Flying out of the pandemic
Although it is obviously early both to say what caused the A320 crash in Karachi and how long it will be before we are returning to pre-pandemic traffic levels, there are some threats in the months ahead that cannot be ignored.
No matter what kind of aviation in which you are involved, it is highly likely that your flying activities have been at a halt much as most other aspects of our lives. With the honourable exception of the freighters, fighting the pandemic directly and covering for most of the belly cargo network lost due to the lack of passenger flights, pretty much everyone else in aviation has been flying less, perhaps not at all, during the last couple months. That is not healthy, either for humans or machines.
Walking to the airplane
Returning to the cockpit after a long time away is a good reason to be cautious and I am not talking about the awful feeling of uncertainty, or even worse, of having lost one’s job. Neither am I talking about how much it hurts for those who love to
fly not to be up there. However, technically, we are talking about proficiency. Many civil aviation agencies worldwide are working on extending some validities when it comes to licences. It is a necessary and welcome measure when everything in practical life has become so much more complicated and some of our many documents have little direct effect on our skills if postponed for a month or two.
Yet not everything can be worked with such ease. One example is the three landings in 90 days’ rule. Yes, it is old and yes, it is arbitrary. For a long-haul pilot who usually lands once or twice every month anyway, it may not make that big difference. However, as with many other legal requirements, it has been written in blood. It is there to protect us from ourselves and as a good reminder of how much our skills decay when not used.
This can be applied to every field in life, of course, but if there is anything essential in aviation, it is proficiency. Like I often argue with those who think they are much better than others because they have a tailwheel endorsement, all previous experience is welcome, but not all is essential. In aviation, what you really need to be good at is at the kind of operation you are doing at that moment and that is why we have proficiency and recency standards, whilst certificates are valid virtually forever. If in normal times we would be picky with someone with an IFR rating, but little to no recent experience in IMC, why would we relax now? Same goes with landing recency, multi-engine flight training and all other pilot skills that must be kept sharp to ensure safety. As I said earlier, it is too early to know how long it will take before we are back to something that resembles normality. However, all available data shows most of the world has now started to get out of the other side of this unprecedented crisis. The tide looks to have turned and since mid-April, when over 17,000 airliners were parked at hundreds of fields worldwide, now part of the fleet is slowly, but surely coming back into service. Whilst similar movements have been seen throughout the entire industry.
We must all play our part to ensure that this transition is as smooth and safe as it can be. Be sure to read your airplane manuals, refresh yourself on regulations and emergency procedures; take another glance at the charts and NOTAMs and recall all those memory items. As we always need to be ready, during every take-off, to lose an engine, do not let complacency or even the enthusiasm of being back in the game drive your attention away from this possibility. Now, more than ever, we must be vigilant. Airplanes are living creatures. They have their own moods, their own idiosyncrasies and from there comes a great deal of their charm. As Ernest K. Gann so well reminds us: “it is our job as pilots to exploit the aircrafts’ qualities and to compensate for their faults.” After being on the ground for so long, they might throw a bunch of faults at us. Every pilot knows how surprising an aircraft can be after going through major maintenance and depending on what we see on the books, we even brief for them. Be careful with your circuit breakers, check your controls extensively, watch your engine run-up and systems closely.
Airliners parked
Airplanes are not designed be grounded for months. To keep these birds on the ground for weeks and months in a row requires several special procedures by maintenance teams. Not all might have been done correctly as planned. Take that into consideration. Never in the past have mechanics everywhere had to deal with such an amount of preserving work at the same time and even more importantly, with different tasks. Airplanes demand different kinds of measures for medium and long-term storage. These decisions were made in a kind of rush when the pandemic frightened Europe in mid-March, but no one at the time knew exactly how long it was going to take before airplanes could fly again. Yet despite those already resuming their rosters and with demand picking up as the Northern Hemisphere summer approaches, to be truthful, we still do not know! Mechanics are our angels on earth, but they are humans too, and have been exposed to an incredible pressure to get these airplanes grounded efficiently. Therefore, the possibility that something was missed on the complex process is fair enough to deserve an extra thought. Remember that every hole can become a nest, every electric component can get dusty, and corrosion is a huge factor in many places. It is also good to remember that the whole aviation system is going through the same problem. Air traffic controllers are not working as much, neither are security staff, whilst all of this requires new sanitary procedures to deal with, some of which can get us easily distracted or even limit our senses.
So, keep up to the task of getting these machines back to life. We are probably about to see in the next months and years a rise in traffic that will reproduce decades of industry expansion. It will be quite a sight. We shall not fall into the trap of overlooking it.