Visiting FAA expert calls for more integrated pilot training

US flight safety guru Dr Kathy Abbott delivered an insightful address to the Safeskies 2011 conference in Canberra last week.

Abbott is the Chief Scientific and Technical Advisor for Flight Deck Human Factors to the US FAA on human performance and human error, systems design and analysis, advanced automation for flight path management, flight crew training/qualification, and flight crew operations and procedures. 

Abbott shared the directions that her team’s research are taking:

• Threat and error management is based on a model of human behaviour that works only at an observable behaviour level; and we need to look at factors that are not observable behaviours but that one can get from accident and incident reports.  
• Pilots and other humans in the system often mitigate operation risk and our entire aviation system is designed to rely on that. It happens all the time; we don’t tend to talk about it as much but we need to. But one of the characteristics of the aviation system is change and we need that when we change things that we don’t undermine the risk mitigation that the humans in the system do.    
• In approximately 25 per cent of 9000+ flights researched by Kathy Abbott’s team there was a manual handling or flight control error of some kind: did not manually handle the aircraft properly after not recognising that the autopilot or the auto-throttle disconnected; lack of monitoring or maintaining energy and speed; incorrect upset recovery; and inappropriate control inputs.
• Co-occurrence analysis was used to look at which elements occurred together. Manual operation may be difficult after transition from automated control; training may be inadequate. We should not assume any causality from just the fact that there is a co-occurrence. Correlation is not the same as causality.
• Flight crews are the risk mitigators for in flight failures and malfunctions of various kinds.
• Failure loads unanticipated by designers, where the flight crew does not have a checklist or procedure for dealing with the specific situation, need to be included.
• Automated systems have contributed significantly to the safety of aviation operations, to efficiency and to the precision of operations. So when we talk about the automated systems mitigating the risk, that’s as real as the pilots doing it.
• In some cases pilots are delegating too much authority to the automated systems; and there’s a variety of reasons why that seems to be happening. One of them is that there’s a message sometimes given to the flight crews that the automated system can perform better than they can, so they should keep it on automation all the time. And in some cases that means the pilots don’t feel comfortable with their own skills.
• But there’s a different category of automation that’s very important for us to focus on; and that is the automation of the calculation and integration of information being given to the flight crew.
• Flight management system programming still generates errors, so this area continues to be a challenge.
• A focus on a policy of managing automation, managing the modes, may actually distract from the task of managing the flight path and flying the aeroplane.
• The knowledge and skills that are needed by pilots is growing, not declining because of automation.
• In around 40 per cent of the accidents reviewed, there were areas of inadequate or insufficient pilot knowledge identified: Understanding of the limitations of flight path management systems; unusual altitude recognition and recovery, including high altitude; and speed and energy management.
• SOPs are not always followed and the more prescriptive the procedures the less likely they are to be followed
• Crew cross-check is sometimes insufficient and data entry errors into the FMS have proven to be an issue.
• The industry tends to make things more ‘proceduralised’ to allow us to take pilots with less experience. That’s got a lot of advantages, but it’s also got disadvantages in that once you get outside the non-routine you have to worry about it.
• In the area of pilot training and qualification, some of the areas for improvement could include: Flight path and energy management; recovery from off-path circumstances; and the use of alternative modes to meet air traffic clearances and requirements. At the moment only one in 10 flights proceeds as originally planned
• The new air space operations, with very precise flight paths using satellite based navigation, are opening up all kinds of policy for managing air space. But in some cases, to get that precision, it needs to be coupled to the autopilot, meaning much less opportunity for the pilots to practise.
• We’re also seeing an increased reliance on electronic data in the navigation databases and the FMSs, but the airspace operations are dependent on the quality of those data.
• Basic airmanship remains critical to successful operations because we still rely on the pilots. There’s a trade-off between the flexibility we put into the system and adding complexity to it. We do foresee increased complexity because we want increased flexibility.

Kathy Abbott concluded that, “Our system is very safe and we should never lose sight of that, but we should also not get complacent about that.

“Pilots and other systems often mitigate operational risk. It’s important to understand those positive behaviours and to take advantage of them. We can make improvements, and we should, and we need to take an integrated approach to doing that…

“Coordinate training policies, procedures and practice; don’t just look at any one piece in isolation. Don’t look at the airspace and the on board systems separately because they need to operate together.

“And we foresee increases in complexity as the corresponding challenges for us.

“So to maintain the safety and effectiveness of our system we need to be ready for change and be prepared to deal with it.”