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Judgement, Decision-Making, and Intuition in the Pilot Selection Process
Published in Robert Bor, Carina Eriksen, Todd P. Hubbard, Ray King, Pilot Selection, 2019
Todd P. Hubbard, Peter J. Wolfe
Airbus A380-842 Engine Failure. “On 4 November 2010, an uncontained failure of the intermediate pressure turbine disc occurred in the No. 2 engine, of an Airbus A380 aircraft, registered VH-OQA, overhead Batam Island, Indonesia” (Australian Transport Safety Bureau [ATSB], 2013). Based on the ATSB report, two bangs were heard as the aircraft climbed through 7,000 ft. after the initial takeoff. From the flight deck point of view, after hearing the bangs, the captain and first officer both looked at messages appearing on the electronic centralized aircraft monitor (ECAM). The initial message warned of a turbine overheat in the No. 2 engine. “The ECAM provides information to the crew on the status of the aircraft and its systems” (ATSB, 2013). Another ECAM message warned of a fire in the No. 2 engine. Then the engine fire message went away and was replaced by an overheat message again, inside of 23 seconds. There were so many ECAM messages that the crew had to slowly sort through them one by one. It took 50 minutes to process each message and determine if the message was valid or invalid. While the rest of the crew processed the ECAM message, the captain flew the aircraft via the autopilot, disconnecting only to assess aircraft handling characteristics. On approach to land, the autopilot disconnected itself twice. After the second time, the captain left the autopilot off and manually landed the aircraft.
Interaction of man and machine: Lessons learned from aviation
Published in Christoph Mueller, Winfred Assibey-Bonsu, Ernest Baafi, Christoph Dauber, Chris Doran, Marek Jerzy Jaszczuk, Oleg Nagovitsyn, Mining Goes Digital, 2019
Finn Hovgaard, Christoph Mueller, George Biro
During the emergency which caused a large number of aircraft systems to fail, the information management in the cockpit became a major issue: The “Electronic Centralised Aircraft Monitoring” (ECAM) system gathers data from 250,000 sensors and parameters to manage 1320 checklists (de Crespigny, 2018). It requires the pilots to work these checklists in an order prioritized by the ECAM system. “We actioned 100 checklists in the air and another 20 on the ground … The result was that the cockpit was one of the most stressful environments it’s possible to imagine.” (de Crespigny, 2018). On this flight, 5 experienced pilots were on the flight deck (ATSB 2013). Nevertheless, “it took about 50 minutes for the flight crew to complete all of the initial procedures associated with the ECAM messages” (ATSB 2013). The Australian Transport Safety Bureau (ATSB) later spent 966 days investigating what exactly happened. Captain de Crespigny states about this situation: “We faced what felt like an overwhelming barrage of urgent checklists, some replaced so quickly by the next one that we didn’t have time to take them in.” (ATSB 2013).
Engine systems
Published in David Wyatt, Mike Tooley, Aircraft Electrical and Electronic Systems, 2018
There are two formats of electronic indicating systems in widespread use on larger passenger aircraft: EICAS and ECAM. The Engine Indication and Crew Alerting System (EICAS) is a Boeing-developed system that provides all engine instrumentation and crew annunciations in an integrated format. The system used on Airbus aircraft is the ElectronicCentralized Aircraft Monitoring (ECAM) system. The two systems operate on different philosophies; however, their basic functions are to monitor aircraft systems and display relevant information to the pilots. Both systems produce warnings, cautions and advisory messages that need to be evaluated by the crew. In certain cases, the system provides the procedures required to address the problem. Each colour display unit uses either an active matrix liquid crystal display (AMLCD) or a cathode ray tube (CRT).
The Effects of Aeronautical Decision-Making Models on Student Pilots’ Situational Awareness and Cognitive Workload in Simulated Non-Normal Flight Deck Environment
Published in The International Journal of Aerospace Psychology, 2023
Qinbiao Li, Hei Chi Leung, Man Him Ho, Ka Lok Leung, Kam K. H. Ng, Cho Yin Yiu
A non-normal flight deck environment, such as an emergency, usually might affect a pilot’s understanding and prediction capacity, negatively impacting pilot behavior and increasing the risk of making errors (Carim et al., 2016). Pilots are required to solve an emergency based on electronic centralized aircraft monitoring (ECAM) actions or operating manuals, i.e., the aircraft operating manual (AOM) providing corrected solution procedures once the abnormal situation occurs provided by the cockpit auditory alert system (Braarud, 2021). In terms of the priority of maintaining safety in the aviation industry and given error-causing distribution, it is critical to assist pilots in making decisions following the standard AOM procedures when an abnormal situation happens in the cockpit. Consequently, the aeronautical decision-making (ADM) was defined by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) as a system approach to the mental process used by pilots to perform the best decision possible in an abnormal scenario (Harris, 2017).