Andrew Doyle/MUNICH
Swiss investigators are recommending that training procedures on western aircraft types, for pilots who began their careers in the former eastern bloc, should be reviewed as a result of the ongoing probe into the crash of a Crossair Saab 340 soon after take-off from Zurich on 10 January 2000.
Switzerland's Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau (AAIB) has already issued five safety recommendations to the Federal Office for Civil Aviation (FOCA) ahead of the final accident report - due to be published at the end of this year. One recommendation states that pilots who completed their initial flight training on aircraft fitted with eastern-style "outside-looking-in" artificial horizons could sometimes have difficulty adjusting to a standard western display.
The Crossair aircraft was being flown by a Moldavian captain and a Slovenian co-pilot when a sequence of events led to the aircraft entering an extreme right bank before control was lost (Flight International, 4 - 12 April 2000).
Investigators have so far uncovered no evidence that instrument failure caused the captain to become disoriented, but are conducting tests using a Crossair Saab 340 to discover whether signals from an onboard cell phone could have interfered with the aircraft's avionics.
FOCA flight inspector Capt Max Wipf says the AAIB made its recommendation after determining that there "could be a close relationship" between the accident and "the fact that the pilots initially trained using an eastern-style artificial horizon, which is significantly different to the method by which the horizon is transmitting information to the pilot on a western instrument."
Wipf says the issue is being "more deeply looked into" by the FOCA. Crossair says that while it has not identified any shortcomings in its earlier training procedures it has nevertheless introduced some changes as a result of the recommendation.
The captain had initially begun a left turn after take-off in accordance with the standard instrument departure (SID) but almost immediately reversed this to a right turn, following his flight director, after the co-pilot entered the Zurich East VOR beacon into the flight management system (FMS).
The AAIB's other recommendations are that:
• pilots should always specify a turn direction when entering a "direct-to" instruction into the FMS;
• the autopilot should be engaged whenever the FMS is being used as the primary navigation source, or when the pilots are experiencing a high workload or operating in dense traffic;
• that the ability of different aircraft types to follow specific SIDs be reviewed.
Source: Flight International
