The steering wheel of my old Reliant Scimitar motor
car once came off in my hands while I was driving. That was certainly
unexpected and the people who sold it to me would probably have said it couldn’t
happen. But it did, and I had to figure out how to steer the vehicle while
stopping in a safe (ish) place. I got
lucky I suppose.
My thanks to Skybrary for https://bit.ly/2ImYXYY - a summary of the
Preliminary Report on the investigation into the crash of B737 MAX 8 on 10 March
2019.
The way I read this summary (and I’m sure I’ll be
corrected if I’m wrong), the aircraft was technically flyable, although not in
a way the pilots had ever seen before and certainly not in a way they had
trained for. In fact, they did manage to fly it for a while, overcoming the
efforts of the automation to pitch the aircraft down into a suicidal dive, by
nose-up elevator and electric stabiliser trim inputs. But eventually it won…
If we go back 10 years to AF447, the pilots were
also presented with something they had never seen and had never trained for.
The aircraft was technically flyable and operated to design but they couldn’t
work out what was happening and correct it. The Air Asia A320 that crashed in
2014 was flyable, although the captain’s well-intentioned actions had caused
the flight control systems to revert to ‘alternate law’. The pilots would have
seen alternate law in the simulator but never with a sudden and unexpected
onset.
I would be prepared to stake a substantial bet
that each of these crews could have easily and competently managed an engine
failure on the preceding take-off (and any other take-off). That’s what we have
trained them for. But these other random, unexpected and potentially startling
conditions are not trained and are therefore far more difficult to manage, just
like my steering wheel incident.
So perhaps it is time be a bit more imaginative
and a bit less optimistic when designing flight training profiles and show
pilots some more extreme and unusual flight conditions.
No comments:
Post a Comment