Aircraft designs must better account for pilot responses: US law

The FAA will soon require aircraft manufacturers to fully consider how various cockpit warnings might affect the ability of pilots to properly respond to failures. The requirements are laid out in a US funding law that seeks to address many concerns brought forth by two Boeing 737 Max crashes. The law requires the FAA to adopt, within one year, a recommendation from the NTSB that applies to “system safety assessments”. Those assessments are part of a process through which aircraft manufacturers, when designing and certificating aircraft, assign risk levels to various system failures. The risk levels are based on assumptions about how pilots will respond to failures. Within one year, the FAA must require that manufacturers’ safety assessments “consider the effect of all possible flight deck alerts and indications on pilot recognition and response”, the law says. That provision applies specifically to safety assessments that address instances when pilots must take “immediate and appropriate… corrective actions” in response to “uncommanded flight control inputs”. The law also requires that manufactures take steps to ensure their designs are safe even when pilots respond to failures in unanticipated ways.<br/>