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WASHINGTON (AP) — Are airline pilots forgetting how to fly? As
planes become ever more reliant on automation to navigate crowded
skies, safety officials worry there will be more deadly accidents
traced to pilots who have lost their hands-on instincts in the
air.
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Hundreds of people have died over the past five years in “loss of
control” accidents in which planes stalled during flight or got
into unusual positions that pilots could not correct. In some
cases, pilots made the wrong split-second decisions, with
catastrophic results – for example, steering the plane’s nose
skyward into a stall instead of down to regain stable
flight.
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Spurred in part by federal regulations that require greater
reliance on computerized flying, the airline industry is suffering
from “automation addiction,” said Rory Kay, an airline captain and
co-chairman of a Federal Aviation Administration committee on pilot
training. “We’re seeing a new breed of accident with these
state-of-the art planes.”
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Pilots use automated systems to fly airliners for all but about
three minutes of a flight: the takeoff and landing. Most of the
time pilots are programming navigation directions into computers
rather than using their hands on controls to fly the plane. They
have few opportunities to maintain their skills by flying manually,
Kay’s advisory committee warns.
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Fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the U.S.
over the past decade. However, The Associated Press interviewed
pilots, industry officials and aviation safety experts who
expressed concern about the implications of decreased opportunities
for manual flight, and reviewed more than a dozen loss-of-control
accidents around the world.
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Airlines and regulators discourage or even prohibit pilots from
turning off the autopilot and flying planes themselves, the
committee said. Safety experts say they’re seeing cases in which
pilots who are suddenly confronted with a loss of computerized
flight controls don’t appear to know how to respond immediately, or
they make errors – sometimes fatally so.
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A draft FAA study found pilots sometimes “abdicate too much
responsibility to automated systems.” Because these systems are so
integrated in today’s planes, one malfunctioning piece of equipment
or a single bad computer instruction can suddenly cascade into a
series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to
rely on the equipment.
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The study examined 46 accidents and major incidents, 734 voluntary
reports by pilots and others as well as data from more than 9,000
flights in which a safety official rode in the cockpit to observe
pilots in action. It found that in more than 60 percent of
accidents, and 30 percent of major incidents, pilots had trouble
manually flying the plane or made mistakes with automated flight
controls.
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A typical mistake was not recognizing that either the autopilot or
the auto-throttle – which controls power to the engines – had
disconnected. Others failed to take the proper steps to recover
from a stall in flight or to monitor and maintain
airspeed.
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“We’re forgetting how to fly,” Kay said.
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In the most recent fatal airline crash in the U.S., in 2009 near
Buffalo, N.Y., the co-pilot of a regional airliner programmed
incorrect information into the plane’s computers, causing it to
slow to an unsafe speed. That triggered a stall warning. The
startled captain, who hadn’t noticed the plane had slowed too much,
responded by repeatedly pulling back on the control yoke,
overriding two safety systems, when the correct procedure was to
push forward.
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An investigation later found there were no mechanical or structural
problems that would have prevented the plane from flying if the
captain had responded correctly. Instead, his actions caused an
aerodynamic stall. The plane plummeted to earth, killing all 49
people aboard and one on the ground.
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Two weeks after the New York accident, a Turkish Airlines Boeing
737 crashed into a field while trying to land in Amsterdam. Nine
people were killed and 120 injured. An investigation found that one
of the plane’s altimeters, which measures altitude, had fed
incorrect information to the plane’s computers.
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That, in turn, caused the auto-throttle to reduce speed to a
dangerously slow level so that the plane lost lift and stalled.
Dutch investigators described the flight’s three pilots’
“automation surprise” when they discovered the plane was about to
stall. They hadn’t been closely monitoring the airspeed.
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Last month, French investigators recommended that all pilots get
mandatory training in manual flying and handling a high-altitude
stall. The recommendations were in response to the 2009 crash of an
Air France jet flying from Brazil to Paris. All 228 people aboard
were killed.
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An investigation found that airspeed sensors fed bad information to
the Airbus A330’s computers. That caused the autopilot to disengage
suddenly and a stall warning to activate.
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The co-pilot at the controls struggled to save the plane, but
because he kept pointing the plane’s nose up, he actually caused
the stall instead of preventing it, experts said. Despite the bad
airspeed information, which lasted for less than a minute, there
was nothing to prevent the plane from continuing to fly if the
pilot had followed the correct procedure for such circumstances,
which is to continue to fly levelly in the same direction at the
same speed while trying to determine the nature of the problem,
they said.
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In such cases, the pilots and the technology are failing together,
said former US Airways Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, whose
precision flying is credited with saving all 155 people aboard an
Airbus A320 after it lost power in a collision with Canada geese
shortly after takeoff from New York’s LaGuardia Airport two years
ago.
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“If we only look at the pilots – the human factor – then we are
ignoring other important factors,” he said. “We have to look at how
they work together.”
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The ability of pilots to respond to the unexpected loss or
malfunction of automated aircraft systems “is the big issue that we
can no longer hide from in aviation,” said Bill Voss, president of
the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. “We’ve been very
slow to recognize the consequence of it and deal with
it.”
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The foundation, which is industry-supported, promotes aviation
safety around the world.
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Airlines are also seeing smaller incidents in which pilots waste
precious time repeatedly trying to restart the autopilot or fix
other automated systems when what they should be doing is “grasping
the controls and flying the airplane,” said Bob Coffman, another
member of the FAA pilot training committee and an airline
captain.
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“All of this has to be instinctive, it has to be trained to the
point of, `Oh, I know what to do,’ ” he said.
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Paul Railsback, operations director at the Air Transport
Association, which represents airlines, said: “We think the best
way to handle this is through the policies and training of the
airlines to ensure they stipulate that the pilots devote a fair
amount of time to manually flying. We want to encourage pilots to
do that and not rely 100 percent on the automation. I think many
airlines are moving in that direction.”
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In May, the FAA proposed requiring airlines to train pilots on how
to recover from a stall, as well as expose them to more realistic
problem scenarios.
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But other new regulations are going in the opposite direction.
Today, pilots are required to use their autopilot when flying at
altitudes above 24,000 feet, which is where airliners spend much of
their time cruising. The required minimum vertical safety buffer
between planes has been reduced from 2,000 feet to 1,000 feet. That
means more planes flying closer together, necessitating the kind of
precision flying more reliably produced by automation than human
beings.
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The same situation is increasingly common closer to the
ground.
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The FAA is moving from an air traffic control system based on radar
technology to more precise GPS navigation. Instead of
time-consuming, fuel-burning stair-step descents, planes will be
able to glide in more steeply for landings with their engines
idling. Aircraft will be able to land and take off closer together
and more frequently, even in poor weather, because pilots will know
the precise location of other aircraft and obstacles on the ground.
Fewer planes will be diverted.
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But the new landing procedures require pilots to cede even more
control to automation.
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“Those procedures have to be flown with the autopilot on,” Voss
said. “You can’t afford a sneeze on those procedures.”
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Even when not using the new procedures, airlines direct their
pilots to switch on the autopilot about a minute and a half after
takeoff, when the plane reaches about 1,000 feet, Coffman said. The
autopilot generally doesn’t come off until about a minute and a
half before landing, he said.
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Pilots still control the plane’s flight path. But they are
programming computers rather than flying with their
hands.
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Opportunities to fly manually are especially limited at commuter
airlines, where pilots may fly with the autopilot off for about 80
seconds out of a typical two-hour flight, Coffman said.
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But it is the less experienced first officers starting out at
smaller carriers who most need manual flying experience. Airline
training programs are focused on training pilots to fly with the
automation, rather than without it. Senior pilots, even if their
manual flying skills are rusty, can at least draw on experience
flying older generations of less automated planes.
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Adding to concerns about an overreliance on automation is an
expected pilot shortage in the U.S. and many other countries. U.S.
airlines used to be able to draw on a pool of former military
pilots with extensive manual flying experience. But more pilots now
choose to stay in the armed forces, and corporate aviation competes
for pilots with airlines, where salaries have dropped.
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Changing training programs to include more manual flying won’t be
enough because pilots spend only a few days a year in training,
Voss said. Airlines will have to rethink their operations
fundamentally if they’re going to give pilots realistic
opportunities to keep their flying skills honed, he
said.
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The International Air Transport Association says the most common
type of airline accident is one in which planes stalled or
otherwise lost control in flight. It counted 51 such accidents in
the past five years.
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—
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