3 July 2007
“Don’t rely too much on glass screens” – that was the message from a talk given to Cirrus owners in the USA over the weekend.
Ahead of a new report from AOPA’s Air Safety Foundation, Bruce Landsberg revealed that 45 percent of fatal accidents involving ‘technically advanced aircraft’ were weather related, as opposed to 16 percent in traditionally instrumented planes. That, says Landsberg, is not the fault of the aircraft.
On the other hand, the clarity and rich information which electronic displays afford pilots means that terrain and fuel management incidents appear to have been significantly reduced in such aircraft. Pilots using them have to learn to be systems managers.
However, Landsberg suggests that there are still things to be learned about handling the new generation of aircraft. They tend to be more slick, and a larger proportion of their accidents tend to happen in the landing phase. Maybe, he suggested, we have to take more notice of training: “we are still playing catch-up on the training aspects… We don’t yet have all of the [training] tools.”
