Controlled flight into terrain

Abstract: Controlled flight into terrain accidents are those in which an aircraft, under the control of the crew, is flown into terrain (or water) with no prior awareness on the part of the crew of the impen...

Abstract: : Although all aviation accidents are of interest to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA), perhaps none is more disconcerting than those in which a fully functioning aircraft is inexplicably flown into the ground. Referred to as controlled flight into terrain (CFIT), these accidents continue to be a major safety concern within aviation, in particular general aviation (GA). A previous study as part of the FAA's Safer Skies agenda examined 165 CFIT accidents using root cause analysis and developed 55 interventions to address their causes. While the study represented the work and opinions of several experts in the FAA and industry, the findings might have benefited from a more detailed human error analysis involving a larger number of accidents. In this study, five pilot-raters independently analyzed more than 16,500 GA accidents occurring between 1990-1998 using the Human Factors Analysis and Classification System (HFACS). Of the GA accidents examined, 1407 were identified as CFIT and compared with non-CFIT accidents using HFACS. The analysis revealed a number of differences in the pattern of human error associated with CFIT accidents. Findings from this study support many of the interventions identified by the CFIT Joint Safety Analysis Team (ISAT) and Joint Safety Implementation Team (JSIT), permitting safety professionals to better develop, refine, and track the effectiveness of selected intervention strategies.

Abstract: Controlled flight into terrain accidents are those in which an aircraft, under the control of the crew, is flown into terrain (or water) with no prior awareness on the part of the crew of the impen...

Abstract: Terrain awareness enhancing avionics, such as Synthetic Vision Systems and the Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System, have been developed to reduce the number of controlled flight into terrain accidents. The protection these systems offer, however, is far from optimal. Synthetic Vision Systems only provide pilots with perceptual data, and leave all cognition and interpretation of data to the pilot. With Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems the opposite is true. Here, pilots are only confronted with compelling advisories and commands without the underlying data and rationale. This paper presents a display system, the Emergency Landing Guidance System, that visualizes the functional meaning of surrounding terrain, adopting an ecological interface design approach. The potential benefits of this approach are demonstrated with the case of locating and approaching a suitable landing area after sudden complete engine failure. To evaluate the effect of the new display on pilot terrain awareness, an experiment was conducted in a fixed-base flight simulator. Results show that the new display supports pilot terrain awareness much better than present terrain avoidance systems, i.e., pilots better understand the "meaning" of the terrain in relation to their goals and constraints. However, pilots also operated more closely to the limits of performance, thereby negatively affecting the metrics for safety.