Alert Warned Pilots: Cut Cockpit Chatter
By Sarah Vos, Lexington Herald-Leader, Ky.
Jan. 19–Less than seven months before Comair Flight 5191 crashed into a field near Blue Grass Airport, the National Transportation Safety Board — responding to a commuter plane crash in Missouri that killed 13 — recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration require airlines to crack down on extraneous cockpit conversations.
In response, the FAA put out a safety alert, instructing airlines to emphasize the importance of maintaining a “sterile cockpit” — in other words, to remind pilots not to engage in the kind of casual chatter that the pilots on Comair 5191 engaged in.
According to NTSB transcripts of Flight 5191′s cockpit voice recorder, released by the agency Wednesday, co-pilot James Polehinke and pilot Jeffrey Clay talked about kids, dogs and careers before taxiing onto the runway, and they continued their conversation as they prepared for takeoff.
FAA regulations forbid any non-essential conversation in the cockpit during taxiing. Comair officials have acknowledged that the two broke company policy about maintaining a sterile cockpit.
But an attorney representing Polehinke, Flight 5191′s first officer and only survivor, said yesterday that Polehinke and Clay’s conversations didn’t play a significant role in the crash that killed 49 people.
“The conversations were well before the takeoff, and the checklists were all done,” Bruce Brandon of Greensboro, N.C., said in an interview.
Brandon pointed to other problems that might have contributed to the crash, such as the incorrect airport charts given to the pilots, the lack of information about recent runway construction and taxiway changes, and the fact that only one air traffic controller was on duty that morning. The controller didn’t notice that the plane was on the wrong runway. The FAA has acknowledged that two controllers should have been working.
“There’s supposed to be an overlapping system,” Brandon said. “Here it obviously didn’t work.”
The Aug. 27 crash was the worst aviation disaster in the United States since 2001, and the worst ever in Lexington.
How often pilots chat about kids, dogs and other irrelevant topics at key moments, whether they crash or not, has never been studied, said David Rapoport, a Chicago-based attorney who has worked on more than a dozen airplane accident cases.
But violations of the sterile-cockpit rule are often found on the cockpit voice recorders after crashes. “In the wrecked planes, there are an awful lot of sterile-cockpit violations,” Rapoport said.
Pilots would observe the rule more closely if it were enforced by random checks, he said. Either the FAA or airlines could periodically check cockpit recorders for violations, he said. Right now, the recordings aren’t saved unless there was a crash or another problem.
Rapoport thinks most pilots follow FAA regulations. “However, people don’t fear the non-pertinent conversation as much as they ought to,” he said. Most of the time, pilots can engage in casual conversation without getting into trouble.
FAA spokeswoman Laura Brown told The Associated Press that the agency enforces the rule with regular ride-along inspections and incident reports that pilots can file anonymously about one another. “We’re not there to watch every mechanic turn every screw, and we’re not there to listen to every cockpit crew listen to one another,” Brown said.
Violators can be punished with a letter of correction, a civil penalty, or a suspension or revocation of their pilot’s license, Brown said. She had no figures on how often pilots are disciplined for such violations.
Since 1981, FAA regulations have forbidden pilots from non-essential conversation in the cockpit during taxiing, takeoff and landing. The rule specifically forbids “any activity during a critical phase of flight which could distract any crew member from the performance of his or her duties.”
The rule came into effect as the result of accidents that included a 1974 North Carolina crash that killed 72 people, according to the Flight Safety Foundation, an international organization of air carriers, flight crew members and others.
As the Eastern Air Lines plane approached the Charlotte airport, the pilots talked about used cars, politics and economic uncertainty. They tried to identify an amusement park in the landscape below.
After the plane was cleared to land, the pilot remarked, “Yeah, we’re ready. All we got to do is find the airport.” The plane crashed three seconds later, more than three miles from the runway. Of the 82 people on board, only 10 survived.
The NTSB made its most recent recommendation about the sterile-cockpit rule as a result of an October 2004 crash of a commuter airplane in Kirksville, Mo. The NTSB report on that case noted that the pilots “frequently engaged in conversation that lacked a professional tone,” and it determined that the chatter was a factor in the accident.
The transcript of the cockpit voice recorder showed the pilots joking, swearing and yawning as the plane descended below 10,000 feet — the point at which the sterile-cockpit rule-comes into play.
The plane descended too fast and missed the runway, hitting trees near the airport. Both pilots and 11 passengers were killed.
News researcher Linda Niemi contributed to this story.
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