Flight Safety - Article Preview

The Sterile Cockpit Hurry-Up Syndrome Minimum Fuel Situation FOQA - Flight Data Analysis of Aircraft for Flight Safety KLM - Pan Am Disaster Runway Incursions Lightning Strike TCAS Traffic Display Airline Flight Safety - A Technical Perspective Danger Posed by Running Engines to Ground Personnel

Danger Posed by Running Engines to Ground Personnel

Photographs of a mechanic who, while working on a running Boeing 737 engine, got sucked in ...

Airline Flight Safety - A Technical Perspective

The maintenance and flight operations organizations are often mistakenly viewed as separate entities with little or no shared mutual interests, when in actuality, the two organizations are closely interlinked in a myriad of complex relationships and objectives. While the maintenance/engineering division provides virtually all the technological expertise necessary to maintain the aircraft fleet, the flight and inflight (flight attendant) organizations are considered the end user of the technical product and, therefore, must maintain a users level of technical knowledge. While the captain is responsible for ensuring the final airworthiness and safety of the aircraft, it is the technical division that maintains, or returns an aircraft to an airworthiness condition. Therefore, an active and formalized communication link between the two groups is necessary for mutual satisfaction of the end product, an up aircraft. An important component of the flight-maintenance relationship is the regulatory-procedural link. Both procedural and technical regulatory issues must be coordinated, thereby necessitating direct communication with relative agencies for effective implementation of evolving safety requirements. At all defined levels of interdivisional relationships, the concept of safety is prevalent, and dependent upon uninhibited access of information and communication between the flight and maintenance organizations ...

TCAS Traffic Display

Manoeuvres initiated solely on the information shown on the TCAS traffic display have often degraded flight safety. Unfortunately some flight crew are tempted to make their own traffic assessment based on the TCAS display, and to manoeuvre ahead of ATC instructions. This can be dangerous as the TCAS II traffic display is easy to misinterpret due to various factors like the nature of the TCAS moving reference display, partial traffic picture given by the system and limited accuracy of TCAS bearing information. ICAO standards only include phraseology to report resolution advisories (RAs). Therefore, pilots should not report, "TCAS Contact" or "We have it on TCAS" after traffic information from ATC. Indeed, such a report provides no added value to ATC. Neither should the pilots attempt, to self-separate, or challenge an ATC instruction, based on information derived solely from the TCAS traffic display. It is the controller's responsibility to separate aircraft. However in the event of a conflict of advice between a TCAS RA and an ATC instruction, the TCAS RA should be followed ...

Lightning Strike

Strike incidence data show that there are more lightning strikes to aircraft below about 20,000 ft than above this altitude, and that jet aircraft are being struck at lower than cruise altitudes, that is during climb, descent or hold operations. Incidence data also show that most strikes occur in or near regions of precipitation. The amount of lightning activity is related to how much precipitation there is, and the presence of vertical air currents (turbulence) ...

Runway Incursions

Runway incursions are continuing to increase despite a greater awareness of the problem among pilots. The factors behind these events vary, but there are some common threads identified. Ben Mitchell an Airservices Australia aerodrome operations specialist explains why are runway incursions occuring and how to avoid them ...

KLM - Pan Am Disaster

A very senior and very experienced Boeing 747 captain under substantial stress decided that what he had heard from the control tower was what he had been expecting - takeoff clearance. Seconds later, Captain van Zanten, fifty years of age, a senior pilot with eleven thousand hours of flight time, and head of the KLM Training Department, saw a sight ahead of him on the runway at Tenerife in the Canary Islands that exceeded his wildest nightmares. As KLM 4805 began emerging from a fogband that had rolled across the runway, another Boeing 747, Pan Am Clipper 1736, sat right in front of it. The disasterously mistaken assumption of Captain van Zanten that the runway was clear and they were cleared to take off, was the saddest - and most dramatic - example of information transfer failure in commercial aviation history. That one decision killed 583 human beings and maimed many more ...

FOQA - Flight Data Analysis of Aircraft for Flight Safety

Operational Flight Data Monitoring, known more recently as Flight Operational Quality Assurance (FOQA), is probably the most important safety tool available to aviation, yet it is fully operational in only a few airlines. Properly managed, the capital investment and running costs are recovered many times over. Pilot associations embrace its benefits, as do maintenance managers, accountants and insurers. Each year the industry identifies world accident causes, many of which would be even more predictable if airlines had the detailed knowledge provided by FOQA of how their aircraft are actually being operated. Data buses in modern aircraft make FOQA data readily accessible for analysis. Without the best information gleaned from that analysis we cannot make the best decisions regarding the performance of flight crew or aircraft systems or aviation's infrastructure ...

Minimum Fuel Situation

Few inflight problems are guaranteed to raise the concern of pilots and controllers alike as much as the prospect of an aircraft running out of fuel. In the period following the Avianca accident in January of 1989 (where Avianca Flight 52 crashed short of its destination after running out of fuel), the ASRS has seen a rise in the number of reports that concern "low-fuel" conditions. Reports may detail the confusion and communications breakdown among flight crews and controllers about what is meant by a "minimum fuel" situation. In more than a few situations, conscientious and understandably vigilant controllers have elevated to emergency status what the flight crew intended only as an advisory ...

Hurry-Up Syndrome

This review of the Hurry-up Syndrome is an adaptation of a research study in which 125 ASKS incident records that involved time related problems were studied. We define Hurry-up Syndrome as any situation where a pilot's human performance is degraded by a perceived or actual need to hurry or rush tasks or duties for any reason. These time related pressures include the need of a company agent or ground personnel to open a gate for another aircraft, pressure from ATC to expedite taxi for take-off or to meet a restriction in clearance time, the pressure to keep on schedule when delays have occurred due to maintenance or weather, or the inclination to hurry to avoid exceeding duty time regulations ...

The Sterile Cockpit

When a flight crew's attention is diverted from the task of flying, the chance of error increases. Over the years there have been dozens of air carrier accidents that occurred when the crew diverted attention from the task at hand and became occupied with items totally unrelated to flying. Consequently, important things were missed. Things like setting the flaps prior to takeoff, or extending the landing gear before landing. FAR 121.542 and FAR 135.100 prohibit crew member performance of non-essential duties or activities while the aircraft is involved in taxi, takeoff, landing, and all other flight operations conducted below 10,000 feet MSL, except cruise flight ...