SPECIAL REPORT: WHO’S FLYING YOUR AIRPLANE?
Part Two: The pilot system error
New pilots are learning to rely more on automation as basic airmanship suffers
Published: December 28, 2009, 8:21 am
Story tools:
Share this story:
When pilot Marvin Renslow flipped on the autopilot less than four minutes after Continental Connection Flight 3407 left Newark airport on a wintry night last February, he said something thousands of pilots around the world repeat every day: "Autopilot's engaged."
He then added a haunting afterthought.
"That's probably a good thing," he said.
Now, in the wake of the crash of Flight 3407, aviation experts have come to wonder if that's so — or if an overreliance on technology in the cockpit has dangerous ramifications.
They worry that pilots are forgetting how to fly in emergencies when airmanship abilities — stick and rudder skills — are needed most. They wonder whether some pilots that America trusts have become more automatons than aviators.
And they worry that the new generation of pilots, who spend growing amounts of their training learning computer systems, will not possess the skills needed to cope with sudden midair surprises — whether it's violent mountain turbulence, icing, or some other event that can create chaos.
"An airplane's systems are very safe, and an airplane will tell you when you are making a mistake 95 percent of the time. That's why there's not a lot of accidents," said a pilot who trains pilots at a major regional airline. (He, like other "line pilots" currently working at airlines, asked not to be identified by name for fear he would be fired.) "But systems break and some [pilots] don't have the airmanship skills to get out of a problem."
A decline in piloting skills is just what Michael Gillen, a Denver-based pilot who has been flying for a major airline for 15 years, found in the master's thesis he completed last year at the respected University of North Dakota aviation program.
"The situation is getting worse," said Gillen, whose study of pilots flying in simulators "showed a significant degradation below what is required for [the FAA] Airline Transport Pilot certificate," the license needed to be a captain on a commercial airliner.
And that doesn't even count those pilots who demonstrate "a lack of situational awareness" — like the pilots of Northwest Airlines Flight 188 who recently overflew the Minneapolis airport by 150 miles.
Experts puzzled
Pilots would not be surprised if Renslow felt more comfortable letting the computer pilot Flight 3407 through the crowded Northeast corridor on that winter night. After all, that's what happens on most flights now, save for takeoffs and landings.
But the mistakes Renslow made, after the automation switched off on approach to Buffalo, leave many aviation experts scratching their heads.
First, he and his co-pilot didn't monitor the speed well enough to know that the plane was flying dangerously slow. And when the stall warning system activated, Renslow did exactly the opposite of what he should have done, pulling back on the yoke instead of pushing it forward to gain speed, never giving the plane full power.
"If he'd just let go of the yoke, the plane would have gone into a position of re-control," said Mark Rosenker, who chaired the National Transportation Safety Board at the time of the crash. "But by fighting it and with the loss of air speed and already going into upset, he exacerbated it by pulling the nose up. This is a guy who totally did not understand what he was doing."
It's a lesson in what pilots are learning, and not learning.
"We're not learning the stick and rudder skills" of the past, said a pilot at Colgan Air, which operated Flight 3407. "You can overrely on technology and don't learn how to feel the airplane getting slow or an autopilot problem that you might have had with these basic stick and rudder skills."
To modern pilots, the autopilot is the mainframe computer, guiding the plane through the skies through much of every flight. Internal airline rules govern the use of autopilots. Some have strict policies, while others give their pilots more latitude.
Jeffrey Skiles, the co-pilot of the US Airways plane that landed in the Hudson River this year, said automation systems are important and can be required, such as for a complex departure. But the better pilots are the ones who hand-fly their planes up to 15,000 feet or so before giving it to the computer.
"What's important is, you are refreshing your skills," he said of hand-flying.
But one thing is constant: Once a commercial plane reaches cruising altitude, the autopilot is almost always on. That's a huge change from only 15 or 20 years ago, when pilots flying a Boeing 727 had no on-board computer, needed compasses to plot routes and manually turned the plane at checkpoints along a flight path.
Today, like a driver with a GPS system in his car, pilots type in the plane's destination and never have to look at a map to get from one city to the next, while the plotted route is tracked along a dashed magenta line on the cockpit's navigational screen.
"Pilots today are managing computers more than flying airplanes," said John Morrow, a pilot trainer for three decades.
But that reliance on technology comes at a price.
"There's less investment in the actual flying skills and more investment in the operation of computer systems, so when systems fail or pilots become overloaded because of system failure, they have less to fall back on than they once did," said Paul Rice, an airline captain and the first vice president of the Air Line Pilots Association.
Rosenker agreed.
Automated systems "are fabulous when they work, but sometimes they don't work, and then you're left with truly having to fly a plane the way you used to," he said.
And Renslow is by no means the only pilot who just wasn't up to it.
When Gillen, the Denver pilot, studied how 30 veteran pilots performed doing five test maneuvers in a simulator, they didn't come close to a perfect score.
Instead, on a scale of five, they averaged levels of threes and twos doing basic instrument maneuvers, such as a missed approach or an engine failure at takeoff. A score of four would have meant they were flying at levels needed for their Airline Transport Pilot certificate.
"A pilot's basic instrument flying skills have diminished over time due to lack of use," he concluded.
The situation will worsen in the years ahead, he said, as airlines retire older planes and replace them with more modern "glass cockpits" with the most sophisticated automation. He stressed that the pilots tested were "highly competent" with the automation systems on, but "struggled" when they were turned off.
Not the only worry
Rusty flying skills are by no means the only worry to stem from the rise of cockpit automation. There's also what the aviation pros call "lack of situational awareness" — otherwise known as just not paying attention. Gillen noted in his thesis that numerous studies have shown pilots who overrely on advances such as GPS mapping systems lose their situational awareness.
And thanks to Renslow and the crew of Northwest Flight 188, it's a growing concern in the aviation community and beyond.
"When you fly under automation, you are taken out of the loop, so you can get distracted," said a former NTSB crash investigator. "But the computers can give up at the worst moment and say, "OK, you've got it,' and you've either been on a laptop, if you're a very bad pilot, or just not as connected to the plane as you should have been."
Renslow and his co-pilot, Rebecca Shaw, clearly were not as connected as they should have been: They weren't monitoring the controls and let the plane slow too much for landing before mishandling the stall warning.
"Why someone can be trained in something and then not do what they were trained to do is what befuddles most of us," FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt said at a Senate hearing this month.
But Renslow and Shaw are not alone.
In a 2004 Pinnacle Airlines crash that claimed the lives of two pilots, the pilots switched seats during flight, in violation of regulations, said Deborah Hersman, who now chairs the NTSB. And that was the least of it: They were trying to enter what pilots at the airline called the "410 Club" — those who pushed the regional jet to its maximum altitude.
"One of them left the cockpit to go get some drinks and come back," she noted. "They weren't monitoring the aircraft's performance as it was climbing. It was having a challenge kind of maintaining its climb rate. Got up close to 41,000 feet, entered into stall. They flamed out both engines."
Then, like Renslow, they mishandled the stall, according to the NTSB, which cited the crew's "poor airmanship" and said "inadequate training" was one reason for it.
Then there's the tale of Go! Flight 1002. On Feb. 13, 2009, the crew of that commuter plane in Hawaii overshot the runway by 29 miles with 43 passengers aboard. "The captain and first officer both reported to their company that they had unintentionally fallen asleep in flight," the NTSB reported.
And most recently, Northwest Flight 188 cruised 150 miles past its destination, Minneapolis, on Oct. 21. "We got distracted," the crew told controllers, claiming later that they were checking flight schedules on their laptops.
The thought of two pilots distracted while on their laptops outraged passengers, regulators and fellow pilots alike.
"You can't have pilots sitting in front of a laptop when they're supposed to be flying a plane at 30- or 40,000 feet in the air with over a hundred passengers on board," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said later. "That would be like a bus driver sitting with a laptop going 65 miles an hour down the road."
Yet it's one of the untold consequences of the age of automation — and something that would be unthinkable to a conscientious aviator.
Learn the stick
Experts say there are no mysteries to training for midair upsets that can, in a flash, take a plane flying normally and toss it on its side. Yet just how much stick and rudder skill a pilot possesses at the time of applying to join a regional airline can vary widely.
A pilot at a major regional airline said the skills of an airline pilot can boil down to merely who is doing the teaching. Some flight schools, known as pilot mills, cram in too much in their 12-month — or less — programs, so that airmanship skills do not become the central focus, the pilot said.
That pilot learned from former military aviators who underplayed computer skills and overplayed the stick and rudder training — and taught, in the air and not in simulators, how to deal with bad turbulence or how to right a plane suddenly flipping on its side or in a spin.
"It was strictly learning how to fly," the pilot said.
Automation is a plus, but it's no substitute for actually learning how to fly, said pilots who worry that the worst pilots are the ones who rely most on technology.
"Sometimes people get wrapped up in the computers and the pretty screens and graphics and forget that this is a plane, and that is a byproduct of the initial training at some of these schools," one pilot said. "Many flight schools are teaching people to be airline pilots instead of aviators."
News Washington Bureau Chief Jerry Zremski contributed to this story.
Second of four parts
Newsletters
Sign up now for daily and weekly newsletters from BuffaloNews.com and get quick links to the info you want delivered directly to your inbox.Reader comments
Log into MyBuffalo to post a comment
MyBuffalo is the new social network from Buffalo.com. Your MyBuffalo account lets you comment on and rate stories at buffalonews.com. You can also head over to mybuffalo.com to share your blog posts, stories, photos, and videos with the community. Join now or learn more.
Comments have been disabled.
Due to a high volume of submissions that violate The News’ guidelines, commenting is no longer available on this story. If you’d like to share your thoughts on this story, click here to get information on contributing to The News’ opinion pages.