

Cockpit crisis - adamtmca
http://www2.macleans.ca/2011/08/24/cockpit-crisis/

======
bonzoesc
> Cockpit component company Rockwell Collins, for example, made waves at this
> year’s Paris air show when it talked about developing a “panic button” for
> commercial airplanes that would give confused and stricken pilots the option
> of flipping a switch and letting the computer fly the plane to safety. Not
> surprisingly, the concept drew ridicule from aviators, who are quick to
> point out that computers are hardly infallible, as anyone who has ever
> struggled with a crashed Web browser knows.

One of the more dangerous things when operating a vehicle is cognitive
overload; when shit goes wrong, a bunch of stuff tends to get dumped on you
and you can't think fast enough to catch up. A way to let the airplane worry
about itself for a minute while the pilots can catch up seems to be a decent
way to address this side effect of being a conscious being instead of an
automaton.

The jab about the unreliability of computers is just that; avionics software
is on a much slower release schedule and has a much more fixed set of inputs
than a web browser, allowing for a more thorough (or even formal) analysis of
its behavior.

> “People say it’s impossible to stall an Airbus, right? It has stall-
> protection systems and it won’t allow you to exceed the maximum angle of
> attack where a stall would occur,” argues Paul Strachan, an Air Canada pilot
> who is the head of the company’s pilots’ union. “But that’s not true. If
> there’s ice on the wing, that whole detection system isn’t accurate to begin
> with. I would be pretty hesitant to get on a plane with no pilot.”

Flight control systems can be built to compensate for all sorts of failures[1]
that would pose grave difficulty for human pilots, but nobody's really
advocating for completely-autonomous passenger planes. The problem right now
is that the autonomous systems to reduce pilot workload and improve safety
have failure modes that tend to overload the pilots with information. A
working, reliable "panic button" would definitely help pilots get back in
front of the plane in an emergency situation, but so would fixing the
information overload to allow pilots to prioritize important issues (pitot
freezing up, speed indicators unreliable) over side effects (unreliable stall
warning, alternate law activation).

[1]: <http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xN9f9ycWkOY>

~~~
a-priori
If there were a "Panic button", would pilots actually use it? In the case they
mentioned, it sounds like the pilot was quite confident that pitching the nose
up further would get him out of the stall. Who knows what his reasons were for
doing that, but he had to "outmuscle" the existing automated systems to do it.
Does that sound like a person who would push a button and let the plane save
itself?

~~~
jedc
It sounds like that it's not a "Panic" button that pilots need, but a "Filter"
button. Where if you've got 10 alarms going off, the "Filter" shows you the 1
or 2 alarms that matter most and need immediate action. Certainly the
computational horsepower for this already exists onboard!

~~~
PakG1
This type of result is attained with experience. My own experience (and many
other people I know feel the same) regarding pressure and panic is that you
need to have experience to be able to withstand pressure and panic, not better
filtered information.

Even with only a few alarms, it's easy for inexperienced people to get
panicked about something. But the claims of Sullenberger, the pilot who landed
the plane in the Hudson river, are sobering.

[http://www.businessinsider.com/capt-sullenberger-stop-
cuttin...](http://www.businessinsider.com/capt-sullenberger-stop-cutting-
pilot-pay-or-next-time-plane-will-crash-in-river-2009-2)

~~~
khafra
Would you recommend that airlines publicize the experience of the pilot on
each flight, and offer discounts for travelling with less experienced pilots?
Because, other than with something like this, "experience" doesn't sound like
an alternative to a "panic button" or a "filter button." Where does the
experience come from?

~~~
PakG1
It comes from training in flight school, smaller planes, the air force, etc.
There are lots of ways to get quality experience before making the jump to the
big planes.

~~~
khafra
I'm pretty sure all major airlines require a ton of hours on smaller planes,
and often large cargo planes, before flying passenger jets--so perhaps
experience is not the panacea, or must be more carefully tailored to include
the right kinds of crisis situations.

~~~
Nick_C
> I'm pretty sure all major airlines require a ton of hours on smaller
> planes...

That used to be true, and may be right now, but the trend is towards airlines
accepting simulator time in lieu. The trouble with that is that simulators are
subject to the same problem as any other complex input device: if you haven't
foreseen the problem beforehand, you don't program the simulator to model it,
and the pilot isn't trained to handle it. Experience can help that simulator
time can't.

The recent high-pressure turbine blade failure on Qantas is a case in point
where the pilots were overwhelmed with page after page of error faults, 145 of
them if I remember correctly. If they hadn't been very fortunate to have two
other senior captains in the cockpit with them, they would have had a great
deal of trouble dealing with the information flow.

Personally, as a light aircraft pilot myself, I would not be comfortable with
young airline pilots with only simulator experience. At least one of them
needs to have a few thousand hours of hands-on-stick experience.

~~~
khafra
Interesting, and disturbing. I sure hope that after every air disaster or near
disaster, a new scenario is added to the mandatory simulator training.

------
watmough
One possible approach that might have helped in the Air France case might be
to let the pilots know what the plane doesn't know, instead of bombarding them
with the unsolvable problems it did know.

At one point, they were at full thrust, nose-up, and climbing, yet in the heat
of a storm of warnings, they failed to recognize that the airframe, engines,
wings were all performing exactly as designed, aside from a panicking
computer.

At that point they had completely lost situational awareness, and held the
plane nose-up and falling until it contacted the water. If they had been able
to 'step back' and look at the wider situation, they almost certainly should
have been able to guesstimate some power settings, trim appropriately to lower
the nose to recover to a normal flight attitude and hang on until they could
trouble-shoot the frozen pitot tubes that had caused the air data computers to
lose airspeed info.

~~~
pygy_
There were several other major UI failures:

 _> In the case of Flight 447, Air France’s pilots’ union has pointed a finger
at Airbus by suggesting that the stall warning system on the A330 likely
contributed to the doomed ﬂight crew’s confusion by sounding only
intermittently even though the plane remained in a stall the whole time._

 _> In the Air France crash, for example, investigators noted that the plane’s
critical angle of attack “was not directly displayed to the pilots” [...]_

Not only were they overloaded with useless noise, but critical information was
either delivered in a confusing way, by design, or hidden from view...

They need UX people, badly.

------
mooism2
The article doesn't mention near misses. How many stalls occur that crews
safely recover their planes from? Can we learn anything from their
circumstances?

~~~
jrockway
I'm guessing this is a normal occurrence that isn't worth collecting
statistics on. Recovering from a stall is simple; it's something you'll do
very early in flight training (well before your first solo flight).

Planes crash when a lot of things go wrong at once. In the case of the Colgan
Air crash, the problem was not the stall. The problem was that the pilots were
sleepy, confused, and under-trained. The stall was too much for them because
they were in a state where they could panic, and they didn't have the training
to stop panicing and start flying the plane. So they randomly poked the
controls, and that didn't save the plane.

Take two training pilots on a full 8 hour's sleep, and the stall probably
wouldn't have even happened. If it did, a "whoa" would have been exchanged and
they might have gone around for another landing approach. But I don't think it
would be a big deal, it's just some randomness that is par for the course when
you are trying to float twenty tons of metal through the air.

~~~
marvin
I'm a glider pilot, and I'm close to stalling every time I fly. It's just
something that's part of the regular procedure: You recognize when it's about
to happen, and take the appropriate action (which is to ease down on the stick
and maintain correct angle of attack). If you're at a reasonable altitude,
there is no danger involved. However, I'm pretty sure that an airliner
operating regularly practically never approaches a stall condition.

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adamtmca
The whole discussion reminded me of Malcolm Gladwell's article "blowup".

<http://www.gladwell.com/1996/1996_01_22_a_blowup.htm>

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iam
The quality of these professional pilots is really disturbing. Why would they
pull up more when the plane is already in a stall? I'm pretty sure they teach
in lesson 2 or 3 of flight school how to recover from stalls by pulling _down_
on the stick.

~~~
yardie
That was part of the problem. They covered that in lesson 2 or 3 but didn't
follow up at lesson 1300. Like you, I assumed stall recovering was something
ongoing but apparently its not. Once you have 1 certificate you move on to the
next and the next.

It's like long division in multivar class. Some people can do it again given
time but most people wouldn't be able to divide 1345 into 26 right off the
bat.

~~~
marvin
But this isn't rocket science. It isn't even long division. Maintaining a safe
angle of attack is the _most basic_ pilot skill there is. If you fly an
airplane at all, this is something you have to think about both on approach
and takeoff.

To me, it seems ridiculous that pilots are unable to remember this stuff.
Really. To recover from a stall, you ease down on the stick and alternatively
apply power. Barring a deep-stall condition, it's really that simple. They
even teach you that the most basic error in a stall condition is to pull back
on the stick in a panic-stricken attempt at forcing the plane to gain
altitude. I'm stupefied at these reports.

~~~
Nick_C
Well, to be fair, flying a heavy is vastly different from a light plane. You
don't have the seat-of-the-pants feel, centre-of-gravity varies greatly during
the flight with fuel burn-off, at cruise you are flying only a few knots over
the stall speed, and so on.

There were even situations where pushing forward was the wrong thing to do
(although no longer, thank goodness). The 727 could enter a situation where
the elevator itself was stalled from the main wing stall.

Modern heavies are about systems management and cockpit procedures. As someone
below points out, if one system is telling you to pull up from overspeed, and
another is telling you to push forward from stall, which do you believe? And,
more importantly, how quickly can you trouble-shoot to find the correct
action?

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maeon3
The super computers are strategically taking out problematic groups of humans,
staging machine accidents that the humans cannot recover from manually.

I see this as a reoccurring theme in the next 100 years as we get self driving
cars, automated food processing, intelligent machines automating everything.
We gotta deal with this in a smart way, require by law "Kill computer" switch
accessible and known by all operators, to get the computer to stop demanding
its own way and just do what the human tells it to do.

Though we can't say we weren't warned, Hal saying he can't jeopardize the
mission to Wall-E auto computer demanding it's own way over the will of the
captain. Is there even a solution to this problem or are we doomed to be pets
one day?

