Jannie Matthysen
One of the lesser-known ‘perks’ of being a helicopter pilot is that you occasionally and unexpectedly spend extended periods of time in a car, driving from one stuck / unserviceable helicopter to another – or to relieve a crew that has exhausted a flight and duty cycle.
It was during one of these impromptu road trips when I rode shotgun with a colleague, Joe, on a five-hour journey. He was happy to assume driving duties, while I was responsible for navigating and providing an uninterrupted supply of entertaining music. Naturally, I was pleased to oblige, given my self-proclaimed excellent taste in music.
Our assigned steed for this journey was a brand-new rental car of the same make and model that Joe owned. This thing was loaded with every conceivable bell and whistle, and I settled into the comfortable passenger seat with Jannie’s Road Trip Playlist at the ready.
While I’m not exactly renowned for being a good passenger, I held my pose for a few hours, but eventually had to address the elephant in the room… or the elephant in the luxury medium size family sedan, in this case.
Joe was not a bad driver, but he tested the limits of my sanity by craning his neck a full 180 degrees every time he changed lanes. “Joe, no offence, but why do you lift your entire torso out of the seat to look behind you? Our luxury family sedan is equipped with convex mirrors, blind-spot monitoring system, lane-change assist, and a bunch of additional safety features with fancy acronyms.” Predictably, Joe was defiant: “It’s the way I’ve always done it…”
Joe’s response propelled us into a debate that consumed the remainder of our journey, and by the end of it, we still had not arrived at any meaningful consensus.
Many moons ago, I had the privilege of flying with Tim Tucker during one of his first visits to South Africa. For those who are not familiar with the name, Tim is the Chief Instructor for the Robinson Helicopter Company – a role that he’s occupied under one title or another since 1982. He’s been instrumental in the development of several Robinson products and the main driving force behind improving Robinson’s safety performance through pilot training. He’s won more awards and accolades than I care to count, and to say that he’s an icon in the helicopter industry would be an understatement.
Somehow, I was assigned to conduct a dual check on Mr Tucker to assess his performance, both for insurance purposes and for his SACAA validation. At the time, I could not have accumulated more than a couple of thousand flight hours, so imagine the state of my shattered nerves when I found Tim Tucker to be the subject of my “expert” judgement.
Fortunately, Tim proved to be a gracious gentleman when I nervously asked him to teach me a few things about the R22, instead of me assessing his performance. What followed remains one of the most mind-blowing experiences of my flying career.
Lacking any effort or stress, he showed me what the R22 was capable of during our flight on a warm spring day near Rand Airport. Without breaching any limitations, he calmly talked me through a series of manoeuvres which took us right to the edges of the R22’s flight envelope.
One remarkable exercise highlighted the autorotation capability of this little helicopter in respect of airspeed, rotor RPM and flight path. It took me weeks to fully grasp and articulate what I had witnessed. Things that I learnt during that single flight in an R22, still influence the way I consider performance and flight characteristics of every helicopter I fly. My kids would say it was epic!
My experiences with both Joe and Tim left me pondering the question of why we do things in a certain way.
Joe, like many others, is reluctant to consider an alternative to the way things have always been done. Tim, on the other hand, showed me things that cannot be found in any training manual or Pilot Operating Handbook. In my own career, I’ve identified many actions in the cockpit that I could not clearly explain. If it’s not written in an SOP, checklist, Operating Manual, or any other approved guidance material, then why do we do it? Where do these actions come from, and how do we know they are safe?
Many pilots I’ve flown with over the years follow a cockpit-flow, instead of reading from a checklist. This is particularly prevalent in single-pilot operations in aircraft that are not too complex. While there is nothing wrong with this approach, the cracks begin to show when you challenge a pilot about why certain things are done contrary to the aircraft’s published checklist. The response is often something along the lines of: “I don’t know, it’s just what I’ve been taught”.
That is not the right answer.
Similar examples are rife in more mature and complex organisations where Operations Manuals, SOPs, and Checklists deviate from procedures originally published by the manufacturer. These deviations are approved by the authorities, so we expect that at some point a good reason for the deviation had to exist. However, when you start digging a little deeper you soon realise that the real motivating factor behind a specific procedure may have been lost in the mists of time.
What are the factors that drive deviating change from a standard, manufacturer-published procedure? There may be a myriad of reasons why a private weekend-warrior in a Cessna 150 or R22 may choose to follow certain procedures. Similarly, large organisations encounter very comparable catalysts for change. Some of these include:
• Regulatory requirements
• Operating environment
• Lessons learnt from incidents and accidents
• Human factors
• Ergonomic and cockpit design
• Systems and process design
• Standardisation
• Efficiency
• Culture
• Tribal knowledge / best practice
• Personal procedures / habit
Once a procedure has been captured and incorporated into the way we do things, we should be less concerned about which of these factors initiated the change, but much more troubled about why the change or updated procedure was required in the first place. This is the problem we encounter in both our own private flying and in long-established commercial operations.
Many of the reasons we introduced change have been lost in translation or simply forgotten. At the more informal end of the spectrum, our flow-items lack clear motivation and understanding.
Of course, questioning a procedure requires an in-depth understanding of the underlying systems, and it may just be that it’s easier simply accepting a procedure, rather than doing the legwork of actually learning and understanding your aircraft’s systems. Again, not the right answer.
Where tribal knowledge, conventional wisdom, or any other form of procedural evolution has found its way into our procedures, we should be documenting, somewhere in a little black book, a secret file, in the cloud, or the back of a cigarette pack, where these changes came from. We have a responsibility to make this a deliberate and formal process. (Okay, I guess the back of a cigarette pack may not be the optimum repository for this data.)
We often see that aircraft evolve to the next model with improved systems and equipment, but SOPs are not updated. A helicopter operator deploys its fleet of helicopters halfway across the world in a completely dissimilar role and operating environment, yet the old checklists remain. An organisation chooses to introduce a more efficient procedure, tailored to their operational needs but five years down the line, no one knows why the procedure exists. People move on, knowledge is lost, and lessons must be learnt all over again. Often at an extraordinary price.
Remember that my friend Joe, who cranes his neck in traffic, learnt the habit decades ago before modern technology made it safe and redundant to do so. Also consider Tim Tucker, who applied his extensive tribal knowledge as a founding-elder of the Robinson clan, to demonstrate how the get the most out of an R22.
Both their actions are laced with good and harmless intentions, but Joe’s craning is no longer relevant, nor required. Tim’s wisdom will be diluted over time by pilots like me who try to emulate what I had learned, but lacking context and detailed explanation.
Which of your procedures are a little fuzzy? How can we better capture the evolution of a procedure to preserve it for posterity? The answer should be obvious, but it will require effort. We have an obligation.
