Jump-seats & Accidents
Thread Starter
Jump-seats & Accidents
It seems to me that many of the accident reports I have read have a jump seat rider. So many in fact that I wonder if anyone has crunched the numbers and seen what the ratio is.
In my experience, we have someone in the jump-seat maybe 5% of the time yet it seems like a much higher % than that for the accident aircraft.
It would be a fairly simple exercise to work out a ratio from say 1980 until now. Can someone tell me if this has been done? If you can't, can you name an accident in which there was a jump-seater post 1980 so I can start gathering my own info.
Cheers guys,
Framer
In my experience, we have someone in the jump-seat maybe 5% of the time yet it seems like a much higher % than that for the accident aircraft.
It would be a fairly simple exercise to work out a ratio from say 1980 until now. Can someone tell me if this has been done? If you can't, can you name an accident in which there was a jump-seater post 1980 so I can start gathering my own info.
Cheers guys,
Framer
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So what would your (hypo)thesis be? And what sort of manipulation would you perform to determine whether it is causation or correlation?
I am reminded of the reports I've read (Sioux City, I'm thinking of you...) where having someone in the jumpseat was of benefit when things went awry... and then there are other reports where you wonder whether a third pair of eyes would have caught the chain earlier...
With all the on-line databases, frequency numbers should be fairly easy (thought time consuming) to compile... it will be interesting to see what you come up with!
Boy I sound like a pompous ass... don't mean to... if you need a research collaborator drop me a PM.
I am reminded of the reports I've read (Sioux City, I'm thinking of you...) where having someone in the jumpseat was of benefit when things went awry... and then there are other reports where you wonder whether a third pair of eyes would have caught the chain earlier...
With all the on-line databases, frequency numbers should be fairly easy (thought time consuming) to compile... it will be interesting to see what you come up with!
Boy I sound like a pompous ass... don't mean to... if you need a research collaborator drop me a PM.
Thread Starter
Hey Jolly,
I'm not qualified to do any sort of study really
I'm a 73 pilot with an interest in all things aviation safety. This is just this months idea, next month I'l probably be looking into LOC or Fatigue or something similar. A while back I looked into hot brake incidents. (in my defence I often drink beer while researching ). My plan is to look at all the part 121 accidents between 1980 and 2009 and determine the % that involved jump seaters and then figure out if that % is too high. It would never stand scrutiny from anyone knowledgable in surveys etc, it's just something I do to keep me learning/thinking. Feel free to jump onboard 
I'm not qualified to do any sort of study really
I'm a 73 pilot with an interest in all things aviation safety. This is just this months idea, next month I'l probably be looking into LOC or Fatigue or something similar. A while back I looked into hot brake incidents. (in my defence I often drink beer while researching ). My plan is to look at all the part 121 accidents between 1980 and 2009 and determine the % that involved jump seaters and then figure out if that % is too high. It would never stand scrutiny from anyone knowledgable in surveys etc, it's just something I do to keep me learning/thinking. Feel free to jump onboard
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Another thought
JG has a point. though. I can direct you to a fatal and a serious where the jumpseater clearly caused the event. But what about legit jumpseaters - like line trainers and checkers? They shape behaviour by their presence but we cannot get rid of them.
But if you can ever make the case to remove checkers on safety grounds then you will be guaranteed immortality!
:-)
TC
But if you can ever make the case to remove checkers on safety grounds then you will be guaranteed immortality!
:-)
TC
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Extra Pilot / Jumpseater as a DISTRACTION
mishaps previously cited:
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/3...-finals-4.html
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/397678-jet-airways-check-pilot-pulls-cb-finals-4.html,
see message #76.
A related factor, since the 1930's mysterious inflight upsets, has been the VISITOR-in-cockpit, and sometimes Visitor-in-seat (this goes back to deH86 upsets of the 1930's, and upset-breakup of B307 Stratoliner / 18Mar39). Lessons here are important for those operators who now are forced to [occasionally] employ a "visitor" FA-in-cockpit to comply with "security" rules:
http://www.pprune.org/safety-crm-qa-...sekeeping.html
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/3...-finals-4.html
http://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/397678-jet-airways-check-pilot-pulls-cb-finals-4.html,
see message #76.
A related factor, since the 1930's mysterious inflight upsets, has been the VISITOR-in-cockpit, and sometimes Visitor-in-seat (this goes back to deH86 upsets of the 1930's, and upset-breakup of B307 Stratoliner / 18Mar39). Lessons here are important for those operators who now are forced to [occasionally] employ a "visitor" FA-in-cockpit to comply with "security" rules:
http://www.pprune.org/safety-crm-qa-...sekeeping.html
Last edited by IGh; 19th Jan 2010 at 17:51.
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Framer,
'Qualified' is a relative term... at the very least you are an SME. There will always be HF wanks like me to do the heavy lifting when the time comes.
I think you are on to something... and would appreciate seeing whatever your initial review of the data shows.
Muscato d'Oro is my lubricant of choice... I tip my glass to this thread and your future musings.
J.
'Qualified' is a relative term... at the very least you are an SME. There will always be HF wanks like me to do the heavy lifting when the time comes.
I think you are on to something... and would appreciate seeing whatever your initial review of the data shows.
Muscato d'Oro is my lubricant of choice... I tip my glass to this thread and your future musings.
J.
Thread Starter
WingoWango;
My thoughts on F/E's is that it is a different situation. I'm interested in this from a distraction point of view and the f/e's had a specific role with specific call outs and checks etc. they were an integral part of the crew so rather than disrupting the flow of events they were a part of the flow.
I could be swayed with a good argument though.
JG; I have never been called an SME before.....should I be offended or pleased?Mines a VB
My thoughts on F/E's is that it is a different situation. I'm interested in this from a distraction point of view and the f/e's had a specific role with specific call outs and checks etc. they were an integral part of the crew so rather than disrupting the flow of events they were a part of the flow.
I could be swayed with a good argument though.
JG; I have never been called an SME before.....should I be offended or pleased?Mines a VB
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Framer,
SME = Subject Matter Expert = Smarter than me.
So you got the gears in my noggin going...
One possible way to do this would be to pick your data set, then go through and see how many events of the total had an FE, other crewmember, flight check, or jumpseater in the cockpit. (i.e. FE/Total, OC/T, FC/T and JS/T). Then see whether these numbers are disproportionate.
If you were, say, to pick commercial aviation accidents in the US between 1990 and 2002, we could take it one step further. Shappell and Weigmann have already performed an HFACS analysis on this data set (link to article below), so we could then perform an HFACS analysis of these subsets (or somehow get their data sets) and see whether these events had different percentages of certain errors or violations. Though we could do this with any data set you choose, they did such a large set to validate their protocol.
Soooo.... have I taken a fun cocktail party question and hosed it for life?
J.
http://01f7812.netsolhost.com/pubs/H...0Accidents.pdf),
SME = Subject Matter Expert = Smarter than me.
So you got the gears in my noggin going...
One possible way to do this would be to pick your data set, then go through and see how many events of the total had an FE, other crewmember, flight check, or jumpseater in the cockpit. (i.e. FE/Total, OC/T, FC/T and JS/T). Then see whether these numbers are disproportionate.
If you were, say, to pick commercial aviation accidents in the US between 1990 and 2002, we could take it one step further. Shappell and Weigmann have already performed an HFACS analysis on this data set (link to article below), so we could then perform an HFACS analysis of these subsets (or somehow get their data sets) and see whether these events had different percentages of certain errors or violations. Though we could do this with any data set you choose, they did such a large set to validate their protocol.
Soooo.... have I taken a fun cocktail party question and hosed it for life?
J.
http://01f7812.netsolhost.com/pubs/H...0Accidents.pdf),
Thread Starter
Ahhhhh Geeeze Wayne.....I was hoping to say something simple like "between 1999 amd 2009 if you were on a part 121 aircraft that had someone sitting in the jump seat you were 1.23 times more likely to be in an accident than if it was just the standard crew compliment".
.....now I'm going to have to have another beer and think about it
.....now I'm going to have to have another beer and think about it
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good premise
I have noticed - anecdotally, informally - a similar pattern. For an local angle - for you at least - add to the list the Qantas 747 overrun at BKK sometime in the 90s, aircraft very badly damaged (repair bill exceeded write-off value but QF chose to maintain their record of no jet hull losses - again, anecdotally). FO (who was flying)'s wife was in the jumpseat. And they really screwed it up, hot on approach, only retarded three engines on flare and roll out, failed to use reverse thrust on a wet runway etc.
The new standard bearer for the phenomenon is the Aria Il62 crash in Mashhad Iran July 24 09 totally due to supernumary crew on the flight deck, a four-man deadheading crew in addition to four (inc radio man) operating crew, some presumably standing and all with a different opinion, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would cross threshold at 200mph, touch down in the second half of the runway, and end up 2km (yes) off the end, with all eight pilots plus another nine (cabin crew, sky marshall, three or four pax) killed. Very tragic (the entire Il62 team in Iran wiped out) but utterly avoidable. It almost transcends the issue of jumpseaters and enters Darwin Award territory.
Same goes for the much documented accident that befell an Aeroflot A310 en route from HKG to Moscow, when the captain put his 15 yo son in the left hand seat, who unwittingly disconnected the autopilot in the roll mode and what transpired in the ensuing final minutes I will leave for you to read up on. A great Aussie book, one of McArthur Job's series of four in-depth volumes on individual accidents, covers the Aeroflot disaster in great detail.
Finally, and more of a cockpit invasion than a jumpseat issue (but relevant to a locked cockpit door policy), a mentally disturbed passenger burst into to the cockpit of a pre-9/11 BA 747 en route to Nairobi and grabbed the controls, aircraft lost 16,000 feet (iirc) before the guy was ejected back into the upper deck passenger area (and the arms of Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry). There's a few of these, didn't an ANA 747 get within mere hundreds of feet above the water at the hands of a knife-wielding MS flight sim nut?
Where does that FedEx guy who went bananas fall? Cockpit invasion or jumpseat hazard? He was FedEx crew and (under slightly false pretenses, he had been suspended from duty) in the jumpseat from boarding onwards.
Oh one more - the worst landing I've ever experienced was on a Ryanair 737-200, after a flight where all the PAs made mention of the two captains (as opposed to a Capt and an FO) up front. Poor shock absorbers never knew what hit em!
On a personal note, in all my experience without exception, responsible jumpseaters add more than they detract from the cockpit, contributing an extra pair of eyes at busy times (but silent like mouse) and a welcome source of entertainment ("I am here to entertain - and inform.") during quiet times.
The new standard bearer for the phenomenon is the Aria Il62 crash in Mashhad Iran July 24 09 totally due to supernumary crew on the flight deck, a four-man deadheading crew in addition to four (inc radio man) operating crew, some presumably standing and all with a different opinion, so it was perhaps inevitable that they would cross threshold at 200mph, touch down in the second half of the runway, and end up 2km (yes) off the end, with all eight pilots plus another nine (cabin crew, sky marshall, three or four pax) killed. Very tragic (the entire Il62 team in Iran wiped out) but utterly avoidable. It almost transcends the issue of jumpseaters and enters Darwin Award territory.
Same goes for the much documented accident that befell an Aeroflot A310 en route from HKG to Moscow, when the captain put his 15 yo son in the left hand seat, who unwittingly disconnected the autopilot in the roll mode and what transpired in the ensuing final minutes I will leave for you to read up on. A great Aussie book, one of McArthur Job's series of four in-depth volumes on individual accidents, covers the Aeroflot disaster in great detail.
Finally, and more of a cockpit invasion than a jumpseat issue (but relevant to a locked cockpit door policy), a mentally disturbed passenger burst into to the cockpit of a pre-9/11 BA 747 en route to Nairobi and grabbed the controls, aircraft lost 16,000 feet (iirc) before the guy was ejected back into the upper deck passenger area (and the arms of Roxy Music singer Bryan Ferry). There's a few of these, didn't an ANA 747 get within mere hundreds of feet above the water at the hands of a knife-wielding MS flight sim nut?
Where does that FedEx guy who went bananas fall? Cockpit invasion or jumpseat hazard? He was FedEx crew and (under slightly false pretenses, he had been suspended from duty) in the jumpseat from boarding onwards.
Oh one more - the worst landing I've ever experienced was on a Ryanair 737-200, after a flight where all the PAs made mention of the two captains (as opposed to a Capt and an FO) up front. Poor shock absorbers never knew what hit em!
On a personal note, in all my experience without exception, responsible jumpseaters add more than they detract from the cockpit, contributing an extra pair of eyes at busy times (but silent like mouse) and a welcome source of entertainment ("I am here to entertain - and inform.") during quiet times.
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RTO -- Nav launched into Throttles
Here's another odd sort of people-in-cockpit distraction-interference:
Air France 272 / 27Jul61 B707-328 F-BHSA T/O accident at Hamburg Germany. [Directional control, Rudder, RTO, rwy excursion.] T/O Rwy 23 (2923m long x 45 m wide), wind 280/18G28; EPR set, slight left rudder-pedal to compensate for wind wx-vaning, speed increase left-pedal decreasing, (F/O held right wheel and some fwd yoke), between 100-120 KIAS a/c veered left, Capt used rudder to regain control but felt rudder was difficult to move; then at 120-130 KIAS a/c again veered left, Capt corrected the directional deviation but pedal resistance increased; yaw left then persisted, right pedal would not move (jammed) [F/E noted hydraulic pressure fell quickly); Captain initiated a rejected T/O, Throttles to Idle, used Reverse Thrust on #3 and #4 and right Brakes (directional control). NLG wheels left skid-marks equating to NW displaced 35 deg angle to Right (but Capt said he did not use NWS). Both Nose Wheels broke away, A/C yaw left persisted, all engine to Reverse Thrust, Brakes, Navigator was flung into the Pedestal-Throttles when NLG-wheels broke away (knocking throttles from Rev Thrust). A/C departed rwy after 2360 m of roll, in a gentle curve to the left; NLG broke, left MLG, then right MLG broke away. Fuselage broke into three sections (two circumferential fractures, one aft of cockpit and another fwd of wing LE). \\ Rudder examined, nothing abnormal found. ... Nav's tumble into Throttle-Reversers added to control problems, Nav had unfastened safety belt during T/O roll in an effort to get a better view as pilot encountered directional control anomalies. ...
Air France 272 / 27Jul61 B707-328 F-BHSA T/O accident at Hamburg Germany. [Directional control, Rudder, RTO, rwy excursion.] T/O Rwy 23 (2923m long x 45 m wide), wind 280/18G28; EPR set, slight left rudder-pedal to compensate for wind wx-vaning, speed increase left-pedal decreasing, (F/O held right wheel and some fwd yoke), between 100-120 KIAS a/c veered left, Capt used rudder to regain control but felt rudder was difficult to move; then at 120-130 KIAS a/c again veered left, Capt corrected the directional deviation but pedal resistance increased; yaw left then persisted, right pedal would not move (jammed) [F/E noted hydraulic pressure fell quickly); Captain initiated a rejected T/O, Throttles to Idle, used Reverse Thrust on #3 and #4 and right Brakes (directional control). NLG wheels left skid-marks equating to NW displaced 35 deg angle to Right (but Capt said he did not use NWS). Both Nose Wheels broke away, A/C yaw left persisted, all engine to Reverse Thrust, Brakes, Navigator was flung into the Pedestal-Throttles when NLG-wheels broke away (knocking throttles from Rev Thrust). A/C departed rwy after 2360 m of roll, in a gentle curve to the left; NLG broke, left MLG, then right MLG broke away. Fuselage broke into three sections (two circumferential fractures, one aft of cockpit and another fwd of wing LE). \\ Rudder examined, nothing abnormal found. ... Nav's tumble into Throttle-Reversers added to control problems, Nav had unfastened safety belt during T/O roll in an effort to get a better view as pilot encountered directional control anomalies. ...
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Yes, and I was on six flights last year where there was someone in the jump seat and nothing happened...
Framer, was I dreaming or had you put up a post earlier in the week seeing whether folks would be game to help you start to go through some reports?
J.
Framer, was I dreaming or had you put up a post earlier in the week seeing whether folks would be game to help you start to go through some reports?
J.
Thread Starter
Ha ha no you were not dreaming. I took it down shortly after posting it as I decided it was a silly idea. I'm looking through the nTSB database but it's quite tricky to get info regarding whether or not the jump seat was occupied on a lot of the reports. I'm starting to think its all a bit ambitious.
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Obvious from the numbers?
It's great to hear people thinking about new safety angles. When I first learnt to drive and after my first prang, my daddy told me the best way to avoid an accident was planning how not to be there at the time. It worked for me.
Proving the jump seat occupied hypothesis would be a lot of work however and besides it's possible the NTSB have already thought about this angle. I expect you realise already that proving correlation is not the same as proving causation. Skewed data integrity will certainly be a problem too. Accident reports record detailed information about jump seat occupancy but equally detailed information for the remaining comparable population of uneventful flights will be difficult to recover.
Then you have to demonstrate that correlation was not influenced by other factors. Jump seat occupancy (especially before 9/11) could have been influenced by whether the aircraft was fully occupied. It may be (although I do not know) that fully loaded aircraft are more likely to have serious accidents. That might bias the result towards an occupied jump seat.
There's other steps too but finally you still have to demonstrate that there was an insignificant probability that it was all just chance. Not easy with a small sample of positive data. History has plenty of examples of things that looked likely or even obvious that turned out later to be just not correct. Two easy to read (non-mathematical) books for anyone interested in the conflict between human nature and scientific data are:
The Tiger That Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot,
and Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
Finally a cautionary tale about the obvious from my younger days: We had bet the company on a new product but 3 out of 4 of the first models we built were under performing. I'd been away and when I returned every engineer was working to find what was wrong with the 'defective' models. It was Christmas week and we were facing the prospect of not being with our families on Christmas day. I knew my engineers were capable guys who would be doing the right things so something else had to be wrong. I took a walk to feed the birds in the park out back. That's when I realised the asumption we had all made. I ran back and moved the guys onto analysing the 'good' models. Sure enough we had the answer within an hour. All the better performing 'good' models had been built with one incorrectly marked and therefore out of specification component (and it was overstressing several others). It was sobering to realise that we could have screwed Christmas and maybe even the Company's future (not to mention my own reputation) because we thought something was obvious without verifying it adequately.
Stay safe!
STAN
Proving the jump seat occupied hypothesis would be a lot of work however and besides it's possible the NTSB have already thought about this angle. I expect you realise already that proving correlation is not the same as proving causation. Skewed data integrity will certainly be a problem too. Accident reports record detailed information about jump seat occupancy but equally detailed information for the remaining comparable population of uneventful flights will be difficult to recover.
Then you have to demonstrate that correlation was not influenced by other factors. Jump seat occupancy (especially before 9/11) could have been influenced by whether the aircraft was fully occupied. It may be (although I do not know) that fully loaded aircraft are more likely to have serious accidents. That might bias the result towards an occupied jump seat.
There's other steps too but finally you still have to demonstrate that there was an insignificant probability that it was all just chance. Not easy with a small sample of positive data. History has plenty of examples of things that looked likely or even obvious that turned out later to be just not correct. Two easy to read (non-mathematical) books for anyone interested in the conflict between human nature and scientific data are:
The Tiger That Isn't by Michael Blastland and Andrew Dilnot,
and Bad Science by Ben Goldacre.
Finally a cautionary tale about the obvious from my younger days: We had bet the company on a new product but 3 out of 4 of the first models we built were under performing. I'd been away and when I returned every engineer was working to find what was wrong with the 'defective' models. It was Christmas week and we were facing the prospect of not being with our families on Christmas day. I knew my engineers were capable guys who would be doing the right things so something else had to be wrong. I took a walk to feed the birds in the park out back. That's when I realised the asumption we had all made. I ran back and moved the guys onto analysing the 'good' models. Sure enough we had the answer within an hour. All the better performing 'good' models had been built with one incorrectly marked and therefore out of specification component (and it was overstressing several others). It was sobering to realise that we could have screwed Christmas and maybe even the Company's future (not to mention my own reputation) because we thought something was obvious without verifying it adequately.
Stay safe!
STAN