DAVID LEARMOUNT / LONDON
Is military flying - bizarrely - safer during war? Evidence would seem to suggest so
Since 11 September 2001, managing military flight safety has been a more complex task. Now, a year on, the US military is preparing for war in Iraq, with President Bush apparently prepared to give the go-ahead with or without United Nations sanction. Many air forces and air arms across the world now face operational challenges or, at least, are likely to be commanded to a state of operational readiness.
In war, mission risk assessment takes on a different character than it does in peace. But the loss of an aircraft and aircrew is still a loss of capability, so risk management remains a task for military commanders despite the demands of operating in a hostile environment. In February this year, with the USA and its allies using air power extensively in Afghanistan, US Air Force chief of staff Gen John Jumper declared a "safety down day" - a day on the ground when all units would review their approach to safety management - because, he said, "the air force has witnessed an increase in mishap rate". The theme of the "down day" was risk management.
In fiscal year 2002 to 6 February, Jumper reported there had been 13 class A flight mishaps ($1 million-plus damage or a fatality) involving five fatalities, three ground events with two fatalities, and 25 off-duty losses of air force manpower. During the calendar year 2001, the USAF suffered 20 fixed-wing flight accidents with seven fatalities. No incidents in either period had occurred in Afghanistan, however - they all took place during range or other types of training. Col Greg Alston, deputy chief of safety at the US Department of Defense, says: "Most of the [FY02] accidents are the result of people taking unnecessary risks." By contrast, at the end of 2001 the US Army saw one fatal helicopter loss and the US Marine Corps had two non-fatal helicopter accidents in Afghanistan.
The last time the USA went to war on Iraqi territory, during the 1991 Gulf War, the USAF recorded its safest year to that point, leading to theories that running purposeful missions in an adrenalin-charged situation may concentrate the minds of flight and ground crew more effectively than peacetime training tasks. But it is impossible to tell whether that was the case because, in statistical terms, the Gulf War was a one-off conflict in which total air superiority was established quickly, and the USAF's role was conducted mainly at medium or high altitude.
One thing war can do is to give flight crews more flying time than usual. Depending on the nature of the mission, that can, perversely, be good for safety because in peacetime, many air forces and air arms face cuts, including in training.
Notoriously, the Indian air force continues to suffer the effects of training economies, but this is not just a lack of aircrew flying time. This year, it lost 16 Mikoyan-design fighters, mostly MiG-21s. The best that can be said is that this figure is slightly below the average of 20 MiG losses a year suffered by the service in the previous three years (Flight International, 25 September-1 October 2001), and these aircraft have not been lost in India's skirmishes with Pakistan in Kashmir. The Indian air force's main problem has been the lack of a dedicated advanced trainer and simulators to prepare its pilots for high-performance aircraft such as the MiG-21, MiG-23 or MiG-27. Now the air force says it is developing more mission-specific type simulators.
Vice-chief of air staff, Air Marshal S. Krisnashwamy, said in June last year that the service was considering whether it might be "operationalising" its pilots too early. The air force lost six more MiG types between July and December. Having lost 220 pilots and 580 strike/fighter aircraft since 1978, it still does not seem to be getting the problem under control. And since the air force is investing considerable sums in French, Israeli and Russian avionics to upgrade its combat aircraft fleet, the loss of a refitted MiG-21 will no longer be just the end of its life for an out-of-date, if still high-performance, strike aircraft.
Method and motivation
The UK Royal Navy's flight safety magazine Cockpit has given a long-term perspective on how high loss rates can be reduced by applying method and motivation.
Former editor Cdr Nigel Arnall-Culliford compared accident rates 50 years ago with those now: "The sheer scale of waste and destruction [then] is almost incomprehensible by today's standards. For instance, in the second half of 1949 there were 323 accidents to RN aircraft out of a total number of hours flown in that period of 56,777. The overall accident rate for 1949 was given as 57 per 10,000h. This compares with about 0.4 per 10,000h today. Despite the remarkable improvements over the years, the pressure to reduce still further the number of accidents and incidents remains, quite rightly, relentless."
For the first time, the 27-nation Air Forces Flight Safety Committee Europe (AFFSCE) has agreed to take common action to develop a collision warning system compatible with military aircraft systems and roles. It will be relatively easy to fit in transport types, most of which have civil airborne collision avoidance systems (ACAS).
But this is easier said than done, says AFFSCE chairman Air Cdre Ray Dixon, because it has to sit easily with fighter operations in formation, yet must be able to "see" gliders and microlights in the Class G (uncontrolled) airspace used for air force training most of the time, and react to civil air transport aircraft anywhere. That means it will have to be secondary surveillance radar (SSR)-based to operate with civil ACAS, says Dixon, but in combat aircraft the pilots will not need vectoring for avoidance, just a range and a relative bearing so they can use their eyes and the aircraft's high agility to take active measures to stay clear of other traffic. UK research company Qinetiq is seeking to determine the equipment and algorithms needed, which must also be light, cheap and easy to fit to combat types.
A French air force no-blame reporting system, Vortex, recently resulted in the postponement of a major exercise, the air force's safety division chief Col Luc Quintaine reveals. Several anonymous messages from a crucial base reported a lack of preparedness. "This, after verification, turned out to be right," according to Quintaine. Vortex is a networked system for reporting flight incidents, trialled in 1994 and operational at all bases by 2000. It is open, anonymous, and "enables everyone to see what anyone else has written," says Quintaine.
On 1 April, the UK armed services consolidated their individual flight safety commands in the new Defence Aviation Safety Centre (DASC). Dixon, its current director, says its task is to co-ordinate defence aviation safety policy across the navy, army and air force. The DASC's roles will be policy formulation, regulation and validation by audit, but each service will retain its specialist flight safety centre.
Meanwhile, the RAF continues to prepare for the operation of its new digital safety database, the flight safety information management system (FSIMS), an infinitely more flexible and responsive system than the present manually filed records. At the same time, the relatively new voluntary human factors open reporting system (HFOR) is developing and maturing. This no-blame reporting system encourages people to file reports on unintentional mistakes they have made that could have caused incidents but did not, on the basis that others may either have made the same mistake or could be vulnerable to making it because of a fault in the system that could be corrected.
Analysing trends
Dixon says engineers and air traffic controllers, not just pilots, are beginning to use HFOR. When FSIMS comes on-line, the ability to track trends and carry out analysis will make HFOR more effective, he says, which will probably encourage people to file more reports. The RAF has also begun to use some downloaded operational data from accident data recorders for operational performance analysis, and Dixon reports there has been little objection from pilots to using this method of flight operations quality analysis. Quintaine says that the French air force is just preparing a similar project, with aerospace laboratory ONERA developing equipment that should go operational in about 5y.
Despite the cool head that the UK DASC appears to have right now, it will have to concentrate hard to maintain conventional flight safety routines in a period of heavy sabre-rattling and the USA's overt preparation for war.
Source: Flight International
