Lessons from past accidents to the current pilot generation
It is generally accepted that the number of serious accidents to aircraft has reduced over the past 25 years. The reasons for this are varied but would include increased reliability of aero-engines and better navigation equipment.
In terms of Australian accidents the usual culprits are in GA while at the same time there have been very few serious large RPT accidents in Australia. This leads to an earlier subject in Pprune pages which discussed seemingly general discontent with the flight safety content of the official ATSB/CASA publication Flight Safety Australia and what measures are needed by the editorial staff to make the FSA magazine more interesting to read - like the former Aviation Safety Digest of yore.
This reader has been researching more than one hundred Air Safety Digests and coming across countless thoroughly informative accident reports involving local GA including PNG - as well as heavy aircraft overseas operators. These reports were included regularly in ASD because of their relevance to Australian flight operations. In turn the journalistic style of the then editor was largely responsible for the popularity of the magazine.
It's a fair bet that most of the current generation of pilots in Australia were not born when the first ASD was published, and are therefore denied the opportunity to learn from these accidents of long ago. Yet, the cause of those accidents are as relevant to the study of flight safety today as they were all those years ago. And I am not talking about the last flight of the Hindenberg airship.. For those saying, Huh? - just Google it.
There is a tendency for the current editorial staff of FSA to treat "old" accidents as not worthy of re-publication to the present generation. Instead, we are served an unending proliferation of advertisements leavened with amateur pilot articles or personal stories with maybe an occasional overseas event. Mind you, no shortage of CRM and TEM ad nauseum. A new course needs to be charted.
In one copy of Air Safety Digest (ASD) I found an NTSB report on an overseas accident reproduced in a well written shortened version covering two pages of text and a couple of sketches. After reading that report I sat back and came to the conclusion that it had a far greater flight safety message that ten FSA magazines put together.
It was about a Boeing 707 accident in USA where, at V1 and max take off weight, a loud noise like an explosion was heard in the cockpit, prompting the captain to abort the take off just after the call of V1. It turned out that the first officer's sliding window had popped open and the combined noise of the engines and high airspeed was enough to scare the captain into an unwise decision. Despite maximum braking and full reverse thrust on all engines the 707 over-ran the 4442 metre length runway and caught fire. The 186 people on board managed to escape.
The investigation found that due to an undetected defect in the braking system, only six of the eight brakes were operating. Hence, in addition to aborting after V1, the captain was not to know the aircraft braking capability was already fatally compromised.
There were several lessons to be learned from that accident and Boeing in later years addressed one of them. That was if a cockpit window becomes unlocked after 80 knots on the take off run, it is insufficient reason alone to abort. That advice is now incorporated in the appropriate Boeing manuals.
Personally, I believe that selected accidents from the past, such as the event described here, should be re-published for the present pilot generation to study and learn from. The editorial staff of FSA apparently disagree. Whether the selected accident occured in 1959 or 2009 should not matter. It is the applicability to the current generation of pilots that is important.
Your comments for and against the publication of early accidents would be appreciated and I am sure will be read by the staff of Flight Safety Australia.
Last edited by Centaurus; 20th Dec 2009 at 13:28.