Ridiculous CRM call for Help- I am in the Red Zone
 

It would be amusing if it wasn't a true story from an employee. One very large well known (deleted as being not pertinent - JT) airline has introduced the most weird and almost unbelievable SOP. Seems if one of the two pilots in the cockpit finds himself a bit over-loaded due to multiple tasks such as reading a engine failure or pressurisation checklist, the company SOP requires he tell his partner (the other pilot in a control seat) that "I am in the Amber Zone"


If the flurry of cockpit activity is getting real heavy the call to the other pilot is "I am in the Red Zone." That means he cannot cope. The other pilot then is required to take all necessary steps to sympathise with the sad one and give him the equivalent of a paternal hug and a "there, there, old son - relax and when you have settled your nerves let me know and we will continue with the checklist or whatever caused you to fall in a heap."


Once old son calms down he tells the other bloke "I am back in the Green Zone now" and cockpit activity resumes.


In addition, the same airline requires the departure and pre-take off safety brief to be read from a printed sheet of two or three pages while the other pilot reads from his printed sheet and nods wisely. In other words a heads down talk fest word perfect.


It is quite incredible that such rubbish as pilots being required to use such childish terminology as Green, Amber and Red Zone when things get busy and cockpit activity increases.


Is all this really true?

A useful discussion should ensue, I trust.

However, might we keep the discussion on the subject philosophy rather than anything approaching identifying the operator/crews please ?

Don't know the operator, know nothing other than what you have said in the original post. So taking a step back from it;

The red / amber / green thing ...

Workload is very subjective, managing your own and your colleagues workload is part of the job but having a common language (I don't just mean english) to do that from must be difficult, particularly for an airline with lots of different national and cultural backgrounds to contend with.

If we can get crew to recognise their own loading (and that's part of the battle) then they need a standardised way of explaining to the other crew where they are and either that they can or cannot accept more tasks, or that they need help with the current task demand. They probably thought about using numbers (1-10) or percentages or whatever, but red amber green is pretty simple really and should give enough discrimination.

Yes the exact phraseology sounds stilted, but then so do most SOP calls when written down. I suspect the wording surrounding the "colour" will be more colloquial in actual use but the message should get through.

So, it's simple to deploy, it solves a potential issue and it's simple to remove if it doesn't work.

I quite like it.

I agree, in principle, that it's a simplistic method of telling someone that he/she is overloaded and not quite 'in the loop' of understanding what's going on. The Captain, who 'should' of course be an experienced aviator, should, at all times, be gauging 'crew performance' and, where necessary, reallocating duties to alleviate the crew workload. In truth, the days are now well gone where a 'three man flight deck' might better resolve a problem than a two crew flight deck; but that's 'progress' I guess!

I'm not sure that there's an all-around answer. Except to say that flight crew are expected to be good communicators in letting his/her colleagues know if they're becoming overloaded. A well trained colleague should be able to recognise when the other one isn't performing as well he/she should, and, offer some assistance in offloading some of the simpler tasks such as radio's et al.

Oversize paper checklists are probably a bad thing yes.

But this red/amber/green - I can't see the problem there. It's creation of some standard and understandable terminology to raise a workload concern within the cockpit. I rather like it. It probably won't get used often, but you can see why once in a while it could have some definite benefits.

Using plain English to explain concepts like this would be far more ambiguous and open to misinterpretation. Take the phrase "I'm working quite hard here", or more severely "I'm maxed out" - they're longer, but also much less clear once the green/amber/red is explained.

Similarly, the concept of "sterile cockpit" which some airlines use to declare no excess chatter, or just saying "transmitting" to allow uninterrupted RT comms for a few seconds serve the same sort of purpose but are more narrow in their use.

I have to say i quite like the concept of the amber/red/green thing. Its short, to the point and raises awareness about a pontential problem. Sometimes things can get hectic in not quite normal situations and workload can spike. Not a bad idea at all.

The other stuff is of course, well, not really a good thing in my book, verbatim reading of very long take off briefs pose no purpose except as a CYA exercise for the CVR. I'd rather have a short briefing that highlights the important points.

Frankly it is bloody laughable. Whatever will the CRM/TEM pundits think up next? "Go around, Captain - I'm in the Amber Zone and approaching the Red Zone so I cannot monitor the autopilot"

To put it in context can you just imagine the 10 man crew of a Boeing B17 Flying Fortress (a Boeing no less) over enemy territory being shot at from all directions and the co-pilot saying to the captain he is in the Red Zone while all the air gunners and bomb aimer are calling to the captain they are all in their Amber Zone. What the hell is the captain supposed to do when he too is already in the Red Zone.

The same principle applies to the two or three pilot crew of an A380 where the second officer considers himself over-loaded and calls the captain and announces he is out of action and in the Red Zone. Or the first officer same thing if for some reason (shudder) the captain has to disengage the automatics or turn off his flight director for a few minutes for some reason.

And what happens if the captain of the aircraft announces solemnly he is in the Red Zone until further notice and the first officer is in the Amber zone at the same time because a flight attendant announces several toilets are failing to flush. Sound a bit far fetched? Maybe. But in all seriousness, surely the trick cyclist boffin who sold the Red, Amber Green zone policy needs his own head read. Totally laughable.:D:D:D

I'm with Centaurus on this one. Toughen up princesses and just do the job! If you declare yourself to be in the Red zone will you be required to stand yourself down at the next point of arrival? What happens if the PF declares themselves in the Red zone at 50' over the fence and the engine has failed at V1+1? Will it require an immediate take over from the PNF?:ugh:

the previous two posts illustrate pretty well why this will not work. There will be a stigma associated with using it and people will ovoid at all costs declaring themselves in the "zone".

BA used to have this saying about overload, it was something like : "admit it in self, recognize it in others". I thought it pointed very well the main issue here.

The solution in my view is to train people on workload management and situational awareness. Both not easy to train but more effective that simplistic gimmicks that ignore basic human behavior.

- an excellent way to look at it. Generally the 'red zone' (as it now appears to be called) is easily recognisable when events and comments pass un-noticed through the sense organs of the other party.

Lookleft - "I like the cut of your jib, sir" but in your examples by the time the 'red' person has recognised the situation and stumbled the words out it is too late.:)

What happens if your both in that zone and the other pilot doesn't have any spare capacity to remove any load.

Either you crash and die like gentlemen aviators, or just possibly you recognise jointly that things are about to go pear shaped, do your best to get out of whatever situation you're in and sort your lives out?

That is pretty much what we do anyway.

I know its not allowed to mention the company name but is this some sort of bollocks to sort out the problems with putting 200 hour pilots in the RHS of complex bits of hardware?

Unfortunately, one or two have also done the "die like gentlemen" bit instead.

I really can't see the issue with this, it's just providing a bit of simple and clearly understood terminology that with any luck most people will never need.

The way you can tell when your flying buddy is maxed is when they start talking :mad: on the radio. Simples.

So how would you know if Jock was maxed then?

That works on several levels...:)

Normally the hearing is the first to go so it would something like this:

- Hey Joe are you on the orange zone?

- Err, what, um

- Are you on the orange zone?

- Wait.... Ah,

- Crickey, he must be in the red zone. I wonder why didn´t he tell me?

What happens if you drift into the danger zone ?


Cue Kenny Loggins :8

Good point and well presented. It works the other way as well, under stimulated and utter :mad: comes out.

Was discussing this with my 700 hour TT FO this morning while I was handling, he reckon on old heap TP's it should be Peachy, yellow, and brown zones.

After the approach checks when he was whizzing round a DME arc hand flown to a NDB with multiple step downs at 250knts I asked him what zone he was in.

Bloody hungry was the reply. Which as he seemed to know what he was doing I left him to do a beautiful constant decent approach round the procedure to land followed by a bacon roll.

And can you declare red zone during pre-flight brief if you can't be arsed on day 6 of early's?