Scared safe

A new federal program exposes airline pilots to close calls in the sky and shows them how to save their plane. The goal: preventing catastrophic crashes.

[Times photos: Bill Adair] The unique controls in the Lear jet permit the instructor to create crash scenarios from which the student pilot can learn to recover, and to resume control of the plane if the pilot can't do so.

By BILL ADAIR, Times Staff Writer
© St. Petersburg Times
published September 17, 2002

ROSWELL, N.M. -- I am in a Beechcraft Bonanza 5,000 feet above the New Mexico desert. I am wearing a blue parachute. I'm afraid we're about to crash.

Pilot Jim Priest pulls the plane straight up until all we can see is blue sky. He pushes the nose toward the ground, and for a moment, we are weightless. We plummet. Now all we see is the brown desert, rushing closer.

Priest pulls back on the stick, and we feel the gravity build as the plane starts to level off. My face contorts the way an astronaut's does in a NASA centrifuge.

"Right there, three Gs," he says. "You feel that?"

I feel it. I am gradually realizing this won't kill me.

[Photo courtesy of Veridian] A specially equipped Lear jet that can mimic big planes is used in the program. Pilots execute frightening loops, dives and pull-ups over Roswell, N.M., in their training.

I am flying loops over Roswell to experience an unusual new federal program that gives airline pilots a scary roller-coaster ride. The idea is to teach them how to recover from a sudden upset when they're flying a big jet.

Officially, this part of the program is called "confidence building," but it's better known as "calibrating the butt."

When a plane suddenly rolls or plummets, pilots get a scary feeling in the seat of their pants. By showing they can recover easily, they gain confidence and realize they don't need to panic.

These skills can have life-or-death consequences. Investigators of last November's crash of American Airlines Flight 587 in Queens, N.Y., have been exploring the possibility that the co-pilot panicked after he was startled by wake turbulence and turned the plane so abruptly that the tail fin snapped off.

Until now, pilots have been trained in simulators that provide the sensations of flight without the cost and risk of real planes. But the computerized simulators have drawbacks. They can't reproduce the extreme g-forces a pilot feels. And pilots know that if they crash the simulator, they won't get hurt.

The program has a unique approach: give pilots a scare and then teach them how their fear can be tamed.

Don't spill the coffee

"Welcome -- come crash with us," says the sign in front of a Roswell motel.

Fortunately, the sign refers to the city's reputation as a crash site for UFOs, not airplanes.

This remote town in southeastern New Mexico is an unlikely location for a program on preventing crashes, but such is the nature of political pork. The state's congressional delegation earmarked $2.8-million for the program to help the Roswell economy and provide a tenant for a dilapidated former Air Force base. About 2,000 airline pilots will come for training over the next five years.

The goal is to prevent mistakes that lead to crashes. The most common type of accident, when a pilot mistakenly guides a plane into terrain, is being addressed by better cockpit warning systems. The Roswell training focuses on the second-most common type: when pilots lose control in flight.

In some of those accidents, the pilots encountered an external force such as wake turbulence. In others, the plane malfunctioned. Regardless of the root cause, pilots can often recover if they are properly trained.

For example, the crash of USAir Flight 427 near Pittsburgh in 1994 was blamed on a rudder malfunction, but the pilots could have prevented the deadly accident if they had known to lower the nose and turn the wheel sharply to counteract the rudder.

Training plays an important role in the way pilots respond. Twenty years ago, about 75 percent of airline pilots had experience in the military, where they flew aerobatic planes and got comfortable with dramatic maneuvers.

Today, less than 40 percent have military experience. They usually have thousands of hours flying charters or corporate jets, but they've spent most of their careers trying to make flights smooth so passengers won't spill their coffee.

In the past 10 years, airlines have expanded simulator training on how to handle upsets. But many pilots say the simulators don't provide enough realism. When they look out the window and see a computer-generated scene, they don't experience true fear.

"Simulators have limits because they can only move so far," says John Cox, a St. Petersburg pilot who is the top safety official at the Air Line Pilots Association. "In-flight training gives you the real feeling in a real airplane."

The program is run by Veridian, an Arlington, Va., defense contractor that has trained military pilots for years but has done relatively little civilian training. In the program, pilots get four hours of classroom instruction, one hour in the aerobatic Bonanza and one hour in a specially equipped Lear jet that can mimic big planes such as the Boeing 737. The training costs about $7,000 per pilot.

Airline pilots make some dramatic maneuvers in the training, but the planes have dual controls so instructors can take over if the pilot gets in trouble.

Russ Easter, a former Air Force test pilot who works for Veridian, says the human body has "muscle memory" that can trigger or dispel a fear. If pilots get a seat-of-the-pants feeling that a plane is out of control, they may be too startled to recover. But if pilots have experienced the feeling before, they stay calm.

"Fear can tend to lock you up," Easter says. "But if you are confident in your ability to respond to circumstances, you are much more effective."

Russ Easter pats the jet's inflight simulator, the equipment that turns the small plane's flight into an approximation of a passenger liner in trouble.

Stick and rudder

The first step is a one-hour flight in the Bonanza. Before we take off, Priest tells me how to jump out and use the parachute.

Priest, a friendly guy with salt-and-pepper hair and a dark moustache, says I should pull the red lever to open the door, then dive straight down so I don't get whacked by the plane's tail. Then pull the cord to open the chute.

It's not the kind of preflight briefing I get on US Airways, but this is no ordinary plane. It is designed for aerobatics, so it has a beefed-up tail and a boost pump to provide fuel when the plane is upside down. The Bonanza doesn't behave like a big jet, but that doesn't matter. The goal is to show pilots that they don't have to be afraid if they start to lose control.

Priest takes off from the Roswell airport and climbs 5,000 feet over the desert to demonstrate the "confidence building" maneuvers.

Anyone watching from the ground would think they were seeing an air show. Priest does loops, barrel rolls and wing-overs, pulling as much as four Gs as he pulls up to avoid the ground.

"Here's a loop," he says as the plane climbs inverted, its belly facing the sky. The windshield fills with blue sky, then the brown desert, then sky again.

Some airline pilots get queasy.

"They're in the real world here; there is a pucker factor," Priest says. "This is not a video simulation."

For years, federal crash investigators have complained that airline pilots are too reliant on autopilots and have lost some basic flying skills. This program is like a trip back in time, when military pilots trained in aerobatic Stearman biplanes.

"This is stick-and-rudder skill," Priest says. "This is the way airplanes were meant to fly. But a lot of airline pilots have never flown this way."

Many personalities

The Lear, now cruising 12,000 feet over Roswell, is pretending to be a Boeing 737.

The plane has many personalities. The captain's seat has conventional Lear controls, but the co-pilot's seat has a unique computerized control that can be programmed to fly like a 737, a Joint Strike Fighter and virtually any other plane.

The computer allows the Veridian instructors to make the plane behave like it's being bounced by wake turbulence or is twisting out of the sky because of a jammed flight control. The computer can make the plane act like the USAir plane in the Pittsburgh accident, the United Airlines DC-10 that had a catastrophic hydraulic failure in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989, or the Fine Air DC-8 that had a shift in cargo leading to a 1997 crash in Miami.

At the controls is Cox, a US Airways captain who normally flies the Airbus A320.

He first does some simulated turbulence encounters. Easter, the Veridian instructor, pushes a button, and the plane's left wing dips toward the ground, putting the plane into a steep bank. If the passengers had been drinking coffee, they'd be wearing it now.

But Cox cranks the wheel to the right and recovers without much trouble.

"Very nice," Easter says.

They're now ready to try the Pittsburgh scenario. Easter pushes the button.

Suddenly the plane's nose swings to the right and the right wing dips sharply. This is a carbon copy of the upset that led to 132 deaths.

Cox yanks the wheel to the left and pushes the control column forward. The plane's nose dips toward the ground as he tries to regain control.

It takes a few seconds for him to level the wings. But the plane's rudder is jammed to the right, so Cox has to keep lowering the plane's nose to get enough speed to compensate. Finally he gets it under control.

Easter releases the rudder and says, smiling, "We saved the day."

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