Mar
15
The Swiss Cheese
Filed Under Airline, Flying Training | Leave a Comment
There is a lot of talk (some of it here) about the shortage of trained and experienced pilots across the globe. The small, feeder carriers are hurting and canceling services for want of crews. Regulators in the FAA/CAA (I know) are privately concerned about standards and experience, many of them being very experienced aviators themselves.
Don’t get me wrong, its not that those recently trained are not competent to fly the tasks they have been prepared for – they are or they wouldn’t be in the seat. They, like the legions before them throw themselves professionally and wholeheartedly into the business with great spirit and dedication. But with flying as with other things, as my father used to say, “You can’t put an old head on young shoulders.”
I might add something like, ‘…and there is only so much you can pack in to a simulator session without it getting silly and becoming counter productive.’ Simulators are increasingly being touted as the magic wand to pass across experience deficit. Good as they are, sim time costs a lot of money and it is still a relatively infrequent episode in an airline pilots life. And… airlines are particularly loathed to spend money where it is either not mandated or there is no visible pay back.
We are all well aware that accidents of most kinds are seldom the result of a single factor. In their aftermath, investigators piece together the causal factors and produce their report. Sometimes their conclusions are anticipated, sometimes they produce surprises; often they illuminate a number of areas that an armchair Sherlock Holmes might have missed.
In explaining the contribution of various causes, analysts have come up with a useful analogy, the Swiss Cheese model. Consider each causal factor as a slice of cheese with a hole in it, the more complex the situation, the more holes. If circumstances manage to line up the holes in the slices, you can fly straight through holes to an accident. Anyone flying a modern jet these days has had this idea offered to them on numerous occasions and it serves well.
What experience and training gives us, is the ability to spot the ‘holes’ and avoid the ‘alignment.’
Simple as that really, anticipation or at worse avoidance if in the final stages the majority have aligned despite your best efforts, you recognise what is happening and stop the last hole appearing in front of you. Insurers naturally want to avoid accidents, their analysts are well up on their cheeses.
Where is this leading us? Air transportation is a safe way to travel but potentially dangerous. It remains safe because the equipment is better designed, less prone to failure and loaded with safety systems, TCAS, EGPWS and the like than it used to be. Equally we are generally better trained and prepared than our aeronautical ancestors. They left their DNA scattered across hillsides worldwide to bring lessons to our classrooms and we ignore them at our peril. We must not rely on these factors to keep us out of trouble, I grant you that it is the man in the machine that is often responsible for the very thing we are trying to avoid, but as yet, we have found no realistic substitute for him.
Experience provides capacity, forethought, the situational awareness and pattern recognition that enables us to avoid the potholes in the daily ‘routine’ scamper around the Airways. By depriving the flight deck of experience we affectively align the first couple of slices of the cheese for our boys. Deprive the combination of experience, and there might not be the foresight available to recognise the symptoms as the remaining slices slip into position.
My thought for the day; the airline system has never been under so much pressure nor the aviation infrastructure so stretched, particularly at the hubs and terminal areas. In the last twenty years I have seen the hours I fly in a year nearly doubled; it is still safe but we have never been under this sort of pressure before. We need to be very careful how we hire, train and constitute our crews for flight. The less experience they have, the more we need to abide by the points in that last sentence.
