Last week the FAA issued a report on “Operational Use of Flight Path Management Systems”.
http://www.skybrary.aero/bookshelf/books/2501.pdf
A small (informal) helicopter group has been looking at that report and their view of it, and its relevance, is as follows:
“The report is comprehensive and appears to cover and summarise most of the issues that we have addressed over a short period of discussion. However, when the report is being read, it is difficult not to fall into the trap of confirmatory bias.
The comparisons between the population examined in the report and our industry is not just one of scale it is also a matter of (lack of) parallel experiences, foreshortened timescales, and variance in operations (for example, we might perhaps require less emphasis on manual skills). We benefit from the application of automation, but this comes at a price because we have not had time to adapt our thinking and processes to, what is, a revolutionary approach to operations. Only in the offshore industry - and probably only in deep-water operations - is there a move to comprehensively re-equip with equipment that has cockpit integration/automation approaching the complexity of the population in this report. Fortunately, this is one of the few corners of our industry that does have the ability to move as one and make necessary changes. Perhaps we might be the exemplar in any changes that are made and this needs to be conveyed to other parts of our industry.
Compared to the airline industry, which is largely homogeneous, we are a collection of very small operators who, for understandable reasons, are more interested in competition than cooperation. For that reason, we do not have the clout to force a change in design (even the authors of the report are only recommending that the process 'takes account of' human-centric design - they make few recommendations for concrete changes in regulations). Nevertheless, because we are a small industry, it is possible to engender the required change in the culture of oversight, training and operations (in a reasonable time scale) although deciding what constitutes 'required change' is going to be the first and most difficult step.
It is accepted that, although changes (of various magnitudes) are necessary in design, certification, training requirements, training regimes, operating procedures, crew cooperation etc., the process of change must be owned at the highest level and be applied and driven from the top. Hence there is a need to ask questions about required changes in:
1. the system;
2. the regulator;
3. the regulations; and
4. oversight.
It needs to be understood that the system should include a version of the ‘plan/do/monitor/adjust’ improvement cycle as part of the State Safety Programme (SSP) – as does the operators SMS. We can continue to discuss how the recommendations of the report are applied to our industry but, in the final analysis, unless the solution at all levels contains a version of this process, it will not be enduring.”
Mars