(USA Today) NTSB: Pilots Need Air-Hazard Skills

By Alan Levin, USA TODAY

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Accident investigators say new flight simulators could help correct the biggest killer in aviation: pilots who can’t recover from out-of-control situations like the one that killed 50 people in a crash near Buffalo last year.

Pilots at airlines receive almost no hands-on training in how to recover from aerodynamic stalls and other extreme scenarios, according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The reason for the glaring shortfall is that current flight simulators, the backbone of airline training programs, cannot accurately reproduce such calamities.

Years of research in the military and NASA has led to new simulators that accurately represent how planes behave in stalls, severe icing and other crash scenarios, according to the NTSB and scientists — but there is no federal requirement to use those simulators.

The machines could help with one of the most vexing and deadly problems facing aviation. A USA TODAY review of NTSB accident reports over the past decade found that 317 of the 433 airline fatalities on U.S. carriers since 2000 — or 73% — could have been prevented with better simulator training. Around the world, planes that went out of control and crashed killed 1,991 people from 1999 through 2008, according to Boeing. That is more than twice that of the second-biggest category, accidentally flying into a mountain or the ground.

In the crash near Buffalo on Feb. 12, 2009, a pilot jerked the plane into a steep climb that stalled the wings. The proper way to recover would have been to lower the plane’s nose, but the pilot kept trying to pull the nose up, according to the NTSB. The plane struck a house, killing all 49 aboard and a man in the home … Read the Full Article at USA Today