Much to Learn From This Pilot's Account.....Is the 'Ship' Heading The Same Way?
(Once a trainee Fighter Pilot
myself, I remember learning flying from the very-2 basics & we flew
from the 'seats of our pants' with open cockpits. This appears to be
sadly missing ,particularly after the advent of computers. Remember, the
emergency landing of Airbus in Hudson River by an ex Air Force Fighter
Plot !)
Industry analysts
estimated last week that in the next 20 years, the airlines are going to
need 466,000 new pilots. When I said to an airline pilot friend that
such a job market would make it easy for his son to follow in his
footsteps, he smiled.
"I think he wants a flying job instead," he replied.
I noted that this sounded odd coming from a fellow who just flew a planeload of passengers back from overseas.
"I didn't fly," he replied. "The computer flew. I sat in the front office, monitoring systems."
"Who flies better," I asked, "you or the computer?"
"Oh, the computer," he
replied. "No contest, as long as things function. When they stop
functioning, it's a different story. Then the computer quits, and I go
to work. Provided I still remember how."
The dilemma isn't
new, but it's being discussed more and more frequently. Pilots don't fly
enough. They get rusty, and when they really need to call upon their
flying muscles, they find them either atrophied or insufficiently
developed in the first place. The symbol of
the problem has become Air France's Flight 447, an Airbus dropped by its
pilots into the ocean three years ago, according to a French inquiry's
final report released last month.
When a faulty speed
sensor made the autopilot quit, two co-pilots on the flight deck would
have needed to hand-fly their Airbus 330, established in cruise at
35,000 feet over the Atlantic, until the captain, who was taking his
scheduled nap, returned to the cockpit. Their task was to fly
straight and level for two or three minutes on instruments, with no
visual reference to the horizon, without reliable airspeed indication,
in light turbulence. They couldn't do it. By the time the captain came
back, the Airbus had stopped flying and was about a minute from
contacting the water.
In 1915, Arthur Roy
Brown, the flying ace credited with bringing down Manfred von
Richthofen, the Red Baron, had his pilot's license issued with six hours
of flight time. By comparison, even the least experienced pilot on
AF447 had 2,800 hours in his logbook. It isn't that today's pilots train
fewer hours; it's that the study of increasingly complex systems and
regulations compete for time and emphasis with flying skills. Airmanship
and command authority are being boxed in by petty rules, for the
comfort of lawyers and bureaucrats rather than to enhance operational
efficiency and flight safety.
Before leaving the
flight deck for his scheduled rest, the captain of Air France's
ill-fated Flight 447 was obliged, as part of his briefing, to ask his
relief pilot if he had a commercial pilot's license. Why would anyone
weigh down the captain's workload with such a query? Would an unlicensed
impostor say to the captain: "Crikey, skipper, I didn't know you needed
a license for this gig" or would he just lie and say: "Yes, sir."
The crew whose fate
it was to be flying Flight 447 had the necessary qualifications. The
problem was that they had them in their wallets, rather than in their
heads. Qualifications in wallets satisfy bureaucracies, but only qualifications in heads ensure the safety of a flight.
It was a "Thales"-type
speed sensor that iced up as the Airbus was skirting a thunderstorm high
above the South Atlantic. Air France, aware of the limitations of the
device, had just begun to replace the $3,500 units. It hadn't gotten
around to changing it in the ill-fated airplane before it departed Rio
de Janeiro for Paris on the night of June 1, 2009. Grounding the entire
Airbus fleet until all units were replaced may have cost only a fraction
of what the accident, investigation and lawsuits will end up costing
Air France, to say nothing of the tragic loss of 228 lives. Some
analysts argue, though, that turning all potential flaws into mandatory
"no go" items would make air transportation unaffordable.
The "Thales" sensors
were more susceptible to icing than other designs, but they didn't all
ice up, and the planes carrying those that did remained flyable and were
landed safely by their Air France crews. So were two other Airbus 330s
belonging to Paris-based Air Caraibes Atlantique. Only Flight 447 fell
into the ocean. One disaster is one too many, of course, but it was no
more an inevitable consequence than it would be for a blown tire to flip
a car.
Airspeed is crucial to flight. Too fast and the plane can break up; too slow and it can fall out of the sky. When airspeed indicators become unreliable, the computerized systems - autopilot and auto-throttles - quit.
On the Airbus, this is announced by the aural warning of a cavalry
charge, the computer's way of calling the human pilot to the rescue.
Aviation is full of
pithy sayings. One is that an airspeed sensor has no backup except
airmanship. Losing airspeed readings can range from a non-event to a
dire emergency depending on the pilot's skill and additional
circumstances. The autopilot quitting on AF447, as it was designed to
do after losing reliable airspeed indication, could and should have
been a non-event. It left an airworthy aircraft flying straight and
level in light turbulence. All Flight 447 needed was a pilot to fly it -
or just let the plane fly itself, which is what planes trimmed for
cruise flight tend to do in stable air, especially if their wings are
kept level - but, as the cockpit voice recorder revealed, there were no
pilots on the flight deck. There were two systems managers being
confronted by a system that suddenly had become unmanageable.
Real pilots would have
disregarded the rebellious computers going viral with flashing lights,
cavalry charges, buzzers and bells, huffily announcing all the things
they stopped doing for the humans aboard or required the humans to do
for them. They would have let the computers crash and concentrated on
flying the plane. The systems managers stopped flying and crashed with
their computers.
George Jonas | Jul 18, 2012
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