Worth the Wait

Continuing to build upon the late-1990s legacy of knowledge, intensive efforts in the past four years have propelled airplane upset prevention and recovery training (UPRT) from the milieu of a few subject matter experts to finalizing international standards and guidance for commercial air transport (ASW, 7/13).

What’s new is increased experience among airlines that — after working closely with other stakeholders to stem the risk of loss of ­control–in flight (LOC–I) — have become voluntary early adopters of UPRT, some receiving glowing responses from pilots who have completed this training.

Presenters and attendees filled in details of these developments, cited a few points of controversy and highlighted next steps on their agendas during the World Aviation Training Conference and Tradeshow (WATS 2013) in April in Orlando, Florida, U.S.

“Stall training [has] been required, for a private pilot license through type ratings, forever,” said Paul Kolisch, a captain at Pinnacle Airlines. “Nonetheless, we continue to lose airplanes in the commercial fleet, and most [such accidents] are following stall events and the loss of ­control–in flight. [Pilots] didn’t need to get upside down or even close to it. But the airplane wasn’t flying. And the pilots didn’t recognize it. … We have to use our imaginations and be open to new possibilities that really, virtually, violate our traditional stall training.”

Despite consensus recommendations of industry specialists behind the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration’s (FAA’s) August 2012 publication of Advisory Circular 120-109, “Stall and Stick Pusher Training,” Kolisch said he still encounters skepticism and distrust about UPRT-related changes. “There are still people out there who say ‘They don’t apply to us,’” he told the conference. “Well, wings apply to you. And if they stop flying, they’re a problem for you.”

A significant discrepancy has endured, he said, between the 5,000-ft to 10,000-ft altitudes traditionally used in approach-to-stall training for airline pilots and the altitudes where actual stalls occurred in recent LOC–I accidents. Moreover, the traditional training had failed to emphasize that typical pilots instinctively react to a startle/surprise affecting their flight path with immediate control input to increase pitch. UPRT instructors address this response, telling simulator students, “That’s what you’re going to do; now here’s how you recover,” Kolisch said.

“In current practices, approach to stall is a scripted maneuver; it’s limited to non-realistic scenarios and it’s typically hand-flown,” he said. “I call it choreography.” Updates to regulatory standards, official guidance and practical test standards overcome such weaknesses. Therefore, stall prevention, recognition and recovery can be accomplished today before an anomaly deteriorates to a violent, possibly unrecoverable, airplane upset, he said.

“The first thing you do is get the nose down,” Kolisch said, paraphrasing the key message adopted by various stall and UPRT working groups. “If you don’t get the nose down, the wings aren’t flying long enough to level them. … [Training requirements also] should not mandate a predetermined value for altitude loss, nor mandate attaining an altitude during recovery.”

Pinnacle Airlines is an example of the airlines that have opted to implement the latest best practices. “No one comes out of our training without going through high-altitude and low-altitude stall training — most of it starting on the autopilot [to be] realistic,” Kolisch said. One point of potential confusion that must be overcome in low-altitude stall training, he said, involves flight crews hearing “PULL UP” alerts from the terrain awareness and warning system at the same time that stall recovery requires them to reduce angle-of-attack to reattach airflow to the wings so that responding to the alerts becomes possible. While showing a video of an airline crew’s simulator session in this scenario, he said, “The GPWS [ground-proximity warning system] was telling them ‘PULL UP.’ Pulling up kills you.”

Stick Pusher Training

For operators of stick pusher–equipped airplanes, UPRT elements should be implemented to avoid negative training, Kolisch said. Without this training, the typical response of a pilot who encounters the shaker or other indicators of stick pusher activation (firing) is to pull the control column.

Simulator instructors tasked with inducing surprises can tell you, “Don’t pull, don’t pull, don’t pull — and you’ll pull,” he said. “But if you practice it a few times, then you’ll release it. … Release, put the nose down, and you’ll recover.”

Lou Németh, chief safety officer and a captain, CAE, cited a potential source of confusion. “You’re sitting in the cockpit of a stick pusher–equipped airplane, and the preflight procedures require you to hang on to the stick pusher and fight through the stick pressure,” he said. “So every preflight, you’re sitting there holding onto this thing, and you’re doing absolutely the opposite of what you should do if the stick pusher fires in flight. … We want to demonstrate the stick pusher, and we want to see the pilot demonstrate proficiency in respecting the stick pusher when it fires in flight.” Németh was chairman of the Stick Pusher and Adverse Weather Aviation Rulemaking Committee and Loss of Control Avoidance and Recovery Training, a committee of global civil aviation authorities; and co-chairman of the International Committee for Aviation Training in Extended Envelopes Training Committee.

Watershed Event

In February 2009, the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash in the United States (ASW, 3/10, and 5/12) began to raise LOC–I to the highest tier of the safety agenda of the Air Line Pilots Association, International (ALPA), eclipsing airline pilot selection, licensing and mentoring, recalled Frank Cheeseman, human factors and training group chairman for ALPA and an Airbus A320 captain for United Airlines.

“We need to give pilots the tools to survive: low-altitude, medium-altitude and, in most of our operations, high-altitude [UPRT],” he said. “It’s a pass-fail exercise. It’s a train-to-proficiency exercise. It’s a survival exercise.”

The airline industry absolutely must “avoid negative training, but at the same time, we shouldn’t be afraid to use our simulators because they’re not exactly perfect,” Cheeseman said. ALPA recently has joined follow-on activities, including a search for ways to enhance the “difficult skill of pilot monitoring” and redouble its effectiveness.

ALPA urges the U.S. airline industry not to attempt to circumvent full UPRT — specifically, the training requirements included in U.S. law¹ — by not exposing pilots to full aerodynamic stalls and recoveries in approved flight simulation training devices (FSTDs). “We don’t understand why this is a big discussion in the United States,” he said.

Airbus and Boeing representatives at the conference reiterated their positions that the stall avoidance and recovery aspect of UPRT is valid and important for all airline pilots, regardless of the protective automation of fly-by-wire airplanes. Such training is necessary in part to prepare flight crews for a lower level of protection — for example, changing from normal law to alternate law² on Airbus aircraft.

“We do the stall exercises up to the point where it is valuable,” said Jacques Drappier, a captain and senior adviser training, Airbus. “We’re not at the point that we go into a post-stall situation, which was the case of the Air France [Flight 447 LOC–I, ASW, 8/12]. There you are in a totally different regime. And I don’t think anybody is ready to go into that regime at this point in time. … I think the limitation is ‘What are the capabilities of training?’ not ‘What are the airplane capabilities?’”

ALPA’s Cheeseman said, however, “There are some airlines that are engaging [in simulator] training in a flight-protected airplane in a full-stall situation. The initial critiques from [ALPA-represented] pilots that have gone through that training have been extremely positive … a tremendous confidence-builder. I happen to be one of them.”

Other Pilot Reports

As part of its advanced qualification program for pilots, UPS Air Cargo has designed programs to teach low-­altitude, low-speed stalls and high-altitude, low-speed stalls in FSTDs, said attendee Jeff Ryan, a UPS captain, Boeing 767 check airman and simulator instructor.

“Having gone through it, I will tell you that it was extremely eye-opening,” he said. “First, [practicing recovery from] a low-altitude, low-speed stall, initially dropping the nose, the airplane regaining flying speed, and then doing a high-altitude, low-speed stall with the autopilot engaged, [reinforced] how much time it actually took once you dropped the nose. … The airplane would break the stall, but your tendency to recover way too early and get a secondary stall was extremely impressive [in] that it took patience to get the airplane … roughly back to about 200 kt. Anything between the 130-kt to 140-kt stall — and even [at] 170 kt — you get back to a secondary stall. So the training was fantastic.” 

Notes

1. The Airline Safety and FAA Extension Act of 2010 affected many aspects of airline pilot licensing and training in the United States in the wake of the Colgan Air Flight 3407 crash near Buffalo, New York.
2. The Airbus system logic called normal law provides a number of automatic protections against exceeding flight envelope parameters. Manual selection or unexpected system reversion to alternate law logic requires different flight procedures.