Guam Route Emergencies Reflecting Vigilance or Roulette?

Back in the days, cars all had manual transmissions. Fast forward through technology and voila, automated transmissions. Like Airbuses and Boeings, the degree of automation—the amount of kick in the stick—affects how one drives. The steering sensitivity of the Aston Martin DB9 varies from the Ford Focus which varies from the Maserati GranTurismo, and on and on.

Is the car operating with a manual transmission, souped up power steering or somewhere in between? If you drive a car, you know the answer by feel. It is through touch, experience and handling that car that you learn how it stops and starts, how it corners, how it takes a hill, or if it is sputtering under pressure and why. The vehicle is unique. Your hands on operation informs you, deliberates with you, engages your senses as part of a machine so you know its paces–the height and depth and breadth it will reach. But even in a car you know backwards and forwards, if you’re on the road with the autopilot on, distant, not communinicating, letting the machine turn over on its own, when you take control again, it can take a measurable length of time for your response to kick in from passive to active. And that’s just braking on a highway.

I believe that stands true for a lot of our daily gizmos.

I believe this autopilot/manual distance between car and driver stands true for plane and pilot.

Take the infamous Air France Flight 447, when the Airbus A330 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, lost in international waters, and eventually after Herculean effort, found. The ill-trained pilots lost track of what was going on, exacerbating what should have been a minor hiccup into disaster. We know there was an investigation, and hopefully it is still ongoing. I really hope it is ongoing because problems are ongoing. In July, an Air France Bordeaux to Paris flight in July nearly stalled. The near stall makes me wonder about Air France pilots, maybe all post eighties pilots. I’ll let pilots talk about the details of the stall, if they want to discuss it; but I am trying to focus on the bigger picture.

My pilots tell me that these days, their primary cockpit activity is monitoring instrumentation.

I would postulate that drivers drive hands-on, and so should pilots. Flying requires reflexes. Too much automation insulates the pilot from developing and practicing “pilotry”. We all know that sports stars become the best in their field because of the doctrine of practice practice practice makes perfect perfect perfect. But pilots do a lot of sitting back and monitoring when they could be practicing.

Are pilots losing touch? Is there a wholesale lack of connection between plane and pilot caused by automation?

I fear passive monitoring rather than active flying is guilty of dulling the reflexes which make a pilot a superstar. Are all pilots actually learning how to fly? or just how to monitor?

Is there a solution? You tell me.

According to the Preliminary Dutch Safety Board Report, “The Board is of the opinion that extra attention is needed for the role of the radio altimeter when using the automatic pilot and the automatic throttle system. The Board has issued a warning for Boeing today requesting extra attention to a part of a manual for the Boeing 737, in which is stated that in case of malfunction of the radio altimeter(s), the automatic pilot and throttle system that are connected to this may not be used for approach and landing. The Board would like Boeing to consider an investigation into whether this procedure is also applicable during flight. With the exception of the malfunction of the left radio altimeter the investigators of the Dutch Safety Board have not yet found any irregularities.

One question that remains now is how Boeing is going to follow up with the reminder for pilots to pay attention. Is this going to be handled with additional training or aircraft or procedure modifications? However–Boeing has said that the autopilot system is designed so that if it senses faulty data from the captain’s altimeter on the left side, the auto-throttle is supposed to switch to the altimeter on the right. In fact, AVweb summarizes it this way: ” The autopilot initiated a power-down of the engines in preparation for landing and the airplane slowed to near stall speed. The pilots responded to the situation too late.”

It seems to us like this is more of a problem of maintenance and pilot training at Turkish Airlines. How could the pilots not have noticed flying for more than a minute with no thrust?

We are eager to see what is going to be done to prevent a repetition of catastrophe. On Wednesday Boeing listed six warning signs that can alert a pilot that something is wrong with the altimeter. Maybe they should have included a Starbucks gift certificate for that extra jolt of caffeine-fueled pilot attentiveness.

The Dutch report indicates that the faulty radio altimeter initiated a sequence of events to which the pilots responded too slowly. The thing is that being a pilot means being aware. There is no margin for error.

Plus, any time I see that an automatic system did the thinking, it makes me pause: “the automatic system – with its engines at reduced power – assumed it was in the final stages of the flight.” If the autothrust/pilot starts to do something unusual, it is the pilot’s responsibility to disconnect it and fly the aircraft manually.

Another thing that seems crucial is the black box data:
“The black box – which can register 25 hours of flying time and which, in this case, covered 8 flights- showed that this problem had occurred twice previously in a similar situation, before landing.” It is crucial in conflicting ways. When it happened before, why was there no “crash” situation? How was it averted? (Probably the pilots flew in manually.)

And…if it happened before, doesn’t it make the faulty radio altimeter a “known problem” and therefore one which the carrier should have corrected before this plane ever went out again?

For those who survived, it really doesn’t matter why it happened.

The passengers–those who perished and those who were injured and those who lucked out and got away without a scrape (if there are any)–are innocents who purchased a ticket.

There’s no one on that plane who will ever board a plane again without thinking twice; some will suffer sleepless nights and develop phobias; and some have paid the ultimate price, losing their health, or their life.

Now they are owed a lot more than a refund.