Germanwings - Overreaction?

Tracking pilots' brains to reduce risk of human error Earlier this year, a Germanwings jet carrying 150 people crashed into a remote area of the French Alps, killing everyone on board. Authorities say co-pilot Andreas Lubitz, who had suffered from suicidal tendencies and depression, intentionally crashed the Barcelona-Dusseldorf flight but they are still puzzling over why he did it. Scientists from France, the US and Japan are now working together to better understand how a pilot's brain functions. The Germanwings accident was a unique case, so scientists have extended their research to understand pilots' physiological and neurological reactions to stress, with the aim of being able to identify the signals that precede potential error in order to prevent it. No matter how well trained and experienced a pilot is, human error is always possible. In this lab in the French city of Toulouse, a team is developing instruments that might help the pilot handle the workload: "We are trying to better understand what can cause human error by using the same tools as neuroscientists, like electro-encephalography, measuring the heart rate, perspiration, the pupil diametre, eye tracking, which means tracking the pilot's gaze at any given moment," explains Mickael Causse, assistant professor at the Aeronautical and Space Institute (ISAE SUPAERO) in Toulouse. "So we're carrying out all of these tests in order to better understand how a human being functions in poor conditions, under stress, or when tired, in order to prevent accidents when that's possible." Wired-up pilots flying a real, light aircraft are put into situations of forced landing. Meanwhile, their brain activity is measured and recorded. Frédéric Dehais, professor of neuroergonomics at ISAE, explains how the eye tracking device works: "It's very light, it weighs less than 80g. It has a frontal camera which shows us where the pilot is looking, his field of vision. And here we have another camera, a smaller one, that films his eye pupil and which shows us, in real time, in which direction the pilot is looking." Pupil dilation is a reliable external indicator of mental stress, according to Dehais. The scientists can watch as a highly stressed pilot's brain literally shuts down many of its critical faculties and shifts from rational decision to emotional reaction, to a state of so-called "inattentional deafness", where audible alarms and spoken instructions are ignored. One of the solutions would therefore be to reduce the load of information directed at the pilot. Daniel Callan is a senior researcher at the NICT (National Institute of Information and Communication Technology in Osaka, Japan): "So the future cockpit is, hopefully, a non-invasive, brain machine interface, that would be able to monitor the pilot's attentional workload use countermeasures, through technology, perhaps a heads-up display, to present information to the pilot in the most optimal way and reduce the amount of information to the pilot optimally, so that under high workload conditions, it's only the situation that they need to deal with, (that's all) they need to attend to." Since the Germanwings crash last March, pilots' behaviour has been under scrunity. However, researchers believe we are still a long way from switching to completely automatic, pilotless planes or even planes with just one pilot onboard. "First of all, there is a psychological barrier - are passengers prepared to board an aircraft without a pilot? For now I would say that's a no. Having just one pilot on board, unfortunately we saw what happened with the Germanwings (crash), that can be a problem. So I think, there will still be two pilots inside the cockpit for a while to come," says Mickael Causse. The potential of this research goes further as it could also be used during the pilot selection process and for monitoring the effectiveness of training techniques and cockpit designs. And it could even be applied to others working in high stress jobs, like surgeons, or for people working in nuclear power control. http://www.euronews.com/2015/05/26/tracking-pilots-brains-to-reduce-risk-of-human-error/ Back to Top

Pilot training Psychologists required IN THE aftermath of the deliberate crashing of Germanwings Flight 9525, pilots cautioned against a knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy by airlines and safety regulators. With hindsight, perhaps, alarm bells should have been ringing about Andreas Lubitz, the 27-year-old first officer who flew his plane into the French Alps, killing 150. He had been treated for severe depression in 2009, and is thought to have hidden sick notes from his bosses before the crash. Yet we also know that Germanwings followed industry guidelines for dealing with mental-health concerns. Harbouring gloomy thoughts does not preclude someone from having a pilot's licence. According to USA Today, as many as 1,500 American pilots are currently prescribed anti-depressants. Though unnerving, the industry's approach makes sense. Pilots, after all, are humans. They can be struck down by medical ailments-physical or mental-just like anybody. Stripping them of their livelihood at the first sign of melancholy would not protect passengers; to the contrary, it would endanger lives. Faced with an ultimatum between treatment and employment, many depressed pilots would hide their condition from their airline. It may then deteriorate. The threat of termination could also raise stress levels on the flight-deck, increasing the likelihood of human-factor accidents. Nonetheless, psychologists think they an under-used resource for pilot safety. According to the European Association for Aviation Psychology (EAAP), there have been six murder-suicide crashes by commercial pilots since 1980. That includes LAM Mozambique Flight 470, which was downed by captain Herminio dos Santos Fernandes in November 2013 under harrowingly similar circumstances to the Gemanwings incident. Fernandes, like Lubitz, locked his co-pilot out of the cockpit during a toilet break, before crashing the jet and killing 33. He had suffered personal torment of a different nature: the loss of his son to an apparent suicide. He, too, underwent psychological treatment before receiving a clean bill of health from his employer. Mental-health evaluations within the airline industry are surprisingly unregimented. ICAO, the UN's aviation body, issues non-binding guidance on the subject. Its Manual of Civil Aviation Medicine states that psychological testing is "rarely of value". This nonchalance is imbibed by national regulators. Britain's civil aviation authority devotes just six lines of its four-page medical document to psychiatric assessments. The most probing questions come in the earliest stage of a pilot's career. Personality tests weed out worrisome character traits-depressive, psychopathic, aggressive and so on-before flight training begins. "But," EAAP notes, "they cannot forecast what happens later in life." Having earned their wings, pilots undergo medical examinations annually, or twice a year for over-40s. These include psychiatric questions-enquiring, among other things, about mood, family relations, substance abuse and sleep patterns-but they are not conducted by clinical psychologists. EAAP therefore believes the assessments "may be rather cursory and [can] miss depressive or other conditions". At the moment, self-reporting and peer-reporting are an airline's primary defence against psychological problems in the cockpit. This seems logical. Pilots should be reasonably forthcoming with personal issues as long as they have faith in their employers' support network. Co-pilots, meanwhile, observe each other in close quarters for extended periods, and have a vested interest in flagging up trouble. But the threat of being grounded still has a chilling effect. "Who willingly admits to anything that could lead to a suspension of their licence?" one Asian captain asked in an interview with Reuters. "I won't. I need my job." Revelations that Lubitz withheld medical records from Germanwings underscore this reality. EAAP believes the solution is regular examinations by clinical psychologists, combined with improved storage and sharing of medical records. Pilots unions oppose such measures. Given that both sides have valid concerns, a compromise would be sensible. Rather than introducing one-to-one psychological assessments, airlines could bring psychologists in for simulator training sessions. Their presence might actually be appreciated by pilots. In recent years, the concept of competency-based training has gained traction in flight schools. The approach incorporates a set of training procedures called Crew Resource Management, which emphasise human factors and communication between co-pilots. Psychologists have ideal skillsets for assisting instructors with the observation and feedback components of this discipline. While there, they may as well assess pilots in other ways too. This softly-softly approach may not be enough for Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, which is now calling for random psychological tests for pilots and relaxed doctor-patient confidentiality. But other airlines may see it as a way of bringing doctors on-board without making them the bad guys. Marlene Manave, the former boss of LAM Mozambique, said of her carrier's response to Flight 470: "There is nothing we can do, because there is nothing that we failed in ... This has to do with human factors, and you cannot predict that." In terms of aviation regulatory compliance, she is correct. But pilot murder-suicide is caused by a damaged mind, not a damaged machine. Psychologists have a valid role to play in keeping civil aviation safe.