Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) addressing the new extended envelope training, as well as certain adverse weather training such as icing and crosswinds. Indeed, the first public comment on the NPRM was a request from American for more time to respond. The European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) has also launched a UPRT rulemaking task working group and expects a report next year. This would lead to amendments in 2016 for acceptable means of compliance (AMC) and guidance materials. Andrea Boiardi, fixed wing expert in the EASA Operational Suitability group, said, “The whole aviation community has been working to identify solutions to reduce the number of LOC-I events.” The EASA rulemaking group is taking “a holistic approach,” according to Boiardi. “We’re looking at the pilot career, starting from licensing to the airline pilot doing his recurrent training. The pilot needs to understand the dynamics, needs to understand the behavior of aircraft in general and their specific type at differ-
Surprise!
ent altitudes and in different conditions; for example, they need to understand the behavior in a stall.” Brent Matthewson, EASA FSTD expert, noted there are already some objective requirements in the Agency’s certification specification for flight simulators, “not only up to stall warning but also looking at stall indications such as buffet and minimum stall speeds.”
One strong argument in favor of UPRT is that many pilots currently flying may have been taught techniques now deemed incorrect. And despite recent guidance emphasizing immediate angle of attack reduction, most still focus on airspeed and altitude. “We’ve been doing this wrong for a very long time,” stated the FAA’s Rob Burke, manager, Air Carrier Training Systems and Voluntary Safety Programs Branch (AFS-280), at the WATS 2014 conference. In a study of B737-rated pilots last year, the FAA attempted to understand how the “startle factor” of an unexpected stall event could be applied in a simulator, where pilots obviously know there’s no danger of actually crashing. One major surprise was that fewer than one in four of the pilots applied the proper stall recovery procedure correctly, according to Dr. Jeff Schroeder, the agency’s chief scientific and technical adviser for flight simulation systems. Perhaps more shocking: most pilots reverted to the old, discredited response, worsening the stall.
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