The terrible Concorde accident this week has shown immense power to shock everyone both inside and outside the industry. Fatal accidents always shock, but in this case the Concorde factor magnified everything - and not just because of its glamour or the fact that this was its first serious accident.
Concorde's name is synonymous with high speed and huge power, and it was both of these that made the pilot's decision as to what he should do to save his aircraft far more difficult. Take-off, with the complex performance monitoring and split-second decision-making that it demands of every crew, is the most difficult phase of flight for pilots in all aircraft. In Concorde, everything happens even faster, with engines not just turning but afterburning, resulting in rapid acceleration, and a delta wing producing a rotation speed some 40kt higher than in subsonic jet airliners.
Analysing a take-off accident from an armchair is desperately unfair to a pilot, especially if the objective is to apportion blame. The only useful thing that analysis can achieve is to determine whether standard operating procedures (SOP) and pilot training need amendment in the light of new knowledge.
Crew drills after passing the V1 decision speed in any take-off are based almost entirely on what to do if an engine fails after that point. The drill is to take off, sort the problem out, then land. It sounds simple. But standard procedures are for standard situations. There are always going to be events for which there is no SOP.
Take Concorde's ill-fated take-off. There is a serious fire emanating from somewhere under the port wing, and it seems to have started well before rotate, possibly before V1. At first it appears to witnesses that a catastrophic engine failure is the cause. But if the problem is not in the engine, the pilot has no instruments to warn him of the danger. So he continues the take-off. Then the tower controller tells him of the fire, but he has passed V1. The aircraft is hurtling toward take-off rotate speed, the pilot is concentrating on managing the take-off, he still cannot see the fire, and may not yet be aware of any of its symptoms. At the same time, his training drills are taking over: aborting take-off is not the SOP, and a long overrun with a fire would probably incur many fatalities, so get airborne and land again as soon as possible - at Le Bourget, the pilot tells air traffic control.
The pilot is making decisions based on incomplete information. So the question of external video surveillance of the airframe rears its head again. If the pilot could have seen the fire, surely he would not have taken off. As with all things to do with take-off, it is not as easy as that.
There can only be one, or at most two, video displays in the cockpit, and in Concorde they would have to be small.
Because no one knows where on the airframe, undercarriage or engines a fault is going to develop, the whole airframe has to be surveyed, and the surveillance system set to display a sequence of short-duration pictures. Watching these would distract the pilots from monitoring the take-off run, flight instruments and engine instruments, which could create its own danger. At a highly charged time like the take-off run, it is likely that a two-pilot crew would ignore the surveillance display. Having a flight engineer, as there is on Concorde, would make the idea more plausible.
Surveillance cameras could be a marvellous resource for pilots who have time, even only a little, to assess the situation. But at take-off, there is virtually no time or crew monitoring capacity to spare.
There is no perfect answer to the take-off situation faced by this Concorde pilot, Capt Christian Marty, but in the absence of cameras perhaps the nearest is teamwork with ATC. At present, current procedures mean once the tower gives take-off clearance, the rest is up to the pilot. If ATC sees something untoward, the controller will inform the pilot. But the reaction is still up to the pilot, the provision of emergency services up to the controller. This is such a critical relationship that consideration should be given to more effective "team resource management" between the two. And for the necessary formal training to be introduced.
Source: Flight International
