Tag: Technology

Communication Prevents Disasters

It’s often forgotten that there’s a need to repeat messages. We are not creatures that retain everything we see and hear. There are exceptional people, it’s true, those who cram away facts and have an amazing level of recall. Often that’s my reaction to watching students leading teams on University Challenge[1]. How on earth do they know those obscure facts?

Most of us do not respond well to those who say, “Well, I told them once. I’m not going to tell them again.” That line is probably one of the most misguided utterances a teacher can make. Like it or not, this approach is part of our heritage. Past ages, when deference was expected, listening was mandatory, and misremembering was entirely the listener’s fault.

We’ve had a cultural shift. Our complex technological society doesn’t work in a command-and-control way. Too many disasters can be traced to miscommunications and misunderstanding. Now, the obligation exists on those delivering a message to go some way to ensure that it’s received with a degree of comprehension. That’s when repetition has a role to play.

One of the pillars of Safety Management Systems (SMS) is Safety Promotion. It’s the Cinderella of the aviation safety world.

Why do I say that? Experience for one. It’s much easier to get policy made and funding for the “hard” sciences like data acquisition, analysis and decision-making systems. These are often perceived as providing tangible results. Actionable recommendations that satisfy the need to be recognised as doing something. Even if that something is questionable.

Communication is key to averting disasters. It’s no good having pertinent information and failing to do anything with it, other than file it. The need to know is not a narrow one. Confined to a specialist few.

Let’s go back to 2003 and the Space Shuttle Columbia accident[2]. This craft was destroyed in a disaster that claimed the lives of its crew. The resulting investigation report is extremely compressive, if slightly overwhelming, but it has some key points to make.

To quote, “That silence was not merely a failure of safety, but a failure of the entire organization.” [Page 192]. In other words, the hidden concerns and internal machinations of an organisation can smother safety messages and led to failure. Since 2003, it’s sad to say that there are multiple occasions when what has been learned has been ignored. The impact has been devastating.

So, to shape the future let’s remember the Cinderella of the aviation safety. Discovering problems is not enough. It’s vital that practical solutions and good practice gets promoted. That needs to be done forcefully and repetitiously.

NOTE: This is, in part, a reaction to watching this video presentation. https://acsf.aero/an-unforgettable-closing-to-the-2025-acsf-safety-symposium-with-tim-and-sheri-lilley/

[1] https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b006t6l0

[2] https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/20030066167/downloads/20030066167.pdf

Plug and sigh

Daily writing prompt
Jot down the first thing that comes to your mind.
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Weird, I know. My first thought as I looked across my tatty desk. Cables are irritating. Even the alternative is irritating. Tapping away at this keyboard I’m tied by a slim black wire that runs off into a darkened place. If I had a wireless keyboard, I’d be doubly irritated. Sure, as eggs are eggs the battery would not be charged when I needed it to be charged. And I would have put the battery charger away in a box and forgotten where I’d put it.

They’re everywhere. Cables and connectors. This could be the century of the cable, much a the last one. Dam things are cash cows too. Companies like to extract the maximum consideration out of us. Our fantastically capable new tech is useless unless we dip into our pockets and buy cables with just the right connector[1].

Fine, there have been attempts to overcome this bond we have with wires. Wireless charging and wireless connections don’t always deliver what they say on the box. They can be as much faff as plugging in cables. Physics dictates those energetic electrons like conductors. When power is needed, travelling faster and further through wires. Whizzing along with the potential to do work wherever they end up.

If I take the bigger picture, the situation is not so simple. Wires dedicated to communication are going out of fashion. Once upon a time copper wires brough the telephone into the house. Now, that communication is optical. Light flashes to the tune of the ones and noughts we seek.

Getting power from A to B, storing it and using it as needed, there lies unending challenges. From the mega to the micro level. Controversies about huge electricity pylons straddling the countryside. To powering the lean electronics hidden in the plastic case of my keyboard.

Oh! I have slipped the surly bonds of wires. And danced the earth on laughter-powered things.

To borrow a poetic line on flying[2]. If only we could loose this bond forever. Unlikely as it seems. In my profession we contend with the fact that civil aircraft, where lightness equals profit, there’s between 100 and 200 miles of wires.

Let’s think. Will this be perpetual? Put aside all the steps that machines may advance, at some level they come down to wires and multiple connections. In a way, lucky for us. That means there will always be an off switch.

[1] https://newsthump.com/2018/05/21/man-decides-to-keep-box-of-cables-hes-has-since-2002-for-another-year/

[2] https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/157986/high-flight-627d3cfb1e9b7

Revolution: Hype vs Reality

Talk is of a revolution[1]. That sounds sensational. It sounds like marketing talk aimed at creating an insatiable desire for something new. So, that kind of talk immediately switches on the cynical side of my brain. Is this hype or is it real?

We’ve had plenty of both in my lifetime. Colourful boys adventure books with novelties like nuclear powered aircraft and moonbase vacations. It’s not that “flying a kite” is entirely bad. Those imaginings of the future had pictures of prototype flying cars. Now, we maybe on the verge of that prediction becoming real.

AI is not new. It’s been a research subject for decades. What we have most recently is the coming together of concepts and the practical machines on which to run those concepts. Amazing has been the speed of progress. That’s a modest word considering the sudden adoption of new tools that go way beyond simple INTERNET search engines.

Bill Hunter’s line: “You can’t stop progress”. At least that’s the line I remember of the 1994 film Muriel’s Wedding[2]. It was said on a rocky path to “progress” induced disaster.

My curiosity centres around avoiding the hype and finding out what’s real. That’s in the vain hope that I might not be left behind in this rapid surge of “progress”. So, to keep up with the latest technical developments I clicked on a TED App. The boss of TED, Chris Anderson has recently interviewed Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI[3]. He’s the guy behind ChatGPT. AI has elevated new people into the spotlight. It’s given established technology companies a headache. Their desire to be in the pack, or leading the pack is mighty strong.

My takeaways form this interview are that AI will outpace human intelligence, in time. No one knows how much time, but the path is set. The direction of travel isn’t in the control of traditional institutions or government departments. Society must get its head around a time when we live with machines that out pace us.

Second, it would be nice to have an enlightened global regulator to ensure that the massive amount of development going on produces outcomes that are for the public good. Chances of that happening are about zero, although not zero. There’s even a possibility that the industry at work on this technology realises the need for a set of enforceable rules.

Questions of safety are paramount. Even though society debated the impact that the INTERNET would have on us, steps to provide protections and boundaries only came about after the event. Lost in a storage box, I once had a book called “The Sleeping Sentinels”. Basically, the thought was that political parties and the legal profession are always more than ten steps behind the technologists. We are highly reactive.

One interesting aspect of the interview was the pauses. What was evident is that it’s hard to find the right language to describe what’s happening. Walking a tight rope between sounding like Chicken Little[4] and a wise respected elderly professor. Revolution is the right word.

POST: It’s not just IT Why AI Demands a New Breed of Leaders

[1] https://youtu.be/Xv8FBjo1Y8I

[2] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PLDcevp5w5o

[3] https://www.ted.com/talks/sam_altman_openai_s_sam_altman_talks_chatgpt_ai_agents_and_superintelligence_live_at_ted2025

[4] https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/chicken_little

Transform of Future Careers

My education was an industrial one. I guess I was fortunate. No “A” levels for me.

Part of my apprentice programme was to move around the different departments of a major electronics company. That included a range from demanding technical areas, testing new designs, to the everyday pressure of a print room run by an ex-Army man who ran it as if he’d never left the Army. Yes, print rooms were once a staple part of an engineering company. Huge dyeline machines that constantly ponged of ammonia twinned with the noisiest dot-matrix printers ever made. I even got to learn some COBAL[1] with the business unit that put together our payslips. Amazingly enough I was introduced to mathematical concepts, like Fast Fourier Transforms (FFT), at a time when the digital logic needed to implement such algorithms consisted of large cabinet loads of discrete electronics. Now, my simple mobile phone can crunch numbers in this way.

Several weeks here, and several weeks there. One excursion meant spending hot summer days in the Mendip Hills at a quarry testing equipment in deep water. Another meant time working in a former brick-built railway shed that served as a small machine shop.

Of all the different experiences that I had in those formative years (16-18 years) the one that I’ll never forget was a secondment to a London based factory. The company’s training officer recognised that this small village country boy needed to go to the big city. Uppark Drive, Ilford no longer exists as a manufacturing plant. That’s no surprise. In the late 1970s that factory handled the company’s long-lived products. Technology that has gone forever.

Anyway, this is not so much about me. What I’m led to speculate about is what sort of modern-day engineering apprenticeship offers. Does it offer the variety of experiences that I had? Is industrial sponsorship as generous and altruistic as it once was? Do industry and government work hand in hand to ensure a future workforce has the skills that are needed?

Simply the answer is probably “no”. In fact, the structure and organisation of design and manufacturing organisations has changed dramatically. In aerospace there are some companies that have a major factory with every facility at their heart but most subcontract extensively. Colleges have been turned into educational shops, paid by student numbers.

Here’s a thought. It’s not so much what’s taught that’s key as much as the exposure to a variety of ways of thinking and working. A variety of exposure give a student a toolbox from which they can then draw. Finding interesting work will depend on adaptation and repurposing past skills. That’ll be the only way to assure the world doesn’t pass by at an ever-increasing pace.

I’m sure that advances in artificial intelligence (AI) will affect everyone[2]. The idea that all AI will do is displace people is wrong. It just means that, like my recollections above, the types of activities that needs to be done will be entirely different in 2065. Unless I’m highly unusual, I will be long gone. But if you are 25 years old this is worth a thought.

[1] https://archive.org/details/historyofprogram0000hist/page/n7/mode/2up

[2] https://nap.nationalacademies.org/download/27644#

From Prescription to Performance-Based Regulation

One regulatory development that has stuck since the start of the new century is the idea that we need to transition from prescriptive requirements to performance-based requirements. It’s not too hard to understand where the motivation to change has come from but there are several strands to the path. Here’s three that come to mind.

For one, the intense dislike of overbearing governmental regulators who adopt an almost parental attitude towards industry. It’s true that safety regulatory bodies have a duty to serve the public interest. The difficulty arises in interpreting that brief. Not as police officers sometimes did, imagining everyone as a potential miscreant.

My experience as a regulator started at a time when traditional institutional approach was quite common. There was a respectful distance between the airworthiness surveyor or operations inspector and the aviation industry that they oversaw. I think, even the term “surveyor” was one inherited from the insurance industry at the birth of flying.

A wave of liberalisation swept into the 1980s. It was an anathema to those who started their careers as men from the Ministry. The idea that regulators should be in a partnership with industry to meet common goals was not easily accepted. Undoubtably a change was necessary and, naturally, easier for an up-and-coming generation.

The next move away from regulatory prescription came as its value declined. That is, not that there will not always be an element of prescription by matter of the written law. However, for detailed technical considerations it became less and less practical to say, this is the way it must be. The minute decision-makers were faced with the complexity of a microprocessor it become clear that it’s not effective to simply prescribe solutions.

Much of the changes that took place can be traced to the evolution of system safety assessment and the use of probabilistic methods in aviation. In mechanics, prescribing a safety guard for a chain drive is straightforward. For complex electronics saying when a flight system is safe enough requires a different approach. Regulators are now driven to set objective rather than dictate solutions.

My third point is a future looking one. Whatever the history and heritage of aeronautical innovation, it’s true that a “conservative” but rapid adoption of new technology continues to be a source of success. Great safety success as well as commercial success.

Hidden amongst the successes are products, and ways of working that don’t meet the grade. The joke goes something like this: “How can I make a fortune in aviation?” Answer: “Just start with a big one.” Implicit in this observation is a wiliness to innovate at risk. That means, amongst many things, having confidence, adaptability and not be so constrained as to be assured failure. An objective or performance-based approach to safety regulation opens opportunity to innovate more freely whilst still protecting the public interest in safety.

There’s no fixed destination for regulatory development.

Key Milestones in Safety Management

One chunk of a recalling of the path civil aviation has taken in the last 40-years is called: Safety Management Systems (SMS). It’s a method or set of methods that didn’t arrive fully formed. It can easy be assumed that a guru with a long white beard stormed out of his quiet hermitage to declare a eureka moment. No such thing happened.

Through every part of my engineering design career the importance of reliability and quality systems was evident. Codified, procedural and often tedious. Some say the quality movement had its origins in the world of the 1960s moonshot and the advent of nuclear weapons. I don’t think there’s a single spring from which the thinking flows.

That said, there are notable minds that shaped the development of standardised quality systems. Acknowledging that the Deming Cycle[1] is core component doesn’t take too much of a leap. It’s a simple idea for capturing the idea of continuous improvement. Aerospace design and production organisations adopted this method readily.

Those first steps were all about the Q word, Quality. How to deliver a product that reliably worked to specification. At the time the S word, Safety wasn’t spoken of in the same way. There had been an underlying presumption that quality success led to safety success. However, this was not entirely true. An aerospace product can leave a factory 100% compliant with a pile of requirements, specifications and tests only to subsequently reveal failing and weaknesses in operational service.

In the saddest of cases those failing and weaknesses were discovered because of formal accident or incident investigation. In civil aviation these are conducted independently. Worldwide accident investigators and aircraft operators often detected a lack of learning from past events. This situation stimulated activities aimed at accident prevention.

In 1984, the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) published the first edition of its Accident Prevention Manual. This document introduced concepts and methods aimed at accident prevention. It was a pick and mix of initiatives and processes gleamed from the best-known practices of the time.

One of the jobs I had on joining the UK Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) Safety Regulation Group (SRG) was to work with the ICAO secretariate on an update to the Accident Prevention Manual (Doc 9422). The UK CAA has long been an advocate and early adopter of occurrence reporting and flight monitoring. Both were seen as key means to prevent aviation accidents.

It was envisaged that a second edition of the manual would be available in 2001. That didn’t happen. Instead, ICAO decided to harmonise information available on safety and put that into one manual. At that point safety information was scattered around the various ICAO Annexes. Thus, the content of the Accident Prevention Manual was consolidated into the Safety Management Manual (SMM) (Doc 9859). This new document was first published in 2006.

There’s much more to say since the above is merely a quick snapshot.

[1] https://deming.org/explore/pdsa/

The Human Touch

One of the most irritating aspects of bureaucracy is codification. What I mean is the need to tick a box that describes you or your problem. Restaurants, retailers, charities, religions, politicians and government departments all do the same. Sophisticated or crude administrative systems fall back on the same methods.

It’s immensely unsatisfying. Applicable to me, at this stage in life, is the age tick box. It doesn’t matter where the questionnaire or data gathering exercise comes from there’s always this box that starts at 65 years old. The previous box finishes at 64 years old.

This fits the respondent into the next step-up in age. Following from this simple date is a whole plethora of assumptions about the nature of a persons’ likes and dislikes, needs and wishes. An unsympathetic algorithm can then crunch numbers and send adverts for sheltered retirement homes, medication and certain types of undemanding travel opportunities.

Now, I could join the chorus of cries against bureaucracy. That would be popular but dumb. It’s a bit like the textiles we put on daily. We could go around naked as the day we were born. Trouble is that our present society doesn’t work well in the case where everyone is naked. Cold too.

So, it is with bureaucracy. It’s not going away anytime soon. The best we can do is to hunt for better ways of collecting data and making it useful for decision-makers and those who want to sell us something. Or even political parties that are keen to target us with their messages.

In the News this week is as good a sketch for an updated Yes Minister as any. Revolution is afoot. Suddenly the pen pushers who tie you up in red tape are going to be replaced with super-efficient algorithms and artificial intelligence to return us to paradise.

I think that’s the only reason Adam and Eve had to leave the garden of Eden. Nothing to do with apples. Well, not the ones that hang on trees. It was an iPad that had fallen though a time warp. Filling in a questionnaire on happiness it seems that one of them ticked the wrong box.

I see a difficulty with replacing civil servants with robotic algorithms and artificial intelligence. It might be the case that for routine activities, where the pattern of human behaviour is straightforward and well understood, a set of operations can be undertaken with a high degree of confidence that a good outcome will be provided.

Where I see the difficulty is that humans are notoriously messy. Inclined to irritation and not the least bit logical in their personal lives. Nothing that has been said this week is about truly eliminating bureaucracy, although that’s the illusion. It’s more about mechanising it using whizzy technology that’s so much better that that which has gone before (so they say).

Let’s just grow-up. We need public administration. We need it to work well. Fundamentally, it takes people to make it work. People who are motivated to work for the public good. People who are adaptive, caring and enabled to do a good job. Give them the tools to do the job. But are we kidding ourselves if we think complex algorithms and artificial intelligence are our saviours?

The Evolution of Air Traffic Control

Until civil air traffic started to grow the need for its control wasn’t the number one consideration. The pilot was the master of the skies. A basic “see and avoid” approach was taken. See another aircraft and avoid it at all costs. Note, I am talking about the early 1920s.

If you want a nice exploration of how it all started keep an eye on the site of the Croydon Airport Visitor Centre[1]. The first London airport was not Heathrow or Gatwick. No, there’s a stretch of grass, a hotel, industrial units and out of town shopping standing on the site in Croydon of the first London airport. 

Firstly, we can thank Marconi for the first radiotelephony. Providing a means for pilots to speak to airports enabled the development of Air Traffic Control (ATC)[2]. It got going out of necessity because there was limited space on the ground and many aircraft wanted to take-off and land.

Aerial navigation took off in the 1920s. A hundred years ago. WWII drove advancement in every aspect of technology. After WWII, the basic having been established, an international body was established to set standards for international flying. That’s where today’s ICAO originated.

Radar and VHF radio transmissions were the cutting-edge technology that enabled air traffic to grow. Radio navigation aids developed as did automatic landing systems. So, by the time the jet-age started there was a whole selection of technology available to manage air traffic. Not only that but the standards required for these systems to interoperate around the globe were put down on paper.

That legacy has served aviation remarkably well. Incremental changes have been made as new capabilities have been developed. Most notable of that evolution is to return elements of control to the cockpit. A traffic alert and collision avoidance system (TCAS) does just that. It provides a safety net.

What we have available to manage dense airspace and busy airports is a complex, highly interconnected, interdependent set of systems of systems and procedures that is not easy to unravel. Each part, in each phase of flight, plays its role in assuring safe operations.

News and rumours are that quick fixes are being demanded in the US. Responding to recent accidents and a perception that all the above in antiquated, a well know tech guru has been thrown at the “problem”. I shouldn’t be a cynic, as having a fresh pair of eyes looking at the next steps in the development of air traffic management should be good – shouldn’t it?

It’s my observation, as an engineer who knows a thing or two about these things, is that any simple solution means that the parties have not thought long enough about the problem. In this case there are no quick fixes. However, there’s likely to be incremental improvements and they will not come cheap. 

[1] https://www.historiccroydonairport.org.uk/opening-hours/

[2] https://www.historiccroydonairport.org.uk/interesting-topics/air-traffic-control/

Future of Single Pilot Operations in Aviation

Flying embraces automation. Now, there’s a statement that didn’t ought to be controversial, but it can be. Even before we became engulfed by the modern digital age, analogue autopilots could assist in the task of flying. Some early ones were mechanical.

The need for full-time hands-on piloting of the physical controls that linked a human and an aircraft’s control surfaces is not fundamental. Large transport aircraft have stepped further, somewhat mimicking what their military counterparts did, and fly-by-wire systems have become commonplace.

As far as technological evolution is concerned, we remain in a transitionary phase. Commercial aircraft that fly overhead are a mixed community. Some, like the Boeing 737 series continue to have cables and pulleys that link aircraft systems and controls. Others, like the Airbus A320 series are the fly-by-wire digital aircraft types in regular service.

Between the pilots in the cockpit and the motion of an aircraft there is a computer. In fact, several computers arranged in a manner so that they continue to work even when subject to failures. A great deal of thought and effort has gone into designing aircraft systems that will be reliable in-service.

Looking at the safety numbers, starting in the 1980s when fly-by-wire was introduced, the overall service experience is extremely good. The practice of system safety assessment has delivered dependable and robust aircraft. Rigorous certification processes are applied. 

Through the technical developments that marched on from the 1980s one requirement has remained. That is that two pilots are needed in the aircraft cockpit. Granted there are exceptions to this rule for smaller transport aircraft. Single pilot operations are not new. For example, in many countries, the Cessna Caravan[1] is approved for a single pilot.

It’s 2025. It’s difficult not to notice the debate around Single Pilot Operations (SPO). That is to open large transport aircraft operations to a new rule. Lower operating costs may be achievable by making a change. It’s even said that this move is a way of continuing aviation’s growth as it becomes more and more difficult worldwide to increase the number of qualified pilots.

It’s good to see this subject being taken up in a forthcoming conference.

RAeS Flight Operations Conference 2025: Single Pilot Operations – Logical Progression or a Step Too Far?[2] 19 March 2025 – 20 March 2025. Royal Aeronautical Society Headquarters in London.

SPO may be enabled by use of complex systems to help make mission-critical decisions. The next step maybe with real-time “artificial” copilots and intelligent monitoring. Will this move the aviation industry toward safer and more efficient aircraft operations? That is the question.

[1] https://cessna.txtav.com/en/turboprop/caravan

[2] https://www.aerosociety.com/events-calendar/raes-flight-operations-conference-2025-single-pilot-operations-logical-progression-or-a-step-too-far

Advancements in Flight Recorder Technology and Regulations

My last posting addressed accident flight recorders and airworthiness requirements. That’s not enough. It’s important to note that aircraft equipage standards are addressed in operational rules. So, the airworthiness requirements define what an acceptable installation looks like but as to whether an operator needs to have specific equipage or not, that’s down to the operational rules in each country.

Internationally, the standards and recommended practices of ICAO Annex 6 are applicable. These cover the operation of aircraft. Flight recorders are addressed in para 6.3.1. and Appendix 8. Let’s note that ICAO is not a regulator. There are international standards but operational rules in each country apply to each country’s aircraft.

One of the major advances in accident flight recorders technology is the capability to record more data than was formerly practical. This has led to standards for Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVRs) advancing from 2-hour recording duration to 25-hours.

Proposed rule changes have been hampered by the impact of the global pandemic. Some new operational rules apply only to newly built aircraft. That means some existing aircraft can retain their 2-hour CVRs.

Another technology advance is what’s known as Recorder Independent Power Supply (RIPS). RIPS can provided power to the CVR for at least 10 minutes after aircraft electrical power is lost. The RIPS is often offered as a relatively straightforward aircraft modification.

I do not know if the South Korea Boeing 737-800 was required to have accident recorders with the capabilities listed above. If they were not, then there’s a good basis for recommending that changes be made to existing aircraft.