Bombardier's Safety Standdown at EBACE this year has ramped up its syllabus to reflect changing needs and a broadening demand.

Now the seminar's reach extends beyond the flightdeck to cater also for the human factors training needs of maintenance professionals and cabin crew. At the same time the Standdown has been subtly changing its focus in response to operational needs dramatically illustrated by a recent regional airline accident.

When US investigators reported on the crash of a Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 at Buffalo, New York in February 2009, it became clear that there was a gap between the pilot training that licensing laws accept and what aviators really need when things get tough.

The Q400 crew had reacted wrongly to the onset of a stall - something most pilots believe they would never do - and the aircraft went out of control, crashing with the loss of all on board.

Safety Standdown EBACE 2010
 © Billypix
Left to right: Rick Rose, Puja Mahajan & David Learmount

Pilots attending the Advanced Aerodynamics workshop at this EBACE Standdown learned that the drill commercial aircrew are taught to recover from a stall is different from the way test pilots manage stalls when they are certificating aircraft, and the airline training leaves room for error. The pilots at Buffalo paid for this lack of knowledge with their lives.

As Bombardier Learjet chief pilot Rick Rowe says, professional pilots think they know enough to be safe. But the trouble is, he explains, "you don't know what you don't know".

It is this "knowledge gap" that has always been the focus for the Safety Standdown. When it began, its motto was "War on Error". Now it has morphed to "Knowledge Ace".

The Standdown still does the same, says Bombardier's director of flight operations Puja Mahajan, it is just an acknowledgement that the war on error is won by providing pilots with more knowledge.

Flight's operations and safety editor David Learmount, a former UK Royal Air Force Lockheed Hercules pilot and qualified flying instructor, comments: "Rick and Puja are right. Pilots attending the Standdown will be amazed by how much fresh information they learn. You walk out feeling more alive to yourself and your job."

Source: Flight Daily News