Automated Flight May Dull Pilot Skills

Planes have become ever-more reliant on automation as they fly in our crowded skies. Safety officials are concerned there will emerge a new kind of accident ---mistakes made by pilots who no longer have the hands-on feeling for the controls in the air.

In the past five years, hundreds had died in "loss of control" accidents in which planes stalled in the air or got into unusual positions which pilots could not correct. An example is mistakenly steering a plane’s nose skyward into a stall instead of down to regain stable flight.

Federal regulations require greater reliance on computerized flying, and Rory Kay, an airline captain who co-chairs a Federal Aviation Administration committee on pilot training, says this is leading to "automation addiction." Kay notes "We’re seeing a new reed of accident with these state-of-the-art planes." Pilots use automated systems to fly airlines for all but about three minutes of a flight – the hands-on time being take-off and landing. For most of a flight, pilots are programming navigation directions into computers rather than using their hands on controls. Kay’s advisory committee warns that this means there are few opportunities to maintain their skills through manual flight.

Although fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the U.S. over the last ten years, pilots, industry officials and aviation safety experts interviewed by the Associated Press were concerned about the decreased opportunities for manual flight. More than a dozen loss-of-control accidents from around the world have been reviewed.

Airlines and regulators discourage and even prohibit pilots from turning off the autopilot and fling panes themselves, the committee said. Safety experts state there are cases in which pilots who are suddenly confronted with a loss of computerized flight controls don’t appear to know how to respond immediately; or errors are made which can be fatal.

A draft FAA study found pilots sometimes "abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems." Because these systems are so integrated into today’s planes, one malfunctioning piece of equipment or a single bad computer instruction can suddenly cascade into a series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to rely on the equipment.This study examined 46 accidents and major incidents as well as 734 voluntary repots by pilots and others. It included data from over 9,000 flights with a safety observer in the cockpit, observing the pilots. The study found that in more than 60 percent of accidents and 30 percent of major incidents, pilots had difficulty flying the plane or made mistakes with the automated flight controls.

A common mistake was not recognizing a disconnect with the autopilot or the auto-throttle. Other mistakes included failure to recover from a stall or to monitor and maintain airspeed.

Kay said, "We’re forgetting how to fly."

The most recent commercial fatal crash in the USA occurred near Buffalo, New York, in 2009. The co-pilot of a regional airliner programmed incorrect information into the aircraft’s computers, creating an unsafe slow speed environment. A stall warning was triggered. The captain hadn’t noticed the plane had slowed so much, so he pulled up on the yoke. That overrided two safety systems; the correct procedure was to push forward.
A subsequent investigation found no mechanical nor structural problems that would have interfered with a correct response to stall. The crash killed all 49 people aboard and one on the ground.

Two weeks later a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 crashed trying to land in Amsterdam; nine were killed and 120 injured. An investigation showed that an altitude measuring device malfunctioned feeding incorrect information to the plane’s computers, causing the autopilot to reduce speed, which caused loss of lift and a stall. The aircraft’s three pilots showed "automation surprise" as the plane stalled.

Last month, the on-going French investigation of the 2009 crash of an Air France flight from Brazil to Paris recommended that all pilots get mandatory training in manual flying and proper procedure for handling a high-altitude stall. Airspeed sensors fed bad information to the Airbus A330 computers, which caused the autopilot to disengage suddenly and a stall warning to activate. The co-pilot pointed the nose of the plane up and it stalled. [The flight information recorders from this flight were recovered from below two miles of the Atlantic Ocean for analysis of this crash].

Former US Airways Captain Chesley "Sully" Sull4enberger suggests that pilots and technology are failing together. Sullenberger is credited with saving all 155 people aboard an Airbus A320 after a collision with
Canada geese shortly after takeoff from LaGuardia airport in New York two years ago. "If we only look at the pilots – the human factor – then we are ignoring other important factors," he said. "We’ve got to look at how they work together."

Pilot response to malfunctions of automated systems "is the big issue that we can no longer hide from in aviation," said Bill Voss, himself the president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Virginia. "We’ve been very slow to recognize the consequence of it and deal with it."

In May, the FAA proposed requiring airlines to train pilots on stall recovery and to expose pilots to more realistic problem scenarios.

"But other new regulations are going in the opposite direction. Today, pilots are required to use their autopilot when flying at altitudes above 24,000 feet, which is where airlines spend much of their time cruising. The required minimum, vertical safety buffer between planes has been reduced from 2,000 feet to 1,000 feet. That means more planes flying closer together, necessitating the kin of precision flying more reliably produced by automation than human beings.

"The same situation is increasingly common closer to the ground.

"The FAA is moving from an air traffic control system based on radar technology to more precise GPS navigation. Instead of time-consuming, fuel-burning stair-step descents, planes will be able to glide in more steeply for landings with their engines idling. Aircraft will be able to land and take off closer together and more frequently. Even in poor weather, because pilots will know the precise location of other aircraft and obstacles on the ground. Fewer planes will be diverted.

"But the new landing procedures require pilots to cede even more control to automation. "Those procedures have to be flown with the autopilot on," Voss said. "You can’t afford a sneeze on those procedure."

"Even when not using the new procedures, airlines direct their pilots to switch on the autopilot about a minute and a half after takeoff, when the plane reaches about 1,000 feet, Coffman said. The autopilot generally doesn’t come off until about a minute and a half before landing, he said.
"Pilots still control the plane’s flight path. But they are programming computers rather than flying with their hands."Coffman says that for a commuter airline, pilots may fly with the autopilot off for about 80 seconds out of a two-hour flight.

First officers, who are less experienced, need the manual flying experience. Further, the U.S. used to draw on a pool for former military pilots with a lot of manual flying experience, but more of those pilots are staying in the armed forces these days.

"Changing training programs to include more manual flying won’t e enough because pilots spend only a few days a year in training, Voss said. Airlines will have to rethink their operations fundamentally if they’re going to give pilots realistic opportunities to keep their flying skills hones, he said.

"The International Air Transport Association says the most common type of airline accident is one in which planes stalled or otherwise lost control in flight. It counted 51 such a accidents in the past five years."

　
　
　Summarized from the Associated Press at: http://news.yahoo.com/ap-impact-automation-air-dulls-pilot-skill-070507795.html