Airbus wants more manual
and monitoring skills in pilots
Ben Sandilands
http://blogs.crikey.com.au/planetalking/2014/06/28/airbus-wants-more-manual-and-monitoring-skills-in-pilots/
Airbus makes a case
for better hands on flying skills for pilots, starting with those
required for its forthcoming A350 series
Earlier this month
Airbus told a high level but low visibility safety conference in
America that the European plane maker was taking steps to overcome
the risks of pilots becoming too reliant on automated flight control
systems.
The only general media
report on this vital issue is
this one by Andy Pasztor on the Wall Street
Journal,
which begins by saying Airbus is revising its pilot training
priorities to emphasise manual flying skills more than ever.
In it William Tauzin,
director of international regulatory affairs for Airbus, says its
new A350 series of wide body jets will be the first on which the
re-emphasis on manual flying, as well as enhanced monitoring of the
circumstances and progress of every flight, will be found in the
approved training procedures.
The story quotes a
safety official for Qatar as saying the A350 training changes are
prompted by “ the growing realization that pilots are losing their
manual skills”.
Qatar Airways will be
the first to put the A350 design into service in the last quarter of
this year, as well as being its largest customer with 80 of the jets
on order.
Both men were speaking
in Washington DC days before the NTSB made its criticisms of the
flying skills and
failure to understand or correctly use automation
by the pilots of the Asiana Boeing 777-200ER
that crashed on landing at San Francisco airport last July.
Much more detail is
carried by the WSJ report, and a search for articles by Andy Pasztor
will bring up many reports he has filed on the automation issues in
the years since the Air France A330 disaster in the mid Atlantic in
2009, and the subsequent near loss of an Air France 777-300ER near
Charles de Gaulle airport more recently, although other serious
matters of competency and standards arise in each of these cases for
those who carefully and exhaustively study the official BEA reports
into them.
These issues are as
relevant to airline operations in this part of the world as anywhere
else. Air Asia X’s over reliance on automation was identified by
the ATSB as a serious factor in an incident involving one of its
A330s on approach to Gold Coast airport.
More recently a Jetstar
A320 whose pilots did not monitor the state of their approach to the
same airport found themselves hundreds of feet closer to the ground
than they should have been because of the entering of incorrect
barometric settings, even to the point of not seeing a systems alert
drawing attention to the error before a ground proximity warning
went off prompting a go around.
Other recent events in
which inadequate or not existent monitoring of crucial elements of
the conduct of a flight included a botched approach to Melbourne
airport by a Virgin Australian 777-300ER, which is a fourth
generation aircraft with flight envelope protections, and an
incident in which a third generation Virgin Australia 737 was left
too long in a mode in which the jet climbed to its intended altitude
while its air speed decayed toward minimum maneuvering speed,
causing the pilots to dive the jet to a lower altitude to recover
proper control speed.
These incidents and
others which are similar have given rise of numerous ATSB and NTSB
and European safety agency reports that reference a level of
complacency or misunderstanding of a newer generation of pilots and
their employers of the need to monitor, and intervene in manually,
where necessary, in the progress of a flight.
But is anyone in
airline managements in general paying attention? The writer has been
told directly and in no uncertain terms by three senior executives
in different Australian airlines in the past 12 years that
automation has made flying safer, so much so that pilots need to be
instructed to use it as much as possible to achieve leaner, better,
more efficient flight and save on wear and tear to engines and so
forth.
The statistics make
those points convincingly. Yet disasters like Asiana at SFO show
that when for whatever reason automation is relied upon to cover for
a crappy approach to a landing, or fails to work as intended for
whichever reason, it means that this dependency has taken the
aircraft to a place where only an alert and manually skilled pilot
or pilots can bring it back.
When they fail to
realise where the flight is, or to bring it back, the loss of life
can be massive, and the damage to an airline’s brand value and
reputation can take longer to repair than it may have the cash
balances needed to survive or restructure.
Plane Talking
has seen the
Airbus presentation.
What stands out in that
presentation, and which wasn’t underlined in the WSJ report, is the
renewed emphasis that the European plane maker wants to see
reflected in an improved regulatory environment on the monitoring or
‘resilience’ skills of pilots working together in an effective
cockpit culture to remain alert to and able to respond to those rare
moments that are the equivalent of your computer suddenly showing
the blue screen of death (Windows) or revolving beachball of Doom
(any Apple computer above OSX 10.6.8).
This isn’t a matter of
concern to Airbus alone. Those who follow the safety writing of
David Learmount at Flightglobal will know that Boeing has been
proactive and convincing in voicing its concerns about a loss of
manual flying skills among pilots, notwithstanding its differences
in approach to the applications of automation compared to its main
competitor.
There is a narrative
those who follow airlines will have picked up that the legacy costs
of old fashioned flying cultures are both too high and in the light
of improved automation, unnecessary today.
It is a narrative,
which if not sensibly and constructively and responsibly corrected,
ends in butchery.
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