Common Cause
How Much is TOO Much
It must be getting close to Christmas time. Every month I continue to be bombarded with the ads in our GA magazines about how much safer we will be if we fly a plane with glass panels. For only a few tens of AMUs (aircraft monetary units, i.e. thousands of dollars), you too can have a high tech integrated panel, with all your steam gauge information in one place in front of you. No more scanning the panel! Most of the new sport and factory planes are not even offering us the choice anymore between the classic gauge panels and the glass panels; you must take the EFIS screens, PFD and MFD, or don’t buy the plane. And the sales pitch is the biggest red herring of all: safer flying than with the legacy aircraft panels.
So here’s proof of the BIG LIE: look for yourself on the FAA website, under Data and Statistics, and Recent Incidents, and look at the number of incidents where the new planes have come to grief. The pilots are the source (75%) of most aircraft accidents (even higher for incidents), and the new integrated panels not only didn’t help to prevent these bad days, they are, in fact, contributing to the continuing dismal accident rates. And in case you haven’t noticed lately, the accident rates have started to turn around and climb. Read the latest AOPA Nall Report. Gee, I wonder why?
Cockpit distractions, increased heads-down time, required button-pushing, and menu confusion are a sampling of the root causes, but nobody wants to talk about this. Just look at the EFIS operator and training manuals: hundreds and hundreds of pages of information and detailed procedures that you must memorize. And the training videos and DVD courses (many hours and days in length) are another clue to the complexity of the new tools, not to their alleged simplicity. Just marry the GPS to the autopilot mode, engage the approach, and watch the show on the display! So what’s happening here? For one, the large amount of button pushing, based on the pilot’s interpretation of the integrated screen presentation, is distracting the pilots from looking outside the plane, especially on final. Then there is the constant refocusing of your eyes from far vision to near vision, and back outside again. Many times the font size on the screens is hard to see, especially under high workload situations (IFR approaches). Ah, but now we have synthetic vision displays. On which side of the windscreen is reality?
To actually accomplish some tasks, we have to scroll through several menus, then select a choice from the pull down menu, and then implement that function or enter the data. If we make a mistake and push the incorrect button, we must back up or start the process all over again…very distracting and annoying. It’s one thing to operate this equipment in the quiet environment of a simulator, or practice on your PC or laptop, and it’s quite another to actually perform these tasks under stress in a turbulent cockpit, with the pilot bombarded with distractions, revised ATC directions, and even possibly some instrument, aircraft, engine and passenger issues. The concept was elegant in its simplicity: combine all that scattered panel information onto one integrated display presentation. BUT IT’S NOT WORKING. The ‘why’ will be explored in the coming months as the wreckage piles up, and the insurance companies pay for the damage, but the trend is becoming clear. You are going to face the challenge of your life learning to being proficient with the glass panel presentations, controls, and now the integrated autopilot and engine monitoring functions. You will get way more than you paid for and bargained for. Unless you are a professional pilot, flying regularly, intensively trained and regularly tested for comprehension, you may be overwhelmed, especially in times of crises and high workload. But the colors are pretty!
Common Cause – There is such a thing as too much information. Procedurally intensive operations of highly complex integrated visual displays, where many choices are available (awesome flexibility), but which must be accomplished serially and correctly, are a clear detriment to safe single pilot operations in general aviation aircraft. Don’t we train ourselves to make one change at a time, measure the incremental results using one primary and several supporting indicators at a time, and continue this process until the aircraft is performing the function or maneuver desired (e.g. landing)? Most of us don’t fly often enough to remember all the button sequence functions. Especially not when under stress. Flying is complex enough; don’t make it harder than it has to be. Look at the accident statistics, not the sales pitch. Would you really spend 10-20 AMUs to make your flying harder? And when the battery runs down…..the music’s over. What’s your experience?
By Mike Sullivan
COM SMEL, CFI, MEI, INSTRI - KHEF C177pilot@live.com