New Self-Assessment Tool for American Airlines Pilots

[PHXPhlyer]

American pilots pilot debriefing
New technology encourages flight reviews without punitive threats.

https://www.dallasnews.com/opinion/comm ... t-reviews/

American Airlines has become the first U.S. carrier allowing every pilot to confidentially review computer simulations of flight incidents as soon as the pilot’s plane parks at a gate. The move promises to raise the bar for training, while simultaneously enhancing operational awareness and promoting a robust safety culture.

The innovative virtual replay system, previously available to roughly 3,000 pilots flying American’s widebody aircraft, is now accessible for the company’s entire fleet and all 15,000 pilots. With commercial aviation safety increasingly under public scrutiny, the animation tool offers significant benefits through self-learning.

The goal is to routinely permit pilots, using company iPads, to privately view and self-critique replays of specific flights. The focus is on portions of trips that otherwise wouldn’t get special attention because there were no hair-raising close calls, injuries or damage to the aircraft. Still, the replays can offer key insights for those on the flight deck.

American says crews can “reflect on what occurred and, importantly, what could have been improved.”


Independent safety experts say the results could pinpoint everything from questionable landing procedures to impaired situational awareness to excessive reliance on cockpit automation. The videos can be played upon landing, later during the duty day, sitting on a crew shuttle to a hotel or even before takeoff the next morning.

Like most large carriers worldwide, American already has a separate, extensive data-collection and analysis network, buttressed by voluntary, non-punitive incident reporting.

The vast majority of pilots in the U.S., though, rarely get a chance to review details of their everyday cockpit commands and actions. Pilots almost never go out of their way to ask safety managers for access to flight replays, primarily because that would raise red flags and prompt official reviews.

Amid months of heightened concerns about close calls on runways, persistent production-line lapses by aircraft maker Boeing and other emergencies, wider embrace of the technology could demonstrate the industry’s proactive stance. Beyond blue-ribbon study groups and strident congressional rhetoric, American’s move highlights a decisive yet relatively simple and inexpensive step to help calm fears of travelers.

In April, American’s pilot union sent an email warning members about a “significant spike” in operational hazards and maintenance-related incidents. Uncovering those incipient dangers is precisely what the replay tool is intended to accomplish.

The process doesn’t entail potential punishment of any in-flight mistakes by pilots from the company or regulators. The downloads don’t involve airline management at all, which doesn’t track who uses the system.

If the cloud-based system works as expected, American Airlines pilots will gain an entirely new, real-time feedback loop to assess their cockpit skills and responses. The carrier has said the process “turns each flight into a learning opportunity.”

American said the initial widebody phase of the simulation effort received “overwhelmingly positive feedback,” with some 70% of eligible pilots trying the system. Expansion “will contribute significantly to our collaborative safety” projects with pilot union leaders, according to the carrier.

Many outside experts agree. “It’s an awesomely powerful tool to play back exactly what happened” before pilot recollections fade, according to Hassan Shahidi, president and chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a leading nonprofit research and advocacy organization. To make a difference, he said, replays must be “part of the normal tasks and methodology to debrief flights,” and “not just somebody randomly deciding today I’m going to take a look.”

Other safety experts see American’s partnership with CEFA Aviation, the privately owned French company marketing the computer application, as a welcome addition to rigid, formally supervised simulator instruction. The concept isn’t intended to replace periodic “check rides” determining pilot competence, but rather to supplement existing mandatory training.

Still, skeptics question the extent to which aviators will embrace the idea. “The technology has great merit and promise, but I’m less convinced pilots will use it,” according to John Cox, a former senior captain and union safety official for another airline who runs a consulting firm. Time constraints and lack of interest from typical crews, he said, could erode anticipated benefits.

The replays aren’t aimed at unraveling accidents or the most serious types of incidents. They also aren’t designed to investigate pilots who violate drug and alcohol rules or otherwise purposely disregard safety standards. Those will be studied and handled through existing channels.

At this point, American has joined a small group of carriers seeking to significantly increase use of the technology. Europe’s leading low-cost carrier Ryanair and Japan’s All Nippon Airways are among those relying on personal replays to help improve cockpit coordination and decision-making by new and veteran pilots.

In helping announce American’s decision, Capt. Paul Fitzgerald, deputy safety chair of the airline’s pilot union, said it “represents a pivotal step forward in our safety enhancement efforts.”

More airlines should follow that trajectory.

PP

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

We had a playback facility on the Tornado F3 sim 35 years ago.
I can't recall a single occasion when it was used for the direct benefit of the crew.*
Of course, the sim instructors were keeping notes, so in the debriefs an instructor was able to answer immediately questions like;
"How low did our airspeed actually get during that manoeuvre?", so I suppose if the crew are self-debriefing, that would be useful.
But every crew (including me and at least half the other sim instructors, who were flying current) knew the debatable points of whatever hadn't gone quite to plan from memory,
so only specifics were the details needed, and it was quite rare that they were actually needed to learn the lesson(s).
The playback was useful for training new sim instructors, because it enabled the instructor trainer to point out the cues that a crew were approaching their capacity limits.
This helped the new instructors learn whether more value would be gained by adding further workload or emergencies, or not.

Given all the reports of crew workload pressure, especially scheduling,
I would think more benefit to the crew's performance would be gained by demanding allocated time for such computer self-debriefs...then actually using that time to get more shut-eye

*Well, not for normal flying and emergencies practice. The Qualified Weapons Instructors found it handy when they were simulating new war missions, especially with new software in the weapons/ECM gear.

[llondel]

The playback was useful for training new sim instructors, because it enabled the instructor trainer to point out the cues that a crew were approaching their capacity limits.
This helped the new instructors learn whether more value would be gained by adding further workload or emergencies, or not.

Do pilots ever get pushed deliberately to their capacity limit to see what happens? I would think it's useful to do at least once, if only to find out how they react, and possibly to go over what happened and point out warning signs of impending overload.

[Fox3WheresMyBanana]

Do pilots ever get pushed deliberately to their capacity limit to see what happens?

Once I got all the handling and mouth music sorted whilst learning spinning in the RAF, my instructor then asked me to start counting backwards in 17s from 243 as well whilst doing the next one.
Being pushed to one's limits was standard from the end of basic (solo out of the circuit) training onwards, the purpose being so one could recognise oneself that one had reached one's limits, and do something to reduce the workload.
I found a couple of things were my own cues, which I believe were pretty common; the first being my flying accuracy, and the second being mental math speed (hence the 17s drill).
These showed up for me before things like missing checklist items or heading for the wrong airfield, so those things never happened to me, because I'd already known to reduce workload and be especially watchful for the latter before they did.

When teaching budding civvy commercial pilots in the USA, it was also company policy to push them occasionally (probably because all the senior bods were either ex-mil or ex-test pilots). However, we would explicitly tell the students that overloading them would be deliberately done at particular places in particular sorties, and explain why.