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Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

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Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#61

Post by chrisseaton »

kalenx wrote: post #54
ebg13 wrote: post #21

Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287 ) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-inv... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889 )

Average does not have the same meaning in the context of this link and yours. We are not talking about physical measurements here.

Why doesn’t the same principle apply? One pilot is very good at one skill, another very good at some other skill. There exists no mean pilot that is fairly good at both, so designing or testing for that is a bad idea. Replace body dimensions with skill sets and it’s the same issue.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#62

Post by dahart »

This seems like a good thing, they should be testing with people who don’t know the answers. Though I can’t help but wonder if this is a very subtle re-framing of the Max accidents to shift blame back towards pilots. This approach of a regulatory agency recommending “average pilot” testing makes both the agency and Boeing look good, and tends to downplay the fact that Boeing intentionally avoided training the pilots, and that the system was only recoverable if you had some extremely specific knowledge. This wasn’t an issue of the quality of the pilots, this was an issue of the quality of the training, which we know was kept from all pilots to attempt to save time and money.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#63

Post by ses1984 »

londons_explore wrote: post #52
zaroth wrote: post #31

I have 15 hours in a Cessna 172, I’d be happy to give it a go! But in all seriousness, in no way shape or form should the testing be informed by the skill assessment of the test operator. The analysis should be looking at the tasks that had to be performed during the test, whether they were properly identified by easily selected checklists, and quantitative measurements of the complexity and physical difficulty of th…

You could take a probabilistic approach... In this 1 in a million situation, 90% of tested pilots managed to follow the procedures to recover. Therefore the chance of a fatal crash is 1 in 10 million. Let the manufacturer decide if they want to make the situation rarer or the training better to reduce the overall crash risk.

How about if that info was available to the public? I don't want to put my health and safety on a scale against someone's profitability.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#64

Post by ceejayoz »

londons_explore wrote: post #48
sokoloff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a tension between progress (some of which offers fuel [and ecological] savings) and cost. If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically. Certification is incre…

This problem would be resolved if type certifications expired. Eg. A newly certified plane type can be produced for 15 years before requiring recertification to new standards. In effect, this forces Boeing to come up with new designs, since the chances of old designs meeting new standards are low. It'll give them a big incentive to find ways to get the cost of certifications down. Up to them if they choose to evolve…

New designs tend to have new issues.

The pre-MAX 737s tend to be remarkably safe because the inherent mechanical issues have been detected and fixed over billions of flight hours.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#66

Post by ohduran »

wimagguc wrote: post #28
ohduran wrote: post #23

Wouldn't you need the worse pilot you can get? Average doesn't account for the fact that 50% of the sample are WORSE.

Imagine the day you're hired to be a test pilot, and _officially_ graduate as the worst pilot there is!

imagine being the second to worst pilot, and not being hired at all.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#67

Post by bronco21016 »

Perhaps a portion of testing could be performed in the simulator using a random sample of line pilots?

The current advanced qualification program in use at the airlines kinda is set up to test operational policies. All pilots of a fleet (essentially a random sample of abilities) go into the sim once a year and perform a check on what’s considered a ‘normal’ flight in the sim where anomalies are presented without being pre-briefed and the crew must over come them just as if they were out flying the line. The data is aggregated and problematic trends are identified and corrected.

Translate the same to new aircraft certification. Get the airplane basically ready and train some pilots in the sim. Just regular line pilots who will be flying the aircraft for their airline. Then spend an appropriate amount of time giving them realistic scenarios (without pre-briefing the anomalies) that test the boundaries of the aircraft performance and see how the human/machine interaction occurs and if there are problems that need to be addressed. In the case of the MAX, MCAS was a new system so scenarios to test pilot interaction with it would’ve been a requirement and I’m sure these issues could’ve been identified.

This already happens to some degree when airlines take delivery of a new aircraft. They make proving runs to hammer out any small bugs and get good real world data on fuel usage, performance, etc. My proposal is simply to expand the scope of proving runs in the sim with a good dose of abnormal operations using normal every day line pilots.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#68

Post by mannykannot »

londons_explore wrote: post #48
sokoloff wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a tension between progress (some of which offers fuel [and ecological] savings) and cost. If you can make a plane that saves an airline $1MM/year/copy but costs them $4MM extra and $500K/yr in training costs, you won’t sell as many as if it costs them $3MM extra and requires no retraining (or even $5MM/$0). Sometimes that difference is enough to make the project not viable economically. Certification is incre…

This problem would be resolved if type certifications expired. Eg. A newly certified plane type can be produced for 15 years before requiring recertification to new standards. In effect, this forces Boeing to come up with new designs, since the chances of old designs meeting new standards are low. It'll give them a big incentive to find ways to get the cost of certifications down. Up to them if they choose to evolve…

> It'll give them a big incentive to find ways to get the cost of certifications down.

That is exactly what went wrong in the 737 MAX process -- the goal was achived by using political pressure to weaken the oversight.

With proper oversight, type-certificate extension is a sound process. Without it, no form of certification is effective.

Re: Plane Tests Must Use Average Pilots, NTSB Says After 737 Max Crashes

#69

Post by tyingq »

ebg13 wrote: post #21

Uh oh. What are they going to do when they discover that there aren't any average pilots? https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/2016/01/16/when-us-air-... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230287 ) https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2016/02/the-inv... (HN discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11155889 )

I imagine they could use total flight hours and total 737 flight hours...or some other metric that roughly correlates to experience and skills.
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