FAA to hone pilots’ crisis skills
More training required for stalled engines, crosswinds
Airline pilots will get more realistic and expanded simulator training under the most significant revision to U.S. aviation-safety regulations in 25 years.
Pilots will receive more instruction on recovering when planes go out of control, handling crosswinds and working together as a team, under a rule regulators adopted to attack the biggest killers in aviation, the Federal Aviation Administration said.
“This is a bright and shining day for us,” Mary Ellen Mellett, one of a group of relatives of the 50 people who died in a Feb. 12, 2009, crash near Buffalo, N.Y., said in an interview after an FAA news conference Tuesday unveiling the rule. Mellett’s son, Coleman, 34, died on the plane.
The FAA estimated that the rule changes would cost airlines from $274 million to $354 million over 10 years, while saving $689 million by preventing accidents and deaths. The main training provisions take effect in 5 years.
“This is a good example where rule-making has moved to catch up to the continually improving safety practices in place today at many airlines,” Regional Airline Association President Roger Cohen said in an email. The Washington trade group represents carriers that work under contract for larger airlines.
Carriers such as United Continental Holdings Inc. and Southwest Airlines Co. “will work collaboratively with the FAA to implement the rule,” Vaughn Jennings, a spokesman for the Washington trade group Airlines for America, said in an email.
Earlier, carriers had said the proposal should be scrapped because it would be more costly than the FAA predicted, according to public comments by Airlines for America. Many of the safety benefits the agency sought already were realized because of other technology improvements, the group had said.
Pressure from relatives of the Buffalo crash victims led Congress to order some provisions of the rule. The crash was caused by a pilot who misunderstood a cockpit warning and began a series of violent maneuvers that sent the plane plummeting.
“I can’t imagine a worse day than the day these families experienced back in February of 2009,” Transportation Secretary Anthony Foxx said at the Washington event. “But they have channeled their grief into advocating for safety improvements that will benefit millions of families all across America.”
However, the Association of Flight Attendants union said it was “disappointed” that provisions requiring enhanced training for them and airline dispatchers, who advise pilots on weather, scheduling and other safety-related issues, were dropped from the agency’s earlier proposals.
The Association of Flight Attendants “has worked alongside the FAA for years on drafting performance standards for flight attendants and it is unfortunate that these issues were not included in the rule,” the U.S.’s largest flight-attendant union said in an email.
Enacting all of the provisions from its initial proposal would have created an “unacceptable delay,” the agency said in the rule announcement.
FAA Administrator Michael Huerta said he is summoning airline safety officials to Washington on Nov. 21 to discuss additional safety improvements.
“I also want to call on the industry to continue to embrace voluntary initiatives to make air-carrier training programs as robust as possible,” Huerta said.
The Air Line Pilots Association, which represents nearly 50,000 air-crew members in North America, called the rule in an email statement a “significant safety enhancement” in both training and flight simulators.
While the FAA’s rule won’t apply to airline pilots outside the United States, other nations often follow the agency’s lead. Other recent accidents, such as the July 6 crash of an Asiana Airlines Inc. plane attempting to land in San Francisco, also have put a focus on pilot training. Three people died when the plane struck a seawall short of the runway. The National Transportation Safety Board hasn’t issued its findings on the accident.
The rule, which had been under development at the FAA since 2004, is also a response to safety board recommendations. The board had called for many of the training enhancements in findings issued after accidents, including the regional turboprop that crashed approaching Buffalo that was operated by Pinnacle Airlines Corp.’s former Colgan unit.
The FAA said in the announcement that it had identified 11 U.S. airline accidents from 1988 to 2009 that potentially could have been prevented by the new training.
The rule is aimed at pilot-induced crashes such as when a functioning plane goes out of control, the largest killer in commercial aviation around the world from 2003 through 2012, according to an analysis by Boeing Co. Such accidents killed 1,698 people during that time, nearly twice as many as the next category and more than one-third of all 4,408 deaths.
The safety board and France’s Office of Investigations and Analysis found in recent accidents that pilots didn’t recover from aerodynamic stalls, which cause a plane to plunge when its wings lose lift, because they hadn’t been adequately trained in simulators.
Like the Colgan flight crew, a pilot on Air France Flight 447, which went down in the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009, killing 228 people, pointed the plane’s nose skyward in response to a cockpit alarm, causing it to stall and then fall into the ocean. The correct response to a stall is to push a plane’s nose down, increasing speed and airflow over the wings.
Advances in mathematical models used for simulators allowed them in recent years to accurately replicate a stall, opening the door to new training, Lou Nemeth, chief safety officer at simulator manufacturer CAE Inc. of Canada, said in an interview last year.
The FAA will move as quickly as possible to draft new regulations allowing those simulator additions so pilots can train with them.
The new rule is the third major regulatory change since the Colgan accident. In the past year, the FAA has also tightened hours airline flight crews may work to limit fatigue and increased the minimum experience required for pilots.