"Terror in the skies"

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"Terror in the skies"

Postby Adam the Akrodude » Fri May 22, 2015 10:56 am

Anyone watch this program last night? Quite a emotive title, but I found it pretty interesting as it largely dealt with human factors with aircrew - stress, fatigue, mental overload and how the new "systems" designed to reduce pilot workload can in certain situations work against the pilot rather than provide aid.

One case in point was a particularly nasty day at I think the airport was Dusseldorf with up to 40 knots of crosswind. It appeared that the wingtip of the A320 in fact scrapped on attempting to land and the aircrew aborted the landing. On the subsequent investigation, it was revealed that Airbus in their attempt to reduce pilot workload had in the system software that once the wheel(s) had contacted the ground, the roll rate was reduced by 50%. Sounds great in theory, but this worked against the pilot trying to control this crosswind on this occasion. As soon as one main wheel hit the ground, the roll rate was reduced by 50% and the aeroplane then drifted across the runway, almost to the edge, regardless of efforts by the pilot to stop this. It was at this point the landing was abandoned and a go-around initiated. This wonderful "feature" was unknown to the pilots and to Lufthansa and was not in the aircraft flight manuals - amazing huh! This was what totally staggered me that such a major flight control "feature" was not even mentioned in the manual, so the operators had no idea.

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Another crash featured was the Turkish Airlines 737 crash at Amsterdam due to allowing the airspeed to decay on approach (same as 777 crash at San Francisco). Fatigue, work overload can all effect the pilots ability to take in information - like monitoring the airspeed. A bit like a CPU slowing down when overloaded, the brain shuts down its ability to take in more information - particularly varying (moving) data. In competition aerobatics, this has been referred to as "dumbing down" when the brain gets overloaded. One thing I think must help aircrew in high workload environments (like approach to land in particular) is the addition of heads up displays in the cockpit. Having the airspeed displayed directly in the pilots line of vision as he/she looks towards the runway must surely help in this case.

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Anyhoo, for a interested layman in the whole human factors aspect of aviation, I found it a interesting program. It looks like it will be a series.
Adam the Akrodude
 
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