Issue 4/94
The year 1994 saw the fiftieth anniversary of the disappearance of the most read modern author in the world, Captain Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. &laqno;St-Ex» died on July 31st, 1944, during his last sortie at the controls of his Lockheed Lightning P-38. He is still today the patron of all aviators of the world. In this issue of ÆRO News, we reproduce in memoriam some of his wonderful writings from the days he pionneered night flying.
The ten minutes' halt was ended and Fabien resumed his flight. He glanced
back toward San Julian; all he now could see was a cluster of lights, then
stars, then twinkling star dust that vanished, tempting him for the last
time.
- I can't see the dials; I'll light up.
He touched the switches, but the red light falling from the cockpit lamps
upon the dial hands was so diluted with the blue evening glow that they
did not catch its color. When he passed his fingers close before a bulb,
they were hardly tinged at all.
- Too soon.
But night was rising like a tawny smoke and already the valleys were brimming
over with it. No longer were they distinguishable from the plains. The villages
were lighting up, constellations that greeted each other across the dusk.
And, at a touch of his finger, his flying-lights flashed back a greeting
to them. The earth grew spangled with light signals as each house lit its
star, searching the vastness of the night as a light-house sweeps the sea.
Now every place that sheltered human life was sparkling. And it rejoiced
him to enter into this one night with a measured slowness, as into an anchorage.
He bent down into the cockpit; the luminous dial hands were beginning to
show up. The pilot read their figures one by one; all was going well. He
felt at ease up here, snugly ensconced. He passed his fingers along a steel
rib and felt the stream of life that flowed in it; the metal did not vibrate,
yet it was alive. The engine's five-hundred horse-power bred in its texture
a very gentle current, fraying its ice-cold rind into a velvety bloom. Once
again the pilot in full flight experienced neither giddiness nor any thrill;
only the mystery of metal turned to living flesh.
So he had found his world again... A few digs of his elbow, and he was quite
at home. He tapped the dashboard, touched the contacts one by one, shifting
his limbs a little, and, setting himself more solidly, felt for the best
position whence to gage the faintest lurch of his five tons of metal, jostled
by the heaving darkness. Groping with his fingers, he plugged in his emergency
lamp, let go of it, felt for it again, made sure it held; then lightly touched
each switch, to be certain of finding it later, training his hands to function
in a blind man's world. Now that his hands had learnt their role by heart,
he ventured to turn on a lamp, making the cockpit bright with polished fittings
and then, as on a submarine about to dive, watched his passage into night
upon the dials only. Nothing shook or rattled, neither gyroscope nor altimeter
flickering in the least, the engine was running smoothly; so now he relaxed
his limbs a little, let his neck sink back into the leather padding and
fell into the deeply meditative mood of flight, mello with inexplicable
hopes.
Now, a watchman from the heart of night, he learnt how night betrays man's
presence, his voices, lights, and his unrest. That star down there in the
shadows, alone; a lonely house. Yonder a fading star; that house in closing
in upon its love... Or on its lassitude. A house that has ceased to flash
its signal to the world. Gathered round their lamp-lit table, those peasants
do not know the measure of their hopes; they do not guess that their desire
carries so far, out into the vastness of the night that hems them in. But
Fabien has met it on his path, when, coming from a thousand miles away,
he feels the heavy ground swell raise his panting plane and let it sink,
when he has crossed a dozen storms like lands at war, between them neutral
tracks of moonlight, to reach at last those lights, one following the other-and
knows himself a conqueror.
Night Flight (1931), page 12.
Surely one of the most puzzling and dramatic aviation mysteries is the crash
of an American Airlines B-727 at St.-Thomas, Virgin Islands. Captain Arthur
Bujnowski had made 154 uneventful landings on the same short, wide runway
under similar conditions of clear daylight visibility and light, gusting
winds.
But on April 17, 1976, Art Bujnowski made a normal &laqno;slotted»
approach, leveled off a few feet above the runway surface, and floated beyond
the point of no return. He decided to go around and applied power. When
he saw that the lag in engine thrust and the short distance remaining made
takeoff impossible, he attempted to abort the takeoff. Three seconds later,
the B-727 crashed through the boundary fence and into a service station,
in flames. Smoke took the lives of 35 passengers and two flight attendants.
The NTSB determined that the cause of the accident was &laqno;pilot
error.»
There is no question that Bujnowski might have perceived sooner that the
airplane would not land within the short runway and have decided to go around
while there was still time and space to do so. Or, failing to do that, he
might have applied maximum deceleration procedures immediately after initial
touchdown (rather than applying thrust briefly), thus minimizing damage
to the plane and most likely avoiding the fire and the 37 deaths. But does
the finding of pilot error as the cause of the accident explain his failure
to land the airplane safely? In my opinion, it doesn't.
An explanation, by definition, is the establishment of a cause-and-effect relationship. What caused Bujnowski's defective control, on this occasion, of an airplane he'd flown regularly and well?
It is axiomatic that an aircraft accident is merely the final action in a sequence of distracting or disrupting events. Three minutes before the St. Thomas crash, the three flight crew members, the cabin attendants, and the passengers were in severe pain because of an unusually rapid increase in cockpit and cabin pressure due to the miscoordination of engine power and the manual setting of the pressurization system during a rapid descent.
Testimony by the surviving crew generally discounted the importance of
the pressurization problem. They did not remember the ear problem. They
did not remember the ear blocking as painful, although their cockpit voice
recordings (CVR) and recollections indicate that they did experience pain:
· 19:07:42 Captain: Boy, I'm deaf. I can't hear a _____ thing.
· 19:07:45 First Officer: Yeah, the _____ thing hurts; my ears hurt.
· Flight Engineer: Yeah, mine do too.
· 19:07:47 First Officer: Quite a bit.
Immediately before and after this episode, other irregularities occurred.
Flight Engineer Mestler twice called for altimeter cross-checks to which
no response is discernible on the CVR. First Officer Offchiss made at least
three facetious, heckling references to the flight engineer about his difficulties
in controlling the cabin pressurization system. Also, Offchiss's altimeter
setting was not changed from the 29.92 inches of mercury employed en route.
In his testimony at the hearing, he could not account for this.
Captain Bujnowski and First Officer Offchiss each testified to not seeing the VASI System at any time during the final approach. They attributed this to the angle of the sun at their back. However, no sun angle could obscure both the left and right light panels simultaneously all the way down a slotted approach. And evidence does not support the hypothesis that the airplane was above the range of visibility of the VASI system throughout the approach.
We cannot prove or disprove a cause-and-effect relationship among any
or all of these irregular and unusual events and circumstances. But scientific
evidence does suggest a reason for what happened: The eyes and inner ears
respond interactively - what affects one, affects the other.
The kinds of stimuli the B-727 crew experienced have been associated experimentally
with systematic errors in size and distance judgments. If we could recreate
the conditions of that flight, we could show that pilots in general would
respond much as Art Bujnowski did.
Experiments at NASA's Ames Research Center by Brant Clark, Bob Randle
and John Stewart have demonstrated that various types of disrupting inner-ear
stimulation are followed immediately by overaccommodation of the eyes-focusing
too near. Dizziness and stressful situations can cause overaccommodation.
It can persist for one to several minutes. In the Ames experiments, when
whole-body rotation of the subjects stopped suddenly, they were unable to
focus beyond about arm's length while trying to focus on targets at optical
infinity.
In subsequent experiments, Lynn Olzak, Bob Randle, and I found that as accommodation
increases, objects at a distance beyond about one meter appear smaller.
The shifts in focus and apparent size seem to be related in complex ways
to texture and clarity of the visual field.
In earlier tests of pilots in an airplane equipped with a projection-type
periscope that cast its image on a screen above the instrument panel, I
found that pilots tended to round out high and land long and hard when flying
by reference to unmagnified (1X) dynamic images of airport runways. Years
later at Ames, Everett Palmer and Frank Cronn found the same effect with
a computer-generated visual system in a flight simulator.
No matter what causes the eyes to focus too near, the result is that the
pilot perceives the runway to be smaller, farther away, and higher than
it actually is.
In the public hearings following the St. Thomas accident, Art Bujnowski
was asked why he failed to see that there was not room to attempt a go-around.
Said Bujnowski, &laqno;All I could see were cottages and stores or whatever
they were. But it seemed like the activity was right there at eye level...
so close that I couldn't put into effect what I thought the stopping distance
might be... » Neither he nor the investigators realized the significance
of his candid reply.
Although correlations may be coincidental, it is clearly possible that the
rapid cockpit depressurization, blocked ears, and consequent pain to the
flight crew at St.-Thomas caused their eyes to overaccommodate. That would
mean blurred vision. It would also make the runway appear farther away and
higher relative to the wheels of the airplane. The pilot would, therefore,
level off high and fail to touch down where he expected to, 1 000 feet from
the runway threshold, as called for by American.
The tenacious retention of &laqno;pilot error» as an accident &laqno;cause/factor» is a subtle manifestation of the natural human inclination to place blame, especially for tragic events that receive wide public attention. If a captain-in-command can be made responsible, other members of the aviation community remain untarnished:
Only the pilot who made the error is punished, along with his or her
family. And their suffering may be assuaged by a liberal pension in exchange
for quiet early retirement - in the event the pilot was fortunate enough
to survive the accident.
If the extremely infrequent catastrophic errors professionals like Art Bujnowski
make are to be reduced, future investigations must flush out the events
that precipitate each accident attributed to &laqno;pilot error.»
Simply finding a scapegoat won't help us to improve aviation safety.
The $200,000 (USD) Hawker Pilot Trainer (HPT) is manufactured by Australia's Hawker DeHavilland and sold worldwide by Montreal-based Aero Innovation. The HPT is the world's first FTD Level 2 certified multi-crew virtual simulator. It comes standard with five different generic aircraft models and several cutting edge training aids created from instructors' dreams.
Montreal - During the past month three more Hawker Pilot Trainer have been
sold by Aero Innovation, Inc. bringing the total to 16 now in operation
or on order in Europe, North America, India, Australia, and New Zealand.
The first HPT was delivered to Airline Training Resources (ATR) of Toronto
Ontario Canada. During the same week, Air Alizé, a Paris-based company
ordered two HPTs following an introduction to the device through an article
in ÆRO News.
The HPT, manufactured in Australia by Hawker DeHavilland, is the first
all-CRT aircraft display and switching control system simulator; only the
power, lift, drag, and attitude controls are physically movable. All system
indications and switching operations are computer-animated by two 486 PCs,
as are the flight displays and the outside visual scene. All manual switching
is done via touch-sensitive screens.
Airline Training Resources (ATR) saw its HPT delivered to its newly expanded
facility at Toronto City Centre Airport. ATR's trainer is now in full operational
service for ab initio training, IFR certification and multi-crew training
of commuter pilots.
&laqno;This unique flexibility of having five very different airplanes in
one box gives us an edge over any of the flight training programs in the
Great Lakes area. With this U$200,000 FTD, we can meet more training requirements
and close the gap between ab initio and advanced training. This is the tool
all flight instructors have been wanting for decades,» stated ATR's
President, Capt. Carlos Monsalve.
Indeed, the HPT comes with five generic aircraft models, from a light single-engine
to a Cessna Citation-like business jet. When a particular model is chosen
from the touch screen menu, the computers load the cockpit layout, performance
charts and navaids data base that are specific to the requested aircraft.
The throttle, flap, and speed-brake levers are also rearranged to mimic
the desired model. The total transformation time is 180 seconds!
The HPTs ordered by Air Alizé will include two additional custom-made
models, a Cessna Caravan-like version and a Dornier 228. One HPT will be
delivered in Fort-de-France, Martinique in March 1995. The second device
is to be installed in Paris in September.
Air Alizé's President Charles Furgerot and Chief Pilot Pascal Perret
confirmed earlier this week that an agreement had been reached with HDH,
following the Chief Pilot's six-day visit at Chicoutimi-based CQFA
College, which acquired five HPTs in 1993.
&laqno;We are setting up the first commuter-level training organization
in the Caribbean of which the HPT will become the centerpiece. The HPT is
what we have been dreaming of without knowing it existed. We have looked
around, there is simply no alternative no matter what the price,»
said Pascal Perret before departing from Montreal.
Created by instructors for instructors, the HPT offers a variety of training
aids not found in any other device, from the live, on-screen force vectors
that bring the classroom inside the cockpit to the automatically adaptive
visual scene augmentation cues that induce the student to make the correct
flight-path responses early in the training sequence. The augmentation cues,
including &laqno;highway in the sky» and &laqno;flight-path predictor»
symbology, are automatically removed as soon as the trainee starts making
the correct responses.