Yet again, too many passengers and crew who died in airline accidents in the last year died in aircraft which, until the moment at which they hit the ground or water, were functioning perfectly - but whose crews were not. These accidents are classed as Controlled Flight Into Terrain, or CFIT. It is not a new phenomenon, but it continues to kill people, despite the best efforts of the global aviation community.
In 1992, the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF), the International Civil Aviation Organisation and others set up a task force whose aim was to halve the CFIT accident rate within five years. They were rewarded with a dramatic drop in the first two years, but the rate has risen, especially for jet airliners. Instead of celebrating success in 1997, the industry is looking at over 600 CFIT-related deaths in a year.
In the course of the anti-CFIT campaign, the FSF has distributed thousands of CFIT-awareness cards to flightcrew and their employers. Airlines and safety authorities have drummed the principles of crew- (or cockpit)-resource management into flightcrew in a tireless effort to ensure that they work as teams, checking and monitoring each other's actions, and the state of the aircraft, to guard against CFIT happening. Despite all this, however, aircraft continue to hit ground which is not where their crews think it is. You can, it seems, lead a pilot to the best practice, but you can't always make him follow it.
Perhaps the problem lies in the very name CFIT. While it may be terminologically correct, it is factually incorrect. An aircraft is not properly in control if its crew does not know exactly where it is. The reason for that may be misplotting, misunderstanding, mis-inputting or mis-timing. Unfortunately, any such mistake can still result in a perfectly serviceable, functioning aircraft hitting the ground when it didn't have to.
It may not be politically correct to say so, but, in most cases, an aircraft which hits the ground in those circumstances is doing so as a result of negligence. It may be primary negligence, in which a crewmember hits the wrong button or misidentifies a marker and fails to check that the right action has been taken, or it may be secondary negligence, in which both crewmembers fail to monitor the aircraft's progress after that first mistake is made, and fail to observe its deviation from the correct path even though the instruments are (in most cases) telling them so. The result is the same, no matter what the type of negligence involved.
Use a word like "negligence" in relation to an air accident, however, at your peril. Use it before the formal accident investigation has been completed, and a pilot's employer, family or union will probably sue for defamation. Use it afterwards, and those who collect statistics will say that it doesn't fit into the classifications they use. So use the comfortable, fluffy, sanitised "pilot error" or benign "CFIT" instead, as if failing to spot an unintended 3,000ft/min (15m/s) descent rate is somehow on a par with getting a simple sum wrong in first-grade arithmetic.
Would it make any difference if CFIT incidents were re-labelled NFIT - for negligent flight into terrain? Perhaps it might. No pilot intentionally makes mistakes, but all of them (like all human beings, including journalists) do at some stage or other. Most would classify those mistakes as "honest", and would be horrified if accused of being negligent. Use of a pejorative, admonishing word like "negligent" to categorise their mistakes might, therefore have the benefit of concentrating people's minds. The trouble, of course, is that in many lawyers' minds, the words "negligent" and "criminal" are inextricably linked: the challenge is to get non-wilful negligence and lawsuits de-linked, so that the problem can be safely discussed.
It is, of course, unreasonable to place all the blame for CFIT on flightcrews. Even modern cockpit designs place high workloads on them. Even the best airlines can place undue pressures on their staffs, wittingly or otherwise. Authorities leave badly designed approaches (especially non-precision ones) in place which, far from making landings easier, make them more difficult. Manufacturers and airlines can help by fitting pilot aids like enhanced ground-proximity warning systems to all airliners, to reduce the chances of a mistake becoming an accident. In the end, however, it must be the pilot who can justifiably say: "I have control".
Source: Flight International
