CVR Censorship
 

Dozy remarked:
:mad:

I disagree. The term is entirely accurate, no matter the intent. IMO, any removal of any information is to diminish our understanding of the conduct of the flight. I am normally quite sympathetic to the valuing of privacy, but in the case of transporting large numbers of people, I'm afraid that privacy isn't at all appropriate. The World has an abiding interest that ought to trump everything else. (I doubt I'll get much agreement on this from a buncha pilots!)

In the case of a private entity passing judgment on the causes of a horrible crash, I believe that some members of the public feel the need to draw their own conclusions from all of the information available. There will always be some people with some sort of "prurient interest," but I think we need to set that aside in the interest of total transparency.

And...this "prurient interest," which is seldom discussed in depth, is natural, AFAIC, on the basis of: there's a natural curiosity about what it's like to prepare to die in a plane crash. Sorry to rip the lid off a jar of spiders.

:uhoh:

Hi,

I agree

Don't shoot the messenger!

The investigatory agencies aren't private entities though, they're usually governmental agencies with a charter that explicitly denotes their independence from the regulator and other government bodies and are ultimately accountable to the taxpayers (many of whom are also the travelling public).

The limits on the use of CVR data for public dissemination haven't changed in four decades, and it wasn't the investigatory agencies that set those limits. As a result, words to the effect of "The BEA is censoring data" are misleading, because the BEA, as with other agencies, has to abide by limits that they themselves have no control over.

I feel like quoting wise words from a few pages back, in an attempt to -perhaps- stop the hamster's wheel:

Dozy:
I wasn't. It was just a little joke, since we have a "censored" emoticon. Regardless, if you are "the messenger," you're delivering fact. But in this case, it was opinion, not fact.

And, thanks for the lecture; I'm well aware that BEA is not technically a private entity, but its processes and machinations are, by definition, private, and that's what I meant.

As for the subsequent reprinting of Chris Scott's diatribe, I didn't like it the first time and I like it even less this time. It's full of uncharitable characterizations and motives-not-in-evidence as to those of us who feel that something may be withheld. Just for one example: "The truth is that no degree of revelation would silence their accusations of tampering of the data..." Nonsense.

The opinion was sandwiched in between facts - namely that the restrictions on CVR publication are outside the control of the BEA, and thus the notion that the BEA are themselves responsible for the redactions for their own motives is incorrect.

No more so than any other accident investigation agency.

Actually, some of the people and organisations he's referring to are indeed that partisan - though I'm pretty certain you yourself are not. For example, the French pilots' union SNPL are well known to have an agenda to harm Airbus at any opportunity - an agenda that dates back to the stink their FE contingent kicked up when Airbus announced the A300 would be available with a two-person flight deck back in the early '70s. You can trace almost every Airbus-related "controversy" in France to the actions of that union and their lawyers - including the notion (for which there is no evidence) that the BEA are somehow involved in deflecting criticism.

The crux of the matter for me is that no person or organisation would stand to benefit from withholding information in that manner. The fact that the BEA report mentions non-optimal aspects of the aircraft design as well as the way it was operated by the airline and the crew means it's likely that both Airbus and Air France will end up paying damages. The A330 is a successful type - its continued existence, operation and sales will not be harmed no matter what was in the BEA report. Is my reasoning in this flawed?

Organfreak,
Google TWA800, look at all the blog sites that continue to this day and then tell all, you still believe it is nonsense... Imagination, leading to fictional conclusions, often outruns reality and facts...

I hear ya, Mr. D.

One of the reasons I don't pay much attention to conspiracy wackos is that (I think) most people are too stupid to actually pull off a complex conspiracy. (Pilots excepted, of course.)

TWA800 is a school case for conspiracist
The key word in the report .. after 4 years of painfull investigations .. is "probable" :8
This leaves doors wide open for anyone with imagination :)

Are the slides posted on line?

Where is the 'I Like' button? :cool:

I couldn't have put it any better.

Lonewolf_50, here's a link to the RAeS site discussing the preso...haven't had a chance to examine it for links to the actual ppt.

I got to their site, but I don't see them posted yet. Maybe too soon.

I did get to listen in to about the first 25 minutes of the presentation. I think I'll save the whole thing for when I am watching a bit of golf this weekend, with the sound off, and thus multi task. At an hour 40, it's a bit of a time investment.

PJ2,

Thanks for the link, Watched the entire presentation last night, it was worthwhile to gain the understanding of stall recovery. I explored the site but couldn't find the actual charts (pdf) from the video. However, your previous postings of the SIM stall exercise you did on stall recovery was confirmed by this video presentation in my mind. TD

Stall presentation
 

A wonderful presentation by both Airbus and Boeng. It was enlightening, informative and to the point. A big thanks to both companies for doing this.

What effect will it have?
 

How will it be used? Will the management and bean counters have a look at it and change some programs? Will the findings and conclusions find their way into procedures and the training of those?

Will aircrews look at it and learn from it?

Franzl,

Your post leaves me wondering ...... I heard four flight test professionals describing how they go about a delicate task that must be approached carefully. They were talking to the Flight Test Group of the RAeS, and I think their purpose was to inform not teach. No lessons to be learned but some questions answered.

Moreover, I suspect that if those much maligned management and bean counters approached those guys and suggested they change their procedures to save a few dollars or euros they would be rapidly and forcibly told where to go and what to do when they got there.:D

That's the conspiricy theorist's answer to scientific professionalism.

When all you have are a few smoking (or in this case salt-water corroded) bits of wreckage there is no way you can be 100% definite about any conclusion - even the 737's rudder hard-overs can only "probably" be all associated with a malfunctioning PCU.

Unfortunately, those with axes to grind - or lawyers - interpret this as a license to let their imaginations run riot.

Somewhat unsure where to place your kind reply.

I wonder myself, in the briefing was nothing new on the planet, mostly stuff what expierienced old school pilots learned about stalls amd falls from the beginning regardless whether it was civil or military. Was this knowledge completely lost and has to be invented again?
How long will it take to make the findings and results available to the line? And still i´m concerned, that it will again end up in some fixed procedure without transfering te knowledge which led to the developement of said procedure.

franzl;

The notion of "amoral calculation" was discussed in Diane Vaughn's work, "The Challenger Launch Decision: Risky Technology, Culture and Deviance at NASA". The notion expresses the common worry and perception that "bean-counting, profit-seeking managers" will drive instrumental priorities in spite of clear evidence of outcomes in terms of deviance, failure, incidents and accidents.

Vaughn found that contrary to her beginning premise (that managers at NASA were expressing an amoral calculation in their operational work), there was almost no evidence of cynical wrong-doing motivated by profit but only the best intentions towards the goals at hand. From Vaughn:
The other notion that Vaughn pioneered (but which we in this business are familiar with by other names) is the "normalization of deviance". For those new to the notion, one way of expressing the meaning is, the reducing of margins of error in standardized proven systems because the standard can successfully be reduced while maintaining sufficient margins of error. (There are other ways of expressing this of course!).

So rather than nefarious activities behind engineers' backs, most managers could claim to be onside with the safety people but they also knew that they had to be mindful of schedules, budgets, regulatory affairs, government politics and public perceptions. As you would expect these are very bright and aware people but none of that guarantees that phenomenon such as normalizing standards through "reasonable justifications" is the right thing to do. Often it is seen as "amoral", and calculated towards pedantic goals only in hindsight.

The recent review of the "courses of action not taken" regarding in-orbit video and photographs of Columbia concerning the wing damage, (initially discussed in papers in Starbuck's and Farjoun's "Organization at the Limit: Lessons From the Columbia Disaster") is one such clear example - a sad one showing that NASA had not fully learned the lessons of Challenger ten years earlier.

If I were looking for a place in organizational dynamics that could lead to present circumstances, (your point about "mostly stuff what experienced old school pilots learned" etc), I would view a relatively unquestioned stance towards the privileged place of technology in present-day operations. Such a question is not informed by what we could call the "fiscal discourse" yet it appears to mimic the effects of "bean-counting" priorities. That way of putting the question leaves the issue open to recognition of the good that technology contributes positively, while examining the permissions we grant technology in terms of the relinquishing of control, all of which can lead to an inappropriate reliance and which, as we know well, will (not may) let us down at the most critical moment.

I think the industry has been changing for some time now - ie., returning to the old ways while keeping technology, and the RAeS lecture is recognition of this and as such is indeed information in aid of this change.

That doesn't mean that pure bean-counting decisions which dismiss safety in favour of commercial gain aren't made. I've seen it happen, (despite senior managers seeing the FDA data.) However from what I saw the other side is by far the weightier one!

I know from conversations with those doing the work, (I'm retired) that this knowledge has been in the simulator scripts and training courses for some time now. I'm less confident that an abiding mild skepticism regarding automation is making similar inroads but I think it is moving inexorably in that direction.

Franzl

I agree that it was mostly well known facts, but although I count myself "a practitioner skilled in the art"(of aerodynamics) I still learned some new things about how stall testing is done these days. I don't think it is a question of knowledge being 'lost' - flight testing is a continuous process and what was being presented was more a statement of the accumulated wisdom of the two flight test departments. Seems to me that your concerns really relate to the transmission of this expertise to the guys who actually fly these machines every day.

That said, I'm not sure how much line pilots need to know about actual flight test stalling techniques but of course the descriptions of typical stall and post stall behaviour were and are relevant.

I'm shooting my mouth off here, because I have no experience whatsoever in this area, but to an outsider it seems that there is sometimes an important gap in the information trail from manufacturers' flight test expertise through their training departments to airline training departments to line pilots. Not just on stall behaviour; there are other examples where inherited wisdom was not passed on.

Pilots will no doubt be able to put me straight on that ;)

It was not my intention to downplay the important work of test flight departements, though posted in this thread my focus was more what it will provide to the end user.

We are in full agreement on your following statement.

@ PJ2 I see your points, now tell me what will change and who will initiate the change? there are lots of saying like ..... my company is doing that and that .......i practice that and that.... and so on. Schouldn´t those necessary changes in training and qualification be regulated and monitored to a necessary standard?

franzl;
Re, "now tell me what will change and who will initiate the change? there are lots of saying like ..... my company is doing that and that .......i practice that and that.... and so on."
I guess I'm not quite clear on what you're searching for. Isn't that how change occurs and isn't this what has been occurring for a long time now? A discussion on the elixir and ultimately the industry's addiction to automation, like any such human behaviour, requires a pretty firm intervention which does not occur everywhere, or at once.

I apologize for the length of these posts - it's pretty dry reading I'll admit but the answers to the kinds of issues you're raising are complicated and can't be captured in a nut-shell, so to speak.

Re, "Schouldn´t those necessary changes in training and qualification be regulated and monitored to a necessary standard? "

Regulators are necessary certainly, but notably and notoriously lag behind such needs as are being expressed here. The aviation industry, people, companies and groups on the other hand take individual initiatives to increase flight safety where the need is indicated and do so proactively (Safety Reporting systems, Flight Data Monitoring & Analysis), and obviously reactively.

This is where change comes from - small steps, quietly taken.

Rarely does the industry wait for the regulatory intervention before taking action. For example, as I have pointed out a few times, in Canada under the CARS, training, demonstration and checking a candidate's response to the approach-to-stall is not required in PPCs on fly-by-wire aircraft. I have offered the thought in discussions that this makes no sense, first because there is nothing magic about fly-by-wire, which can stall an airplane just as easily as hydraulically-powered controls can and second, even a protected airplane can stall, as we now know, (so the elixir of automation was reinforced in at least one country's air regulations). The assumption in this regulation regarding PPCs is that somehow, fbw "protects" one against the stall, which we know is not true. It is software add-on "protections", (for gums, "limits"!), that are at work in the B777 and Airbus types.

But I know for a fact that practically-speaking, in Canada the approach to the stall has been and continues to be trained, practiced and checked in PPCs in 'Airbus aircraft and all other types, (at least at the carrier with which I am familiar) notwithstanding the absence of the requirement to do so.

Another example - the FAA's "minimum hours" rule came a long time after the industry began dealing with issues which arose out of inexperience, poor training/checking and the worst aspects of poor implementation of SMS Programs, (where in this regard the regulator discovered that oversight was still necessary because such implementations are very complicated and "self-reporting" needs a lot of maturing before the regulator can step back).

Within months of the AF447 accident, I know that some airlines were ensuring that crews were being exposed to, trained and checked in these procedures; - the manual-handling issues were quite rapidly brought to the fore as well.

My thought in the post above was first to deal with the notion of the bean-counter-as-amoral-calculator, not that such behaviour doesn't exist - it does, but that it is not the norm; most people working in a system intend to do their very best within the context in which they are employed. The point is, the causes of aberrant (meaning unsafe or leading to risk of unsafe outcomes) do not necessarily always come from parsimony but from misunderstood goals and contexts. As an airman you already know how aircrews can and do react to penny-wise / pound foolish cost-savings.

Like you I agree fully with Owain's statement that you've quoted but those circumstances don't arise out of bean-counting behaviours. Such failures to communicate seem to come from a lack of appreciation of what information in flight test work may or may not be useful and required information for daily line operations. While complex, airline operations are very much like rabbit trails - extensive but narrowly-focused on the needs of the daily operation. Recurrent training is expected to look after the contingencies and abnormalities. With few exceptions this was my experience and although not universal, is largely the case in the west.

So, it isn't as though the regulator shouldn't be setting the standard; it's just that the standard is often set long before the regulations formalize and standardize the standard...so to speak, (my brother who is an engineer always observes that that is the nice thing about standards...so many to choose from).

Thread #11 starts here