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Avoiding Plane Crashes By Crunching Numbers
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The training got pilots to focus more on landing at the right speeds and with the right rate of descent, reducing the rate of unstable approaches by more than 70 percent, the company's executives and pilots said.
"The rates were unacceptable to us," said Paul Morell, the carrier's vice president of safety, who emphasized that such incidents were rare even before the reduction. "It really boils down to this: Zero is what is acceptable to us. We don't want any of them."
An added benefit of such programs, the carrier said, is the ability to monitor changes.
Within a few months of the new approach procedures, US Airways spotted some problems in how pilots abandoned landings during unstable approaches, which is known as conducting a "go around," said Tom Lulkovich, the carrier's director of flight safety. The carrier then stepped up training to eliminate the issue.
"We want to know how effective we were at mitigating risk," Lulkovich said.
The carrier has even used the database to pinpoint unstable approaches to runways at different airports. Pilots were having trouble on one type of approach into Las Vegas's international airport, so the carrier rewrote its charts to give pilots a better sense of when to make their turns, pilots and executives said.
Two years ago, a few US Airways jets were damaged when their tails hit the ground on takeoff. Such events are exceedingly rare, especially among highly trained pilots. The company's executives were perplexed -- until they analyzed flight data, which showed their planes' average pitch rate at takeoff was too high by a few tenths of a degree.
After changing the pilot training program, the carrier recorded no further tail strikes at takeoff, executives and pilots said.
US Airways also has used the data to lobby federal regulators to make changes. It provided the FAA with detailed lists of instances in which planes' midair collision warning systems sounded near the international airport in Phoenix. The FAA used the data to help redesign the airspace around the airport, a project completed in October, to mitigate the risks of small planes colliding with jetliners.
"Everything is about identifying risk here," Lulkovich said.
