On helicopters, elephants, and training.

Coming face to face with the elephant in the room

In a keynote presentation on how we train at the recent British Helicopter Association Safety Day, one of the UK’s most experienced TRI/TREs, an insider in the world of helicopter training for over two and a half decades, addressed the elephant in the room that has been stubbornly refusing to move: everybody acknowledges that very little has changed in how we train helicopter pilots for four decades or more. In the meantime much else has changed: from the aircraft we fly and the airspace we fly in; the availability and impact of modern tools and technology; the types of tasks they enable us to achieve with our aircraft; even what we know about teaching and learning. But collectively we are unwilling – or unable – to make significant changes to what the training and checking system prescribes. Why is this? And what should we do about it?

Training for operational risks

It is no exaggeration to say that the international standards and national regulations for helicopter pilot training are still to a large extent based on requirements cascaded from accidents involving fixed-wing aircraft from generations ago. Driven by a philosophy that repeatedly practicing specific emergencies that have already happened will engrain in pilots a knowledge of how to deal with ‘worst case’ events through training, neither does this account for the endless combinations of new ways pilots find to crash their aircraft, nor does it consider that many of those ways aren’t the result of a technical malfunction at all. With time, new types of events occur and these are simply added to the requirements. The result? A progressively crowded training schedule and an enduring ‘tick box’ approach to training.

In the early 21st century, following some prominent accidents, the airline industry convened to address exactly this and determined that a strategic review of recurrent and type-rating training for airline pilots was the answer. Evidence Based Training was born from this industry-wide consensus. The resulting shift to training based on assessing specific pilot competencies determined by evidence from their operation is ongoing. Alas, their rotary wing cousins have been largely left behind while this seismic shift has been taking place. This is in some ways ironic because should we take time to gather the evidence, we would see that helicopter operations have by far the widest range of different flying tasks and the greatest delta of all between how we operate our aircraft in practice and how the system requires us to train.

The primacy of training for power loss

One of the many contradictions in the way helicopter training priorities have become oxidised, is the primacy of critical power loss as a training requirement and as a consideration in our assessment of operational risk. It is baked into our certification standards, training and checking, and flying procedures, and is often discussed as an example of the distance between how we are required to train and how we operate our aircraft in the real world.

As the conference theme of the day was tail rotors, this point was raised this in terms of how the drilling of engine failures takes precedence over tail rotor malfunction. Although those of us who have the privilege of flying large twin-turbine helicopters are likely to practice both of these skills in the simulator, the training requirement for a private pilot when it comes to tail rotor problems is limited to a ground briefing.

Operationally there is still a significant bias towards which technical malfunctions are prioritised. To give a practical example, as a SAR pilot, every single time I come into the hover alongside a boat or a cliff I consider my power and height combination and explicitly state my intentions in the event of power loss. I am required to do so by SOP. I do not explain my intentions in the event of a tail rotor malfunction, nor  – if I’m honest – do I likely give it too much thought. (This specific scenario is something I have discussed previously – link here).

It is also true that whether through training, convention, or SOP we are primed to consider technical emergencies over other kinds of operational risk. Consider a HEMS pilot who departs from a hospital landing site following a performance class one back up procedure. This involves a steep, high-power, backwards climb to ensure the pilot maintains the ability to reject back to the pad in the event of a power loss. But such a profile arguably raises the exposure of the aircraft to a tail rotor malfunction at high power and low airspeed. Mitigating of the risk of an engine failure comes at the price of accepting a potential increase in other operational risks, such as the dangers of downdraft to passersby or the possibility of lifting loose articles into the flight path. Accident and incident data tells us that we fall victim to operational risks much more frequently than we do to technical failures. Are we getting this equation right, and if not, how do we redress the balance through training?

Why is it so difficult to effect systemic change?

A helicopter is a miracle of engineering which depends upon thousands of moving parts to ultimately lift it into the sky. Each of these parts creates friction and drag as gearboxes mesh together, shafts and turbines spin, and rotors push air so we lubricate them with oil to keep things moving and we drive them with powerful engines. The interaction of human created systems and organisations is even more complicated and is also made up of many interdependent and interlocking elements. These too create drag and inertia, often in ways that are too complex for us to understand. Just like the machines we create, the larger they get, the harder they are to drive forward and they do not benefit from oil to overcome some of the friction. We see this kind of operational drag manifested in our training system.

In the socio-technical system the number of stakeholders involved is unfathomable. Each will have a different perspective, priority, and position. Change is expensive, disruptive, and always controversial. It is human to be suspicious of it, and to cling instead to routine and familiarity. Because any given change will never suit all parties, powerful opposing forces will be encountered. Even the regulator doesn’t set the rules in a vacuum, but is constrained by a web of other regulations, international standards and conventions, and knock-on consequences. We often think that re-writing the rules of the game should be as easy as a few strikes of a pen, but as US President Barak Obama (the most powerful individual in the world at the time) complained, even he was unable to implement key changes due to the constraints of ‘the system’ and complex web of interests pushing back against him.

What can be done about it?

It is a fact that most change and progress happens incrementally. What that means in practice is that small, practical, achievable advances are important. The weight of opinion on any issue eventually tips the scale after many thousands of individual grains of sand are removed from a balance on one side, and added to the other. Cultural and organisational change happens in just this way. To achieve progress we need to ‘sweat the small stuff’ and not underestimate the value of marginal gains.

Even if the overarching system were in place to do it, switching to training based on the assessment of evidence-based core competencies is not a single step, not a large single piece of work. No operator is going to make the switch overnight. The process is complicated, expensive, and requires know-how. An instructional cadre steeped in the values and knowledge of a more modern approach takes time to grow (something that is handicapped further by an ageing pilot population). 

However, a more modern philosophy and progressive training culture, such as a competency based approach can be nurtured even while it remains bedded in the roots and soil of the legacy system. Some of the early pieces of the puzzle can be put in place. It begins with teaching the instructors the basic principles of the philosophy and allowing them to introduce those principles piecemeal. For example, moving towards a facilitated debrief structured by competency. This is a bottom-up, evolutionary approach to driving change; it creates progress by slowly moving the organisational culture at the coal face. It won’t see radical rule changes overnight, but eventually the regulatory framework is dragged along and top-down change must follow. With this perspective we all become responsible for contributing to change instead of looking to others to make it happen, and its great advantage is that when enough stakeholders get on board and take responsibility individually it becomes powered by the weight of the multitude rather than being dependent upon the decision-making of the few.