The COVID-19 pandemic has increased the likelihood and impact of a wide variety of safety risks across the aviation industry. Beyond keeping passengers, flight crew and ground crew safe from the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus during maintained operations, the unique demands for the resumption of schedules are themselves creating new risks.
Arjan de Jong, program manager maintenance for engineering, management and technology at the Royal Netherlands Aerospace Centre says that a key focus has been on returning aircraft to service.
“Aircraft manufacturers prescribe specific maintenance tasks that must be carried out before the aircraft can return to service. These tasks may vary from simple checks after a short parking period to more extensive maintenance if the aircraft has been preserved for a longer period of time,” de Jong notes. “When parking for a shorter period of time, you must regularly switch on the on-board systems, start the engines and close openings with plugs. With longer storage, aircraft are preserved. Then special oil goes into the engines, so-called preservation oil. This thicker oil than normal should prevent corrosion and protect the bearings.”
Bringing aircraft back into service is a highly specific and proceduralised business, which should enable aviation to rely on one of its strengths: the operationalisation of safety standards. Regulators have issued guidelines, as have airline trade associations like IATA [PDF].
Beyond the flight deck, “there are a whole set of procedures that OEMs, manufacturers, and engine manufacturers in particular, are working with their customers on, to make sure that they follow all those procedures, so when they get back into operation, they are certified or recertified and are safe for operation,” says Hassan Shahidi, president and chief executive officer of the Flight Safety Foundation.
Considering the impact on crews is vital
Inside the flight deck, though, there are unprecedented human factors issues to consider.
“Airlines and regulators,” Shahidi says, “want to make sure that, when the pilots are back into the flight deck that they are fully trained, and capable of carrying out a safe operation.”
To that end, close attention has been paid to “pilot training and competency, especially if the crew has been not flying for a while, and is then getting back into the cockpit and starting flying,” Shahidi explains, noting that “different airlines have different procedures and approved programmes with the regulator, depending on which part of the world they’re in, with respect to their training programme. The longer the pilot has been out, it takes a bit longer to get retrained and get refresher training — perhaps sometimes, simulator training or even check rides.”
At times, fundamental definitional questions have been raised. For example, what does “rusty” mean in the flight deck in the COVID context?
Indeed, says Mark Millam, the Flight Safety Foundation’s vice president, technical “being fully trained and ready for being in the cockpit still doesn’t make you completely familiar with the routes that you’re put on, and the airports that you might be going to, and the things that might be in certain approach procedures and things like that.”
Other pitfalls may include changes to procedures and updated manuals, while there’s a double-hit at airports. Some airports have looked to make the most of a bad situation and capitalise on lower traffic demand in order to speed up construction projects. That creates construction hazards like suspended runways, taxiways, aprons and terminal areas, as well as the usual cranes and potential for runway incursions. And its end goal is to create physical changes to airports, which pilots may not be used to, and with reduced flying there may be substantial differences between an airport they last saw in 2019 and the same facility today.
To help manage these risks, the Flight Safety Foundation has created a series of safety punch lists covering air traffic services, airports, flight operations, ground operations, human factors, manufacturers, MRO and maintenance, and regulators, as well as a set of general considerations.
The wider regulatory and safety picture is increasingly complex
Fundamentally, says Millam, the industry has had to get to grips with the unprecedented scale of change as a result of the COVID-19 crisis.
“When the whole COVID pandemic started, we recognised that this was going to be an abrupt change in the way that things get done,” Millam explains. “First of all, just to scale down operations, there was huge change that came along with that, and then to sustain things at a much smaller level, that was a big change from where it was at previously.”
The FSF issued a series of crisis resources, including its COVID-19 Safety Roadmap, now in its second edition [PDF], to inform decisionmakers and to assist operation and safety personnel to manage the pandemic’s impact on their work.
“Many of the things that we commented on in that document are indeed risks that have shown up as we’ve gone through the pandemic,” Millam reflects, but highlights that “we never really kind of understood to what scale we might encounter some of those things.”
A key challenge, FSF chief executive Hassan Shahidi says, has been for the auditing programmes by states and organisations, which have traditionally been via on-site auditors that travel to conduct their inspections.
“In a situation where you’re not able to dispatch trained personnel to those facilities, because you can’t travel or there are restrictions,” Shahidi says, “that’s certainly been a challenge. I think the industry has been very, very creative and innovative, at least in the short term, to have remote auditing capabilities and data gathering while we’re getting back to recovery and into more on site auditing.”
In some cases, governments have issued exemptions to safety auditors, while in other cases auditing organisations have been able to authorise new in-country auditors with the skills and capabilities to understand the standards and conduct the audits without crossing borders.
“Industry,” says Shahidi, “has really looked at ways in which to do some of this auditing remotely — and continue to keep the safe standards that we’ve had in the past.”
It’s clear that much work is being done to maintain aviation’s high safety standards. But one of the most striking safety recommendations comes from the FSF’s “general considerations” safety punch list — indeed, the very first item on that list. For the moment, the foundation advises, “consider all operations as non-normal and therefore a threat to safety.”
Author: John Walton
Published: 12th October 2021
Lead Photo credit: Photo by Ellen Jenni on Unsplash
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