Airline Pilots and Professionalism

by Capt. Gihan A Fernando
MBA,
gafplane@sltnet.lk
RCyAF, SLAF, Air Ceylon, Air Lanka, Singapore Airlines, SriLankan Airlines, CAASL.

The story is told of two school friends, meeting after many years at a school function. One asks the other what sort of job he is doing. The answer was that after leaving school he had gone to Medical College and then qualified as a Surgeon. “How about you” he asked in turn. His friend had replied that he worked as an Airline Pilot.

Then the Surgeon says, “I had to go to Med School for five long years and another year of internship before I was even called a ‘Doctor’. You guys have it relatively easy as your training is only about 18 months and you get to be called an Airline Pilot.”

Then the Pilot tells the doctor the essential difference is that “you get to bury your mistakes while my mistakes will bury me!”

This is just one aspect of an airline pilots’ working life.

Another aspect is the ability to evaluate and manage the potential risks involved, from departure to destination by maintaining a situational awareness in relation to other traffic in the vicinity. If the risk is too great then the pilot does not pursue the initial plan of action. Instead he/ she will draw on his/ her knowledge and experience to follow an alternate means of compliance.

To help pilots to achieve this, in modern aircraft there are two Light Emitting Diode (LED) displays in front of each of them known as the Primary Flight Display (PFD) and Navigational Display (ND). In the ND there is traffic in the vicinity displayed from the Traffic Collision Avoidance System. (TCAS). (See picture)

As can be seen, the pilot has all the conflicting and other traffic in the vicinity displayed on his ND to help build mental picture. Also, perhaps to a greater degree, listening out through his headphones, or speaker, the chatter between the other aircraft in the vicinity and the control tower, helps them to form that mental picture. In an ideal world he/ she will not do anything to compromise safety. The Litmus test is to ask the question whether one would take the same course of action if one’s family was on board that flight.

This bring me to the recent report of a SriLankan Airbus 330 aircraft that declined to climb when given clearance to climb by Ankara Air Traffic Control (ATC), as they were aware of another aircraft at higher level. The crew would have had the display of all the traffic in the vicinity on their ND’s (the instruments are duplicated). Therefore, there was no real conflict of traffic and good communication prevailed to ensure that it was a non-event. This is a common occurrence of the day-to-day life of an airline pilot.

It probably warranted a confidential ‘Incident Report’ which is essentially a confidential feedback to the management and can be passed on to the ATC in Ankara, Turkey, through proper channels to fine-tune their operations. The cardinal rule in report writing is that it should contain only facts in the third person and the crew should never pat themselves on their backs! By accident or design this non-event had been leaked to the media and hyped. Was it to create a distraction from our day-to-day problems? As one airline pilot put it, it was no big deal. How did the confidential document such as this leak out to the public domain? In contrast if a surgeon saves a patient’s life, using his knowledge, experience and skill, he does not go bragging in public and it doesn’t even make the news!

After two significant crashes in the early seventies in Florida Everglades and Portland, Oregon, USA, in the pre-glass cockpit era, it became evident that resource management, communications and knowledge on human factors were deficient among airline crews and needed to be formally instructed in these ‘soft skills’. Workshops were soon designed and conducted to discuss all aspects of an Airline pilots’ working life. It became mandatory to be held every two years for all airline pilots the world over. By the pilots for the pilots. The surgeons soon copied the methods used like the use of checklists and called it ORM (Operating Room Management). The Captain or the Surgeon sets the ‘tone’ in his team.

The writer was a Crew Resource Management (CRM) facilitator for almost 10 years in a successful far eastern carrier. At the end of the three to five day programme, he wrapped up with a quote from Capt. Robert N Buck “My heroes are the unknown, unheralded airline pilots who fly without incident or accident, making decisions, stopping potential disasters before they happened, flying all night to see though scratchy, tired eyes; fighting bad weather in all seasons from ice to thunderstorms; away from home and family for at least half of every month.”

Almost every time I got a hesitant applause from the wide cross section of Aviators in the class room. This was a normal day-to-day experience in an Airline pilot’s working life and it boils down to professionalism.