Thank you.
Good morning everyone.
Thank you very much for giving us this opportunity to appear before your committee.
My name is Edward McKeogh. I'm the president of Canadian Aviation Safety Consultants. As the name would imply, the emphasis of our group is aviation safety. That will be the theme of what I will talk about right now.
Findings of investigations into recent high-profile catastrophic aircraft accidents have pointed to a serious inability of many aircrew to competently handle their aircraft in the case of autopilot failure or unsuitability. The evolution of the autopilot in recent decades has been very impressive, to the point where pilots are now using it a minute or so after takeoff. They fly the aircraft off the ground and engage the autopilot a minute or so after takeoff. It does the work in working them out of the departure pattern, en route, and in the arrival. Then they take over and hand fly the aircraft for only a minute or so before arriving at their destination.
The result is that we have people with thousands and tens of thousands of hours in their logbooks, but only a very small amount of hand flying of aircraft. This has resulted in recent catastrophes.
Air France flight 447 crashed into the South Atlantic a short while ago. Here, there was an aircraft at 35,000 feet, with both engines working fine and controls working properly, and when the autopilot went off air because two of the three pitot tubes giving it airspeed information had iced up, it said to the aircrew, “alternate law”, meaning that now you have control and you're going to fly the aircraft. Four and a half minutes later, the aircraft crashed into the South Atlantic, killing everyone on board, the reason being that pilots do not have enough experience in handling an aircraft, in hand flying it.
It might seem to some to be a bit boring or inefficient to fly the aircraft at high altitudes, but it gives you a feel for what it's like up there in thin air when the aircraft must be maintained in that narrow window between stall speed and critical Mach.
Similarly, another one was the Asiana arriving in San Francisco. There was a NOTAM: in other words, they were told in advance the instrument landing system would not be available to them. In that case, what you have to do is think ahead of what you're going to do to set up a visual circuit. A landing isn't made in the hash marks at the end of the runway. It's set up miles back, at 300 feet for each mile, so at 1,000 feet of altitude, at the proper alignment with the runway and at the proper referenced air speed, that is where you start.
They had none of that going for them, because they were not used to hand flying their aircraft. The autopilot had been flying the aircraft for them too long. With three people in the cockpit, what happened was that both airspeed and altitude deteriorated markedly and amazingly, and the aircraft, with a very nose-high attitude, had the tail hit the seawall at the San Francisco airport. It broke off, a lot of people were killed, and the aircraft was destroyed.
The thrust of what I'm saying is that we have to introduce this into the training system of airlines and have airlines allow their people, when conditions are suitable at destinations, to cancel an IFR flight plan and ask the control agency if they could do a VFR approach and learn to fly the airplane that way.
Now, we have a long list of things we would like to see introduced into aviation training, things that we would like to see upgraded, but what I've done here is limit it to two of the more serious ones. One you've just heard, and another one—I'll be brief here—has to do with aviation safety lectures. Just as doctors, dentists, stockbrokers, and what have you are required to conduct and attend continuation training lectures to keep them up to speed on their profession, we feel that there isn't enough of this done in aviation.
Some of the larger airlines have an in-house program of this kind. We would like to see it work all the way down to the earliest level of training, even at the flying clubs, and that—