Pilots Get Advanced Emergency Training : United Airlines: Flight simulator teaches crew how to cope when their plane reaches the point beyond which it would be hopelessly out of control.
When the stars suddenly seem to spin, the aircraft shakes and debris starts flying around the cockpit, a startled pilot has split seconds to analyze the problem and fix it. But first--like a doctor--the pilot must do no harm.
Few pilots face such chaos while flying airliners. But within the next year, every United Airlines pilot will experience this scene--and others--in a flight simulator as part of United’s new “advanced maneuvers” training program. It is supposed to teach pilots how to survive when their planes reach what aviators call “the edge of the envelope”--the point beyond which the plane is hopelessly out of control.
United began planning this program years ago, long before the crash of USAir Flight 427 near Pittsburgh Sept. 8 with the loss of 132 lives. But the sudden, unexplained roll and dive of Flight 427 have helped persuade many in the airline industry that United’s philosophy is right: Pilots are sometimes handed such severe, sudden emergencies that they do not have time to think, and if they are not trained to have the appropriate instinctive reactions, they may lose the plane and everyone on it.
The Federal Aviation Administration and the Air Transport Assn., which represents major airlines, have formed a committee to discuss guidelines for a model program, led by USAir’s training chief, Thomas Johnson. Boeing is also considering development of a program for its customers.
Pilots routinely are trained to handle predictable emergencies such as engine fires. They are trained to avoid--rather than survive--situations that may not be survivable.
The National Transportation Safety Board calls this philosophy a mistake. In a report on the Feb. 15, 1992, crash at Toledo, Ohio, of a DC-8 freighter, the board observed that “airline pilots are not periodically trained to recover from unusual attitudes as are military pilots or civilian acrobatic pilots. The presumption is that an airline should avoid an unusual attitude and will never have a need to recover from one.”
The list of sudden in-flight upsets is short but often disastrous. United Flight 585 flipped from the air on approach to Colorado Springs on March 3, 1991, killing 25 people. American Eagle Flight 4184 suddenly rolled onto its back over Indiana on Oct. 31, 1994, and plunged into a farm field, killing 68. Even when pilots recover from upsets, passengers are often killed or injured by violent maneuvers.
L. S. (Larry) Walters, United’s standards captain for its Boeing 757 and 767 fleet and a developer of the advanced maneuvers program, said training for sudden upsets is “the most glamorous part” of the program, but it also deals with many other dangerous situations that passengers might not notice if handled correctly.
The program, in fact, grew out of a noise-abatement regimen implemented by the city of Santa Ana at John Wayne Orange County Airport. The rules force aircraft to reduce power immediately after taking off, leaving the plane in a nose-high attitude at low airspeed.
“It made some of us a little nervous,” Walters said. “We wondered what would happen if we had an engine failure.”
Such situations have been killers. Midwest Express Flight 105 crashed shortly after takeoff on Sept. 6, 1985, at Milwaukee, killing 29, when the crew apparently mistook which engine had failed and pushed the rudder in the wrong direction.
United’s solution reflected the “keep it simple and do no harm” philosophy that now permeates the advanced-maneuvers program: Don’t touch the rudder, stabilize the plane with other controls, and only then put in the proper rudder deflection to compensate for the lost engine.
Some months after pilots had been trained for the slow-speed, engine-out maneuver, a United flight lost an engine shortly after takeoff from John Wayne, Walters said. The pilot recovered and landed the plane without further incident. According to Walters, his passengers knew nothing until he told them they were returning to the airport.
That specific emergency is one of 13 most pilots are unlikely to see in real life that are now programmed into United’s flight simulators. Each has a separate set of survival tactics that pilots are expected to rehearse when they come in for recurrent training.
Some of the tactics go against a pilot’s natural instincts. Recovery from a sudden roll, for instance, requires manipulating the controls while avoiding any attempt to level the aircraft until the roll is stabilized. In other words, it’s OK to let the plane lose altitude if necessary rather than risk over-stressing the wings or causing a stall, where airflow over the wings slows to the point the plane cannot stay aloft.
United’s simulators cannot simulate flying debris and fear, but even in the middle of chaos, pilots can be trained to quickly perform a simple--and correct--maneuver, Walters said.
United has long been a pioneer in pilot training. The airline developed the first “crew resource management” program to teach members of flight crews to work smoothly together, and developed the first wind-shear training program, which has all but eliminated wind-shear crashes in the United States.
But the airline is concerned that its advanced-maneuvers program will be misinterpreted by the public.
“We’re not doing acrobatics here,” Walters said.
The United program emerged as an issue at the safety board’s recent hearing in Pittsburgh into the USAir crash. Capt. William Traub, United’s head of training, described the program while avoiding a sensitive question: Could the pilots of USAir Flight 427 have controlled the sudden roll if they had taken the right action in time? And what was the right action?
United was reluctant to testify because of the possible perception it was criticizing USAir or its pilots, according to safety board sources. The USAir crew members were praised by the board for careers of care and professionalism and for following the book in their final flight. But the board is still exploring whether they could have saved the plane with other actions.
