Originally Posted by
L39 Guy
That’s a fair point. My response and likely that of my “cohorts” is this: what was presented to the three crews upon lift-off was a classic Unreliable Airspeed (UAS) scenario which is a an emergency that any B737 type rated pilot ought to have seen in a simulator complete with all the bells, whistles and other distractions. The fidelity of simulators is really quite amazing.
So how is it that 1/3 crews did the drill and saved the aircraft (by controlling and flying the aircraft including a managing its speed thanks to doing the UAS drill) while the other 2 crews did not do the drill which ultimately lead to an uncontrollable aircraft as speed was so high that no human could manually trim the aircraft?
Once we have addressed that issue then the next one is how is it that the successful Lion Air crew needed a jumpseat pilot to point out that they had a runaway stab trim and the fatal Lion Air crew was thumbing through the checklist looking for a memory item when they lost control of the aircraft.
To me, this points to a serious training issue at both of these airlines.
"How is it that...?" is exactly the right question IMO, but the answer may be "they were physiologically incapable under the circumstances" rather than "they didn't know how".
Like, the first step in response is probably to ensure that pilots' rational minds do indeed know how to recover the aircraft in a classroom setting. If that's missing then yeah, incompetence, basic training issue, needs fixing immediately. It's possible that this was missing in all three of these cases. It's also possible, based on available evidence, that it wasn't; in this scenario, we proceed to the next step.
If the pilots' rational minds have the solution but they're not applying it, then my understanding of human factors suggests that the likely problem is that their reacting minds - Mark Levy's "chimpanzee brain" from the video linked earlier - is siezing control, in keeping with a few billion years of evolutionary training, and letting the aircraft fly itself into the ground, because chimpanzees can't fly jet aircraft.
There's a couple of obvious approaches to deal with this scenario. The first is to figure out what stimuli are causing the chimpanzee to take over, and removing those stimuli. This is classic human factors work. For example, the stick shaker is AIUI a nice bit of human factors design that is intended to reliably break the pilot's concentration and draw attention to the fact that the aircraft is approaching a stall. Probably there is an amount of time it needs to run before 99.9% of humans have consciously noted it, and that's probably single-digit seconds. Having it drop down to an insistent throb after that point might maintain the information while allowing the pilot to concentrate again. (Maybe this is the wrong fix; the point is that this is the *class* of solution you'd be looking for.)
The second one is to actively train the chimpanzee to sit down and shut up, which probably requires replicating the systems' conditions more faithfully in training. Yes, a simulator captures the aircraft system's condition very accurately, I'm not disputing that, but it's not obvious that it's capturing the human system's condition. Specifically, I would imagine that the chimpanzee learns very quickly that the simulator is essentially safe and it has nothing to worry about, so it doesn't flip out if it suspects the simulator is about to crash. In a real in-flight emergency, that's not going to be the case, so pilots probably should be explicitly trained to manage their own minds and bodies in emergency situations to prevent the chimp from taking over.
One possible solution (on which there is probably a bunch of research that may show it to be a very poor idea) would be to hook crews up to an IV line in sim training, and give them a massive slug of adrenaline when they first realise something is wrong. Their body is then going to want to drop into a classic fight-or-flight response; given that a stall can neither be run away from nor punched to death, this is unproductive, so you'd want to train pilots to manage this physiological process so they can get back to applying their rational-mind training as quickly as possible, and fly the damn plane. If they don't have this training, it's not surprising that they're failing at this in real life, and if that's the case then all the sim time and process-knowledge in the world isn't going to save them.