Training: The Leading Killer

Jay Hopkins

Monday, December 14, 2009 at 10:40 PM ET

Verified

Courtesy of X-Plane 9

Key Takeaways:

Loss of Control In-flight (LOC-I) is identified as the leading cause of fatal commercial aircraft accidents and fatalities, primarily due to pilots' lack of experience with extreme attitudes and often incorrect, counter-intuitive reactions to upset conditions.
Aircraft upsets can be triggered by various factors, including system failures, pilot error or weakness, and environmental causes, with the "startle factor" often leading to exacerbating the problem.
APS Emergency Maneuver Training has developed a simplified, universal recovery strategy, "Push-Power-Rudder-Roll-Climb," to effectively manage diverse upset situations.
APS offers comprehensive training programs, including web-based, simulator-based, aircraft-based, and integrated approaches, which significantly improve pilots' ability to recognize, avoid, and recover from upset conditions, with the integrated method proving most effective.

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I was really surprised. I was looking at a chart that depicted the number of fatal accidents that occurred in the commercial jet fleet throughout the world between 1999 and 2008 (available at boeing.com/news/techissues/pdf/statsum.pdf). It showed that Loss of Control In-flight (LOC-I), with 22 accidents, easily beat the nearest contender, Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT), of which there were 17 occurrences. However, LOC-I opened an even greater lead when I looked at the number of onboard fatalities, with 1,926 fatalities compared with 961 for CFIT.

It is hard to believe, but the leading cause of fatal accidents in commercial aircraft during the past 10 years and by far the leading cause of fatalities is that the crew lost control of the airplane. However, it was not a surprise to the folks at APS Emergency Maneuver Training. Their formal research on the topic of recovery from upsets shows that 90 percent of pilots who have not had previous upset-recovery experience will pull back on the controls when trying to recover from an overbank situation beyond 90 degrees of bank, even though that is absolutely the worst possible action because it will exacerbate the problem by steepening the bank and literally pulling the airplane into the ground.