Plane Conversations

My mother was a chemistry teacher who, much to the dismay of her chart memorization-minded colleagues, left a copy of the periodic table uncovered on the wall for student reference.  I’m sure that period table memorization is just another circle in Dante’s Hell, but I digress.  Mother’s belief was that the students would end up remembering what they needed from using the chart.  Those that didn’t probably weren’t going to be chemists, anyway; so, it didn’t matter in the long run.  Her belief was that if they used information and skills, students would learn the basics in a more organic way than by memorization.

In his book Fate Is The Hunter, Ernest K. Gann describes crossing the North Atlantic using basic navigational tools of a watch and a sextant.  Certainly, today’s aviators have it much easier using radio beacons and even GPS.  Glass cockpits have replaced many gauges and dials with heads-up displays and automatic computation.  Once at cruising altitude, aircraft fly themselves, as some Northwest passengers unwittingly found out.  But what happens when these automations are interrupted?  Are today’s pilots comfortable enough with the basics?

When cell phones were new technology, people talked about losing reception due to solar activity.  Since normal cell phones don’t actually use satellites, dropped calls may have been more the result of the lack of a tower than a solar flare.  However, today’s technology is worlds different and global navigation systems do use those satellites to triangulate signals to pinpoint a location.  In a BBC News article, author Jason Palmer points out that the navigation systems use signals that are “incredibly weak and, as researchers have only recently begun to learn, sensitive to the activity on the Sun. … Solar flares – vast exhalations of magnetic energy from the Sun’s surface – spray out radiation across the electromagnetic spectrum, from low-energy radio waves through to high-energy gamma-rays, along with bursts of high-energy particles toward the Earth. The radiation or waves that come from the Sun can make sat-nav receivers unable to pick out the weak signal from satellites from the solar flare’s aftermath.”

While Business Week’s Jeremy van Loon contends that solar activity is currently at its lowest point in the century, Stuart Tiffen of Das Welt quotes Dr. Dirk Soltau of the Kiepenheuer Institute for Solar Physics as saying that sunspots seen on the face of the sun in recent months indicate that the star is at the beginning of another 11-year cycle.  Using past cycle activity to predict the behavior of this one, “by 2015, more charged particles from the sun will be interacting with the ionosphere in the Earth’s upper atmosphere. This can lead to the ionosphere thickening and interfering with orbiting satellites, Soltau said.”  However, Tiffen notes, many global agencies are working towards a solution, including the European Space Agency (ESA), which “recently launched the European Geostationary Navigation Overlay Service (EGNOS), which improves the accuracy of satellite navigation signals over Europe. … Using EGNOS, signal accuracy can be improved down to 1.5 meters, according to ESA.”  And Mark Petovello and Joe Kunches add in Inside GNSS, that agencies are constantly monitoring solar activity and are constantly moving satellites to avoid or diminish the effects of the increased radioactivity.  Clearly the global navigation industry is taking the situation seriously and is actively planning solutions.

What does this mean for aviation?

Since many aircraft currently use some sort of global positioning device for navigation, devices disabled or misdirected by the sun’s interference could wreak havoc with the entire system.  As antiquated and inefficient as the current ATC system in the United States is, it is less vulnerable to solar activity than the proposed NextGen system based on satellite communications.  Now, I’m no Luddite; so, I’m not about to propose that we stick with our current system any more than I would propose that we go back to flying low, following highways and train tracks.  The vulnerability of the system does make me a little uneasy, though, particularly given the newest generation of pilots who, while certainly capable, have not been trained to navigate the old-fashioned way.  What sort of back-up system do they have in their knowledge bases to deal with an outage of computer navigation systems?

Stay with me now, I’m going to make a big leap.

Colgan Air lost flight 3407 as a result of many factors culminating, according to the extensive NTSB investigation, in pilot error.  The pilots’ error was not leaving the autopilot engaged when they encountered icing conditions (as I originally asserted), but (as a reader John Herbert pointed out) “continuous violation of the sterile cockpit rules, resulting in a total loss of situational awareness, so that the flight crew let the aircraft speed decay until the plane stalled. When the aircraft tried to recover automatically, the pilot overrode the nose-down stick and pulled back, basically dropping the airspeed to zero.  Fatigue and limited training and experience were also involved.”  In response, the US Congress proposed legislation in H.R. 3371 requiring, in part, that pilots “have at least 1,500 flight hours to qualify for a certificate.”  To be honest, I’m not sure that section of the bill really needs to be there since both of the pilots involved in the event prompting the measure had more than 2,000 hours.  Earlier sections emphasize training, which is a more important issue.  After all, you can have 50,000 hours of flying tourists in the tropics, but that’s not going to help you in Sweden.  It’s not all about experience.  Training plays a huge role.

Now, let’s get back to solar flares.  How many pilots today routinely receive navigation training using any method other than global navigation or other systems vulnerable to solar activity?  Not that many.  So, unless we want to find ourselves back on the train, I would propose that pilot training include more navigational basics.  It’s not quick.  It’s not sexy.  But it works.

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