Seconds to Disaster: US Edition by Ray Ronan

The quality of their 1500
hours and what level of supervision and development is still open to debate.
    In Europe the introduction of
a new license allows airlines to have pilots with less than 250 hours flying
experience entering the cockpits of commercial airliners. The safety margin is
being cut so close that it could even prove fatal.
    Despite the world becoming a global
village, despite instant communications, many of the lessons learned from accidents
and incidences fail to travel well.
    Pilot fatigue must be tackled.
Is overworked, cheap labor in the cockpit conducive to a safe flight? Long
commutes forced on pilots have to be curtailed. Finally, training beyond simple
box-ticking must be introduced if the industry wishes to avoid future
catastrophes by putting passenger and crew lives at risk.
    But until airlines and
regulators agree to truly put the passenger first, and the recommendations
proposed after the Colgan Air crash are adopted worldwide, many more aviation
disasters are only waiting to happen.
    And many millions of passengers’ lives will continue
to be put at risk.

Chapter 13
How Technology is Changing
Aviation
A Marriage for Better and for Worse
“ A hundred years ago, it could take you the better part of
a year to get from New York to California; whereas today, because of equipment
problems at O’Hare, you can't get there at all.”
Dave Barry (Only
Travel Guide you'll ever need)
    Aircraft are becoming more
and more sophisticated and yet this statement will disturb readers;
frighteningly, a widely spoken phrase by pilots in response to an aircraft's
odd behavior is, “What is it doing now?”
    Meaning that spurious behavior
by the aircraft’s onboard computers has caused an inadvertent action to be
performed by the automation. From computers turning the aircraft in the wrong
direction, to every display in front of the pilots suddenly turning blank,
glitches do occur. They occur more often than you would think, but pilots
generally tend to cope.
    US Federal Aviation Administration's
chief scientific and technical adviser, Dr Kathy Abbott, does not believe
computers are ready to replace pilots, who “successfully deal with seventy
percent of unanticipated failures, let alone the failures for which there was a
checklist”. [57]
    To reduce the workload on the
pilots and enable them to deal with the current aircraft flight situation and
to plan ahead, the flying can be done and the systems monitored by computers.
    When the first fly-by-wire
Airbus was under production, an unofficial phrase coming from the heart of
Europe was that the most expensive passenger seat on the aircraft would be that
of the pilot. Which may be partly the reason that pilots are being ‘designed
out’ of the aircraft, when in reality, the intelligence of the automation is
not yet good enough to do the pilot’s job.
    The pilots sit at the nose of
what can be very large planes, locked away behind a cockpit door and isolated
from the flight attendants, and also “in essence” isolated from the aircraft
systems . “More importantly is the mental isolation caused by the nature of the
controls,” says Donald Norman of UC San Diego.
    Another problem is that the
automation does exactly what it should up to this point, relieving the workload
on the pilots but taking them “out of the loop.” But often when something goes
wrong there is no warning or obvious lead up as the automation provides no
running commentary on its operations to the flight crew; as was the case, we
will see in the next chapter, with the pilots of the Air France Flight 447.
    Pilots who one minute were
sitting in relative peace can be abruptly plunged into a maelstrom of failures
and warnings.
    One such example was the
explosion of an engine onboard a Qantas Airbus A380 on November 4 th 2010. Severe damage to other parts of the aircraft caused fifty seven separate warnings to be generated by the
automated systems, which were presented to the pilots in the