‘johns’ (#121) is almost back to the original question … how does the industry “reduce the number of unwarranted rejected takeoffs above V1.”
The report (#1) gives several reasons for high speed RTOs, but few solutions amongst the recommendations:-
- Revitalise the ‘Takeoff Safety Training Aid’; a worthy training initiative, but in the current economic climate will the likely meager effort be effective.
Surely, the critical issues can be covered in less than the current two volume tome.
- Train for events other than engine failure and use realistic scenarios; focus on the limiting cases, we do not have the luxury of ‘infinite’ runways.
This is another good initiative, but similarly limited by time and resource. It would be foolhardy to expect that every relevant scenario could be covered, let alone remembered for timely recall during a real event, so perhaps we have to identify generic training, i.e. situation awareness, surprise management – issues of human performance – simplifying the decision / action process.
- Understand pilot’s behaviors; yes a good research topic, but the industry has used CRM etc for many years, which in several RTO instances appears not to have helped.
Perhaps we should take what is currently known about human behaviour and re consider how it is applied.
- Review procedures and guidance; yes these can influence behavior. Provide appropriately phrased SOPs, which together with education can elicit desirable behaviour – preflight ourselves as well as the aircraft. A briefing is the flight-plan for the mind. An RTO requires a new plan, formulated in a moments decision, whereas continuing after V1 is only a revision to the existing plan.
Standard situations should be reduced to ‘if – then’ decisions, providing of course that the situation is correctly identified.
The confusion surrounding ‘unable or unsafe to fly’ could be reduced by removing - disassociating these aspects from RTO training.
The basis of certification, whilst not perfect, provides sufficient assurance that the aircraft will fly and thus crews should not be overly concerned. The reasons for being unable to fly are in two broad categories.
Those which are self generated, e.g. errors in configuration, wt/cg, and weather assessment; these are generally addressed by procedures and checking (behavioural issues), and warning systems before take off.
Other, rarer events, whilst foreseeable, are so random that perhaps only a human can resolve the situation, e.g. runway incursion, double control jam, multiple engine failure. We could consider the solution of these incidents as mitigating the effects of the hazard or error, and/or reducing the severity of the impending accident. IMHO these activities, and particularly the assessment, decision, and action processes, are sufficiently different from RTOs as to place discussion and training of them elsewhere, and if the pressures of the economic climate minimize the training effort, so be it; better to concentrate on correct recognition and action for the more probable (but still infrequent) RTO / V1 Go scenarios.