Pilots at the crossroads

A two-day conference, ‘The Aircraft Commander in the 21st Century’ held at the Royal Aeronautical Society in London, looked at many of the challenges facing airlines and flightdeck crew and threw up several concerns – not least the growing shortage of pilots worldwide and differing personal qualities of many joining the profession.

One such concern, the audience heard, was the diminishing quantity of ex-military pilots making the transition to the civil industry, due both to shrinking air arms and deteriorating salaries and conditions for airline pilots.

Military pilots, with their inbuilt qualities of discipline and leadership, were fast becoming a minority in airline crew rooms, the conference heard.

On the technology front, the ever-increasing complexity of aircraft systems meant that crews could become buried in trying to dig down through layers of data in their attempts to solve problems when common sense was sometimes the more appropriate approach.

This last point was a theme of the keynote address given by Captain David Evans of Qantas, who was flying as supervising check captain on Airbus A380 Flight QF32 from Singapore to Sydney on November 4 2010 when one of its Rolls-Royce Trent 900 powerplants exploded.

One of the biggest problems the flight crew had to deal with, said Evans, was handling the avalanche of warning messages generated by the aircraft’s ECAM monitoring system, which attempts to prioritise alerts.

More than 60 warnings flashed up on the cockpit displays. One of the first warned ‘Wings not balanced’ and recommended the crew cross-transfer fuel from one wing to the other – despite the fact that this would have increased fuel loss by pumping it through obviously damaged plumbing.

The crew worked through the ECAM warnings that seemed essential and ignored others that were not, said Evans. “We simplified things by looking at what [systems] we had, rather than what we hadn’t. There was a lot of ECAM ‘white noise’. But we knew we had four hours’ flight time despite losing fuel, which gave us options.

“The job of the 21st century commander is to sort out problems with the help of technology, not depend on it. What needs to be brought back is healthy scepticism of technology, not reliance on it.”

The prime lesson from this incident, said Evans, was that common sense and airmanship remained prime qualities in pilots.

Answering questions afterwards, he agreed with audience members that basic flying skills were leaching out of the younger piloting community as technology became more complex. “During my Airbus training everything comes to you as a procedure. I think perhaps we have to question that. The understanding of how something works in a modern aircraft is probably beyond a pilot and it’s not necessarily vital for him to know that.”

Throughout the conference several speakers warned of the dangers of increasing complexity of cockpit systems and pleaded for manufacturers both to reduce the amount of information presented to flightdeck occupants and to make what was presented to them more easily understandable.

Captain John Monks, British Airways’ regulation and development manager, recalled that when he was a young pilot on the Boeing 737-200: “You had to go hunting for information. In a modern aircraft, it throws information at you and keeps on throwing it at you.” This made the ability to prioritise what they were looking at vital for today’s pilots.

Captain Scott Martin, experimental test pilot with business jet manufacturer Gulfstream, added: “Automation is not supposed to transfer responsibility away from the pilot. We need to get the pilot back to being the decision-maker.” Automated systems should be treated as a third crew member, he said, and challenged if they did something that seemed wrong. And aircraft manufacturers needed to keep the avionics simple and ensure they provided pilots only with the information they really required.

“A captain’s role is to bring his aircraft and passengers home safely and efficiently, whether or not the automation works,” said Lufthansa captain and International Federation of Airline Pilots Associations’ official Uwe Harter. “Highly automated systems can be very convenient but are difficult to understand in depth.”

The slow erosion of traditional handling skills meant that when things went wrong pilots were increasingly at risk of being unable to correct the situation. “I’m an A320 pilot and it’s good to do manual flying. It keeps me in the loop. Don’t try to match humans to technology but technology to humans. The Apple iPhone is a good example of this – it’s very intuitive to use.”

Pilots needed to be ‘designed in’ to the system, said Harter. “Who would want to work somewhere if he’s not needed? If we’re just observers, then please put a decent espresso machine in the cockpit, because it’s so boring to just sit and watch!”

Whereas virtually every previous generation of youngsters has regarded a pilot’s job as glamorous, this was no longer the case, said Qantas’s Evans. Security considerations meant young people were no longer allowed into the cockpit where flight crews could share their passion and instil in them an interest in aviation. The cost of self-funding training was very high and the financial rewards of being an airline pilot were not as substantial as in previous decades. “Clearly,” he said, “we have to make the job more attractive.”