In Report on UPS Crash, Safety Board Urges Steps to Deter Pilot Fatigue On Overnight Cargo Flights
The National Transportation Safety Board ( Twitter: @NTSB) found Tuesday that the probable cause of the crash of a UPS Airbus A300 cargo plane on approach to the Birmingham, Ala. airport last summer was the flight crew’s errors during the approach, including their failure to monitor the aircraft’s altitude.
The crash at 4:47 a.m. on Aug. 14, 2013, destroyed the plane as it hit the ground less than a mile short of the runway, killing both the pilot Cerea Bell and the co-pilot Shanda Fanning.
The board found that Fanning was suffering from “acute sleep loss” which contributed to her errors, including failing to make required minimum altitude callouts during the approach.
The NTSB recommended that the Federal Aviation Administration ensure that airlines with overnight operations remind flight crews of the threat of fatigue.
The board also recommended that UPS work with the Independent Pilots Association to improve the crew fatigue reporting system.
In a statement, UPS (Twitter: @UPS) said “it is difficult to understand how the NTSB reached its conclusion regarding fatigue related to night flying when the pilot had not flown in 10 days, and the first officer was off eight of the previous 10 days.”
UPS said it schedules pilots to fly about 30 hours a month, compared with 55 hours a months that passenger pilots fly.
NTSB member Robert Sumwalt, a pilot with 32 years’ experience, criticized UPS for not activating up-to-date software on the plane that could have alerted the crew to how perilously close it was to the ground.
Sumwalt said that the company had “guys running around with clipboards and stopwatches to make sure that if an airplane is a minute late, somebody is going to be held accountable for it. But the sad thing here is this was a layer of defense — the Smart Call Outs [which alert pilots to low altitude levels] and the updated TAWS [terrain awareness and warning system] — were two defenses that could have possibly prevented this accident.”
And Sumwalt added, “If you’re interested in efficiency, I can guarantee you that on Aug. 14 of last year, those packages on that airplane did not get delivered by 10:30 in the morning.”
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