US FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt says he will bring together airlines and human factors experts in April or possibly sooner to discuss the consequences of advanced automation as it applies to pilots, controllers and mechanics.

The basic question that will be addressed at the meeting, says Babbitt, is "Have we automated to the point where the human is out of the loop?" The FAA chief was speaking to ATI and Flightglobal in Houston on 12 January after a kick-off event for initial operations of the FAA's automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast services (ADS-B) in the Gulf of Mexico.

Autopilot use is largely determined by efficiency measures in those areas, a reality that would tend to signal increased automation and autopilot use as the FAA moves toward 4d navigation, where an aircraft must pass certain waypoints at a relatively precise time.

The role of automation and training has been in the safety spotlight after several recent high profile accidents in 2009, including the stall-related crash of a Colgan Airways Q400 in Buffalo in February, the crash of a FedEx MD-11F during an otherwise normal landing at Tokyo Narita in March and the unexplained loss of an Air France A330 over the Atlantic in June.

Flightglobal recently reported that during its Crew Management Conference in early December that experts are debating whether a seeming deterioration of pilot skills is the symptom of long term effects of operating highly automated aircraft.

Babbitt says the impact of increased automation could also affect air traffic controllers and maintenance workers. "I've asked FAA's human factors experts to look at it," he says. "We have to make sure a human is the ultimate decision maker."

A key goal of the upcoming meeting, he notes, is to get carriers to share what they've learned on the topic. "If a carrier has developed a good procedure, I want to tell others about it," says Babbitt.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

Russia's Air Force will develop in 2010 a civil aviation safety program that should more than halve aviation accidents, a Defense Ministry department said in a statement on Saturday.
"A federal target program is being drafted to ensure civil aviation security which we think will reduce aviation accidents by two to three times and cut damage by 15 billion to 20 billion rubles ($502 mln- $670 mln) annually," Maj.-Gen. Oleg Kolyada, the head of the Air Force flight safety department, was quoted as saying.
He said though it would take almost the whole of 2010 to revise Air Force regulations, the bulk of documents would come into force as soon as possible

2009 was the year with the lowest number of fatal accidents on record for the 31 Member States of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), according to preliminary data. However this good safety record was overshadowed by the accident of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic. This was the only fatal accident for aeroplanes registered in an EASA Member State in commercial air transport*. Despite this, the number of fatalities in 2009 (228 fatalities) is significantly above the decade average. The high number of non-fatal accidents (24) in 2009 indicates that further progress in safety is necessary. In comparison, the decade 1999-2008 had every year on average 27 non-fatal and five fatal accidents with 92 fatalities.

Further information on safety in civil aviation will be included in the “Annual Safety Review 2009” due to be published by EASA later this year.

"It wasn't a very flattering year for aviation safety because so much could easily have gone so much worse," said Bill Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va.
Data from the Flight Safety Foundation, which cooperates with the Aviation Safety Network, show that while the rate of major accidents dropped sharply over the past decade, most of the improvement was accomplished by 2005. The rate of accidents per million departures has held roughly steady for the past five years, according to the foundation's data.

Other disturbing global trends, according to safety experts, stem from the steady stream of accidents since 2005 in which pilots lost control of mechanically well-functioning aircraft -- usually due a computer problem or pilot confusion involving automated flight-control systems. The period also produced an average of 30 major runway-overrun accidents per year.

New standards for pitot probes are expected to emerge from a working group being founded in the wake of June's fatal loss of an Air France Airbus A330 over the south Atlantic.
Airbus is backing creation of the working group, which is set to begin its activities in the first quarter of 2010, after criticising a proposed revision of certification standards as lacking sufficient rigour.
Investigation of the crash of Air France flight AF447 on 1 June - the latest update to which is due this week - has generated concerns over the performance of pitot tubes under icing conditions.

Pitot tube certification is based on requirements laid out in European technical standard order ETSO C16. While the European Aviation Safety Agency says it is not "presuming on the potential contribution" of pitot icing to the AF447 accident, it opened a consultation in August on revising ETSO C16 - which was based on decades-old criteria - to align it with the US FAA's more modern standard TSO C16a.
But Airbus, in its response to the EASA consultation, has expressed "significant concerns" about the adoption of the updated requirements. It claims that the icing conditions laid out in the US standard are "not sufficiently conservative" and that icing test requirements are lower than the airframer's own. Airbus says the standard does not require probes to be tested in ice-crystal or mixed-phase icing, despite their sensitivity to these conditions. "Such an omission is contrary to the objective of setting a minimum level of performance, particularly as most aircraft fly in such conditions," it says, adding that probes designed and tested only in liquid icing could "require a significant redesign" to meet the stricter criteria. Airbus also believes that the update should also take installation effects into account, and that probes should be tested at angles of attack up to 15° at least. It recommends that EASA should dispense with the update in favour of developing new icing requirements through the proposed working group.

EASA states that the update to ETSO C16 is a "first step" that "has to be done" in the interim, but adds: "In the future this ETSO will be upgraded using the outcome of the working group, which will be a new international standard for pitot probes."

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

When a system (e.g. an aircraft) is delivered and in its pristine condition, it has an initial level of safety often justified by the designer's "Safety Assessment", which is often archived after certification. However, safety is not self-sustaining [ARP 5150] - it depends on numerous factors, including the original design; manufacturing; operating crew and maintenance actions; operational and environmental effects; quality of spare parts; modifications; configuration control; etc. 

Click on link below to view the speech which was delivered on the same day that the Hadden Cave report was published - and coincidently touched on the relationship between OEM Safety Assessment vs IPT Safety Cases.

 European aircraft maker Airbus is ratcheting up efforts to cope with a growing aviation hazard: poorly executed flight tests of jetliners emerging from major overhauls.

Spurred by a pair of recent flight-test accidents in France and a near-crash in Britain, Airbus says it has revised rules for its own cockpit crews, who are responsible for checking the safety of newly delivered and overhauled planes.
In 2007, an Airbus jet being delivered to Etihad Airways crashed into a barrier during ground tests.
Airbus also is helping its customers around the world develop tougher standards for how airline pilots should conduct tests to verify proper operation of aircraft following extensive maintenance.
Safety experts say the effort, outlined at an aviation-safety conference in Beijing this month, seeks to address the problem of pilots getting into trouble when computers or other systems act up during airborne checks of increasingly complex and automated airliners.
According to the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, over one-quarter of commercial-aircraft crashes since the late 1990s involved some type of testing or ferry flights without passengers. Based on such statistics and recent examples, French accident investigators earlier this year urged European airlines and regulators to develop more-stringent rules and procedures for conducting those kinds of flights.
Flight tests are essential after extensive overhauls, called "heavy checks," because the guts of the aircraft—from miles of wiring to cockpit instruments—are pulled out and either refurbished or replaced.The aluminum shells are painstakingly inspected for cracks, engines are taken off and flight-control surfaces are removed Once the work is finished, the aircraft must be tested and flown without passengers to ensure its parts have been reassembled correctly and all systems work as intended.
While some airlines such as UAL Corp.'s United Airlines and AMR Corp.'s American Airlines rely on specially trained and designated "check" crews for such flights, other airlines assign regular pilots to verify the plane is safe to resume flying passengers.
In revising its rules, Airbus built on lessons learned from a pair of flight-test crashes that highlighted crew mistakes and ended up destroying planes.
In November 2008, an Air New Zealand Airbus A320 on a check flight crashed into the Mediterranean Sea off the southwestern coast of France, killing all seven people aboard. Investigators determined that while carrying out a low-speed test at an unusually low altitude, the pilots inadvertently stalled the jet by disconnecting the automatic thrust designed to keep it going at steady speed and attitude. In doing so, they failed to understand how the plane's computers would react.
"We see a lot of problems with [airplanes] decelerating too rapidly and throwing themselves into a stall situation," said Harry Nelson, a senior flight-test pilot and manager for Airbus, a unit of European Aeronautic Defence & Space Co. "Certainly, we're getting a lot of queries from our customers" about how to safely conduct flight tests, he added, along with increased focus by regulators.
In late 2007, a new Airbus A340-600 being delivered to Abu Dhabi-based Etihad Airways crashed into a concrete barrier during routine ground tests outside the Airbus headquarters in Toulouse, France.
Investigators concluded that an Airbus engineer revved up all four engines to high power at the same time, but didn't put a chock under the wheels to prevent them from rolling. When one of the Etihad crew believed the plane was moving, the engineer assumed there had been a hydraulic failure.
To clear the problem, the Airbus engineer momentarily released the parking brake, and the plane began accelerating. In seconds, the $250 million jet smashed into the barrier, shearing off the cockpit and seriously injuring four people aboard. The harried engineer never pulled back on the throttles.
These high-profile mistakes—plus a third post-maintenance incident involving an EasyJet plane in Britain that plunged about 10,000 feet before the pilots managed to regain control—prompted Airbus to reassess and tighten internal safety procedures.
At the same time, Airbus has launched its first series of training classes specifically designed to sharpen the flying skills and decision-making abilities of flight-test pilots working for carriers. The five-day course is intended, in part, to teach them the hazards of testing systems at low speeds. The course also deals with how to adjust power, handle the controls and troubleshoot systems while approaching or trying to recover from a stall.
Reflecting a growing concern over unexpected glitches with advanced flight-control computers during unusual maneuvers, Mr. Nelson told the safety conference: "We've all been hijacked by our own cockpits."
He described the tendency of many pilots "to battle with automation and try to get it to work" instead of quickly reverting to manual controls as soon as difficulties crop up.
Bill Voss, who runs the Flight Safety Foundation, an industry-supported advocacy organization, also sees dangers in pilots struggling to figure out why state-of-the-art flight computers might be misbehaving. Data indicates there are a host of problems "out there in the world of automation, more than is recorded," Mr. Voss said in a speech earlier this year. "Truth is, pilots didn't always deal with automation anomalies very well."
In recent months, both French and British accident investigators have criticized the commercial aviation industry for often failing to provide specialized training for pilots conducting flight tests. French investigators, for instance, concluded that there aren't clear-cut regulations or safeguards that set "a framework for [such] nonrevenue flights."
In the U.S. as well, crash investigators and regulators are focusing on the potential hazards of such flights. In the fall of 2008, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration recommended that carriers analyze flight-data recorders from nonrevenue flights in order to pinpoint safety hazards and pilot deviations from standard operating procedures.