Pilot errors - or lack of training? - Tony Cunnane's Afterthoughts

Written on 31 July 2011

Flying instructors and examiners always have difficult decisions to make when a student or candidate starts to deviate from safe flying. If you take control too soon, you can be accused of not giving the pilot under test sufficient time to recognise and correct the situation. If you take control too late, you crash!

The long-awaited report on the 2009 Rio-Paris airbus disaster has just been published and, understandably, has attracted a lot of public interest. As an RAF pilot and examiner I was drawn to the statement in several newspapers that "…the cockpit crew did not realise the Airbus A330 had stalled, in spite of repeated warning signals in the cockpit." It was also reported, in the i  newspaperof 30 July, that neither of the pilots at the controls had received recent training in manual control at high level.

I find it astonishing that neither of the A330 pilots at the controls apparently realised their aircraft was in a stall. Even if the flight instruments were misbehaving, the airframe buffet must surely have caused them to consider that the aircraft might be in a stall. Professional pilots know that there are several sorts of ‘stall’ and not all of them occur at low air speeds close to the ground. Unless there has been a change in stall recovery procedures since I stopped flying, the initial action, irrespective of whatever the flight instruments may or may not indicate, should always be to ‘unload’ the wings, that is to push the control column forward. Pulling it back, as allegedly the pilots of the Rio-Paris Airbus did, will only deepen the stall by increasing the wings' angle of attack, with a very high rate of descent the inevitable consequence.

That report triggered this Afterthought.

One very dark night at 31,000 feet between layers of clouds over the North Sea in the 1970s, I was flying in the right hand seat of a Victor K1 conducting an Instrument Rating Test (IRT) on a very experienced captain. IRTs were often practised in the Victor Flight Simulator but the actual test had to be conducted in the air and most of the flight had to be conducted manually, that is without using the auto-pilot. At one point, ATC instructed us to alter heading 40 degrees to port to avoid conflicting traffic. The candidate entered what should have been a routine turn with 30 degrees of bank. I put my hand on the four throttles waiting for him to request the normal 5% increase in thrust that was necessary to maintain speed and height in the turn. Not only did the candidate not ask for the power increase but he allowed the angle of bank to increase beyond 30 degrees and, at the same time, he let the aircraft’s nose drop. In other words we entered a descending left hand turn at an increasing bank angle with the speed increasing rapidly (the Victor was a very ‘slippery’ aircraft at high level). He made no response at all when I urgently called him to "check bank; check rate of descent". It was as though he had suddenly become paralysed into inaction. I took control of the aircraft as the bank increased beyond 45 degrees and had to recover the aircraft to straight and level flight without inducing a high speed stall (also known as an accelerated or ‘g’ stall). That required full power on all four engines and a very gentle pull up, not only to avoid stalling but to avoid the application of ‘rolling g’, which, to put it unscientifically, twists the airframe. During all this the navigator, doubtless speaking on behalf of all three rear crew members, asked on the intercom in an anxious voice, "What the Hell’s going on?"

Throughout those dramatic few seconds, the candidate remained completely silent. Whether this was because he was embarrassed at what he had just allowed to happen, or perhaps because of a medical problem, I knew not. I told the ATC controller, who had obviously noticed on his radar our unexpected manoeuvres, that I was curtailing the sortie and returning to base. The candidate maintained his silence and I completed the return to base and landed without any input at all from him. Of course, he failed his IRT for dangerous flying and was grounded by his squadron commander. I submitted my factual post flight report and heard nothing more officially about the incident. I actually worked for Headquarters No 1 Group at the time, not any of the Victor flying squadrons but I never got any feedback from Group HQ so I took that to mean they approved of my action at failing the captain's IRT.

I was aware that one or two Victor pilots thought that I’d acted too soon and thereby potentially ruined a very experienced captain’s career - but they were not there and didn't know the full story. I heard no complaints from any navigators or air electronics officers on the Victor squadrons.

My Victor Tanker stories on my RAF Years website start here