No Pilots Aboard Today

We turned on the telly Saturday to see the burning wreckage of this Asiana Boeing 777 which crashed while landing on San Francisco International's runway 28L (and for the benefit of the many talking heads in the so-called newsrooms who consistently get it wrong, it's pronounced "two-eight-left" not twentyeight left). Thankfully the casualties were not worse than they were with the only tragic fatalities being two teenaged girls who we are now hearing reports of might have been hit by emergency vehicles. It could've been much worse as the aircraft may have had as much as 15,000 lbs of fuel still aboard upon landing, a normal amount of reserve fuel.

To any trained pilot, the primary cause of the crash was immediately apparent; the aircraft had obviously landed well short of the runway. The video reporting clearly showed the debris field starting at the water's edge and the trail leading to the burned fuselage showed landing gear, horizontal and vertical stabilizers all having departed the main portion of the aircraft. Even visible was an aircraft part apparently still in the water.

This initial conjecture was confirmed several days later with the release of this video taken by a bystander which clearly shows the aircraft well below a normal glide slope hitting the jetty and bursting into flame. The only question that remained is what caused this aircraft to land so short?

Aircraft accident investigations are by their nature slow, plodding, drawn out affairs. The investigators must take their time to account for every possible aspect which may have been a primary or contributing cause of an accident to include such mundane details as what the pilots had for breakfast, or the brand of grease used on the aircraft (a factor in an Alaskan airlines crash years ago). Investigators will go to Herculean efforts to retrieve the voice and data recorders and to reconstruct the aircraft to determine the most likely cause of an accident. It's as much art as science with entire schools run by military and civilian safety agencies devoted to the discipline.

This case may well be different. The pilots are alive, the recorders are intact, the wreckage is readily accessible, and the accident itself was caught on video. This is simply an investigator's dream case. The investigation has already ruled out possible terrorist activity, and the likelihood of a mechanical difficulty seems highly improbable. A British Airways B777 landed short of it's intended runway several years ago due to a fuel icing problem affecting both engines simultaneously, though that problem has been addressed. That aircraft employed Rolls Royce engines while this aircraft was equipped with Pratt & Whitney engines making a similar malfunction very unlikely.

What is left then, is the control of the aircraft by the pilots. One of the most basic skills learned by any pilot from their first days in any aircraft is how to fly a visual approach to a runway. It's quite simply the bread and butter of all piloting skills. What the pilot has in front of him is a small strip of pavement upon which he must place his aircraft after having flown a stabilized approach. By stabilized approach, we mean one that approaches the runway at a constant angle, usually three degrees in slope and at a constant airspeed. This means that at about three miles from the runway, the aircraft will be about 1000 ft above the runway elevation. We can still hear our primary flight instructor repeating "aimpoint, airspeed" while in Air Force undergraduate pilot training over three decades ago.

We were later in our career, a military flight instructor ourselves, repeating the same "aimpoint, airspeed" mantra to our own students. Common rookie errors made by beginning students would be things like channelizing on one particular aspect of the approach to the neglect of others. For instance, a student might be doing a great job controlling airspeed but allowing the aircraft to sink below its optimum glidepath. Or another might be right on glidepath but allowing their airspeed to decay below a safe point. The one most deadly sin which every beginning pilot has drilled into his or her skull is to never become "low and slow" on approach. This is important for the simple reason that the "low" part takes you closer to the dirt you don't want to hit, and the "slow" part takes the aircraft closer to a stall where the wing quits flying. Even being a little slower than normal approach speed makes an aircraft sluggish to fly. Together they can kill.

Another integral part of being a pilot is known as the "crosscheck" or feedback loop. No pilot ever flies a completely perfect approach. Rather, the pilot makes control inputs, the aircraft will respond to those inputs which the pilot will either see visually or on the instruments, and then correct. This feedback loop continues on an approach all the way to touchdown with innumerable observations and corrections being made constantly. The skill to be learned by rookie pilots is recognizing deviations before they become large and making appropriate corrections. As an analogy, when driving down the road, few drivers are conscious of the many small inputs they make on the steering wheel, they just make them before the tires go over the yellow line. A pilot does the same thing but only in three dimensions.

We apologize for spending the last few paragraphs detailing the basics of flying an approach, but we believe it's important to understand the mechanics of how an approach should be flown on a clear and calm day. These principles are virtually the same for every aircraft in the sky regardless of its vintage or sophistication. Pilots need to either fly the aircraft, or ensure that the autopilot is flying the aircraft using these principles to be considered competent professionals.

We've recounted the basic skills needed to fly a visual approach that all pilots should possess, but would now like to explore the conditions this crew encountered on their approach. It has been reported that part of the electronic landing system and also the visual approach lighting system on San Francisco's runway 28L were inoperative Saturday. It's likely much hay will be made out of this fact, but this is a canard as we'll explain. The specific electronic equipment which was inoperative was the electronic glideslope part of the ILS system. This is a directional radio signal which the aircraft receives and displays to the pilot where the aircraft is relative to a three degree glideslope. It is primarily used for landing in instrument conditions, i.e. when the runway can't be seen.

In addition to the the inoperative glideslope, the PAPI or "precision approach path indicator" was also inoperative. This system is a simple array of spotlights behind baffles which indicate either white or red to indicate to pilots their position on the glideslope. The reason for both of these outages is apparently due to some ongoing construction on the runway which necessitated a "displaced threshold" or simply the end of the runway being officially displaced down the pavement a certain distance. The runway is then marked with a new runway threshold by paint. Since the existing systems were calibrated for the original runway threshold, they were deactivated as they would not have been accurate for the displaced one. This is not an uncommon occurrence.

Both of these outages were published in the Notams or "notices to airmen" which detail all pertinent information needed by pilots for landing at any airport. Pilots are expected to review the notams for every leg they fly so this outage should have been known by the Asiana crew even though with the weather being clear, it should not have made any impact on the flight. Our point, though, is that none of it should have been needed for a routine visual approach, especially when the crew had prior knowledge. The 777 can even generate its own internal glidepath for display to the pilots had they wished to set it up.

 We will admit that while flying an approach with no PAPI or electronic glideslope is an annoyance, it is not any cause for alarm. One must simply pay closer attention to the visual cues that are available. When the runway is in sight, pilots are expected to use the appearance of the runway to determine whether they are high or low on the glidepath.

The next bit of information to reach the public is that the pilot flying the aircraft that day had only 43 hours in that type aircraft and that this flight was his first trip to this airport in a 777. While this sounds like it may be the smoking gun, we have cause for doubt. This pilot was a veteran with over 10,000 hours including the 747. Having low hours in type is a routine practice today as modern flight simulators are as realistic as the aircraft. In almost all cases, a pilot's first actual flight in a new aircraft will be on a revenue flight with passengers. There are seldom, if ever "training flights" any more.

Having ourselves flown jumbo aircraft, we know being low on glidepath is more critical on larger aircraft for the reason that the pilot sits well in front of the gear. On a 777-200, the pilot is more than 90 ft in front of the main landing gear. During approach, being even slightly low on glidepath can cause a short landing. It is highly unlikely that these pilots didn't know that being low on approach is problematic but in any event, being slightly low would generally mean getting the tires scuffed up from being drug through the overrun, not a grossly short landing as in this case. The normal touchdown zone for airliners is 1000-3000 ft beyond the threshold. This aircraft hit the jetty which appears to be over 2000 ft short of the threshold, nearly half a mile short of where it should have touched down.

The way this seems to be shaking out is one of two scenarios. Reports indicate that the inexperienced pilot was in the left seat which may mean that the pilot in the right seat was either an instructor or line copilot. If it turns out that the right seater was an instructor, he clearly let his charge get the aircraft well outside of acceptable parameters and beyond his ability to salvage the approach. This is a double failure: the student made a rookie error, and the instructor allowed it, if this was the actual scenario.  Instructors need to not only know how to teach but to let minor deviations occur so the student can learn but never to allow the situation to progress beyond their ability to recover.

In the second possible scenario, the line copilot observed the captain allow a major deviation to occur and said nothing until it was too late. One of the tenets of crew aircraft piloting, is that the crew functions as a unit, and a deviation left uncorrected by the non-flying pilot will be as serious an offense against the non-flying pilot as if he had made the error himself. Non-flying, or monitoring pilots are as equally responsible as flying ones. Here's where the question of culture possibly enters in.

It has been well documented that a hierarchical culture can prevent or interfere with the necessary intervention from a subordinate in a safety sensitive situation. In such a culture, deference to authority and age are held in very high esteem. Korean national crewed airlines in particular have had a string of accidents attributed in part to this phenomenon. Whether or not this is the case here has yet to be determined by crew interviews and analysis of cockpit communications. A concerted effort was made on the part of Korean safety agencies back in the 1980s to address this problem by introducing training and methods known as crew resource management.

We've written previously how automation is slowly allowing hands-on piloting skills to whither. The scariest thought about this accident is that apparently without the routine electronic guidance that these pilots were used to seeing, they made gross errors of airmanship, and the monitoring pilot either did not see the error or was somehow inhibited from correcting it until it was too late. We realize it may seem harsh to criticize the pilots when the official investigation has hardly started, yet it is hard for us to imagine any other cause for flying a perfectly good jet into the ground. Should mitigating evidence appear such as a mechanical problem, we will be the first to offer a retraction. Whatever the underlying cause, though, a gross deviation was allowed to occur and left uncorrected on a clear day with calm winds in a state of the art aircraft.

Are They Sleeping Up There?

Yes. No. That would be illegal, dangerous, and stupid. We're reminded of one of the standard briefing items given by grizzled senior captains to all new copilots: "Don't let me wake up and catch you napping!"

The FARs (Federal Aviation Regulations) are somewhat ambiguous about this. While there are rules relating to the amount of rest needed before flight and the length of crew duty days, they don't specifically forbid napping on the job. However, in the spirit of most government regulations of this nature, if it doesn't specifically say you can do something, it's a sure bet that you can't. The FARs also provide a convenient catch-all regulation for dealing with any situation that is not specifically mentioned. That is the "careless and reckless" provision of Part 91 under which sleeping might be covered. And lastly, it should be generally expected by your employer that you stay awake on the job!

And yet, fatigue as it relates to aviation is a huge concern. Fatigue is now recognized as a physiological phenomenon rather than a moral failing. And the implications for flight safety are huge. Fatigue was cited as a factor the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 in February of 2009 though the NTSB declined to list it as a cause. While the primary cause of the crash was the captain's mishandling of the aircraft resulting in a stall, fatigue of both the captain and first officer likely exacerbated recognition and recovery of the stall. Indeed, the effects of fatigue are well known and can seriously degrade task performance and situational awareness. Studies have indicated that being awake for 24 hrs degrades performance as much as a .10% blood alcohol content. One poor night of sleep in the crash pad and your pilot may as well have a beer before coming to work.

As a result of the Colgan crash, Congress passed the Airline Safety and Federal Aviation Administration Extension Act of 2010. This law required the FAA to overhaul existing flight and duty time regulations, and also to require the establishment of a fatigue risk management plan at all commercial airlines. The new regulations, which will be implemented soon, include changes to duty hour limitations based upon when a pilot reports to work in an effort to respect circadian cycles. Fatigue is notoriously difficult to self diagnose and the new regulations acknowledge this. There's a lot to like in the new regulations, but as per normal when dealing with any political process, much mischief has also snuck into the law masquerading as safety improvements.

In any industry that is populated by older more mature companies, but also has younger, nimbler upstarts  unencumbered by legacy labor contracts, a proven strategy is to try to saddle the competition with the same burdens that exist in the older companies. Hence what one might see is an alliance between the established players, their labor unions, and ever willing government regulators to hamstring new entrants. And sure enough, that is in evidence in the new rest regulations. For instance, while the pilots of some low cost carriers may fly 80 or more hours in a month, pilots for the large network airlines fly 60 or fewer hours monthly. So rather than fight their own unions for increased work rules, the legacy airlines petition the government under the rubric of safety to make their competitors fly their pilots less thereby driving up costs. 80 flight hours at a six flight hour work day, which is not unreasonable, means about 14 days at work.

Overall, though, the new regulations should have a positive effect in lessening the exposure of the flying public to the dangers of fatigued pilots. One of the most beneficial methods of combating fatigue though, didn't make the final cut. And that is naps. It has been long recognized that a short nap can produce dramatic improvements in performance lasting up to several hours. Nasa has done extensive research into the science of naps for pilots and astronauts and has found that while there are drawbacks such as sleep inertia immediately following a nap, the benefits are palpable. The FAA however, citing a lack of data, has declined to regulate for controlled napping. This is probably one part science and two parts politics.

All the attention given to fatigue though comes down to a simple fact of life. Sometimes you just get tired and it may or may not have anything to do with how much sleep was achieved the night before. Having a bowl of your favorite chow mein followed by sitting on the sunny side of the plane in mid afternoon during a long cruise might just have you nodding off, and there's little to be done about it. So while certainly no napping in flight occurs, on occasion one pilot has been known to let the other take both the controls and radio in order to do some enhanced overhead panel study, or perhaps to check the eyelids for leaks. All in the name of safety, of course.

Do Phones Really Interfere With the Instruments?

When it comes to your phone and other electronics interfering with aircraft electronics and instruments, the short answer is maybe. Does this make them dangerous to use during takeoff and landing? Probably not. Are flight attendants, who are charged with enforcing this rule under pain of discipline from their employers, and fines from the FAA, a little overbearing at times? Sure. Wouldn't you be if the usual folks to push it are the frequent fliers who know better, and are the same ones who try to explain to you why it's a stupid rule? Does the persistence of this rule really have more to do with bureaucratic inertia and ineptitude on the parts of both the FAA and FCC than with any real or imagined danger? Absolutely.

A little background: Electronics on airplanes or avionics, have traditionally been used for communications and navigation. Any radio is susceptible to interference from another nearby radio due to bleed over. Owners of ham radios are well acquainted with complaints from neighbors who can hear their transmissions over their TVs and radios. The noise you hear on your AM radio when you drive under a power line is the same thing, as your radio is picking up the RF (radio frequency) energy from the line. For this reason, the RTCA (Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics) which advises the FCC,  first recommended a ban on inflight electronics in 1961. 

Fast forward to today and the situation is only more complicated. While the avionics of yore were strictly analog and consisted of just radios, virtually everything on a modern airliner is controlled by digital electronics. This includes even the flight controls and engines. Aircraft manufacturers have replaced throttle and flight control cables with digital controls to reduce weight and to improve control of aircraft systems. When you look up front in the cockpit and see those large throttles, they're not physically connected to the engines at all, but simply relay signals to a computer which then electronically commands fuel valves in the engine to control thrust. All Airbus and soon all Boeing aircraft will have completely electronic flight controls, which means there is no physical connection between the cockpit and the wings. Some 737 aircraft which have been retrofitted with cargo fire warning systems actually transmit their own data to the cockpit by radio. Rewiring the aircraft was considered too cost prohibitive. Clearly, we don't want to interfere with those things.

On the other side of the interference ledger, consumer electronics have been revolutionized by digital electronics as well. While old "bag" analog cell phones might have transmitted with as much as 3 watts, modern digital phones are typically well under 1 watt and can be as low as 20 mW. They even self regulate their power output depending on the signal quality they receive. This is why leaving a phone on accidentally in flight will quickly drain the battery...it's searching for a signal at maximum power. Standard WiFi signals are also in the range of several hundred milliwatts. Most personal electronic devices (PEDs) are types of computers and while they may emit only tiny amounts of RF radiation, they are operating in the same frequency range as the computers on the aircraft. Of special concern here is the GPS signal upon which the aircraft depends for navigation. GPS satellites are in high earth orbit and their signals are quite weak, and might be blocked by closer transmitters that are bleeding over. 

The end result of the melange of electronics on board an airliner is a cacophony of potentially competing signals from a radio spectrum point of view. We remember from our military days catching a ride in the back of an electronic reconnaissance (spy) plane. The pilot explained that because the electronics in back were so sophisticated and temperamental, no updates could be made to the cockpit without extensive testing and RF deconfliction. The same principle more or less still applies, but it is nigh well impossible to test and catalog the many thousands of different types of consumer electronics being brought on board and hence the general ban during takeoff and landing. Another potential problem is devices which are misbehaving electronically due to perhaps being dropped or broken.

The entire question then simply rests on risk mitigation or "do you feel lucky today, punk?". Well, do ya? A charter flight which crashed in 2003 in New Zealand killing eight, is usually cited as one that is thought to implicate a cell phone. The pilot's own phone was connected during the last few minutes. Whether the aircraft's electronics themselves were compromised is unclear. Overall, though, while the potential is certainly present, trying to determine whether any one anomaly noticed up front was caused by a cell phone in back is close to impossible without extensive instrumentation and controlled conditions. 

While we routinely observe momentary anomalies in aircraft performance, interference in radio communications, and systems that just don't do what they're expected to do, there's no way to tell exactly why these things happen. Most are considered just annoyances, such as a bit of static on the radio, and don't impact operations at all. There are so many redundancies in systems and procedures, that only a truly major disruption in electronics would compromise safety, which we've never experienced nor heard of. Many airlines are even issuing their pilots iPads and other computers for use as approach charts and flight data computers to further reduce the weight of carrying flight book bags. These devices are required to be used during all phases of flight to include takeoff and landing.

So here is where the bureaucratic risk avoidance mechanism kicks in. Even though these devices are probably safe to use during takeoff or landing, no government bureaucrat is going to risk his job and government pension to sign off on lifting the ban...without the proper motivation. And as per usual, when dealing with a circle-the-wagons turf protecting agency such as the FAA, that motivation will come from political pressure. And sure enough, the hue and cry for relief on the use of PEDs in flight has become so great that this past August, the FAA announced the formation of an industry working group to address the issue. After that, rules will have to be written, comment periods observed, and maybe then some relief will appear. But, until such time as a consensus can be reached that both assures safety and gives the regulators some political cover should anything ever really go wrong, we'll all just have to carry along a real paper crossword puzzle for the time between pushback and ten thousand feet.

So You're on Fire. What Now, Genius?

Actually, that was a trick question. You're always on fire when flying in a jet. Two fires are always (or should be) burning on an airborne 737, three if you've got the APU running. Burning fires are how a jet engine works. No firee, no workee. Unlike the engine in your car, which needs the fire to be relit by the spark plugs at every cycle of the piston, the fire in the hot section of a turbine engine is lit once when the engine is started, and is then self sustained with no external ignition source until the fuel source is cut off at engine shutdown. 

Of course there are safety systems in place to relight the engine should the flame go out for some reason, but this system would only be used in an emergency. But what kind of things might make the fire go out or cause a flameout as we say in the biz? As any boy scout can tell you, a fire needs three things: fuel, oxygen, and ignition. Obviously, running out of fuel would be one reason to cause a flameout. In 1978, a United Airlines DC-8 crashed for just that reason. The crew became preoccupied with a landing gear problem and simply ran the jet out of gas and crashed. The only silver lining was that relatively few people were killed due to no post-crash fire. The fuel tanks were empty. Extreme rain ingestion has also been known to cause engines to flameout though modifications to intakes have minimized this problem by diverting rain away from the hot section of engines.

But getting back to fire, it is very useful when it is controlled and stays where it's supposed to. What happens when it escapes? On an airplane, nothing good. The short answer is you either land, put it out quickly, or die.  An uncontained fire on an airplane is probably the worst thing that can happen to any pilot short of hitting the ground. Besides all of the usual problems associated with fire such as smoke and heat, on an airplane you can't escape and the clock is ticking as the fire destroys the systems used to control the airplane.

On May 11, 1996, ValueJet 592, a DC-9, crashed into the Florida Everglades after catching on fire shortly after departing from Miami. The accident report stated that the cause of the fire was improperly loaded oxygen generators stored in the cargo compartment which caught fire shortly after takeoff. What is notable about this accident is that the crew became aware of a problem just six minutes after takeoff, and crashed into the swamp about three minutes later. It took that long for the intense fire to sever the control cables. In the aftermath, airlines were required to install cargo fire warning and suppression systems though they would not have saved that fated airliner due to the burning oxygen generators providing their own oxygen.

On September 2, 1998, Swissair 111, a McDonnell Douglas MD-11, crashed into the North Atlantic just off of Nova Scotia after a fire broke out in the space between the cockpit and the fuselage killing all 229 passengers and crew. The investigation revealed that insulation installed in the walls of the aircraft likely caught fire from a wiring defect. Aircraft systems were quickly compromised by the fire and the aircraft hit the water 21 minutes after noticing odors from the fire and only 30 miles from Halifax. The crew was faulted for taking time to dump fuel and run checklists, but it's not clear if a direct route to Halifax would have mattered as the flames spread so quickly. The pilots' flight manuals were found to have been melted indicating that they were using them to beat back the flames before hitting the water.

On July 17, 1996, TWA Flight 800 crashed off the coast of Long Island shortly after takeoff from JFK Airport enroute to Paris. All 230 passengers and crew were killed. While the aircraft was not technically brought down by a fire, the investigation focused on the possibility fuel-air explosion in the center wing fuel tank after discounting terrorist activity. The mixture of fuel fumes and air in the space above the fuel in that tank, or ullage, was believed to have become volatile due to heating from the air conditioning pack which had been used extensively on the ground due to a delayed departure. It was believed that ignition was provided by a voltage anomaly or short circuit which was then transmitted to the tank through the fuel quantity measuring system. The takeaway from this accident has been the introduction of nitrogen gas inerting systems designed to keep the fuel ullage non-volatile. 

Ironically, an uncontained fire on a pod-mounted engine, which most airliners have, is not as serious a situation as a fuselage or cargo compartment fire. All airliners are equipped with engine fire suppression systems consisting of bottles of fire retardant which can be discharged into a burning engine. But should the engine fire not go out, it will simply stay in the engine. The slipstream will likely keep the fire from travelling up the engine strut to the wing. Fuel and hydraulic fluid can be cut off to a burning engine using fire control switches in the cockpit. The extinguishing agent used in these systems, a type of Freon, is no longer manufactured due to environmental concerns about ozone depletion, but enough supplies remain for current needs.

We've covered a variety of causes of and reactions to aircraft accidents caused by onboard fires. While extremely rare, an airborne fire is an extremely serious event. It's one of the reason's that aircrews have so little sense of humor when passengers smoke in restrooms, and toss smoldering butts into the trash. That reinforcement you see around the trash container door is designed to contain an explosive fire. There are also smoke detectors and extinguishers in restrooms for that reason. The latest concerns about fires have concerned aging wiring bundles which can explode rather dramatically when they get moist. Aging or flammable insulation is also a concern.

While flying remains one of the safest modes of transportation, all pilots are aware of those who have gone before and done battle with this particular demon. It is not one which takes many prisoners. The ill-fated Concord in the above photo hit a piece of debris on takeoff which shredded a tire that punctured the fuel tank. The leak was then ignited by the engines. There were no survivors. If you're ever unlucky enough to be on an airplane which catches fire, expect a rough ride because the folks up front know the clock is ticking.

Airliners Today Just About Fly Themselves, Don't They?

Well, they kind of do. Until they don't. Then what happens is either a pilot flies the aircraft or there's a worse outcome.

The first autopilots date back to 1912, barely a decade after the Wright Brothers first flew, and the capabilities and complexity of these devices have been growing since. The earliest autopilots were simple affairs designed to keep the aircraft straight and level to reduce the pilot's workload. In modern transport aircraft, the autopilot is just one of many systems which can be categorized under the heading of flight management. Today's flight management systems which include the autopilot, auto throttles, air data and navigation computers are designed to control and optimize the operation of the aircraft from takeoff through landing.

When autopilots were first introduced, their purpose was simply to reduce the workload on the pilot so he could tend to other duties such as navigation, radio communications, and engine monitoring. As the size and range of aircraft grew, autopilots were later recognized as way to reduce pilot fatigue to allow longer flights. Flight duty rules even today restrict length of flight duty time a pilot can be required to fly without an autopilot. Since the early 1980s, though, the focus of flight management systems has been on fuel efficiency.

Like an automobile, the consumption of fuel in an airplane can be greatly affected by how it is operated. For any given weight and air temperature, there is an optimum speed and altitude which will produce the greatest efficiency. Flying even a few knots either faster or slower than optimum speed can result in  "over burn" or wasted fuel. Just a thousand or so feet above or below optimum altitude can also have the same deleterious effect on fuel consumption. There have even been cases of overseas flights getting into trouble because of a pressurization problem requiring a descent, only to find that the aircraft didn't have enough fuel at the lower altitude to make its destination.

Navigation has undergone a similar transformation. Long gone are the days when pilots would use a radio receiver to fly from ground based radio station to station. Inertial reference systems, ring laser gyros, GPS navigation, and performance based navigation systems such as RNP now allow pilots to fly from any point on the planet to another in the most direct route independent of ground based navigation aids. Precise guidance systems allow for extremely accurate approach guidance even in mountainous terrain with little visibility, the bane of many an aviator over the years. The fuel and time savings using direct routing have greatly increased efficiency and would astound ancient mariners who had only the stars and sextants for guidance.

Determining when to climb and descend also has a significant effect on fuel efficiency. Flight management computers can determine the winds at altitude and adjust for a very precise descent point. These systems fly complex flight profiles with far more precision over a longer period of time than can humans. The fuel savings are significant and easily justify the many millions of dollars spent on these systems.

"Hand flying" or manual control of an aircraft then, has become actively discouraged as the machine simply does it better for longer. Any decent pilot can fly as well as an autopilot for a short while, but doing it for hours on end is neither feasible nor desirable. Automation has changed the very nature of piloting over a relatively short period, but as with any transitional change, there have been some unintended consequences not all of which are good. These problems include the atrophying of piloting skills which on occasion are still needed, complacency as pilots are reduced to system monitors, and a disturbing trend of  people who are simply unqualified occupying cockpits with some disastrous results. We will address all three of these issues.

An inevitable result of the increase in automated flying and reduced manual control by pilots has been a concurrent loss of piloting or "stick and rudder" skills. Whether or not this is a good thing is somewhat of an open question. All major airlines have now fully embraced all facets of automation, but have also included the following admonition in a typical flight manual for pilots to maintain their stick and rudder skills:

Pilots must hand fly the aircraft periodically to maintain proficiency. This will only be accomplished when flight conditions permit, procedures do not require the use of automation, and the dictates of safety, service, and efficiency are not compromised.

So what was once the bread and butter of the profession, a skill which was a pilot's stock and trade and took years to acquire, is now only expected to be practiced periodically. Rather than a lament by pilots who see their skill set made superfluous by technology, the question needs to be asked whether the stick and rudder skill set is still needed. Apparently the FAA thinks so and has data from actual incident reports to support that position. Another recent FAA report also notes that training for human interface with technology is lacking as well. Our opinion is that while automation is steadily improving, it has a long way yet to go until real pilots are made completely anachronistic. In the meantime, we let raw piloting skills deteriorate at our peril.

On February 12, 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 crashed in Buffalo, NY with the loss of all lives on board. The NTSB, in its report, faulted the captain of that flight for improperly responding to a low airspeed situation that occurred on approach. The Q400 aircraft they were flying had been delivered new to Colgan in 2008 and had the latest avionics suite to include an autopilot, glass panel displays, and stall warning systems. Further investigation into the captain's aviation background revealed that he had failed multiple flight examinations and had needed remedial training to be brought up to standards as recently as two years before the accident. In this case, the captain was simply unprepared to salvage a bad situation in spite of all the automation systems at his disposal.

There is an adage concerning computers which states that one of their chief benefits(?) is that they allow humans to make mistakes at a much faster and efficient rate. It should be to no one's surprise that the addition of computers to airplanes has proven the enduring wisdom of this aphorism. As mentioned above, while automation demotes the use of hands on flying, the programming of flight computers becomes ever more critical. A mis-programmed route will result in an airplane flying a precise GPS guided, auto throttle speed controlled path to a place that neither the pilots nor controllers expect. Entirely new classifications of gross navigational errors have had to be created to account for the mis-programming of automated flight systems.

The nature of skills needed to manually pilot an aircraft involve a constant feedback loop of control inputs, followed by results delivered by instrumentation, followed by corrections to achieve a desired flight state. The automated cockpit, however, requires intense programming prior to flight followed by a hands-off monitoring of the aircraft as it executes the programming.This is a classic mismatch of skill sets. A pilot trained from the beginning of his or her career to be "in the loop" and to "fly the jet" is now reduced to the job of monitoring of a system that almost never makes a mistake, assuming it was programmed correctly.

The operative word here is "almost". For automation does fail and on occasion fails spectacularly. The nature of irregular operations or system failures is that they don't generally pre-announce their arrival. It is during these times that the pilot has to step in to manually fly the airplane during a critical phase of flight without the benefit of having warmed up. A well known human reaction characteristic, the startle response, which can temporarily disrupt a logical response to an unexpected situation, further complicates an attempted recovery when automation fails. We can't help but think that bringing all attention and skills to bear on an unexpected situation or system failure will be exacerbated when the ground state was from one of semi-disinterested monitoring vice being an active participant in the flight feedback loop.

On December 20, 1995, American Airlines Flight 965, a Boeing 757 employing state of the art automation, crashed while descending for landing at Cali, Columbia. The accident report implicated improper programming of the aircraft's navigation computer. Specifically, a database discrepancy between the on board electronic navigation database, the controller's instructions, and their charts resulted in the crew typing in an incorrect instruction. While the crew thought the computer would take them to a beacon near their destination, they had inadvertently typed instructions to fly to a point in nearby Bogota. The resulting turn in mountainous terrain to the errant point, and the crew's failure to monitor their position, caused the aircraft to hit a mountain resulting in the loss of 159 passengers and crew and the aircraft.

While the previous two examples of problems with automation are associated with pilots who currently have or at one time had the requisite piloting skills for their responsibilities, a trend of pilots being placed in cockpits who never developed the appropriate skill level is equally disturbing. On June 1, 2009, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-203, departed Rio de Janeiro for Paris, France. The aircraft was last heard from at 01:35 UTC and was never heard from again. A search later revealed wreckage, though it appeared that the ocean had swallowed whatever evidence there was of the cause of the accident. It wasn't until nearly two years later when the flight and voice data recorders were recovered from the ocean floor, that a chilling picture of the fated airliner's last minutes emerged.

While the captain was sleeping on his break, copilots 32 year old Pierre-Cedric Bonin, and 37 year old David Robert entered an area of turbulence. For an unknown reason, the autopilot and auto throttles disconnected leaving the yeoman aviators to manually fly the aircraft. This should not have been a problem to any experienced pilot. Several rookie airmanship errors, however, such as pulling back on the control stick while in a stall, failing to understand the indications the instruments were relaying, and a profound lack of situational awareness doomed the aircraft and its 228 passengers and crew to a watery grave within three minutes. It is chilling to read the transcript of the last words of two pilots who clearly did not know how to fly their aircraft out of danger.

The two young copilots of Air France 447 were likely given only rudimentary stick and rudder training before graduating to automated cockpits. We'll refer to them as automation babies. It is expected that any time an aircraft automation system places the aircraft in an undesirable state, the pilot is expected to recognize the situation, and to take proper action to return the aircraft to a desired state. From our experience as a military flight instructor, it is far more difficult to take an aircraft which is out of a normal state and return it to within proper parameters than it is to maintain that aircraft within the proper parameters in the first place. The skill level required to fix a bad situation is far and away greater than that needed to maintain the figurative middle of the lane. Couple the need for a greater skill level needed for recovery with the startle effect, and the potential for disaster seems uncomfortably close when the automation decides to take a powder.

We are now transitioning from a time when nearly all commercial pilots cut their teeth on aircraft with either rudimentary or no autopilot, to one of where after a short initial period of hands-on flying, all flying is done using automated systems. Automation babies will not have the skills to fall back on when things go awry. When Chelsey "Sully" Sullenberger glided his Airbus A320, one of the most highly automated aircraft flying today, into the Hudson river after both engines had failed, he was relying on the skills he had acquired manually flying Air Force trainers and fighters. No automation system exists that could even pretend to do what a well trained stick and rudder pilot did that day.

We honestly have no quarrel with the overall philosophy of using technology to enhance aviation safety and efficiency. The airline industry is under tremendous cost pressure and technology holds the key to a safe and profitable future for airlines. Care must be taken, though, to ensure that automation is employed wisely, and that piloting skills are maintained at least until such time when automation can truly fly the airplane under any circumstance. Pilots are expensive to train and with the cost pressure on airlines due to rising fuel prices and the expense of training pilots on complex automation systems, basic piloting skills have unfortunately come to be considered expendable. This is folly. Our fear is that the gap between the time where automation is truly robust, and where the reservoir of old school piloting skills dries up may allow more Air France 447s to hit the water.

Let's Talk about Air Traffic Control

Recently, we were contacted by a close relative who was concerned about aviation safety due to the possibility of a shortage of air traffic controllers. Never mind that most of the effects of the current budget impasse have been manufactured by the administration, it got us thinking that the public perception of the role air traffic controllers play in modern aviation has become somewhat skewed over time. Are they as essential to aviation safety as they once were? What role has technology played in the movement of air traffic? Let's investigate.

While the history of the heavier than air craft dates back to the Wright brothers in 1903, air traffic control has its beginnings in the 1920s when people with flags would signal pilots when they could take off and land. What we consider modern air traffic control, with controllers actively directing the flight of aircraft, didn't occur until after World War II when radar became commonplace. The post war air traffic system that was developed consisted of aircraft following radio beacons across the country, and then being directed or "vectored" by a controller using radar to an instrument approach for landing. Tower controllers would control traffic in the immediate vicinity of an airport and control takeoffs and landings. 

It is important to note that while airplanes flew for decades without any need for ground control, air traffic control or ATC exists for two separate and sometimes conflicting reasons: safety and efficiency. In the infancy of aviation there was a theory that came to be known as the "Big Sky Theory" which posited that the sky was so big and airplanes were so small that collisions were unlikely. As aircraft grew larger and faster, it was soon determined that the sky was not so big after all. There are no fender benders in the air. Any collision would likely result in fatalities in one or both aircraft. Several high profile mid-air collisions such as the Cerritos DC-9 accident in 1986 crystallized the need for improved and error free aircraft separation standards.

Concurrently, runways that were located near population centers became more valuable as air traffic increased. Construction of new airports in congested urban centers has become prohibitively expensive so the existing runways are needed to accommodate the greatest amount of traffic consistent with safe aircraft separation. At times the need for increased airspace utilization seemed to conflict with the need for the safest possible operation and all of this pressure was placed on the backs of air traffic controllers. Move traffic too inefficiently and the public complains about delays, but make one egregious error and people could be killed. Hence the popular depiction of an air traffic controller as a chain smoking coffee mainlining emotional wreck.

But is this still the case? As in most every other aspect of human endeavor, technology has made huge advancements and changed the very nature of aviation as a result. Let's start with technology improvements in aircraft. The introduction of inertial navigation systems (INS) beginning in the 1970s and later GPS systems have largely eliminated the need for commercial aircraft to navigate by using ground based radio aids. While equipment on modern aircraft can still receive and use these radio signals, they are not necessary for extended range navigation and hence controllers are not as necessary to make sure aircraft stay on these imaginary "highways" in the sky. Most flight plans today are "point to point" with the aircraft able to navigate directly to a point hundreds or even thousands of miles away on a direct route.

As a result of the Cerritos accident mentioned above, in-flight air traffic avoidance systems were developed and installed on all commercial aircraft. This system known as the traffic collision avoidance system or "TCAS", is an airborne data-link in which all participating aircraft with compatible equipment have a display in the cockpit showing the location and relative altitude of every other aircraft in the vicinity. The system not only detects possible threats, it can issue verbal and visual signals to the pilots in each aircraft to avoid a collision. All aircraft which wish to operate in the same airspace as commercial airliners must have some type of this equipment installed. This system has virtually eliminated the possibility of a mid-air collision.

Lastly, an array of technologies have been installed on modern transport aircraft which fall under the general category of automation. On board flight navigation computers are now able to fly complex arrivals and departures with highly precise altitude, lateral positioning, and airspeed. Whereas before this technology was deployed, a controller might have to issue dozens of instructions to each individual aircraft, now a controller might issue one clearance for the entire procedure which the aircraft will then follow from initial descent all the way to the runway.

Technology has also been improving the equipment that controllers themselves use albeit at a slower pace. Controllers now utilize predictive software tools which show where an aircraft will be at some future point based on current parameters. Flight clearances are now transmitted electronically to aircraft directly through a data link obviating the need for controllers to read them to pilots. The future of air traffic control technology will ultimately deconflict an aircraft from all potential collisions before it even takes off. Controllers today, like pilots, are becoming more system managers than hands-on operators. Artificial intelligence and other promising technologies will eventually mean fewer controllers will be needed to manage this system as it will only require human input by exception backed up by airborne systems and pilots.

While air traffic control is a government function in the U.S., there is no innate reason for this to be so. A private corporation called Nav Canada handles all traffic control functions in Canada. There are other private corporations which provide ATC functions in other countries thereby avoiding the inevitable politicization and cost inefficiencies of a government bureaucracy with equal or better safety records. 

Commercial aviation is already one of  the safest modes of transportation available and promises to become ever safer as new technologies are deployed. Were all radios to go dead today, rest assured that every airliner aloft would land safely. So the next time you hear of threats to air safety due to engineered budget crises, know that those threats are empty.

Whither Yon Pilot Shortage?

There is a crisis brewing in the airline industry. It's been brewing for many decades and may...or may not finally be arriving. It's the pilot shortage. New FAA rules for pilot training coupled with high retirement rates have been fingered as the latest culprits, but the pilot shortage has been threatened many times before only to be a no-show.

 Like any other career field, factors like wages, demographics, product demand, competing careers, and training costs all affect the numbers of pilots employed by airlines. Major airlines hire pilots primarily from the military and also civilian backgrounds such as regional and cargo carriers. The military trains its pilots to their own standards while regional and cargo carriers have historically depended on entry level pilots such as flight instructors or banner tow pilots with very little experience. They are given minimum training and started out as copilots.

Both of these traditional pipelines however, the military and civilian, are largely shut down. The military, weary of losing its expensively trained pilots to the airlines, now requires a lengthy commitment of service in exchange for pilot training. At the end of the commitment, many military pilots are close enough to retirement to have the draw of a pension keep them in the service. On the civilian side, strict new FAA rules for minimum experience have all but dried up the flow of new aviators into the career field. Coupled with the cuts in wages and bankruptcies in the last decade at most major airlines, the promise of a long and lucrative career with a major airline is not the draw it once was.

Retirements on the other hand are only making the need for replacement pilots worse. The mandatory retirement age for pilots was raised from age 60 to 65 back in 2007, partly as a response to the request of airlines with large numbers of retirement age pilots. That retirement holiday came to the end in late 2012 and retirements once again threaten the staffing of airlines just as the new FAA rules are set to be enforced. But the shortage will not affect all carriers equally.

Major airlines with the highest pay scales are unlikely to be as greatly affected by the pilot shortage. There is a ready pool of aviators in the regional airlines ready to make the jump from their lesser paying positions. The majors will poach experienced pilots from the regional carriers. It is the regional airlines which may suffer from a lack of staffing. While their wages have historically been low, the unspoken deal was that part of a regional pilot's remuneration was the flight hours he or she was accumulating.

The new FAA experience requirements upset this arrangement as pilots must now show up already having these hours just to get a job. This will add greatly to the cost of choosing to become a pilot by many thousands of dollars. The low wage model, then, will likely fail to attract sufficient numbers of aspiring pilots unwilling to assume large amounts of debt when the payoff of a left seat job at the majors may be decades off.

There are some factors which may slow the precipitation of the crisis. For one, there are still many thousands of pilots still on furlough from the major airlines. Presumably though, this slack may only delay the shortage onset as pilots are all eventually recalled. Secondly, with economic margins in the regional airlines being very tight, the mainstay of the regional fleets, the 50 seat regional jets are being retired in favor of 80 and 100 seat aircraft. With these larger aircraft, more passengers can be flown with the same or fewer pilots. It is questionable, though, whether these trends will be enough to forestall a staffing shortage.

The last variable in the equation is pilot wages. They will inevitably have to rise to attract more pilots into the profession, yet with margins being as tight as they are, any significant wage increase may make the operation uneconomic. Current wages are starting to trend up, but it is not clear whether this trend will last or attract new talent into what is becoming to be recognized as a difficult and uncertain career field with a payoff of a high wage job at a major airline a receding mirage.

Lashed to the Mast: Hospitality and Airline Industry Outlook

It should by now be plainly obvious that the travel industry will be undergoing some profound changes due to the soaring cost of fuel. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) estimates that the increase in fuel bills for the global airline industry will top $91 billion this year. With the current average price of jet fuel at an eye popping $158 per barrel, many of the world’s airlines find themselves in a full throttle race in reverse to try to shrink their way to profitability.

United Airlines is disposing of their entire 737 fleet and furloughing thousands while American Airlines is also parking nearly 100 aircraft with a commensurate level of layoffs to name but two examples. The low cost carriers are also not immune with several bankruptcies and liquidations already having taken place while many of the survivors are hanging by a thread.

IATA estimates that the current situation will likely have a greater effect on the industry than did the attacks of 9/11 with industry losses of over $6 billion possible in 2008. This downturn, while similar in scope to 2001, differs as its primary cause is an engineered lack of supply driven by fuel costs as opposed to a lack of demand due to terrorism fears.

As airlines must raise fares to cover their fuel costs, many markets that were once profitable become money losers as price sensitive customers stay home. This effect is most pronounced in leisure markets as they typically have the lowest margins and highest price sensitivity.

Honolulu, for example, is losing over 27% of its air service while other leisure destinations such as Las Vegas and Orlando are losing about 15% each. Business travel is not escaping unscathed either. IATA estimates that business travel has dropped to levels unseen since 2003.

Lehman Bros. analyst Gary Chase estimates that airline seat capacity will be reduced 11% by fourth quarter 2008 and that the industry needs to shrink by at least 15% next year to achieve profitability. Some of this pain is no doubt due to a sluggish economy, but unlike past industry downturns, consensus opinion is that the airline industry will soon be smaller than it is today.

Into this breach steps the hospitality and lodging industry. The hospitality industry, which has recently enjoyed several years of robust growth and profitability, now finds itself lashed to the mast of a listing airline industry. And like the airline industry, the hospitality industry has been on a growth spree to increase its room capacity and market share.

As of April of this year the domestic US lodging industry had over 650,000 rooms in the construction or planning pipeline for an increase of 22% over the year earlier figure. These rooms will soon be looking for customers in a weak market.

Industry consultant PKF Hospitality Research estimates that a 10% decline in the number of airline seats domestically will result in a 3.9% drop in demand for lodging compared to the 3.3% drop in 2001. That translates into about 40 million fewer rooms occupied or a loss in revenue for the industry of about $4.3 billion.

This has already been reflected in the stock prices of most major hotel chains which are off between 15% to 20% this year. The weak US dollar has been a lone bright spot for some properties which cater to overseas tourists, but occupancy rates overall have started to decline for many domestic hotels. Profits are likely to be down 20% from their 2007 levels according to industry trade journal Hotels.

Aircraft Spotted

Taxiing out for takeoff last week at ONT and I spotted this C-26B Metro. It took some searching but I found this picture of the aircraft. Its used by the California Guard in drug interdiction.

The Metro Lives