A Blurred Vision
By Richard L. Collins
November 2007
 It seems to me that there is a blurred vision of Technically Advanced Airplanes (TAAs). This description has come to encompass a wide variety of airplanes with an even wider variety of equipment. Many homebuilts are TAAs, as are light-sport airplanes. All you have to have is a moving map, a GPS and an autopilot, and as time runs on this will be the rule rather than the exception when it comes to new airplanes as well as older airplanes that are used for transportation. All the new ones will also have glass cockpits and the retrofit market for glass is about to take off like a rocket.
Inevitably, the safety card gets played. Does this equipment make the risks of flying easier to manage? In truth, the basic TAA adds no information that hasn't been available so there's not much safety potential. Let's go through what is there.
The first question is how did we come to call something that is commonplace "technically advanced"? And how did we identify something that is and has been commonplace as an area in need of special training and attention, or as something that contributes to "safety"?
GPS, which seems to be the basis for technical advancement, has been approved for instrument approaches since the summer of 1994. I flew the first one ever in an airplane with an approved system and a current database and have been flying them ever since. So have a lot of other pilots, but if our training system is lacking, it all started in 1994. The simple fact is that while legions of pilots have been and are flying with GPS, probably only about half have gone to the trouble to learn all there is to know about the GPS navigators that are installed in these airplanes.
It is easy to get IFR approach approval for a GPS. It has mainly amounted to a test flight and a self-certification that the GPS works like it is supposed to work. Newer units don't even require this action. Still, an astonishing number of pilots have paid good money for units like a Garmin 430/530 and have never gone to the trouble of certifying them for IFR. Also, the number of sophisticated GPS navigators flying around without current databases is quite high. Likewise, in a lot of airplanes with "weather in the cockpit" systems, the owners have either not purchased the weather receiver or do not subscribe to a weather service.
Does GPS help pilots manage risks? Much is made of the better situational awareness that is found with moving maps. This can cut both ways, though. If a pilot does not thoroughly understand a GPS navigator, confusing moments can arise and confusion is not good in the cockpit, especially if the airplane is in clouds. However, over the years there have been accidents that occurred when the pilot wasn't where he thought he was. GPS should help on this.
Actually, the risk question relates as much to technically advanced pilots as to aircraft.
There has been a lot of talk about FAA/Industry Training Standards (FITS). A look through this reveals a lot of good stuff but reading through it leaves you breathless. At least whoever prepared it didn't seem to pause to take a breath. It is a literal fire hose approach to teaching pilots how to use the equipment in these airplanes.
GPS is the key. If a pilot doesn't have full knowledge of GPS, then there's nothing there to start with in training.
GPS is really simple but it has been overcomplicated. The manufacturers rightfully wanted to have as many features as possible in the navigators. And it cannot be learned by twisting knobs in the airplane. You have to know what you want to look at and how to make it show up on the screen. The result of this complexity is that some pilots have made it simple. A pilot who has a GPS can actually use it with little knowledge of a majority of its features.
Any pilot can grasp the "direct to" function of a GPS. This can be used like any other navigational system. By doing a direct to each navaid along a Victor airway, for example, an IFR flight can follow an airways clearance. If VFR, the direct to point can be the destination and the GPS will lead you there. (Just be ever mindful of regulated airspace along the way.)
A GPS knows where the airplane is, it knows the speed across the ground and it knows the track being made good. The pilot has only to tell the GPS how he wants to use this information. The previous light airplane navigational systems, VOR/DME and ADF, didn't know much or any of that. They had information only in relation to ground stations. And maybe it is hard for some pilots to wrap their minds around a system that has no relationship to signals broadcast from ground stations.
Anyway, if GPS and moving maps are the basis for technically advanced flying, the teaching emphasis has to start there. And once a pilot learns to program the GPS, then flying is just like it always was. Keep the needle in the middle and you get where you are going.
If the navigational system in a TAA is a break from the past, what else changes and how does it affect the way we manage the risk?
Actually, even in a glass cockpit airplane, the informational changes are slight until you get to more sophisticated systems. The things we fly by: attitude, heading, rate of turn and information from the pressure instruments are basically unchanged over the history of instrument flying. It's nice seeing it all on a screen, with the attitude picture much larger, but that is it. Loss of control in clouds has been a big part of the continued VFR and IFR serious accident picture for years and a display change is not likely to alter this. The emphasis on autopilot use in TAA training might, however, make a substantial difference.
Reliability is another matter. Vacuum or pressure systems running gyroscopic instruments have not been the most trustworthy things around and every year there are serious accidents related to the failure of these systems and instruments. The new glass cockpit systems do away with that monkey-motion and replace it with equipment that should be far more reliable. They can't be totally reliable, however, and part of learning to fly one of these airplanes is learning what to do in case something fails. Is there a big difference between a pilot dealing with a vacuum failure and a pilot transitioning from a now dark screen to mechanical instruments? I think the main risk difference is in the latter being more unlikely.
Some things that are added to many, if not most, glass cockpit airplanes do bring new information for pilots to use in managing risks.
Ground prox, or terrain awareness warning systems (TAWS), use knowledge of position and a topographic database, or map, to give a visual picture of elevations relative to the height of the airplane and to issue verbal warnings if a pilot is about to fly into a bad place relative to the ground. In a two-year period before this equipment became available, I found 27 serious general aviation accidents that might have been prevented by this equipment. That is a definite plus.
Traffic advisory systems (TAS) are also found in a lot of TAAs. These are active systems that interrogate transponders of other airplanes and display traffic on a screen. There are five or 10 serious midairs every year and this equipment addresses some but not all of these. In the recent past, for example, a NetJet Hawker collided with a sailplane that had its transponder turned off. The only things that kept the event from being a total disaster were the parachute on the sailplane pilot and a truly remarkable job of flying by the crew in the badly damaged Hawker. Traffic equipment is great but there are always exceptions. Another traffic information system (TIS) is based on the Mode S transponder and information sent to the airplane from selected terminal radar facilities.
The electronic traffic systems of today will be replaced by a new ADS-B system in the future.
The other new information available in a TAA airplane is "weather in the cockpit." For that matter, this is available in any airplane and the handhelds often have more information than the panel-mounted units.
It is hard to say what effect this information, especially the Nexrad picture, will have on the risks that pilots find when trying to move about in a stormy sky. Properly used, the Nexrad picture can revolutionize our interface with convective activity but it is designed for avoidance of areas of weather. Look at it from afar and plan a trip around it. When used for penetration of areas of weather, it might actually add to the risk. Nexrad shows only rain. There is also a lightning display on many units. Any clouds associated with a thunderstorm, rainy or not, electrical or not, can generate turbulence that makes a light airplane hard, if not impossible, to fly. The risk reduction potential in Nexrad is an open question; the answer depends on how pilots use the information.
In the end, the big question relates to the two types of pilots we have, and the two types of instructors that are out there. Newer pilots tend to be more technically advanced. Older pilots, well, you know the saying about teaching an old dog new tricks.
On instructors, there are still a lot who pooh-pooh technology and concentrate on the art of flying. Trouble is, some of that art has become largely electronic and pilots need to learn that part along with the basics.
It'll be a long time before we know for sure how all the new equipment helps pilots manage risks.
Training
According to Flight International, an excellent international aviation publication, a 1999 change by the European Joint Aviation Authorities (JAA) did not improve the safety record. The major regulatory change didn't alter the basic training much but did make revalidation checks more frequent and stringent. It was found that this had no significant effect on serious accidents in singles flown by private pilots and instructors.
In the U.S. we wave the recurrent training flag with some vigor and I suppose our recurrent training might relate to the JAA's revalidation checks. Maybe there is a parallel, too. In my time doing this, a flight review every two years has been instituted for all pilots, as has a requirement for flight instructors to renew their certificates every two years. Neither of those things were very "stringent" nor could anybody say that they measurably reduced any accident rate. But we have to keep trying.
An Exception
Some huge percentage of thunderstorms move from a westerly direction. Until the other day, I had seen only one that moved from an easterly direction. It was unusually fierce and I thought about it when, a time later, an airline 727 was lost right after takeoff in New Orleans. There was a thunderstorm moving toward the airport from an easterly direction. The airplane was taking off toward the storm. The crew didn't discuss the movement of the storm though they did talk about the shifting nature of the surface wind.
A storm is meanest on the side toward which it is moving and the direction of the feed of moisture into the storm. In the classic storm that is moving from the west, that is the east and south side of the storm. If the storm is moving from the east, the west side would be the most disturbed.
We'll never know how that 727 crew was sizing up the storm, but the changing wind and downdraft bested the performance of the heavily loaded 727 and it flew into trees off the end of the runway.
I thought of that again this past summer. We were sitting on the deck, enjoying a cool one. There was thunder to the east and my wife remarked that the storm was moving away from us. A few minutes later a raindrop the size of a quarter landed on my rapidly balding head, we retreated inside, a ferocious wind came up and 2.5 inches of rain fell in just over an hour. And I was reminded once again that a storm moving from an easterly direction can be as potent as those found in a squall line ahead of a cold front.
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