A319 FO windshield blowout

[Dan Winterland]

Good work! The QRH procedures would definitely not be applicable in this event. A good example of why skill and airmanship is still required, despite the best efforts of the industry to make them obsolete!

Would like your explanation for that, not familiar with the A319

An explosive decompression requires an emergency descent. The Airbus procedure as described in the Flight Crew Techniques Manual relies on the use of the Autoflight System and consequently the Flight Control Panel. But if this has been ripped from it's mountings and is hanging by it's wires, it's going to be of little use. It also requires some crew communication, but if one of the crew has no eardrums left and there is a 300knot gale inside the cockpit, that's not going to be possible. Modern airline crew training relies on procedures based on the designers best guess at all possible scenarios. They produce procedures based on these and they are what are in the electronic checklist procedures and programmed into the simulators - and consequently this is what the crews train for. There is little variation in these and pilots get quite good at managing the 'canned' emergencies.

But in the real world, the aircraft doesn't really care what the designers thinks it should be doing and it breaks down in many various and inventive ways. In the last five years, I have had four major events in Airbus types and not one of them was resolved by the pre-determined actions as defined by the ECAM (Engine Control and Monitoring System). In fact, in one case, following the ECAM procedure would have made the situation far worse by depressurising the cabin. In all these four cases, it required airmanship,experience and systems knowledge to achieve a safe and satisfactory outcome.

Current training is being cut back to the bare minimum based on the assumption that modern aircraft are so automated that they will look after themselves. The result that training is very heavily procedure based. Rigid Standard Operating Procedures are now the industry standard and there is essentially no flexibility outside these rules leading to the loss of airmanship and basic flying skills I alluded to.

Luckily, passengers have had Captains Chesney Sullenburger, Tammie Jo Shults and Liu Shunjian with their experience, skill and airmanship to get them back to earth safely. The current trend means this type of pilot is becoming increasingly rare.