Agenda – 2021 UPRT Safety Summit

Capt. John Cox, CEO at SOS

How well does your Upset Prevention and Recovery Training program fit into your flight operation? If it is a stand-alone separate part of training not part of the normal flight operations, including briefings, then are you getting the most from it?

Flight safety auditors see many different flight operations. This presentation will look at integrating UPRT into the normal, every day, flight operations. Including considerations in high density airspace where heavy and super heavy jets are common, and other special areas of interest such as mountainous operations in high winds.

Pilots train for unexpected events regularly. Following that training the preparation for an event is a regular part of briefing. The briefing focuses the crew on expectations of the upcoming part of the flight (e.g. takeoff or approach/landing). Including an assessment and expected steps if an upset occurs can improve the likelihood of a successful upset encounter.

Considerations of when UPRT briefings should be conducted and potential content will be discussed.

Sonnie Bates, CEO at Wyvern

Safety leaders in the energy industry use the Bow Tie technique to analyze hazards, align mitigation strategies, and reduce severity of undesired states. This technique is also well-suited for the aviation industry, especially when seeking to understand the risks related to loss of control inflight. In this presentation, you will learn to appreciate the beauty of the bow tie technique as it is founded on creating a visual display of the threats related to the hazard, the barriers we can create to insulate us from these threats, and recovery techniques should we ever find ourselves in an undesired state.

Cody Louviere, Founder at King Crow Studios with Randall Brooks, VP at APS

Co-presenters Cody Louviere and Randy Brooks will discuss the development of VR capabilities and their application to the Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT) domain. Virtual Reality (VR), developed for gaming, has created a level of reality useful for high end technical training, including flight simulation. The real world story of unintended consequences will be shared that led to the development of a VR Procedures Trainer (VRPT) for the Boeing B-52. The role of VR into UPRT and its integration with other training resources will be shared, along with recent findings from the rollout of VR in UPRT at APS. Future potential capabilities and technical developments will also be discussed.

Dr. Janeen Kochan, CEO at Aviation Research

Unexpected events, particularly those creating surprise, interrupt ongoing mental and behavioral processes, creating an increased potential for unwanted outcomes to the situation. Human reactions to unexpected events vary for a number of reasons, including level of domain expertise, previous experience with similar events, emotional connotation, and the contextual surround of the event. Research suggests that a person becomes surprised when their expectations are inconsistent with reality by an amount higher than could reasonably have been expected from the cues available and utilized by the individual. Expert pilots are normally able to process large amounts of information quickly and accurately, while continually and seamlessly modifying their situation awareness. However, decision making performance can be impaired when pilots are confronted with events that do not adhere to expected schemata. Unexpected or surprising events cause a disruption in cognitive processes leading to a decision making delay. This decision making delay lasts until the inconsistency between what was expected, and reality, is analyzed and integrated into the pilot’s situation awareness.

Data on human factors aspects associated with Loss-of-Control Inflight and thus germane to Upset Prevention and Recovery Training is presented. First, the factors most frequently involved with surprising and unexpected events and their consequences provide the background. Then, three specific human factors aspects of Upset Prevention and Recovery Training are presented as a special case of pilot decision making when initiated by a surprising situation or unexpected event. The focus is on how these select factors can be embedded in the training of the requisite cognitive and flying skills necessary to best perceive the situation, process the information, and perform the correct action, in response to an airplane upset or loss- of-control situation.

Note: Though research based, this presentation is formatted for the operational pilot.

Capt. Bryan Burks, UPRT SME at Alaska Airlines

In 2009, an International Working Group (ICATEE) commenced activity to provide guidance to industry in how to reduce LOC-I accidents. Simulators remain the most common tool in pilot training, but there were questions regarding the ability of enhancements to address LOC-I. Over the next five years, enhanced aero-models were developed which could provide representative aircraft behavior for simulators in upsets and aerodynamic stalls.

Alaska Airlines began to deliver enhanced UPRT to their pilots in 2012, 7 years prior to FAA mandates for UPRT. Much has been learned from introducing 30 minute blocks of UPRT in recurrent training every year since. This progression validated that the most efficient use of simulators in UPRT was as the finishing “tool” in presenting accurate, realistic maneuvers that demonstrated basic aerodynamic principles that pilots must be intimately aware of.

When Alaska Airlines transitioned from analog displays to modern Primary Flight Displays (PFDs) in the 1990’s, the curricula was adapted to emphasize the wealth of new dynamic data available to the pilot encompassing energy state, flight path, and trends. New blocks of UPRT leveraged these displays, combining them with maneuver sets which provided force feedback to pilots through the flight controls. Each UPRT maneuver was designed to demonstrate a practical application of basic aerodynamic concepts that a pilot could “see and feel” in interaction with the simulator. Beginning with basic manual maneuvers without flight directors in the normal envelope, the curricula was expanded to demonstrate degraded performance outside the normal envelope, and in the marked differences between low and high altitude flight. Pilots responded favorably to the new training, and a vigorous analysis of FOQA data indicates that since these initiatives began in 2012, there has been a steady and significant reduction in low speed precursor rates and other data relevant to mitigating LOC-I.

Capt. Clarke McNeace, VP at APS with Paul Ransbury, CEO at APS

The line-up of Upset Prevention and Recovery Training (UPRT) providers across the industry is growing at a greater rate than ever before. While it’s exciting to see aviation embrace this important training, end users such as Corporate Flight Departments must be cautious. Unlike airlines, progressive flight departments are correctly integrating live on-aircraft UPRT solutions to benefit from this training medium’s superior capability to overcome potentially incapacitating human factors associated with real-world airplane upset events. While on-aircraft UPRT is essential, departments must careful not to—despite their best of intentions—throw the baby out with the bath water, so to speak, to leave advanced simulation behind.

Corporate flight departments, on-demand carriers, and business aviation operators gain maximum benefit from designing the integration of academics, on-aircraft piston and jet, advanced simulation, and even virtual reality solutions in some instances into their recurring UPRT regiment. Generally speaking, UPRT limited to simulator-only or on-aircraft-only solutions, as two examples, leaves serious risk mitigation gaps that are completely unnecessary in modern times. Fully effective solutions do not need to be expensive, nor do they need to be complicated or spreadout over long periods of time.

This presentation lays the framework for proven-effective training footprints and provides resources for flight departments to model and seek out their optimum UPRT solutions; customized solutions that fully consider how they operate, their training rhythms, and the specific fleet-types they employ.

Capt. Philip Adrian, CEO at MPS

The presentation will go into the drive of industry to wait for the perfect solution of training tools (gold-plated full-flight simulators (FFSs), aerobatic capable airplanes etc.) while, especially for the Prevention aspects of Upset Prevention and Recovery Training, there are a lot of “lower-level” tools available with which pilots can start.

Rather than waiting for perfectly simulated undesirable results during recovery we should be avoiding in the first place, we should focus on training our pilots early and with the right-sized tools, under the supervision of well-trained instructors.
With the task-to-tool approach, every task in itself can be analyzed for the correct delivery method and tool, so that training can be done with tools like iPad and general aviation aircraft, leaving the final consolidation training on the all-attitude airplane to expert training organizations like APS and performing only the complex recovery exercises on the upgraded FFS devices.

Perfect can be the enemy of “good enough”.

Capt. Brad Bennetts, Airbus UPRT Expert

In February 2009, a Bombardier Q400 stalled and crashed in New York after the crew experienced a startle event and pulled back on the control column, exceeding critical angle of attack. In the same month, a Boeing 738 stalled and crashed at Schiphol in the Netherlands after the crew experienced a startle event, pulled back on the side stick, and exceeded critical angle of attack. In June of the same year, an Airbus A330 stalled and crashed over the Atlantic Ocean after the crew experienced a startle event and pulled back on the side stick, exceeding critical angle of attack. The list of startle induced LOC-I accidents continues, and is staggering in the commercial aviation industry.

OEM’s and regulators have now acknowledged the degradation of manual flying skills due to increased reliability on automation, yet many airlines discourage manual flying in daily operations. It is a fact that many commercial pilots do not possess the required skill sets to recover from a LOC-I situation in flight. Since LOC-I is still the biggest threat to aviation safety, we must fix this problem.

Required training must be taken seriously and implemented effectively using properly trained instructors. In UPRT the safety implications and consequences of applying poor instructional technique or misleading information are arguably more significant than in other areas of pilot training. This presentation summarizes the experience of training 25 FSTD instructors and hundreds of pilots in the Airline environment. This training proved itself under severe startle during a real-life event over the Swiss Alps, saving the lives of all 259 people on board – you cannot put a price on this.

During this presentation, I will discuss the best practices for Airline UPRT instructor qualification, and the stages of implementing an effective UPRT training program in an Airline environment.

Event Team

Event participants are encouraged to join this session with questions on any aspect of UPRT. In attendance will be experts on the development, design, and implementation of UPRT solutions at nearly every level of aviation from ab initio training to corporate flight operations to air carrier integration to diverse use-cases with military agencies. If your specific question cannot be addressed during this session, a ‘post-event questions link’ will be provided to all attendees to ask questions via form submission for appropriate UPRT experts follow-up with you off-line if needed. We look forward to seeing you in this session!