhaps CRM and TRM should be elevated to GRM: global-resource management. Godsey sums up the communications issue neatly: "We're doing a lot, we're learning a lot from other people, but we're also sharing what we're doing with other people. • 40 FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 4 - 10 June 1997
Sign up to
Flight Digital Magazine
Flight Print Magazine
Airline Business Magazine
E-newsletters
RSS
Events
