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Implications for Modern Transport Airplanes
Historically, pilot-induced oscillations (PIO) associated with fly-by-wire technology have occurred in military and experimental aircraft, which usually introduce advanced technologies before they appear on civil transports. This has provided a breathing space for that category of PIO problems to be worked out before exposing the traveling public to new hazards. However, fly-by-wire technology is now standard for new transport airplanes, bringing the possibility of PIO.
A U. S. National Research Council (NRC) report (McRuer, 1997) is intended to alert all interested parties to this hazard and to offer recommendations to avert serious problems in the future. Aside from the evident need to continue research and pilot training in this area, a few striking conclusions and recommendations emerge from the NRC report:
1. Parameters measured by on-board flight recorders, the “black boxes,” need to be at higher data rates, to capture PIO events that may have contributed to accidents. Dr. Irving Statler, who is involved in a major part of NASA’s Aviation Safety Program, states that the highest data rate found in black box recorders is only 8 samples per second, as compared with the 20-30 samples per second needed to capture PIO events.
2. Highly demanding tasks with known and suspected triggering events for PIO should be included in simulation, flight test, and certification. These tests should use pilots with experience and training in PIO events.
3. Current certification procedures should be revised to incorporate existing techniques for mitigating the risk of PIO.
The warnings that were sounded by the NRC report of potentially dangerous PIOs in commercial aviation should be taken seriously. The recommendations of the experienced group that wrote the report should be put into action.
On the matter of recording PIO events that may have contributed to accidents, an ambitious approach is under study at the Aerospace Corporation and at RTCA (Grey, 2000). This is a satellite-based aircraft monitoring system and data archive that does away with the need for on-board flight recorders. The satellite-based system could provide real-time, high-data-rate information for accident prevention or diagnosis. Such a system is seen as a logical outgrowth of developments in the field of communications.
