Complex failure management and decision making

[Dr.Pilot]

Buenos dias, aviators!

Nowadays the airline operations are becoming more and more redundant and safe, as a result of it the pilots' job is becoming routine as something complex or complicated happens very very rare. It's common that many pilots do not even perform go around throughout their career. So, the problem of lack of experience in decision making and problem solving is arising. Even we do practice different failures in the simulators every six month (OPC/LPC), I find that it is not enough to develop skills, because due to huge amount of mandatory items we do have a lack of time for the real weak points.

So, the question is. How do you develop yourself in complex and complicated situations management (complex is sum of high workload, awful weather, weak co-pilot, manual flying, lack of knowledge, etc)?

[Big Pistons Forever]

The imperative is always Aviate ,Navigate, Communicate. The way to handle complex emergencies is to ask yourself "what do I need to do NOW" to attain/maintain a safe aircraft state, then where do I want to go, then communicate in an unambiguous manner inside the cockpit then outside the cockpit what you are going to do.

It sounds facile but it is not. When bad things start happening it is very hard to force yourself to take a breath and systematically go through the Aviate, Navigate Communicate decision making tree. When I had a very bad day in an aeroplane I actually verbalized those 3 words to help focus my thinking.

[Dan Winterland]

It's a conundrum. Accountants have pared training to the bone and the industry has embraced SOPs as the solution to training deficiencies. And the simulators only reproduce the faults in the ECAM/EICAS which is mitigated by the SOP philosophy. But what happens when you're faced with an issue which the aircraft designers have not anticipated? That's where you need experience and flexibility - something that is missing from the modern syllabi. It's incumbent on us instructors to vary the emergencies we simulate away from resolution by the 'standard' solution. When we think back to problems we've had in the past , how many have been resolved by SOPs. I would guess very few. In the last five years I have had four major issues on Airbus types. Not one of these was resolved by the ECAM drills. It required experience and systems knowledge to get the aircraft back into a safe state.

[Fl1ingfrog]

Dan speaks sense, there seems to be two sides at war and another standing smugly by with their arms crossed. The human being, the team and somewhere but no where near the scene, there are the computer boffs. Statistics tell us that 85% of accidents are the fault of human error. This can be a single human error or that of a team. The Boffs (not human for this purpose) hardly ever carry the can or are brought to account.

Computing at airliner level is a skill of the very few and so no on else understands it sufficiently. Who's to blame them then? So whilst we have CRM, MCC, human factors and TEM no one has written a language or a means where pilots and and computer programmers can communicate with each other. Not an easy task of course: i.e. who can tell the introverted programmer from the extroverted. Answer: the extrovert is likely to look up at your knees when you speak to them. You will be unlikely to get an answer but instead a strange look of confusion as if your from Mars and talking gibberish.

Remember the Paris Airshow Airbus crash. The surviving Chief Test Pilot saids that they had practiced the manoeuvrer over and over ready for the display. Who could know the aircraft better than him. He claims that unbeknown to him the software was modified overnight (computer boffs never modify of course - they call it updating) and without informing the crew. The test pilot has maintained this was the cause of the crash into the trees ; the modification prevented a pitch up below a certain speed. The test pilot has never wavered from his claim but to no avail, he still carries the blame.