September 3, 2011

"Automation Addiction" in flying and its relation to process safety

Joan Lowy of AP has written an article mentioning the following:
'Pilots' "automation addiction" has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don't know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.
Some 51 loss of control" accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.
"We're seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes," said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. "We're forgetting how to fly."
Read the article in this link.

This has direct relations to the Chemical Process Industry. With so much automation in our idndustry, I am sure that operators are really forgetting their troubleshooting skills in the event of an emergency. Dr Trevor Kletz has always propounded that things must be kept simple and the way process control manufacturers are developing and implementing "solutions" for process safety, it leaves me dumbstruck. In another post, I had written that today I see operators who are becoming "procedural robots" during emergencies and plant upsets. This is a dangerous situation. Simulators do help in keeping operators skills up to date but management often thinks that it is a waste of money. Cluster simulation training ( for processes that have the same licensor) could be started, with companies pooling in for a common simulator training facility.

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