NTSB INVESTIGATING REMOTELY
The NTSB hasn’t sent staff to an accident scene since last March and it’s unlikely to start doing so anytime soon. The board issued a travel ban at the outset of the pandemic and it won’t be lifted until COVID-19 is under control. “The safety of NTSB staff is the Chairman’s and agency leadership’s first concern. We have to consider not only the investigator(s) themselves but all with whom they come in contact. That could include other agency staff, as well as their families, and their communities,” said NTSB Vice Chairman Bruce Landsberg. The NTSB is relying on local authorities and law enforcement to assess accident scenes and supply evidence to NTSB investigators. “The hard reality is that some ongoing NTSB investigations will likely be impacted by pandemic measures,” Landsberg said.
AIRLINE PILOTS DOWN ON THE FARM
Airline pilots are finding work in Australia running massive agricultural harvesters as the country gets ready to bring in a bumper crop of grain when a shortage of labor threatens the harvest. Farmer Amanda Thomas saw that hundreds of Australian pilots were being furloughed so she set up a Facebook recruitment page reasoning that anyone who could fly a jet should be able to handle a grain harvester. “Pilots spend a lot of time operating machinery. That’s kind of their core job,” Thomas said. “And whether it’s an airplane or an agricultural machine, it’s all the same.” They may not be quite the same but there are some systems on a harvester, like the GPS-driven autopilot, that will be familiar to the pilot recruits. “They’ve recognized the transferability of the skillset of an airline pilot, someone who could operate heavy equipment and learn large amounts of information quickly and remain proficient,” said A320 pilot Andrew King.
