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Making Cirrus Safe Again, and risk management

I suspect we would have 10-100x more accidents if we didn’t have automation on jetliners.

Humans are incapable of doing anything repetitively without occasional errors.

Channel Islands

greg_mp wrote:

In which 5 hours handflying. That is not so different than us…

Depends on the ops, but their accident record speaks for itself. If you spend 100 hrs a month (and that is flight time, presence time may well be 150 or 170 hours) in a workplace, you know your airplane inside out. Your point about the hand flying is relevant nevertheless. That was one of the things discussed as a consequence of AF447 as well. It is widely airline dependent however. Those who have a strict flight data monitoring and admonish anyone ever taking manual control pay the price: See Asiana. Others are more lenitent or out of need, such as airlines which fly to airports which lack the facilities for automatic approaches. European charter airlines operating into places like Greece e.t.c. get a lot more handflying done than citihoppers northern Europe. The practice of visual approaches also for airliners in the US for instance also helps.

Goes all into the same thing: In order to fly your plane safely you need to fly it, automated and handflown, to stay proficient.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

pistonfever wrote:

(1) Humans by their very nature are unreliable creatures, they can not be relied on to repetitively complete a task without occasional errors.
(2) Systems are inherently reliable by their nature, they can continuously repeat a task with absolute reliability.

I take it you refer to the technical parts of systems? That’s an important distinction. Humans are always part of a complete system. Indeed, we attempt to design systems so that they are resilient to occasional human errors.

(Actually it is not even true that technical system can repeat a task with absolut reliability. They do fail – both intermittently and permanently.)

ESKC (Uppsala/Sundbro), Sweden

pistonfever wrote:

I suspect we would have 10-100x more accidents if we didn’t have automation on jetliners.

Humans are incapable of doing anything repetitively without occasional errors.


The safety record or airliners are, I think, due more to proficiency and strong process, helped by ops, more than automation.
There is no such automation in the army, and there are very few automation, but the guys are machines, that are chosen because they can handle process in any situation. Automation is a confort and help us to do complex thing, but if we program it bad, we go CFIT. Proficiency is the key in any of these.
LFMD, France

From here

pistonfever wrote:

Without doing this, we will be the last generation to accept the inherent risks associated with being PIC.

The question is highly individual. There are some which will accept this kind of risks, others won’t.

One problem I see today is that people appear to go in the direction of risk avoidance rather than risk management. Even more mistake the two for one another, which could not be further from the truth.

Risk avoidance is restrictive and will reduce what you deem “safe” to do dramatically to the point where people get scared to leave the house. Therefore it is not something very desirable and can cause other problems such as health issues as well as depression and anxiety disorders. Unfortunately a growing part of the population develops this kind of anxieties, often enough with stuff they don’t understand in the first place.

Risk management means KNOWING the risks and managing it, a) by applying avoidance where appropriate and b) by accepting it where it is inevitable and c) developing technology and strategy to eliminate some of the risk factors with the goal of making the overall risk more acceptable.

There has been a tendency unfortunately that particularly in aviation but also elsewhere the newest risk is that one of legal prosecution which bases on risk avoidance and the question wheather the acceptance of a certain risk was negligent or not. The threshold for that has lowered massively in recent years, leading to more prosecution and therefore more people going towards risk avoidance with an eye less on the actual risk to life and property but towards the risk of legal implications. In my impression, also many CAA’s these days shift from management to avoidance, not least because of the legal threat.

None of this helps GA, nor does it help the individual human, who starts to get more and more frightful and scared into inactivity.

LSZH(work) LSZF (GA base), Switzerland

Good synthesis Mooney_Driver, thank you.

Caen LFRK, France

greg_mp wrote:

In which 5 hours handflying. That is not so different than us…

The difference between flying in a commercial environment for 50-100 hours and a private recreational environment for 5 hours every month is like day and night. And „handflying“ doesn‘t have that much to do with it.

Cirrus safety stats are ok now after all the standardization and training programs have come up.

The DA40 for comparison is just as good safety wise without all these efforts. It’s easier/more forgiving, and less used in challenging conditions than the Cirrus.

always learning
LO__, Austria

greg_mp wrote:

The safety record or airliners are, I think, due more to proficiency and strong process, helped by ops, more than automation.

Yes. And adapting the process, learning from mistakes… clear rules.

always learning
LO__, Austria

Excellent posts by Mooney_driver in both threads..

EETU, Estonia

I feel we are probably maxing out the ability of humans alone to materially reduce the fatality rate of .89/100,000 hrs

.89/100k may be at the optimistic/marketing end – SEP GA runs closer to 2-3/100k historically.

The simple FG class (DA40 etc) are closer to 1/100k.

Oxford (EGTK), United Kingdom
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