One of the surprising and possibly unexpected early recommendations coming out of the investigation of the recent Air France Airbus 330 crash is that training in certain basic piloting skills and the handling of unusual situations must be strengthened and improved. Excuse me? Have we already reached the stage where the pilots of a sophisticated aircraft like the 330 are left wondering what to do when the screens go blank or numbers no longer add up?
One accident, however tragic, is probably not enough to draw far reaching conclusions on this thorny issue. But it does pose a question in a different context: is the training of air traffic controllers any better and is it keeping up with developments in the cockpit?
It is an open secret in aviation that incidents occur here and there as a result of inadequate training, misunderstandings or unforeseen events. I still remember clearly when many years ago an aircraft that had just taken off from our mid-sized airport called a fire warning in one of the engines and announced that they were turning back to land on the opposite end of the runway they just took off from. We alerted the fire brigade and told them to scramble, aircraft with engine fire returning to land, 4 minutes to go. The person who took the call asked without apparently finding anything strange in the question: could you make them hold about 15 minutes? The units from the city fire station will not get here in 4 minutes… Disregarding for a moment why the airport fire brigade needed additional strength from the city, it was patently obvious that the guy answering the call had no idea what an engine fire meant and that what he was suggesting was total nonsense. His training clearly lacked a few important elements.
Then there was the El Al crash in Amsterdam… The pilot said “We lost an engine” and the controllers interpreted this as meaning one of the four engines of the 747 was inoperative. Not nice but hardly a reason for too much worry… All this time, the 747 was struggling to stay in the air with serious structural damage caused by the engine breaking off. There was no standard phraseology to use in cases like this…
A few years ago, talking to the commander of the emergency services at an airport near a place where aircraft make landfall after their ocean crossing, he described how they had to scramble in the last minute when aircraft that have declared an emergency hours before were coming in to land simply because vital information was not passed to them in time. Better procedures and more discipline would certainly have solved the problem…
Not so long ago a 737 sunk to ground near the runway in Amsterdam, apparently as a result of inappropriate crew reaction to what should have been a situation well within the capabilities of a well trained crew to handle.
Looking towards the future, there are certain developments that will potentially alter the way aircraft behave in response to certain events. Airbus is quite serious about building an auto-descent capability into its aircraft (possibly starting with the A350XWB) that will bring the plane down to a safe altitude should the crew be incapacitated as a result of oxygen starvation. There have been proposals to make aircraft intelligent enough to fly “home” and land automatically in case somebody tries to hijack them.
Trajectory based operations, with its very strong focus on trying to fly the optimum trajectory in most circumstances, will bring automated functions which are less radical than auto-descend or fly-home, but noticeable they will be for sure. Especially when something goes wrong…
In spite of the recent accidents and incidents, pilots continue to have an excellent safety record that is shared also by air traffic management and air traffic control within it.
But the incidents do show a need to be ever vigilant. Are we sure that all air traffic controllers are aware of how these modern aircraft work and how they differ from their earlier kin? In particular, are ATCOs able to properly identify and understand the consequences of certain anomalies a pilot may report and which may be very different from what we were used to on older, simpler aircraft? Is basic training and even more importantly, recurrent training taking care of imparting and maintaining this knowledge? Are new developments being watched to ensure that their details get into the training syllabus in time?
Before you answer with a resounding yes, think about the first recommendations of the Air France crash investigation…
Airbus and its Flight Control Laws are coming in for a lot of comment. Rightly so, but let’s not forget that aircraft accident rates are at an all-time low. Of course, it is always sad to lose any aircraft, and especially disappointing when the accident seems to be correctable by training, but overall, the advent of the more complicated aircraft seems to have resulted in more, not less, safety.
Whether that makes it right to try to automate ever more emergency procedures (e.g. emergency descent as you say) is another matter. Airbus are thinking of automating the TCAS RA response – I would prefer they looked at their dreadful TCAS display first!