Is Your Airline Pilot Ready for Surprises?

By Sally B. Donnelly Sunday, Oct. 06, 2002
    • We were flying east through the clear morning sky, easing the nose gently up toward 12,000 ft. above New Mexico. I was sitting in a Learjet's jump seat, wedged between two pilots with half a century of experience combined. There were no airplanes around for miles, and we were cruising smoothly along, as aviators say, "fat, dumb and happy." This is what flying today is supposed to be about — if you can make it through security.

    Suddenly the plane jerked sideways — like a car getting rammed broadside. We began fishtailing, then rocking and then doing both at the same time. One wing dipped, and within 3 sec. the plane was rolling sideways, then over, and we were looking up at the ground. The seat belt cut into my lap. Then, almost as fast as it happened, the pilot regained control and guided the plane back to right side up.


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    They call this "practice." And safety experts say many more drills like this one are needed. My New Mexico maneuvers were part of a two-day program sponsored by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and backed by the Air Line Pilots Association to teach pilots how to prevent "loss of control" incidents, now the No. 1 cause of airline fatalities. There is an urgency to this approach: the crash of American Airlines Flight 587, which killed 265 in November 2001, is considered a loss of control, perhaps triggered when the plane hit the wake of a jumbo jet while departing New York City's Kennedy airport.

    A growing concern that pilots don't know how to cope with surprises is the reason that the FAA is researching the use of real aircraft and simulated midair emergencies to train pilots how to react to unexpected and severe movements by the aircraft. "The challenge is dealing with pilots who have years and years of safely and gently flying along, and suddenly they have a mechanical failure or a severe-weather incident," says Lou Knotts, an ex — fighter pilot who is now a vice president at Veridian, a research company that trains military and civilian pilots. "We're trying to prepare them for those."

    Many airline pilots these days are more like office workers than Chuck Yeager. Today's highly computerized flight decks mean that pilots spend a lot of their time typing data into their flight-management systems rather than sharpening their stick-and-rudder skills. "Some pilots can get into situations that are so unnatural and frightening that they freeze," says Terry McVenes, deputy chairman of the pilots' union's safety committee. "For example, when the plane goes nose down, it takes a lot of physical strength — and absorbing about 3 Gs — to pull the plane out. If a pilot tries to pull as he's been trained, it's likely it will be too gentle. Then it's too late, and he can't save the plane."

    Another contributing factor to the need for pilot retraining: Most new commercial airline pilots lack the rough-and-ready military-jet experience of their predecessors. And although pilots frequently train in ground simulators, many pilots argue that there is no substitute for the real thing. As sophisticated as simulators are in replicating emergencies, they still provide mostly visual cues. The Learjet, on the other hand, can provide the real G-forces and actual sights and sounds. "Ground simulators are like your kid's PlayStation compared to real flying," says an airline pilot.

    In a small building on the edge of the Roswell, N.M., airport, we were given a preflight briefing. Even the veteran pilots were getting butterflies as they listened to the flight plan. Knotts explained the sequence of maneuvers we would fly to re-create such real-life accident scenarios as the rudder failure of USAir Flight 427 near Pittsburgh, Pa., in 1994 and a hydraulic failure that resulted in the cartwheeling crash of United Airlines Flight 232 in 1989.

    Then it was up in the sky. Flying the Learjet, even with it customized to feel like a 737, makes one realize just how little time a pilot has to react to a crisis. We tried rudder malfunctions, icing problems, wake turbulence and losing all hydraulic power. In one exercise, pilots are told to point the nose almost directly at the ground and then pull like hell out of the dive. Watching the ground get closer in the Learjet's large cockpit windows was frightening; it felt as if it took forever before we started to climb out. In an emergency, even the best pilots have only a few seconds to do the right thing. Classes like this may be the difference between something catastrophic and something merely terrifying.