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Tuesday, Nov 24, 2009
Do two distracted Northwest pilots portend a frightening breakdown in air safety? No. Plus: A personal note
By Patrick Smith
Read more: Technology & Business, Flying, Airlines, Business, P. Smith, Ask the Pilot
Salon/DG Strong
Oct. 29, 2009 | I know what you're wondering. How could a pair of experienced airline pilots allow their $50 million Airbus A320 to wander 150 miles off course, totally overflying its destination, before realizing the error and cowering back to land. So it went, for reasons not yet understood, with a Northwest Airlines flight from San Diego to Minneapolis last Wednesday.
To this point, what we know for sure is that one way or another the pilots became distracted. They bypassed Minneapolis and fell out of radio contact with air traffic control for nearly an hour. When the story first broke, the pilots had reportedly been involved in a heated discussion -- something about company policy -- that diverted their attention and caused them to bypass Minneapolis. A few days later the story changed. Now the pilots claim to have been working on their personal laptop computers, going over their schedules.
I'm the first to admit that it doesn't look good.
To start with, airline policies vary as to what pilots are or aren't allowed to do during the cruise portion of flight, but most carriers, Northwest included, prohibit the use of laptops and other forms of personal entertainment. Indeed, the Federal Aviation Administration has revoked both pilots' airline transport licenses (they can later be eligible for reinstatement). Even still, how two pilots could have remained so distracted, for such a protracted length of time, is very difficult for me to understand.
Yes, the cockpit radios can sometimes remain quiet for long stretches, particularly when flying late at night or over remote areas. And yes, it is common for pilots to temporarily lose contact with ATC: We copy down the wrong frequency or mistakenly leave the volume down; we miss a handoff. But these are innocuous gaffes that generally resolve themselves after just a minute or two. For an hour to pass? On a short-haul domestic flight? Had they not noticed the absence of ATC? Were they not monitoring their position relative to the flight plan waypoints, right there on the plane's navigation screens?
Do airline pilots sometimes become distracted? Of course they do, just as any professional in any line of work occasionally becomes distracted, even in the middle of important duties. There is no such thing as a perfect flight; pilots make minor mistakes just like anybody else. But this was something different.
Just the same, I am more than a bit dismayed by the intense media focus on this story. There was no catastrophe. There was no near catastrophe. The plane was temporarily off-course during high-altitude cruise flight, under ATC watch above non-mountainous terrain. The crew made an embarrassing mistake, and will be punished accordingly, while the rest of us who fly for a living will draw important if obvious lessons. It was a comparatively minor event that has received far more attention than it deserves. I've been astounded by the level of traction. A week later and it's still above the fold. Reporters and pundits have been digging and digging for some nonexistent deeper meaning, asking if perhaps the event was a symptom of a frightening breakdown in air safety. One radio station even asked me if I thought the incident was related to "pilot stress" brought on by Northwest's ongoing merger with Delta.
No, I don't. I think it was what it was: a freak event.
Red herrings everywhere. I appeared on a talk show the other night with an aeronautics professor who began talking about cockpit automation, and how the downside of the high-tech flight deck is the propensity for pilots to grow bored. Modern avionics, she insinuated, were making this sort of incident more likely. Bollocks. Boredom and automation have little to do with one another. Boredom was a factor 60 years ago, when planes had rudimentary autopilots and propellers spun by pistons. It's going to be a factor in any profession where the bulk of tasks becomes repetitive and routine. We don't know exactly what happened over Minneapolis, but the fancy electronics of the Airbus A320 weren't the problem, trust me.
I operate eight-, nine-, even 12-hour nonstops all the time. There's a certain tedium that I expect and have to deal with. But is it because of the automation? No. If I had to have my hands on the wheel that whole time, I'd be twice as bored and 10 times as exhausted. And on the whole, Minneapolis notwithstanding, pilots are pretty good at the kind of self-discipline it requires to be alert for long periods of low workload. It's part of the job. (What's the best method for combating boredom? One word: conversation.)
Contrary to what people think, both boredom and fatigue (we'll get to the latter in a moment) are often easier to manage on long-haul flights than on shorter ones. Most flights over eight hours long carry augmented crews, allowing pilots to take organized rest breaks in a bunk room or designated crew seat. On a 12-hour nonstop from New York to Tel Aviv, a pilot will spend no more than three or four consecutive hours at a control seat, versus six hours on a trip between New York and San Francisco.
And the cockpit can be a busier place than you might imagine, even late at night over the middle of the ocean: There are ATC and company position reports to transmit and record, weather reports to check, arrival procedures to review and plan, aircraft systems to monitor, logbook issues to take care of, and so on.
On Wednesday, CNN ran a story about pilots becoming bored. It included the following:
When cruising over great distances, "it's very easy to be distracted because there's not a whole lot going on," said Emilio Corsetti, a 30-year commercial pilot with American Airlines who has written numerous magazine articles about aviation. An airliner's entire flight can be programmed; once that program is activated, "the plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," he said.
When I read that, I thought my head was going to explode. Rarely have I come across a more misleading statement in the mainstream media when it comes to flying. This is arguably the most grotesque caricature of cockpit automation I have ever encountered, and any pilot who reads this ought to be fuming.
Corsetti is talking about the programming of general flight plan data into the flight management system -- the basic, repeat basic, profile of a flight. A jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route. But the idea that a jet "will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all" is absolutely preposterous and downright offensive to anybody who flies for a living. There are so many myths out there when it comes to cockpit automation, and pilots are often their own worst enemies, grossly oversimplifying things in an eagerness to boast of the various technologies at their disposal. I've said it before, and I will say it again: Automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. Even the most routine and "automated" flight remains subject to countless contingencies and a tremendous amount of input from the crew. Yes, tremendous.
Also, please ignore the media's harping on the fact that the Northwest pilots reportedly were not wearing headsets at the time. It is perfectly normal for pilots not to wear headsets during the cruise portion of the flight. They'll use a hand-microphone for making transmissions, while listening over the flight deck speakers.
Meanwhile, not everybody is buying the laptop excuse, theorizing instead that both the captain and first officer had fallen asleep. Thus, whatever the actual cause or causes, the incident has ignited a conversation about the problem of pilot fatigue, similar to what transpired in the aftermath of a Colgan Air (Continental Connection) crash near Buffalo last February. Unlike other aspects of this story, this is a conversation worth having.
Next page: Pilots should be allowed supervised cockpit naps (one at a time, obviously)
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