If there’s anything I’ve learned in my 31 years in aviation, it’s that just about every pilot claims their spiritual hometown as Lake Wobegon, where “all the women are strong, all the men are good-looking, and all the children are above average.” Which is to say that if we weren’t all a bunch of raving egomaniacs before we started flying, the experience of soaring through the sky and looking down upon oblivious earthbound folks didn’t do us any favors.
I have yet to meet anyone who describes themselves as a below-average pilot, and the least competent people I’ve flown with were all supremely confident in their abilities. And yet, I too have always nursed the secret conceit that I’m an especially capable aviator—at least until recently, when I received incontrovertible proof that I am, in fact, thoroughly and merely average. I’ve been forced to look in the mirror, and it turns out I’m just a plain Jane after all.
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The mirror in question is called FlightPulse, a flight data analysis tool developed by GE Aerospace. My airline uses it both internally and as a pilot-facing app on our iPad EFBs. FlightPulse is the newest outgrowth of a larger project, now about 20 years old, known as Flight Operations Quality Assurance (FOQA). Participating airlines equip their aircraft with quick access recorders to harvest and regularly uplink detailed flight data. This permits near-real-time monitoring of safety trends and capturing major but nonaccident events that might have gone unreported. FOQA has been a key contributor to the admirable safety record at U.S. carriers over the last several decades.
You might presume that airline pilots would strenuously object to such intrusive monitoring, and they once did, In fact, many years ago, the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA) threatened a nationwide strike over proposals to use flight data recorders and cockpit voice recorders for monitoring and enforcement purposes. What changed? FOQA was developed as a collaborative effort by the FAA, the airlines, and ALPA and other pilot unions, all of whom agreed the data would never be used punitively. Thus far all players have stuck to the bargain. A cornerstone of the program is anonymity, so flight data has traditionally been de-identified for all users, with one exception—the gatekeeper.
The gatekeeper is a pilot, employed by management but representing the union, who knows the identity of pilots associated with major FOQA events. They are permitted to contact the pilots and get their side of the story, even bring them into the office to review the data in a nonthreatening environment. The gatekeeper looks for contributing factors such as fatigue or communication breakdowns, writes significant event reports for airline-wide distribution, and helps develop changes to training or procedures triggered by major events or negative trends. Gatekeepers do not have disciplinary powers, however, and are not allowed to pass on pilot identities to management or anyone else. Getting a call from the gatekeeper is a rare event—I’ve never had one, knock on wood—and so FOQA, until quite recently, has been rather opaque to the average line pilot.
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FlightPulse changed that dynamic, ripping the lid off FOQA and allowing individual pilots to see our own flight data, warts and all, as well as the de-identified flight data of our peers. As a professional pilot, self-analysis and critique has always been one of my skill sets, even an ingrained habit, but one that was formerly dependent on subjective and fallible memory rather than objective recorded facts. For the first time, I am now able to look back on past flights with perfect, unflinching clarity.
For example, last week I flew a Boeing 737-900ER from Salt Lake City to Tampa, Florida. I took off from Runway 34L at 169,800 pounds gross weight, rotated at 1.8 degrees per second, and lifted off at a pitch attitude of 6.5 degrees. I hand-flew the first 13.3 minutes, covered 1,722 nm at an average ground speed of 511 knots, and burned 22,200 pounds of jet-A. On arrival I hand-flew the last 8.8 minutes and achieved stable approach to Runway 19R at 1,710 feet. Below 500 feet I got a bit slow, momentarily down to 147 knots, versus a reference speed of 144 and target of 152. I recall the landing being a bit of a thumper—and sure enough, the data says I touched down at 230 ft/min, resulting in 1.5G load. I disconnected the autobrakes at 102 knots, turned off the runway with 4,400 feet remaining, and had a maximum speed of 16 knots on taxi in.
Mildly interesting stuff, but not a ton to take away other than further proof that I’m not as sharp on the tail end of a red-eye. But wait, what’s this KLAX-KLAS flight several weeks ago with a yellow triangle next to it? That signifies an automatically flagged FOQA event. I didn’t get a call from the gatekeeper, so it couldn’t have been too bad. Before FlightPulse, I probably wouldn’t have remembered it. This one is for an unstable approach due to an excessive descent rate (1,232 ft/min). Mind you, it was to Runway 1L at Las Vegas, with a 3.4-degree glideslope, high density altitude, and an approach speed of 150 knots, all of which put our nominal descent rate very close to the book maximum of 1,000 ft/min.
The first officer, who was pilot flying, got slightly above the glideslope and exceeded the max rate while correcting back down. I called out the deviation, he responded “correcting” and adjusted the flight path, so we continued to landing rather than executing a missed approach—exactly as our procedures permit. Of course, FOQA didn’t capture the challenge and response, so the event showed up as an unstable approach continued to landing.
Here’s the really cool part: We knew that exact scenario was a threat beforehand, thanks to FlightPulse. We have the recently added ability to look at the last 1,000 flights on any particular route and see where other crews had flagged events. We had seen the top threats in KLAS were unstable approaches and GPWS sink rate alarms and both were overwhelmingly experienced on arrivals to Runway 1L, so we briefed those as threats and talked about how we would respond to either event. Now that our event is flagged, it will serve as additional warning to future crews flying that route. Pretty great stuff.
Before FlightPulse added this research capability, I’ll admit I usually logged in to look at my 180-day average numbers and compare them to the overall 737 pilot group—exactly the sort of ego-fluffing exercise you’d expect from my ilk. But the effect was the opposite. It’s not that my numbers are bad—they’re just extremely average. On a typical flight I taxi at a maximum of 21 knots, rotate at 1.9 degrees per second, hand-fly for 14.5 minutes, achieve stable approach at 1,552 feet, cross the threshold at 44 feet, touch down 1,542 feet down the runway, and disconnect the autobrakes at 91 knots. That’s within a few percentage points of my peers all across the board (with the sole exception of hand-flying time, where I’m well above par). I couldn’t get much more average if I tried.
So, it turns out I’m nobody special. But the pilots I fly with are pretty damn good. So maybe the mirror didn’t show a plain Jane after all. Perhaps, instead, it showed just another pretty face in a crowd of pageant-winning beauties. I can live with that.
This column first appeared in the May Issue 958 of the FLYING print edition.
