AF 447 Thread No. 10

[PJ2]

franzl;
Re, "now tell me what will change and who will initiate the change? there are lots of saying like ..... my company is doing that and that .......i practice that and that.... and so on."
I guess I'm not quite clear on what you're searching for. Isn't that how change occurs and isn't this what has been occurring for a long time now? A discussion on the elixir and ultimately the industry's addiction to automation, like any such human behaviour, requires a pretty firm intervention which does not occur everywhere, or at once.

I apologize for the length of these posts - it's pretty dry reading I'll admit but the answers to the kinds of issues you're raising are complicated and can't be captured in a nut-shell, so to speak.

Re, "Schouldnīt those necessary changes in training and qualification be regulated and monitored to a necessary standard? "

Regulators are necessary certainly, but notably and notoriously lag behind such needs as are being expressed here. The aviation industry, people, companies and groups on the other hand take individual initiatives to increase flight safety where the need is indicated and do so proactively (Safety Reporting systems, Flight Data Monitoring & Analysis), and obviously reactively.

This is where change comes from - small steps, quietly taken.

Rarely does the industry wait for the regulatory intervention before taking action. For example, as I have pointed out a few times, in Canada under the CARS, training, demonstration and checking a candidate's response to the approach-to-stall is not required in PPCs on fly-by-wire aircraft. I have offered the thought in discussions that this makes no sense, first because there is nothing magic about fly-by-wire, which can stall an airplane just as easily as hydraulically-powered controls can and second, even a protected airplane can stall, as we now know, (so the elixir of automation was reinforced in at least one country's air regulations). The assumption in this regulation regarding PPCs is that somehow, fbw "protects" one against the stall, which we know is not true. It is software add-on "protections", (for gums, "limits"!), that are at work in the B777 and Airbus types.

But I know for a fact that practically-speaking, in Canada the approach to the stall has been and continues to be trained, practiced and checked in PPCs in 'Airbus aircraft and all other types, (at least at the carrier with which I am familiar) notwithstanding the absence of the requirement to do so.

Another example - the FAA's "minimum hours" rule came a long time after the industry began dealing with issues which arose out of inexperience, poor training/checking and the worst aspects of poor implementation of SMS Programs, (where in this regard the regulator discovered that oversight was still necessary because such implementations are very complicated and "self-reporting" needs a lot of maturing before the regulator can step back).

Within months of the AF447 accident, I know that some airlines were ensuring that crews were being exposed to, trained and checked in these procedures; - the manual-handling issues were quite rapidly brought to the fore as well.

My thought in the post above was first to deal with the notion of the bean-counter-as-amoral-calculator, not that such behaviour doesn't exist - it does, but that it is not the norm; most people working in a system intend to do their very best within the context in which they are employed. The point is, the causes of aberrant (meaning unsafe or leading to risk of unsafe outcomes) do not necessarily always come from parsimony but from misunderstood goals and contexts. As an airman you already know how aircrews can and do react to penny-wise / pound foolish cost-savings.

Like you I agree fully with Owain's statement that you've quoted but those circumstances don't arise out of bean-counting behaviours. Such failures to communicate seem to come from a lack of appreciation of what information in flight test work may or may not be useful and required information for daily line operations. While complex, airline operations are very much like rabbit trails - extensive but narrowly-focused on the needs of the daily operation. Recurrent training is expected to look after the contingencies and abnormalities. With few exceptions this was my experience and although not universal, is largely the case in the west.

So, it isn't as though the regulator shouldn't be setting the standard; it's just that the standard is often set long before the regulations formalize and standardize the standard...so to speak, (my brother who is an engineer always observes that that is the nice thing about standards...so many to choose from).