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Aviation History
2004
2004-09 - 2120.PDF
FULL LIST OF READER SERVICE & ADVERTISER CONTACTS - P7I EDITORIAL +44 (20) 8652 3842 Quadrant House, The Quadrant, Sutton, Surrey SM2 5AS, UK Fax +44 (20) 8652 3840 email flight.international@rbi.co.uk Editor Murdo Morrison +44 (20) 8652 4395 mnrdo.morrison@rbi.co.uk Editorial Assistant Andrew Costerton +44 (20) 8652 3835 andrew.costerton@rbi.co.uk News Editor Andrew Doyle +44 (20) 8652 3096 andrew.doyle@rbi.co.uk Commercial Aviation Editor Max Kingsley-Jones +44 (20) 8652 3825 max.kingsley.jones@rbi.co.uk Defence Editor Craig Hoyle +44 (20) 8652 3834 craig.hoyte@rbi.co.uk Operations/Safety Editor David Learmount •44 (20) 8652 3845 david.learmount@rbi.co.uk Business & General Aviation Editor Kate Sarsfield +44 (20) 8652 3885 kate.sarsfield@rbi.co.uk Senior Reporter Justin Wastnage +44 (20) 8652 3S6ijustin.wastnage@rbi.co.uk Technical Reporter Rob Coppinger +44 (20) 8652 3843 rob.coppinger@rbi.co.uk Spaceflight Correspondent Tim Furniss +44 (1237) 477883 tim@spaceport.co.uk Senior Technical Artist Giuseppe Picarella +44 (20) 8652 M54joe.picarella@rbi.co.uk Editorial Artist Tim Brown +44 (20) 8652 8043 tim.brown@rbi.co.uk EUROPE/MIDDLE EAST Israel Correspondent Arie Egozi +972 (3) 9413132 Middle East Correspondent Gerald Butt Russia Correspondent Vladimir Karnozov mr00079@east.ru AMERICAS Washington DC Office Fax +1 (703) 836 8344 Americas Editor Graham Warwick +1 (703) 836 3448 graham.warwick@rbi.co.uk East Coast Editor Stephen Trimble +1 (703) 836 3084 stephen.trimble@rbi.co.uk West Coast Editor Guy Norris +1 (949) 252 8971 Fax +1 (949) 252 8972 guy.norris@rbi.co.uk Brazil Correspondent Jackson Flores Jr +55 212439-6062 Fax +55 212349-6090 fubar@uol.com.br Canada Correspondent Brian Dunn ASIA/PACIFIC Singapore Office Fax +65 6789 7575 Regional Managing Editor Nicholas lonides +65 6780 4311 nicholas.ionides@rbi.co.uk Deputy Asia Editor Brendan Sobie +65 6780 4309 brendan.sobie@rbi.co.uk Regional Reporter Leithen Francis +65 6780 4314 ieithen.francis@rbi.co.uk Australia Civil Aviation Correspondent Emma Kelly +61 (8) 9454 4987 emmajkelly@bigpond.com Associate Editor (Defence) Peter La Franchi +61419246620 Fax+61 (2) 62312795 nulka@ozemail.com.au EDITORIAL PRODUCTION Group Production Editor Graeme Osborn +44 (20) 8652 3828 Group Art Editor James Mason +44 (20) 8652 4994 Chief Sub-Editor Chris Thornton +44 (20) 8652 4997 Deputy Production Editor +44 (20) 8652 3850 Sub Editor Simon Rees +44 (20) 8652 3848 Photographer Mark Wagner +44 (20) 8944 5225 WWW.FLIGHTINTERNATIONAL.COM Webmaster Sheena Buchanan +44 (20) 8652 4432 webmaster@fligbtinternational.com SUBSCRIPTIONS +44 (1444) 445454 rbi.subscriptions@rbi.co.uk THE FLIGHT COLLECTION kim.hearn@rbi.co.uk © and Database Rights 2004 Reed Business Information Ltd. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission in writing of the publishers OMyMw AVsoft, part of The Flight Group, is a producer of ^Gr^5^#F | computer-based aviation market information systems and safety management software. Tel: +441788 540898 email: sales9avsoft.co.uk www.avsoftxo.uk /l"/"* J Air Transport Intelligence (ATI), Flight Internationat'ssister j~\J J online service at www.rati.com, contains the full text of Flight ^—^^m International and Airline Business since 1996. Full text of the magazines can also be found online with Lexis-Nexis, Dialogue, FT Profile, IAC and Reuters. Editor Kieran Daly +44 (20) 8652 3837 Reed Business Information COMMENT Back to the LOFT Fuel leaks, like many systems failures, are rare events, but pilots have to cope with them. And they need help from manufacturers and trainers Now that the full story of the Air Transat "glider" incident in 2001 has been released, the Portuguese investigators have given the avia tion world plenty to think about. It is not the main points of the story that make the differ ence here - those were known soon after the Airbus A330's impressive gravity-powered arrival at Lajes air force base, Azores in August 2001. It is the minutiae of how it all worked that provides food for thought. The aircraft actually worked exactly as it was designed to do from the time the maintenance- caused leak began - insidiously, but quickly - to deprive the A330 of fuel. But the question the inquiry quite reasonably asked was: why was this process insidious? Why did the air craft's sophisticated and - by current standards - intuitive warning system not spell out to the crew that there was a fuel leak? The system provided plenty of clues that all was not well, but no warnings as such. The process of If pilots see line- oriented f lightcrew training as a test, it has failed tracking the clues back to the cause remains, in many state-of-the-art cockpits, a matter of detective work of the type that flight engineers used to be best qualified to practise. But since flight engineers have been replaced by com puters, the computers had better start doing what the flight engineers did best - talking to the pilots in their own language to explain what seems to be wrong. It is clear that it would be difficult, or impossi ble, to design a total aircraft fuel system that would detect fuel escaping from any point within it, so the answer has to lie in an exten sion to the existing system that detects fuel usage/quantity anomalies. Airbus has already reacted to this with a modification that means the electronic centralised aircraft monitor now provides an alert to the pilots that a discrep ancy is developing between the fuel on board and the rate of fuel use by the engines. The most probable cause for the rapid development of such a discrepancy is a fuel leak. The prob lem then - and here the crew would still have to revert to detective work - is to find out where the leak is, so they can isolate it. That is when the crew should, according to standard proce dure, go to the quick-reference checklist (QRC). This is what the Air Transat crew failed to do when the ECAM warned them there was a fuel imbalance, with far less fuel in the right wing tanks than the left. They carried out the fuel crossfeed procedure without reference to the QRC, and so missed the "caution note" that if a fuel leak is suspected, they should go straight to the page for fuel leaks. In the fuel leaks procedure, if the location of the leak is not known, the crossfeed valve should not be opened. The trouble is, the crew had their attention diverted for nearly an hour before the fuel imbalance advisory was presented because they were preoccupied with unusual, but not critical, engine oil readings. So the ECAM raw fuel readings and the rapidly dropping fuel-at- destination values available via the multi-purpose control display unit had received less attention than they normally would. Crew preoccupation with a non-critical issue while a serious threat develops unnoticed has brought down many aircraft. Accident reports often turn to pilot training for the solution in their recommendations, and the report on the Air Transat glider is no exception. The Portuguese investigators recommend that flightcrew oper ating manuals and checklists should "contain adequate information related to fuel-leak situa tions". That is fair enough, but they add that airlines should "review flightcrew training pro grammes to ensure they adequately prepare crews to diagnose and take appropriate actions to mitigate the consequences of fuel-leak events". Fuel leaks are rare. Pilot recurrent training - logically - tends to focus on the more likely events, especially those that are critical and require instant action. Incorporating unlikely occurrences in training could divert attention from the higher risks. The solution is well-man aged line-oriented flightcrew training (LOFT). This is not a new idea, but neither is it a part of all airlines' training programmes. In LOFT, crews "fly" long, "normal" sectors in a simulator or advanced flight-training device, and are trained in systems failures, including those that are rarer and more difficult to solve. "Trained" is the operative word. If crews see LOFT as a test, it has failed. If a systems failure is rare and solving it complex, crews will need retrain ing in it, and as systems become more reliable and real failures rarer, LOFT will become the main method for pilots to reinforce their theo retical systems learning and practise dealing with the problems that may never happen, but with which they have to be familiar. SEE AIR TRANSPORT P12 www.flightinternational.com FLIGHT INTERNATIONAL 26 OCTOBER - 1 NOVEMBER 2004 3
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