Safe Skies: Passenger Safety and Survival

Passenger safety and survival has always been the most important issue for commercial and business airlines and aircraft manufacturers alike. Airplane engineers and designers, researchers and the aviation industry in general are constantly on the lookout for more advanced safety technologies and systems for cockpits to make flying even safer.

The case of the Air France Flight 447, however, has shown once more how fragile and sensitive the technologies are, in particular when specialised training is needed. On June 2009, the plane plunged into the Atlantic Ocean after four minutes of downfall, killing 228 people on the way from Brazil to France.

Nearly two years on, the black boxes of the flight were finally recovered from the ground of the ocean, giving information about the happenings in the last four minutes on the plane. At the end of May 2011, the French government released a report revealing that speed readings in the cockpit had gone haywire after ice had blocked the jet’s speed sensors. At the same time, the horizontal stabiliser of the electronic flight control system had failed.

In the following four minutes, the pilots made several mistakes on how to handle the rapidly sinking plane, resulting in the fatal crash into the ocean. As a result, industry members and experts call for better training for pilots and better tools to warn them when their planes are about to go out of control.

Nasa’s aviation safety programme

Nasa has long realised the need for constant research into better safety systems and technologies. Through the Aviation Safety Programme Nasa, together with numerous cooperating aviation companies, is trying to develop the next generation of air transportation system, or ‘NextGen’, with the goal to "make travel through increasingly crowded skies more efficient and speedy while maintaining or increasing safety."

According to the programme, numerous safety issues have to be addressed during the development of future technologies, including the assurance of flight critical systems, the discovery of safety issues, automation design tools, prognostic algorithm design, vehicle health assurance, crew-system interactions and decisions, loss of control prevention, mitigation and recovery, engine and airframe icing and finally atmospheric hazard sensing and mitigation.

With the programme, Nasa seeks to provide increasing capabilities to predict and prevent safety issues, to monitor those issues in-flight and lessen their impact by exploring hardware and software systems that can verify and validate all these challenges.

The iPad as electronic flight bag

Flight bags have long been an essential tool in the aviation industry, containing aircraft and flight crew operating manuals and navigational charts, which guide crews in everyday situations as well as in crisis.

While the first electronic flight bags (EFB) were introduced in the mid-1990s, fewer than 5% of the globally operating commercial planes currently use the electronic version of the bag, according to estimations by US-based Jeppesen, a company specialising in aeronautical charting and navigation services, flight planning, pilot supplies and aviation training. The other 95% of airlines still send their pilots carrying the traditional flight bag from one cockpit to another, weighing as much as 70lbs.

A major step towards modernisation of EFBs was made by Jeppesen in March 2011, when the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) authorised the Jeppesen Mobile TC App for iPad as an alternative to paper aeronautical maps. The approval came after a three-month in-flight evaluation, including a successful rapid decompression test and non-interference testing.

The first airline to use the app as a sole reference during taxi, takeoff and landing on ten different aircraft types is Executive Jet. However, Jeppesen Mobile TC App project manager and senior manager, Jeff Buhl, said that it had "an international focus" and that there are "quite a few operators who are investigating the solution globally."

"When you look into bigger aircraft, they will probably be looking for a mounted solution, where the pilot doesn’t want to have a kneeboard. It depends on the operation, the type of aircraft being flown and the space available in the flight deck for what the optimal solution is for each carrier," said Buhl.

The FAA authorisation has set the stage for the iPad as a digital and wireless EFB to be rolled out by business and commercial aircraft operators. Industry members expect that the recent introduction of Apple’s second edition of the iPad will drive further interest in the tablet as an EFB solution. Jeppesen for instance predicted that it will have a "huge impact on aviation" and deliver reliable and up-to-date information on landing, alternate and emergency airports, flight operation manuals, quick response handbooks for emergency and abnormal procedures and flight releases.

Monitoring aircraft performance

While EFB mainly give information about airports, mapping and response methods, the monitoring of an aircraft’s performance is the second significant tool for safety and passenger survival. Reporting automatic updates about the condition of a plane to people on the ground, most of the today implemented systems allow speedy handling if any maintenance or safety issue should come up.

In 2009, Gulfstream launched the first version of a fault monitoring system, the PlaneConnect, which sends real-time information to the ground while the aircraft is still in the air. Any faults or anomalies in the airplane’s performance are reported, and as soon as the report is received on the ground the problem can be diagnosed. Then the replacements of any faulty parts can be ordered and organised as long as the plane is still in the air.

At the same time, the information sent to the ground can be a significant tool to improve the performance of planes in general. Airlines can agree to send the fault reports to Gulfstream Technical Operations, where computers review them and highlight any issue that needs to be improved. They then can identify new trends for system reliability, and order investigations where necessary to develop better systems and technologies for the future. 

Flight fatigue tools

Flight fatigue has always been a challenge for the safety of air travel. Especially after 9/11 the debate surrounding the sleeping patterns of airline employees has accelerated as flight attendants had to take on even more responsibility and a greater role in protecting the safety of air travellers during flights.

Now, new aviation industry regulations recommend that operators implement fatigue risk management systems to identify and avoid crew fatigue more efficiently and based on science, as compared to the existing regulatory flight and duty time limitations.

As a result, Finnair has recently become the first commercial carrier to develop crew schedules based on a fatigue risk management system, developed by Boeing and Jeppersen. Finnair vice president for safety and quality management, Antti Aukia said: "We have reached a very important milestone when it comes to crew fatigue. We have, as do most airlines, a fair distance still to cover in mastering crew fatigue."

He went on to describe that the new tool will be central for Finnair’s operations. "We’ve introduced this functionality fully within our other safety barriers and we are now able to guide our crew rosters away from fatigue from the start, based on sound scientific principles."

The example of the Air France Flight 447 has shown all too well that the safety and security of passengers is not only dependant on aircraft systems and technologies, but also on human physics such as flight fatigue, and above all the psychological reaction of humans in extreme situations.

Industry experts have not only raised questions about the plane’s automated control system and speed sensors, but accounted the fatal development of events to the decisions made by the crew and the pilots in particular.

Besides better tools to warn pilots when their planes are about to go out of control, they also need better training and directions on how to handle dangerous situations so pilots are not as startled and confused during emergencies. Only then, can maximum safety and security for passenger survival can be reached.