Guy Norris/LOS ANGELES
Like a chill wind, news of the Korean Air Boeing 747 accident at Guam swept through the safety meeting in Vancouver, rattling nerves and unsettling delegates.
Less than 24h earlier, almost at the exact time of the crash, attendees at the first Technology and the Flight Deck symposium heard from former US Federal Aviation Administration Administrator David Hinson say that "-the clock is running-time is short".
Unaware of the terrible events unfolding thousands of kilometres away to the west, Hinson referred to the growing statistical probability that, if the accident rate were to be held constant at the 1996 level of about one per million departures, the projected growth in traffic could result in a serious accident every week by 2015.
Boeing Commercial Airplane Group chief of human-factors engineering, Curt Graeber, said: "We need a twofold improvement in safety, and preferably a fivefold improvement in the future - that's a tremendous challenge." Pierre Jeanniot, director-general of the International Air Transport Association (IATA) agreed, stating: "The implications of that simple, but chilling, arithmetic are beginning to percolate through to people beyond our industry. Our industry would rapidly lose its own credibility, and the public's confidence, if we were faced with a 'CNN-type' incident every week," he emphasised, stating that IATA wants an industry strategy to reduce the aircraft-hull loss rate by 50% by 2004. "That means removing nine or ten [hull-losses] a year altogether from the crash statistics," says Jeanniot.
Although modern airliners, according to studies by Boeing and major international agencies, have a better safety record than their forebears, it is to the highly automated, electronic-flight-instrument-system types that the future belongs. At Vancouver, IATA listed the main problems and recommendations concerning the interface between flightcrews and modern flightdeck systems:
- pilots do not always have the required understanding of the functions, capabilities, limitations and behaviour of the aircraft systems when they are controlled by automation;
- there is an absence of regulatory guidance for cockpit-design standards, particularly to prevent human errors and increase flightcrew situational awareness;
- there is no software industry standard for aircraft flight-management systems;
- in some cases, a pilot's decision not to revert to manual control has contributed to an accident;
- pilots should be able to exert manual control over an aircraft without being forced to first disconnect automatic systems;
- automation should not replace pilot skills;
- failure to adequately manage automated systems could bear as great a threat to flight safety as any lack of manual flight skills.
Many of the same conclusions have also been reached by an FAA Human Factors team, which set out to report on the interfaces between flightcrews and new-generation flightdeck systems after several new-technology airliners were lost in accidents (Flight International, 9-15 October 1996). The team worked on the basis that all accidents are caused by human error of some type, and that the consequences rather than the errors are the problem. Modern flightdeck designs have eliminated some problems, but introduced others .
The FAA team's Kathy Abbott says: "From the evidence, the Human Factors team identified issues that show vulnerabilities in flightcrew management of automation and situation awareness." Their investigations have revealed some unexpected findings: "More often than we expected, say on a dark winter night with gusty conditions, crews would turn on an automatic system to get out of danger," says Abbott.
Neither the FAA, the European Joint Aviation Authorities human-factors steering group set up to work with its US counterpart, nor IATA expects easy answers. One commonly called-for solution, however, appears one of increased flightdeck standardisation. The FAA team says that standardisation "-is generally desirable" and would reduce the potential for crew error and confusion, cut training costs and reduce equipment costs. "We're not saying everyone has to have exactly the same cockpit and procedures - it's got to be sensible," says Abbott.
A typical example of an area ripe for standardisation, says the FAA team, is given by the different positionings of the take-off/go-around and disconnect switches on the throttle levers of eight Airbus Industrie and Boeing (including ex-McDonnell Douglas) airliners in current production.
The call for standardisation has its opponents, however. "We're balancing the progress of innovation and the need for product improvement against the needs of standardisation," admits Abbott.
By its very nature, any move towards increased standardisation will be at the heart of future initiatives to safety improvement - which Jeanniot sees as "-a partnership approach. The only way that we can achieve a substantial reduction is through a partnership of airlines, governments, airports, providers of navigation services and, of course, aircraft manufacturers. Increased safety must be our universally stated objective".
Source: Flight International
