Human Factors in Multi-Crew Flight Operations

Harry W. Orlady, Linda Orlady

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351563437
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Tecnologia e ingegneria
• Categoría: Ingegneria aerospaziale

With the pace of ongoing technological and teamwork evolution across air transport, there has never been a greater need to master the application and effective implementation of leading edge human factors knowledge. Human Factors in Multi-Crew Flight Operations does just that. Written from the perspective of the well-informed pilot it provides a vivid, practical context for the appreciation of Human Factors, pitched at a level for those studying or engaged in current air transport operations. Features Include: - A unique seamless text, intensively reviewed by subject specialists. - Contemporary regulatory requirements from ICAO and references to FAA and JAA. - Comprehensive detail on the evolutionary development of air transport Human Factors. - Key statistics and analysis on the size and scope of the industry. - In-depth demonstration of the essential contribution of human factors in solving current aviation problems, air transport safety and certification. - Future developments in human factors as a 'core technology'. - Extensive appendices, glossary and indexes for ease of reference. The only book available to map the evolution, growth and future expansion of human factors in aviation, it will be the text for pilots and flight attendants and an essential resource for engineers, scientists, managers, air traffic controllers, regulators, educators, researchers and serious students.

1 Our Heritage in Air Transport

The Early Days of Powered Flight

This chapter is by no means a complete history of air transport. However, a brief understanding of air transport history and its heritage will help understand and appreciate the development and the application of today’s aviation human factors.

Powered flight, as we know it, is a product of the 20th century. Most historians agree that it began with the historic flight of those two mechanical geniuses, Wilbur and Orville Wright.¹ Their epic flight took place at Kitty Hawk, North Carolina on 17 December 1903 and it has forever changed our world.

The first real pioneer in aviation was Leonardo da Vinci. His drawings were based on the way birds fly. Over 500 years ago he recognized, among other things, the importance of redundancy in air safety. His early drawings show duplicate wires for lift so that if one broke the other would hold (J. Lederer, personal communication, 2 February 1996). All biplanes still have lift wires in duplicate.

A New Undertaking

Over the years, men continued to envy the birds and to think about aviation. At the time of the Wrights, many others were also actively working on this new undertaking. Men such as Alberto Santos-Dumont and Gabriel Voisin of France, Sir George Cayley and Sir Hiram Maxim of England, Otto Lilienthal of Germany, Percy Pilcher of Scotland, Lawrence Hargrave of Australia, and Octave Chanute, Glenn Curtiss, and Samuel Langley in the US, all made major efforts to achieve powered flight. Each came close and each made valuable contributions to a new and developing science.

Otto Lilienthal and George Cayley deserve special mention. In the early part of the 19th century, Cayley laid the foundation of modern aerodynamics and clearly envisioned a practical airplane. Unfortunately, he was unable to provide a suitable power plant (Moolman, 1980). The pioneering work of Lilienthal in early gliders had a big influence on the Wright Brothers. Wilbur Wright called him the ‘greatest of the precursors’. Among other things, Lilienthal introduced the concept of crash survival. He firmly believed that gliding was a preliminary to mastering powered flight and met his death on 9 August 1896 in one of his many gliding experiments. Unfortunately, on the day he was killed, Lilienthal was not using the willow hoop (prellbügel) around his body which he had devised to absorb the energy of a possible crash (J. Lederer, personal communication, 2 February 1996 and Moolman, 1980).

The Wright’s innovative world-shaking flight did not create an instant industry. There were few true believers, and they were scattered throughout the world. Most of the early faithful firmly believed that the primary use for this primitive device, called an airplane, would be to carry the mail and their efforts were mainly to get exploratory contracts from their governments. Initial attempts to prove that airmail was both feasible and desirable were made in Great Britain, France, Italy, Japan, Australia, and in the United States. However, Great Britain has the distinction of being the first nation to officially sanction an airmail trial. In February 1911, it staged a flight containing 6,500 letters and cards over a five-mile route at an Industrial and Agricultural Exhibition in Allahabad, India (Jackson, 1982).

The airplane’s military uses in World War I provided considerable impetus to the growing interest in aviation because early airplanes were an effective supplement to the military ground forces. They were used successfully for observation and with limited success for the bombing of railroads, cities and other targets. Most of the bombs were dropped by hand. At this time people, especially investors, did not see an expanded civil use for the airplane. The aviation visionaries still believed that the primary civil use of an airplane was to carry the mail. European countries led the way in the carriage of mail both on the continent and internationally.

The First Scheduled Night Flight

In the US, an early requirement to get sufficient support and financing for this fledging industry was to prove that pilots could routinely fly at night. The first pilot to do this officially was Jack Knight who, on 23 February 1921, flew through the night from North Platte, Nebraska to Chicago. His flight was a crucial step towards completing the first scheduled continuous coast-to-coast airmail flight. Details of the flight indicate how trying flying was in those early times.

Knight had flown from Omaha to Cheyenne the day before his famous night flight. He then deadheaded (flew as a passenger) to North Platte where he was scheduled to fly back to Omaha. The incoming mail flight had a mechanical problem and it was 10:44 p.m. before the mechanics could ready the plane for the flight back to Omaha. A tired Jack Knight landed in Omaha at 1:10 a.m. the next morning.

In Omaha there was a crisis. The pilot, who was to continue the flight, was still in Chicago because the weather was judged unflyable. In Omaha, there was no one else to fly. Jack Knight, who not only had never before flown the route from Omaha to Chicago but was also fatigued, volunteered to continue. He borrowed a road map covering the Omaha to Chicago route from the Omaha station manager and using it flew on to make aviation history.

A raging snowstorm just east of Des Moines created one of Knight’s most critical periods. The snowstorm was critical because Knight needed to find a set of railroad tracks to show him the way to his refueling stop at Iowa City and snow obliterated the railroad tracks.² Bonfires, at specific sites had been used to identify other cities enroute, but bonfires were of little help in a blinding snowstorm. Knight used his dead reckoning skills, and perhaps a bit of luck, to finally find the airport at Iowa City.

He arrived in Chicago at 8:40 a.m., the morning of 23 February 1921, after literally having flown all night. The flight made him an instant hero and one of aviation’s immortals. A new pilot took over and the epoch flight continued until it reached Hazelhurst Field in New York 33 hours and 20 minutes after it had left San Francisco. Although this time seems lengthy by today’s standards, in 1921 it was 65 hours (almost three days) faster than the fastest train. An enthusiastic Otto Praeger, the Second Assistant Postmaster, proclaimed that the coast-to-coast flight was a conclusive ‘demonstration of the entire feasibility of commercial night flying’. The flight was a momentous step in civil aviation. Congress was so moved that the next day it approved the Air Mail Service’s $1.25 million appropriations bill by a nearly 2-to-1 vote (Jackson, 1982). This appropriation provided a much-needed monetary transfusion for the early US Air Mail Service and kept air transport alive in the United States.

Meanwhile, the Europeans pioneered airmail routes to Africa and South America as well as within Europe itself. Aviation progress was much more sporadic in the US where the Post Office led by Assistant Postmaster General Otto Praeger and the National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics,³ vigorously advocated increased carriage of mail by air. World War I was over and the Congress, despite its passage of the Air Mail Services appropriation bill in early 1922, was still highly skeptical. The fledgling airlines needed more money, and Congress controlled the purse strings. In those early days passenger traffic was almost nonexistent. Airmail contracts with the government provided the only reliable money source.

US geography helped the new entrepreneurs. The sprawling and stretched-out United States provided a golden opportunity for the continued development of domestic airmail. Over 2,500 miles separated the principal cities and financial centers of the East and West Coasts. Even the fastest trains took nearly four days to span the continent. Reliable airmail could significantly reduce that time.

The ‘Lighted Highway in the Sky’

Stimulated by Jack Knight’s flight and led by Otto Praeger the Post Office made a major effort to prove that scheduled night mail flights were truly feasible. In 1922 an engineer named Joseph Magee was hired to study the problem of night airmail. After about a year of study, Magee’s recommendation was for the Post Office to construct a system of beacons and emergency landing fields between Chicago and Cheyenne. This was the critical night stretch for a proposed transcontinental airway.

Magee planned major terminals at Chicago, Iowa City, Omaha, North Platte, and Cheyenne. Each of them would have a 36-inch revolving light mounted on a 50-foot tower. These lights would have revolving beams that swept the horizon three times a minute. Each would be visible for 100 miles on a clear night. In addition, emergency fields were recommended. These were to be placed approximately 25 miles apart and each had an 18-inch beacon located on a 50-foot tower. The 902 mile illuminated airway that resulted was marked at three-mile intervals by gas lights that flashed 150 times per minute. The main airports were equipped with flood lights and field boundary lights. Landing lights were installed in the wings of the rebuilt British de Havilland D.H.4s, which were the airmail airplanes of that day.

There was nothing like the Post Office’s lighted airway anywhere in the world. It made the airway a ‘lighted highway in the sky’. This was a monumental technical achievement, and it made transcontinental airmail flights possible. The Post Office’s lighted airways were completed under the regime of Col. Paul Henderson, who succeeded Otto Praeger. Henderson was not an aviation enthusiast. Earlier (1919) he had proclaimed that, ‘(Airmail was) an impractical sort of fad, and had no place in the serious job of postal transportation.’

When reviewing this era, the role of the Post Office, and of people like Otto Praeger, in pioneering the use of airway beacons should not be underestimated. This was true pioneering, made much more difficult because support from the congressional politicians in Washington was lukewarm at best. The US Army had an experimental lighted airway between Columbus and Dayton, Ohio which was used sporadically and the French had experimented with beacons to guide night flights but that was all.

The First Instrument Flight

The fledging industry still had its teething problems. During this formative period it became essential for pilots to learn to fly in clouds and in bad weather. They had to demonstrate that they could fly solely by reference to their instruments and a few of them were unable to do this. While the ability to fly solely by reference to instruments is commonplace among pilots today, it was not commonplace during the early years. Some pilots were unable to acquire these now necessary skills. The ability to adapt to a changing environment became an absolute requirement for pilots at a very early stage in this young industry. The need for flexibility and the ability to adapt has remained to this day.

The feasibility of flying solely by instruments, when the cockpit was entirely enveloped by clouds or fog, was proven by Lieutenant James H. Doolittle of the United States Air Corps. On 24 September 1929 he took off and landed at Mitchell Field, Long Island after flying in an entirely hooded cockpit over a measured course. Lieutenant Doolittle was guided only by his instruments, which included three innovations in aircraft instrumentation; a Kollsman precision altimeter, a Sperry Gyrocompass, and a Sperry artificial horizon. He also used special radio receivers. His flight, which lasted only 15 minutes, proved that flight without outside visual reference, was possible. It followed an intense year of research financed by the Daniel Guggenheim Fund for the Promotion of Aeronautics. The flight provided a positive milestone for the struggling airlines and Doolittle’s airplane is now in the National Air and Space Museum.

The Fledgling Industry Makes Meaningful Progress

Many people believe that the world’s first regularly scheduled passenger airline—the St. Petersburg-Tampa Line—had its inaugural run on 1 January 1914 (Jackson, 1982).

Figure 1.1 The First Airline

Source: Illustrated Encyclopedia of Propeller Airplanes, page 2, Gunston, 1980

Unfortunately, after a promising beginning, the brand new airline folded at the close of the spring tourist season and was not revived. At approximately the same time the airline SCADTA was flying its own airmail and passenger service between two large cities in Columbia, South America. SCADTA flew seaplanes up a river that cut the time between the cities from days on land to a few hours for the airplane flight. Some people claim that SCADTA actually flew the first scheduled passenger flights.

The Chosen Instrument

It seems somewhat ironic that meaningful progress for the fledging aviation industry did not happen in the United States but in Europe. This in spite of the fact that the US was the home of the first powered flight and has good claims that it had the first scheduled passenger airline. World War I had devastated much of the European rail network because the railroads had been ruined by artillery fire and by sporadic bombing. This laid waste to many heavily traveled land routes. Several European States also had routes to distant colonies. Combinations of rail and passenger ships took substantially more time than did air transport. With the War over in Europe, there was abundance of surplus aircraft and of trained pilots who needed jobs. It was a natural for aviation development.

The British led the trend with aviation advances during this period. Political leaders in Britain were convinced that the Empire should link its distant colonial outposts by air. In a far-reaching government decree, Great Britain combined all of its fledging and struggling airlines into ‘the chosen instrument of the state for the development of air transport on a commercial basis’. They did this in 1924. The result was soon the world-renowned Imperial Airways that later became British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC). Much later, BOAC merged with British European Airways (BEA) and became the British Airways (BA) of today.

Other European Developments

Meanwhile France’s Lignes Aériennes Latécoère was flying the mail across the Pyrenees to Barcelona, North Africa and eventually to South America where its pioneering continued. The airline changed its name t...