ho trovato questo interessante testo nella rete e condivido con chi abbia il piacere di leggerlo...
I think this is worth reading for those who haven't read it already.
“We cannot afford pilots and the technology failing together! If we only look at the pilots – the human factor – then we are ignoring other important factors, we have to look at how they work together.” (US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger)
Des Barker – Airnews, Dec, 2011.
In Typical melodramatic fashion, the media, through Yahoo News, had a “full go”, without a proper understanding of the issues and, in an article published by Associated Press, the question was posed: “Are Airline Pilots Forgetting How To Fly?”
The article started with: “As planes become ever more reliant on automation to navigate crowded skies, safety officials worry there will be more deadly accidents traced to pilots who have lost their hands-on instincts in the air.
“Hundreds of people have died over the past five years in ‘loss of control’ accidents in which planes stalled during flight or got into unusual positions that pilots could not correct. In some cases, pilots made the wrong split-second decision, with catastrophic results, for example, steering the plane’s nose skyward into a stall instead of down to regain stable flight,” the article claimed.
FAA CONCERNS.
Is there any substance to the media concerns?
“Spurred on in part by federal regulations that require greater reliance on computerised flying, the airline industry is suffering from automation addiction,” said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chairman of a Federal Aviation Administration committee on pilot training.
“We’re seeing a new breed of accidents with these state-of-the-art planes.”
“Pilots use automated systems to fly airliners for all but about three minutes of a flight: the takeoff and landing. Most of the time pilots are programming navigation directions into computers rather than using their hands on controls to fly the aircraft. They have few opportunities to maintain their skills by flying manually,” Kay’s advisory committee warned.
The AP article continued: “Fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the US over the past decade. However, The Associated Press interviewed pilots, industry officials and aviation safety experts who expressed concern about the implications of decreased opportunities for manual flight, and reviewed more than a dozen loss-of-control accidents around the world.”
“Airlines and regulators discourage or even prohibit pilots from turning off the autopilot and flying planes themselves,” the Kay advisory committee said. “Safety experts say they’re seeing cases in which pilots who are suddenly confronted with a loss of computerised flight controls don’t appear to know how to respond immediately, or they make errors – sometimes fatally so.”
PROBLEM DEFINITION.
A recent FAA study found serious flaws in pilot training for handling automation and suggested that flight crew had never been properly trained for operating highly automated aircraft, and that for many of the problems, they had to deal with there were no checklists, leaving the pilots to manage using ingenuity and airmanship.
Inadequate crew knowledge of automated systems was a factor in more than 40% of acdcidents and 30% of serious incidents between 2001 and 2009. Presenting progress in her research, FAA human factors specialist, Dr. Kathy Abbot, catalogued the evidence of disharmony between crews and their highly automated aircraft.
Among the recurring handling problems pilots demonstrated, included lack of recognition of autopilot/auto-throttle disconnect; lack of monitoring and failure to maintain energy/speed; incorrect upset recovery and inappropriate control inputs.
Abbot delivered the judgement: “Failure assessment is difficult; failure recovery is difficult, and the failure modes were not anticipated by the designers.”
The FAA study also found that pilots sometimes “Abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems.”
Because these systems are so integrated in today’s aircraft, one malfunctioning piece of equipment, or a single bad computer instruction, can suddenly cascade into a series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to rely on the equipment.
The study examined 46 accidents and major incidents, 734 voluntary reports by pilots and others, as well as data from more than 9 000 flights and found that, in more than 60% of accidents and 30% of major incidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the aircraft or made mistakes with automated flight controls.
The question that begs asking is, however:
“Is there anyone out there in the aviation community, the pilots, aircraft design engineers, test pilots, line pilots and civil aviation regulators who has noticed the irony of aviation’s technological advances over the last 107 years of powered flight?”
The problem stems from the fact that smart avionics, smart aerodynamics and smart flight control systems have made modern aircraft a lot easier to fly and consequently pilot workload has decreased significantly to the extent that the ‘pilot out of the loop’ philosophy increasingly poses a threat to piloting skills decay and situational awareness.
ENGINEERING INNOVATION.
It is no secret that engineers seized upon the fickleness of pilot judgement to deliberately design “pilot error” out of the cockpit. The universally accepted 72% of accidents attributed to MAN, spurred engineers on to introduce automation technology into the cockpit to ameliorate pilot handling and judgement inadequacies.
A real relevant question: “Is automation error going to be the new human factors contribution to accident statistics?”
There is no doubt that innovative engineering and technological advances have increased aviation efficiency and safety at a higher rate than any of the other sciences, but how we are actually directing the benefits and the training of this technology gain, should be a concern to all.
Over the years, regulators have exercised their mandate in directing safety conventions in accordance with their existing knowledge and experience. But, with aviation worldwide facing a revolution in technological affairs, it would appear that the influence thereof is beyond the scope of current aviation community’s comprehension.
One could say that engineers have led pilots to a place where a trust in technology has overwhelmed a faith in the ability of the pilots to recover from a “bad situations” and, to a certain extent, the pilots themselves are complicit in this situation; the luxury of automation is turning pilots into “better informed” passengers with inadequate physical cues to handle emergency situations in some cases.
Very little seems to made of the fact that engineers have not yet succeeded in designing zero defect equipment and their backup of quadruple redundancies statistically reducing failure to better than 10/9, have not lived up to expectations in the real world.
AVIATION COMMUNITY ROLE.
Other prudent questions: Do the aircraft manufacturers and regulators understand that pilot training has not kept up with technological innovation?
In fact, do the test pilots understand that the engineering innovation and advances in automation that they have Released-to-Service, have out-paced the existing training regiments?
And training captains – have they interrogated the impact and influence of automation on their pilot’s abilities to deal with the complex permutation of automation idiosyncrasies?
Do ‘line pilots’ even bother to consider the impact of automation and modern systems on their handling skills and situational awareness? It is doubtful. What has , in fact, happened is that the aviation community at large has just accepted automation as the progressive way forward as the key to solving human shortcomings in dealing with judgement and psychomotor issues.
However, very slowly, the pilot community worldwide is being alerted to the threat of automation; several recent accident investigations have concluded that automation and its concomitant addiction effects are more regularly being classified as a contributory factor to accident causal factors.
In fact, several airline training captains worldwide are beginning to voice their concerns at the lack of basic situational awareness and “below par” handling capabilities appearing in the cockpits. In several accident cases, the causes could be traced back to pilot’s inadequate “hands-on” abilities or loss of situational awareness operating the latest generation aircraft.
Coupled to the adverse effects of innovative technologies on pilot’s handling skills, the over-emphasis for “paper licences” by civil aviation authorities, without an equivalent focus on handling skills and decision making, by the transfer of such knowledge from classroom to cockpit, has lead many “old hands” to question the future of manned aviation.
The removal of stalling and spinning from the basic flying training syllabus as a mandatory basic handling requirement, has been debated for many years and is being accepted by civil aviation authorities in many cases. Not their fault, but engineers, offering an improvement to aviation accident safety statistics through stall and spin free handling qualities in their latest products, are in fact, indirectly producing handling-deficient pilots.
The resultant question is: Are pilots with a lack of recognition of high angle of attack characteristics and low confidence in handling aircraft at high angles of attack, the cause of accidents that should never have occurred?
CASE STUDIES.
Without being judgemental, the loss of the Air France Flight 447 Airbus over the Atlantic in 2009, saw, over a time span of four minutes, a series of twenty-four ACARS messages sent automatically, indicating among other speed measurement inconsistencies, the disconnection of the autopilot and the airplane going into ‘alternate law’ flight control mode which happens when multiple failures of redundant systems occur. Altogether 228 people died.
The loss of major systems left the pilots with information overload. Latest draft versions of the accident investigation allude to the pilots losing situational awareness and lacking in the ability and basics to fly “attitude and power” in an effort to “keep the shiny side up.”
The simple failure of a radio altimeter led to the delayed attempts at stall recovery of the Turkish Airlines’ Boeing 737 Flight 951 in which investigators’ preliminary report confirmed that the pilots allowed the automatic systems to decelerate the aircraft to a dangerously low speed as it approached Schiphol Airport.
With very late detection and pilot response at 450 feet agl, the pilots scrambled to accelerate out of the stall before it crashed to the ground, killing the three flight deck crew and six others on board. The radio altimeter had informed the automatic flight system that the aircraft was eight feet below the surface when it was still nearly 2 000 feet in the air which caused the auto-throttle to pull back the power to idle, as if the plane were touching down.
The Amsterdam incident was at least the fourth over a 13-month period in which pilot error caused an airliner to stall and crash. The accident findings intensified the debate over the dangers of pilots losing their basic flying skills as a result of relying on the sophisticated electronics that control airliners through most of their flights.
Boeing was prompted to issue an unusual world-wide alert covering procedures that already should be second nature to aviators: “to carefully monitor primary flight instruments during critical phases of flight” such as takeoffs and landings.
There should be no intention of turning the issue into a “Manual flying versus automation flying” or “Airbus versus Boeing” debate.
Collectively we will have to capitalise on the tragic accidents which indicate a need for more robust flying skills and level of technical understanding without leaving the old basics of flying out of the technological surge in aircraft systems.
IS THE THREAT REAL?
Is engineering getting ahead of, and out of synch with the pilot’s abilities and regulator knowledge? Could the advanced technologies instituted to ameliorate human shortcomings turn out to be a bigger threat to safety than the human factor? Are test pilots the missing link that can close the “technology handling gap” by introducing appropriate procedures and processes?
Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, appears to think so. “The ability of pilots to respond to the unexpected loss or malfuncion of automated aircraft systems is the big issue that we can no longer hide from in aviation. We’ve been very slow to recognise the consequence of it and deal with it. Airline training programmes are focused on training pilots to fly with the automation, rather than without,” he said. “Senior pilots, even if their manual flying skills are rusty, can at least draw on experience flying older generations of less automated planes,” he pointed out.
“Airlines are also seeing smaller incidents in which pilots waste precious time repeatedly trying to restart the autopilot or fix other automated systems when what they should be doing is “grasping controls and flying the airplane”, said Bob Coffman, another member of the FAA pilot training committee and an airline captain. “We need to encourage pilots to do that and not rely 100% on the automation.”
Locally, the issue of “Automation Addiction” was intensely deliberated and debated upon at the International Aerospace Seminar of South Africa held in Centurion recently, during which it was concluded that the rapid pace of engineering innovation held the potential for a regression in pilots’ handling skills and situational awareness. But, there is no going back on technology – that would be impractical and unrealistic, given the significant contribution of technology to aviation safety.
The threat, however, is real. Automation is getting ahead of, and out of synch with, the pilot’s abilities and regulator knowledge; advanced technologies instituted to ameliorate human deficiencies could turn out to be a bigger threat to safety than the human factor.
The pertinent question is: How to deal with the challenges of integrating human factors with automation?
Certainly, a compromise solution would require a more closely integrated effort between design engineers, test pilots, line pilots and regulators to close the loop of understanding the impact of technological innovation on the fickleness on the human psyche.
THE WAY FORWARD?
The biggest question is: How do we, as aviators, help the regulators and other decision makers that ultimately create standard operating procedures, to understand the complexities of the challenge facing aviation into the future?
It is not unexpected that the highly successful course the industry has been on for the last 25 years is in need of an adjusting to the “revolution in technological affairs.”
That adjustment needs to reconsider the human interface and ensure pilots have tools which include robust enough “manual flight skills” and technical understanding to resolve the occasional automation failure or irregularity.
In no way can it be overstated the need for the pilot to be completely confident or “I own this aircraft in every dimension of its operation.” Without that conficence the pilot is unable to bridge the gap between fully automated flight and resolution of an “Automation Exception.”
From the regular side, it would be required to ensure that training regimes adequately address the human factors issues of skills regression and situational awareness.
Cognitive saturation and pilot workload following failures would have to be considered by the design engineers and test pilots.
By the same token, test pilots would likewise have to play a larger role in ensuring the interface between engineering and the line pilot by closing the understanding gap between both parties, while airlines, charter companies and flying schools should acknowledge the extent of the challenge of integrating the next generation pilots safely into highly automated cockpits through adequate training of pilots to cope with automation.
Finally, pilots of the automation generation (otherwise known as “pilots of the magenta line”), will be required to more fully understand the matrix of failures possible from integrated systems.
In fact, the technical knowledge level of pilots would have to be increased to that approaching an engineer.
Automated systems are complex and without fully understanding the intricacies and multiple permutations of complicated matrix systems, would leave pilots at the mercy of automation following failures.
As Sully Sullenberger said: “If we only look at the pilots – the human factor – then we are ignoring other important factors. We have to look at how they work together.”
* Acknowledgements: Captain Dennis J. Landry, Airline Pilots Association, ADO Group; Chairman, Master MEL Committee.
