Pilot Error !

Last year 162 people met an untimely death when AisAsia Flight QZ8501 disappeared off radar and vanished into the Java sea.  As is the case with all air crashes, huge sums of money were expended on debris recovery and air crash investigators pieced together tiny fragments to recreate the situation that led to the crash.  Quite plainly, these people died because of pilot error.

It is the circumstances that this investigation revealed that must worry airline passengers.  Never have the aircraft built today been safer and both AirBus and Boeing go to great lengths to duplicate systems so that performance failure is rare.   Modern aircraft are fully capable of flying themselves and in most cases the pilots are supervising the auto-pilot rather than actually flying the plane themselves.

A litany of air crashes has revealed a tendency for today's pilots to think of themselves more as engineers than pilots and when a problem arises their first consideration is to try and adjust the computer to alleviate the discrepancy rather than take control of the aircraft.  Often, this allows other unintended consequences to dictate the final outcome.

In the Java sea crash, the way ahead encountered savage thunderstorms which the pilots sought to avoid and a small maintenance problem was brought to their attention by a warning signal generated by the computer.   A constant warning buzzer can be irritating and the pilots decided to silence it by the time honoured method of pulling the circuit breaker.   Unfortunately, on that circuit this cessation also switched off the auto pilot, causing the aircraft to climb and lose speed and diluting the air flow over the wings because of the thin air at a very high altitude.  This caused the plane - to stall.

Recovering from a stall used to be the basic of pilot training, but today's aircraft are so sophisticated that it receives little attention in the extensive regimen undertaken in training simulators.  In several recent crashes it has been evident that the pilots have completely missed the signals that indicate a stall and the aircraft has simply fallen out of the sky when a basic recovery manoeuver would have returned it to normal flight.

It is comforting to know that the pilots of the aircraft in which we fly have impressive hours of flying on their flight records, but in today's skies most of those hours are spent literally sitting in the pilot's seat and watching over what the computer is doing flying the plane.  The actual "hand on " experience is probably limited to a few seconds on the controls during the landing procedure.

There is also an increasing chance of combat between the thinking programmed into the computer's memory bank and what the human mind decides as the answer to problem solving.  Some years ago an air crash happened when a pilot was asked to fly the plane low and slow at an air show to show it to the crowds lining the runway.   To do this, he lowered the undercarriage and set the flaps for a low speed pass - but the computer thought he was about to land - and cut the engine power to make this happen.   The pilot realised the danger and rammed the throttles to full power - but it takes jet engines several seconds to spool up - and that time factor resulted in the crash.   It seems that a safety factor designed to prevent what the computer sees as human error on the pilot's part contrasts with considered pilot action taken to achieve an unusual result.   Two minds trying to fly the one aircraft delivered a fatal result !

It seems evident that there is a need for constant reevaluation of training by more time spent "hands on " in the flight simulators to range over all the possible eventualities that can occur, and to instill the response of manually taking control rather than trying to refigure the computer when a problem arises.    That is the reason that those in the pilot's seat have command bars on their shoulders  - and the responsibility to see that the journey ends safely !