Flight test safety workshop, London, October 2007

[Genghis the Engineer]

FLIGHT TEST SAFETY WORKSHOP
SETP/SFTE

Wednesday 17 October 2007 - Thursday 18 October 2007
No.4 Hamilton Place, London W1J 7BQ

The purpose of the Safety Workshop is to provide an open forum where test safety issues can be presented, discussed and probed with other members and disciplines of the flight test community.

The theme of the workshop is “Managing Risk for Flight Test”. The technical program will concentrate on Risk Management lessons learned and will focus on risk mitigation associated with every facet of flight testing, to include, but not limited to: planning (sound plan = safe plan), test condition buildup, test conduct, ground support, crew egress systems, use of ground base simulation, etc. Discussion will also include mitigating risks associated with program delays and escalating costs. The scope includes all members of a test team to include supporting facilities. The workshop will highlight the importance of sharing information and learning from our successes and failures.

This is a joint event from the Royal Aeronautical Society, the Society of Experimental Test Pilots, the Society of Flight Test Engineers and Maurice Girard, Senior Test Pilot, Cessna Aircraft Company.

Deadline for submitting paper proposals is the end of this month (contact SETP/SFTE HQs for details), for conference details Email [email protected] or tel. +44(0)207 670 4345

[idle stop]

It is worth noting that this is the FIRST such event to be held in Europe. SETP has for many years run Flight Test Safety Workshops in the USA, very successfully.
Jim Sandberg, SETP President, expressed the hope, at the recent SETP Symposium in Linkoping, SE, that there would be a good attendance and that this would become a regular 'don't miss' calendar item in Europe. Let's hope that Industry will be supportive. (My next stop is to check the RAeS conference fee charges.......)
Also, please see the Genghis post re Gerard Guilluamaud, in whose memory Grob Aerospace are donating an award to be presented at the Workshop.

[Teadriver]

Shame I'm rather too far away to be able to go to that symposium. I wonder if there will be any discussion on the negative aspects of risk analysis. I've been involved in far too many scenarios where the analysis only focusses on what might go wrong with the testing (or, more usually, the design that affects the testing) and on how to mitigate that, but fully ignores the positive safety or knowledge benefits of doing that testing. We rarely make any debate or concession to the bleedin' obvious truth that - sometimes - if you want to make progress you have to accept some level of risk. Put another way, risk is relative and needs to be balanced against the requirements and objectives: in my experience, that rarely happens. Anyone who was at the LA SETP annual symposium in 1999 or 2000 (can't remember, it's an age thing) and heard Scott Crossfield at the Friday lunch will recall a brilliant summation of the dangers of unbalanced risk analysis and the resulting loss of capability and excellence. I challenge anyone going to the Oct RAeS symposium to try raising that challenge and see how far you get.

[L Peacock]

A recent test flying programme at Boscombe Down not only required takeoffs and landings but also a diesel tractor to tow the aircraft from the hangar to the apron:eek:. Imagine the carnage. Fortunately the hazards were recognised and countless lives were saved by abandoning the reckless venture. :ugh::ugh:
Teadriver, useful thoughts, well put.

[Genghis the Engineer]

The points are well made, although clearly if you accept too high a risk of losing the aircraft and personnel, then you are almost certainly accepting a similar risk of programme failure - since without them, you really are up a polluted creek without a paddle!

Wyvern and I have offered a paper to the symposium; we don't yet know if it's been accepted, and it's not exactly what you are describing, but I think it might go a fair way to accepting your challenge Teadriver; perhaps somebody would like to pass judgement after the seminar!

If you check your PM's, I'll send you the abstract.

G

[lightningmate]

Genghis,

Will this be a Register and Pay event or what. The info on the RAeS Site does not specifically clarify. If its a pay event, then I need to start justifying the cost, any idea what any costs may be?

lm

[Genghis the Engineer]

A flyer I got posted out says "Delegate charges will range from £100 to £315+VAT and will be published in the printed programme".

If it's normal RAeS rules, then people presenting a paper might not have to pay, but I don't know that.

G

[Teadriver]

You're right in what you say GtE, but my interest and concern comes from earlier in the process than that. By the time we get round to the safety reviews you're talking about the trial scope has usually been defined by Other Beings - e.g. design offices, aerodynamicists, project managers - so all we're doing in the flight test safety review is minimising residual risks in that narrow remaining task. The mis-applied “safety” argument hits us much earlier than that.

For example, let's pretend we're evaluating a high AOA trial on a sporty plastic fighter jet. Aero model away for years, playing with computers and jolly expensive metal models in windy tunnels: they make their best professional guesses at the results but are the first to admit they can't model with great precision and confidence at high AOA, particularly when they’re modelling that stuff well ahead of prototype first flight so that they can work out how to design the mega-smart flight control system (FCS) to keep the plastic pointing forwards all the time. Then we start flying and envelope expansion, they start finding out what’s wrong with the model, and massage it accordingly. Trouble is, the closer they get to their predicted AOA limit, the more uncertain they get. Is the prediction real? Don’t know, they say, don’t have the data, have to put such margins on our modelling and wind tunnel data because of “safety” concerns that we can’t rely on the data. That means that we can’t get flight clearances to go and get the data because the data’s not “safe”. The programme managers then assume that because the data’s not reliable, we’d best not fly there, pity about the performance spec but we’ll trade that against something else. Meanwhile, every test pilot in the programme is up in arms over the negative, over safe “add another 10 knots for safety” design and clearance mindset while pointing out that this is actually what flight testing should be about – we have the instrumentation, the cleared spin chute, the post-departure modelling and a load of experience on how to safely run such a programme – so why don’t we go fly a progressive, controlled workup programme to get Real Data – using (what the FCS project test pilot of the time described as) God’s Wind Tunnel, thereby resolving all the modelling uncertainties.

In that little story (fictional, of course) there are at least 20 examples of the use of a “safety” argument for not doing something that wasn’t balanced by an assessment of the benefits to be gained for doing that something – and they all occurred long before the flight testing empire got around to applying their own safety analysis to the undemanding and simple test programme that was all that would remain. That’s what I was referring to in my original note.

[Wwyvern]

Is it true that there has not been a Safety Workshop in Europe? I seem to recall attending one in Lindau in Germany at the 25th European Section Symposium in 1993. However, my memory is not what it was.