Holy cow. My wife and I travel to China periodically to visit the in-laws - sometimes on Chinese airlines.
According to transparency.org’s Corruption Perception Index, Singapore ranks in the top 10 world wide wrt lowest corruption. (Denmark is #1, Japan #20, USA #23 - out of 198 nations ranked.)
https://www.transparency.org/en/cpi/2019/results/
Is this an argument to take Singapore Airlines when we can?
ETA: let me rephrase the question. LSL, you suggested that cultural issues regarding corruption are a strong contributing factor regarding the aviation safety culture of a given society. On that basis, is a metric like the Corruption Perception Index a useful tool - perhaps among many other tools - to guesstimate the readiness of a given state airline to handle unforeseen aviation circumstances? [Not asking you to pass judgment on a particular country’s aviation industry. I’m just looking for some metric(s) to consider.]
Thanks for your immense contributions to this discussion.
Interesting that earlier on they decided to disconnect the autopilot and deploy the speed-brake.
The aircraft ended up higher than the required descend profile. At MAKLI the
aircraft was at 9780 ft and at about 245 knots IAS. In order to manage the descent
and lose the additional height, “OPEN DES” mode was selected via the FCU, both
autopilots were disengaged and speed brakes were extended.
This is a good thing to do in an A320 because, with the autopilot engaged, you can only get half speed brake. If you want full speed brake then you need to disconnect the autopilot. What is not so good is doing it at approximately 15 NM and nearly 10,000’. At this point they are about 5000’ too high and 25 knots too fast. The best ace in the world can’t fix that.
Good to see you Richard!
Yeah, from the report clearly out around 10+ miles they had twigged to the fact they were too high, but didn’t evidence much recognition of just how stupid-high they were.
Per the diagram in the report they managed to get the flight path almost under control by 5 miles out, but with far, far too much airspeed to land out of.
I can’t speak to Airbus, but every jetliner I’ve flown if you find yourself both high and fast, slowing aggressively in level flight to VRef, getting fully configured ASAP, then plummeting to re-intercept the vertical profile works better than just aiming the jet downhill to regain the vertical profile first then trying to correct your ludicrous speed at the bottom. If nothing else doing it my way slows down your pace to the runway and affords more time for your brain to catch up to the jet and to sort out just how screwed you are or aren’t.
Assuming the 320 is similar, the fact these guys chose to aim at the FAF & corresponding altitude shows me an airplane steerer or an airplane operator mentality, not a pilot mentality.
Then when they pulled the gear up as if going around but didn’t change flight path to match the game was over. Sounds like between the 2 pilots and HAL, there were 3 cooks stirring the soup and nobody knew what the brewing product was tasting like.
Ugh!
Its great to see LSLGuy back.
On the issue of the “fake pilots”., its
(full disclosure, I as stated up thread knew one of the victims and have been peripherally involved in the litigation regarding pilots licensing).
There is a three-way dispute over the issue of licensing since 2012, between PALPA (Pakistan Airline Pilots Association), the Civil Aviation Authority and the Federal Government. The main issue is that PALPA does not think the modified qualification exams have anything to do with flying and the CAA does. Compounding the fact that PALPA is a pretty politically influential union.
As for “fake licenses” that’s a Minister taking a (very ill-advised) shot at a union he has regularly clashed with for years. In reality, no one license is “fake”, 300 or so people have been flagged for discrepancies. This includes bad stuff, like not being current on qualification but also small things like a question as to how they gave a test the same day the flew (the answer they flew to Karachi and then gave it) and in a few cases people who have been accused of having licenses which they have not qualified for, when they have in actuality just begun training and qualification for them and they have never claimed to have them right now; basically the auditor has confused applied for and has.
Its a mess.PALPA is in my opinion a bunch of thugs but the minister is an idiot whose stupidity hurt our industry and thank God for Covid the actual damage will be mitigated since there isn’t much flying going on right now.
A basic overview of whats going on
A more detailed take (biased IMO but explains it well)
Nice to “speak” with you again AK84; you’re always a fount of calm knowledge well-explained. I learn something every time I read your posts. I’m sorry to know you’ve lost a friend / relative to this avoidable debacle.
Good to learn this “fake pilot” stuff is mostly confusion / political posturing. God save us all from fact-free loud mouthed politicians world-wide.
Those are both interesting articles. I’d be curious to learn more about BALPA’s official position. But the second article certainly raises at least a colorable claim that the CAA has created an arbitrary testing mess and is now hiding from the consequences of their half-assed workmanship. Which, 8 years on, has developed a patina of age that would give it unwarranted respectability. With, of course, some blatant corruption / cover-up to add spice to the fetid stew.
As a general matter there is a lot of ferment in worldwide aviation right now that the government standards of approved training and testing regimes are increasingly out of step with current reality. Obsolete as to both the practical needs of the industry and the ever-accumulating knowledge of how best to train & examine workers, and how best to organize work tasks for them. ICAO is the lead agency for international coordination, but ultimately it’s up to the individual national authorities to make the recommended changes.
This is certainly true in the US as to regulation of mechanic training / testing / licensing and pretty much all aspects of regulating repair facility licensing, procedures, and operations oversight. Both those systems are badly obsolete and everybody knows it. The way forward is far from clear. And, pace my comments earlier about culture, a lot of US people / businesses / agencies / lobby groups are simply pushing for business advantage rather than for doing the safety-optimal thing, Admittedly it’s not very clear what that safety optimal thing is, nor what it would cost. And cost is, after all always a consideration.
There’s some degree of obsolescence / brokenness on the US pilot side as well, but it’s comparatively minor. And yes, there’s an unseemly undercurrent of airline vs union in all of it. Strong unions are an essential bulwark to aviation safety. But like any other force, they can become overweening and captured at least partly by the Dark Side of defending unwarranted privilege and the occasional individual bad actor. Meanwhile technology marches on while regulators fear regulatory change as a career risk. Large industry incumbents prefer the status quo which entrenches their advantages, while up-and-coming disruptive players prefer goals-based rather than extant procedures-based regulations that would afford them an opening to innovate around the dinosaurs.
There isn’t a crisis here, at least not in the US, but there is a gathering mess. Things have become a little too constipated and change is become more and more overdue. It’ll be exciting to watch played out against all the rest of the moving parts of the worldwide industry. For tortoise-racing levels of “exciting”.
ThelmaLou: “[aside]Kinda like doctors and priests, eh?[/aside]”
In a move inspired by aviation, surgeons have adopted checklists to limit mistakes during operations, like verifying sponge counts.
I can’t speak to how well this has reformed the surgeon-as-God complex to allow underlings to speak up when things go sideways, but surgical training programs emphasize teamwork these days.
LSLGuy as I said, my involvement has been very peripheral (giving advice to the people giving advice) but in the year or so this has been an issue, I have been thinking about you and your posts many times.
How much do tests really relate to normal flying operations? Obviously the classroom is a big part of such a technical vocation, but (imperfect analogy time) we all remember various obscure traffic rules we had to learn for our driver’s test, which never come up in real life.
These are the basic tenets of crew resource management. According to the Wikipedia page, that emphasis on highly cooperative teamwork and communication has been adopted by not just pilots, but also by aircraft maintenance operations, medical teams, firefighters, and several other fields in which worker/public safety is at stake.
[Part 1 of 2]
There’s a vast body of aircraft mechanical knowledge and of ATC and regulatory knowledge that’s utterly unrelated to what it takes to simply control your own airplane alone in 3D space like they did in the 1920s. “Aircraft handling” is a very fundamental skill, but it’s far from the only skills & knowledge needed in modern professional-level (or even hobbyist-level) aviation.
All that knowledge is trainable using traditional academic techniques. And is potentially testable. As in any complex field, there’s important factoids and trivia factoids. There’s also factoids you use every day and ones you may need only once per lifetime. Those two metrics are mostly orthogonal.
Well-designed academics correctly prioritizes those 4 quadrants. And well-designed testing directly supports the academics. We should not be “teaching the test”. But rather the teaching should be teaching 100% of what you will need every day, and 100% of you may need some days, plus some of what you might rarely need. And the testing should be verifying that (at least a representative sample of) what was taught has stuck.
Ideally folks come away with a well-recognized boundary between what they know, what they sorta know they know, and what they know exists that they don’t know, but know where to go look it up and know when it’s needed. IMO we should be teaching with that knowledge structure in mind and then testing that we succeeded in implanting that structure.
Sadly, it’s really easy for test writers to create a mountain of questions that are simply easy-to-ask trivia, rather than being about important stuff.
My crude summary was off the top of my head. I left out a few factoids I also know off top of head that were excess to Tripler’s needs. I’d expect any professional pilot to be able to recite the same sort of practical summary on request. A hobbyist pilot needs to know at least the outline of those airspace types that are germane to the sort of flying they do where they do it.
I also know where to go look up the nitty gritty details if I needed them. I’d also expect my crewmate to also know at least which book to look them up in. [Also relevant to that post, the search feature of our electronic manuals has been a real boon for us all!]
A lazy test writer could create another hundred questions about nuance corner cases of airspace regulation that nobody will ever encounter, and if they ever did, they’d have no hope of remembering the details. That sort of trivia test crap used to be commonplace in the US and may well be what PALPA is fuming at the CAA about. We’re by no means over that crap entirely, but major progress has been made during my 30 years in the biz.
[Part 2 of 2]
On top of the overall complexity common to all advanced skills such as doctoring, lawyering, engineering, etc., one of the unique challenges of our job is the real time nature of it.
You, for example, may have forgotten everything you ever learned about charitable remaindermen beyond the existence of the term itself. If you encounter it at work some day you’ll at least know to go read up on it before proceeding. You won’t be Dunning-Kruger oblivious to the term’s significance. Our challenge may be that we avoid being Dunning-Kruger oblivious, but we also don’t have time to go look it up either. So IMO industry really needs to be teaching lots of rules of thumb, easy to remember jingles, etc., so that in extremis, we’re not totally winging it; instead we’re at least in the ballpark of the official guidance. And IMO if that’s what we’re teaching that’s also what we should be testing.
Another common aviation saying is “Measure it with a micrometer; mark it with a crayon; cut it with an axe.” Especially when stuff’s going pear-shaped, we’re wielding that axe as fast as we can. Testing (or even teaching) with a micrometer fosters bad outcomes.
Sadly the bureaucratic mind recoils at such heresies.
LSLGuy I think PALPA does not like the Military Aviation background of a lot of CAA, or at least the technical and air safety guys, they think them too eager to blame pilots. A legacy of the British Raj, there wasn’t any separate air regulator during the British era, it was done by the RAF (there is still none in modern India) and the PAF was very influential in setting up the CAA and many posts including the air safety board are still staffed by former PAF men/women and on occasion serving officers on secondment.
You have a background in both commercial and military aviation, I am sure you can understand the culture clashes.
Clash for sure.
Plus a deep-seated belief on the part of many ex-military that there should be a guaranteed cushy airline job waiting for them upon separation from the service. One with built-in seniority from when they started in the military. Any obstacle they can throw in the way of the folks coming up through the civilian piloting ranks is fair game.
I’ve listened to this ignorant spew more than once while cruising along. It ain’t pretty.
In countries with government-owned flag carriers, or even formerly government-owned flag carriers the incestuous relationship between carrier, military, and regulator can become obscene. And has a lot to do with the recent Ethiopian & Malaysian mishaps.