Pilot-Training Programs Taking Off
The cockpit instruments facing Capt. Dave Carbaugh show his Boeing 757 flying about 250 knots, 10,000 feet above the broad valleys south of Seattle.
An instant later, the flight is going terribly wrong. Red lights flash, gauges spin, alarms scream. Worse, the view out the windshield shows the ground above, the sky below.
Carbaugh calmly rolls the jetliner upright as it plunges into a steep dive. As an agitated electronic voice shouts, “Overspeed!” he pulls the plane level and powers back.
Recovery complete.
Just “basic stick and rudder skills,” Carbaugh says as the computer-screen world outside his window freezes.
Just another school day in a flight simulator at Boeing’s Customer Service Training Center, where Carbaugh is chief pilot of flight safety in the company’s flight crew training department.
Thousands of pilots are brought to the center each year to be taught everything from how to start jet engines to the intricacies of handling wind shear and engine failure. They learn in the cockpits of two-story-high aircraft simulators, which cost at least $22 million apiece.
Spurred by high-profile accidents in recent years, Boeing and others are developing ways to teach pilots to survive highly unlikely--but extremely dangerous--situations where jets are at the edge of control.
“It’s pushing the envelope of the airplane a little,” says Capt. Bill Traub, vice president of flight standards and training at United Airlines, a leader in so-called “advanced maneuvers” training.
“When you get outside the envelope, you know the characteristics of the airplane and how to deal with it.”
Of course, commercial airliners aren’t supposed to wind up on their backs, as in Carbaugh’s demonstration, or on their sides or nearly vertical. But they do:
* In an unsolved crash in September 1994 near Pittsburgh, a USAir Boeing 737-300 rolled violently to the left before plunging 6,000 feet into a hillside, killing all 132 on board.
* A United Airlines 737 on approach to Colorado Springs rolled sharply and plummeted to the ground, killing 25 people in another unsolved crash on March 3, 1991.
* On April 26, 1994, an Airbus A300-600R crashed at Japan’s Nagoya Airport, killing 264 people, after an inexperienced co-pilot tried to abort the landing. The plane stalled as it started climbing at a precipitous 53-degree angle.
* On April 6, 1993, wing slats on a McDonnell Douglas MD-11 improperly extended, repeatedly pitching the plane’s nose up and down over the Aleutians. Two passengers died and 150 were injured aboard the China Eastern jet.
Such incidents are rare. National Transportation Safety Board figures show 35 accidents last year among nearly 8.7 million flights by major U.S. carriers.
That means pilots get little chance to practice advanced flying skills on the job.
Former commercial pilot Al Prest, the Air Transport Assn.’s vice president for operations, said he flew 20 years “and never approached in the real world anything that we plan to do in simulators.”
“We need to go back and learn more about the performance capability of the airplane and does the pilots’ ability match that,” Prest said.
Boeing, the largest commercial jet manufacturer, often acts as a clearinghouse for training programs.
What’s learned in studying advanced maneuvers will be shared.
“When it comes to safety, there’s really no competition,” said Traub, based at United’s training center in Denver.
