Can Covid 'rustiness' make pilots less prepared?
Many airline and airport workers have been laid off or furloughed in the past couple of years, and for some that has meant coming back to work after a forced break -- an especially delicate proposition for pilots. Could long periods away from the cockpit affect a pilot's confidence or performance? In a report about an incident that occurred in September 2021 at Aberdeen Airport in Scotland, the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch suggests it's possible. A Boeing 737 on approach to the airport was told to perform a "go around" -- an aborted landing during which a plane climbs back up, circles around and tries again. It can happen for a number of reasons, such as bad weather or obstacles on the runway. The aircraft should have climbed to 3,000 feet before flying in a circle to approach the runway again, but instead it "deviated significantly from the expected flight path," the report says, descending rapidly and with an "undesirable" increase in airspeed that wasn't corrected soon enough. It took about a minute for the pilots to fix the mistake, before landing safely. The report notes that the crew had not always flown regularly in the previous 18 months, although flight simulators had been used to help maintain skills. "The real-world environment," it reads, "creates different demands on crews, and it is possible that this event illustrates that lack of recent exposure to the real-world environment can erode crews' capacity to deal effectively with those challenges." The report also states that "the safety benefits of simulator training are well established" and underlines that a link has not been established "between this event and a lack of line flying," but said that it is "clearly one possibility."<br/>
https://portal.staralliance.com/imagelibrary/news/hot-topics/2022-02-23/general/can-covid-rustiness-make-pilots-less-prepared
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Can Covid 'rustiness' make pilots less prepared?
Many airline and airport workers have been laid off or furloughed in the past couple of years, and for some that has meant coming back to work after a forced break -- an especially delicate proposition for pilots. Could long periods away from the cockpit affect a pilot's confidence or performance? In a report about an incident that occurred in September 2021 at Aberdeen Airport in Scotland, the UK's Air Accidents Investigation Branch suggests it's possible. A Boeing 737 on approach to the airport was told to perform a "go around" -- an aborted landing during which a plane climbs back up, circles around and tries again. It can happen for a number of reasons, such as bad weather or obstacles on the runway. The aircraft should have climbed to 3,000 feet before flying in a circle to approach the runway again, but instead it "deviated significantly from the expected flight path," the report says, descending rapidly and with an "undesirable" increase in airspeed that wasn't corrected soon enough. It took about a minute for the pilots to fix the mistake, before landing safely. The report notes that the crew had not always flown regularly in the previous 18 months, although flight simulators had been used to help maintain skills. "The real-world environment," it reads, "creates different demands on crews, and it is possible that this event illustrates that lack of recent exposure to the real-world environment can erode crews' capacity to deal effectively with those challenges." The report also states that "the safety benefits of simulator training are well established" and underlines that a link has not been established "between this event and a lack of line flying," but said that it is "clearly one possibility."<br/>
