Proceedings of the Special Senate Committee on
Transportation Safety
and Security
Issue 6 - Evidence
OTTAWA, Thursday, June 10, 1999
The Subcommittee on Transportation Safety of the Standing Senate Committee on Transport and Communications met this day at 10:55 a.m. to study the state of transportation safety and security in Canada.
Senator J. Michael Forrestall (Chairman) in the Chair.
[English]
The Chairman: We are continuing our study on the state of transportation safety and security in Canada. This morning we are privileged to have with us Dr. Gerald Marsters. He has some 40 years experience in aviation, university teaching, and research and development. Dr. Marsters was a pilot and a pilot instructor in the RCAF from 1952-58, after which he pursued studies in mechanical engineering at Queen's, then aerospace engineering at Cornell University, earning a Ph.D. in 1967. In January of that year, he began teaching at Queen's, becoming of professor of mechanical engineering in 1974.
In 1982, following a sabbatical year, he was appointed Director of Airworthiness, Transport Canada, a position he held for five years. Dr. Marsters then became the Director General for the Institute of Aerospace Research at the National Research Council, retiring from that position in March 1994. From March 1994 to the present, through his consulting firm, AeroVations, he has provided technical and management advice to a number of aerospace clients, both industry and government. He served as a sessional lecturer at the Carleton University aerospace engineering program. He is an active pilot with experience on many types of aircraft, including rotary wing.
This morning, Dr. Marsters will talk to us about the future of aviation, touching on safety. I hope you do not fly Sea Kings or Labradors any more.
Mr. Gerald F. Marsters, President, AeroVations Inc.: I try to avoid them, sir.
The Chairman: We are at your disposal.
Mr. Marsters: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Good morning, honourable senators. I am pleased and honoured to be here to have an opportunity to speak to you about aviation safety. If I truly were a futurist, I probably would be doing a lot better in consulting than I am. It is very hard to look at the future.
I prepared some remarks, but I am prepared also to depart from them should honourable senators have questions in areas in which I might be able to shed some light.
I will now go through the overheads that I have prepared.
To be able to look at the future, we have to deal with what is going on now and make some estimates and projections from there. Major aircraft accidents have plateaued at about 1.5 per million departures. To put that in context, if you were to launch an aircraft every minute from Ottawa, a period of about 15 months would elapse before the first accident would occur. Mind you, we launch more aircraft than one a minute on a worldwide basis.
This next overhead shows about 17 years of fatal accident records that show that presently we are experiencing somewhere in the neighbourhood of 50 major fatal accidents per year, killing about 1,200 to 1,500 people. These are facts you all know about, so I do not need to press on with them.
The next overhead illustrates the nature of the problem. In the next few years, some people are saying to 2015, some are saying to 2010, the number of departures will increase from roughly where they are now to about 30 million departures. This is close to a doubling. The effect of this, therefore, is that if we keep the rate of accidents constant per million departures the number of accidents will double. This suggests that, on a worldwide basis, there will be a major accident every 12 to 15 days rather than approximately one a month.
This overhead indicates where, in the commuter world, there will be a substantial increase in the number of aircraft that are available and, therefore, a substantial increase in the number of opportunities for accidents. There are about 2,000 or 2,100 commuter airplanes around these days, and that will go up to close to 3,000, according to the estimates that appeared recently in Aviation Week and Space Technology and attributed to the FAA.
Many people do not think about safety very much. We enjoy remarkable levels of safety, although air travel is not inherently safe. The important word there is "inherently." When I speak to students every year at Queen's on aviation safety, I put this slide up. They gasp, and they say, "What do you mean?" The key word is "inherently." Why would you think it is inherently safe to get in a thin-walled metal tube that is pressurized and hurtle yourself eight miles above the surface of the earth at close to the speed of sound?
The Chairman: I do not.
Mr. Marsters: Aviation is not inherently safe. It is safe; it is extraordinarily safe compared to other means of getting around. However, if you want to rush around like that, there is a risk involved.
Following the TWA-800 accident off the coast of New York, there was a knee-jerk reaction. People put ideas together. Their target became absolute safety, no more accidents. That is an excellent target. However, absolute safety implies zero risk. The only people who enjoy zero risk are already dead.
The reason we are doing as well as we are is that the current systems are, in my view, very robust. That is, the tolerance for error is quite high. In my own flying experience, I suspect that at least once or twice during every flight in which I was in command of an aircraft I made an error that somehow or other got forgiven. Maybe I made two or three errors. It turns out that the system, as it is presently structured, with aircraft sophistication and so on, allows quite a few errors before running into trouble. Accidents result from an accumulation of errors, as you know, rather than a single event. I am sure that every time I have flown an aircraft, I have messed up at least once and probably more times. I just was lucky that nothing more serious happened.
The next overhead will give some examples of what I mean by high tolerance. It refers to accidents at Fredericton, Brussels, a PC 12 at Gander, and the last one is the B767 at Gimli. Those events are proof that the system is extraordinarily robust. The Fredericton accident was truly miraculous in that people were not killed. It had every possible earmark of having a major accident. Yet, for reasons that may not be absolutely clear, the robustness of the system, perhaps the strength of the airplane and the good fortune to have the pine tree where it was rather than, say, a few feet forward, that accident was survivable.
Brussels is one that you may or may not know about. Northwest Airlines had a Boeing 767, I believe it was, that was en route from Detroit or Chicago, I think, somewhere into Frankfurt, Germany. They landed at Brussels, to everyone's surprise, including the flight deck.
The Chairman: The wrong airport.
Mr. Marsters: The wrong airport. It is almost impossible to believe that that could happen nowadays. Yet, the pilots managed to land a Boeing 737 full of people at Brussels by mistake. The people who were sitting in the first class cabin knew about it because they were watching the map on the screen. They could see where they were going. The flight deck crew was up front, maps flying all over the place, trying to figure out why their radio frequencies were not allowing them to talk to the people they wanted to talk to. A robust system surely had to be in place to prevent that situation from turning into a massive accident. These guys broke out of the clouds, lined up on the runway, and said, "We are here, but we are not sure where `here' is."
The PC 12 at Gander is a fairly recent Canadian accident where a single-engine aircraft with a load of passengers -- I forget how many -- managed to make a forced landing safely in a swampy bog area just outside of Gander. You probably know about this one. We have only recently approved single-engine aircraft for passenger instrument flight rules travel in Canada. I believe this is the first event where passengers have been involved in the failure of a single engine on such an airplane. Again, a robust system and a large measure of good luck prevented any deaths in that accident.
The final incident that I put on there was the Boeing 767 incident at Gimli. The crew took off from Montreal and subsequently Ottawa without enough fuel to get to where they were going, which was Edmonton. The engines all stopped somewhere over Red Lake. By dint of great luck and a robust system, they managed to put the airplane down without loss of life at Gimli. This happened quite a long time ago. Many of you will remember it.
The challenges that I see in the future are challenges that are already facing us. The first of these is called CFIT, which stands for controlled flight into terrain. One might wonder why anybody would fly into terrain in a controlled fashion, but it happens on a regular basis. In fact, CFIT has been identified as the largest major killer of people in aviation over the past two or three decades.
What happens is that people become confused, ground aids do not work properly, or somehow people mismanage the job they are doing. Part of what leads to that is the question of situational awareness. As aircraft the complexity of aircraft increases and more and more systems are being operated by computers, without intimate involvement by the flight deck crew as to what is going on, it is becoming easier to lose what is called "situational awareness," knowing where you are.
"Vertical navigation" is a term that was not coined when I learned to fly. "Horizontal navigation" is involved in the mistake in going to Brussels instead of Frankfurt. They did not know where they were. Vertical navigation means knowing where you are in the vertical plane. Managing vertical navigation, with aircraft that have high descent rates and high forward speeds, is every bit as important, perhaps more important, as managing the horizontal navigation.
Situational awareness has led to some major accidents recently. The most famous one probably is the one that happened in Cali, Columbia, where a crew was given a revised clearance. They punched the numbers into the computer without realizing that they had gone past the reporting point. The onboard computer said, "I have not come to that reporting point yet, according to these new instructions." They turned to get to that reporting point. The auto pilot did the job and flew them into a mountain. The flight deck crew did not know where they were.
From my point of view, the problem that is going to face us very seriously as we move forward is training. There is a shortage of aircrews. There is a shortage of people coming through the system. For many years, airlines depended upon well trained pilots leaving the military and coming into their cockpits with a lot of aviation experience. That stream has largely dried up. The result is that we are getting people who have come through a civil system, which, in my view, does not demand as much rigor in the training, does not demand as much time to acquire certain levels of competence, and so on.
We understand that there are people in the United States being hired and put into the right-hand seat as first officers with as few as 300 hours. Somebody has referred to this as on-the-job training in the right-hand seat. Not a big confidence builder.
We do not train people very effectively in dealing with unusual attitudes in aircraft. There have been a number of accidents recently where the airplane has entered an unusual attitude before the accident. It seems clear that pilots who have not had the pleasure of turning an airplane over, possibly even doing aerobatics, are not well equipped to deal with unusual attitudes.
In my view, the shortage of well trained and experienced pilots is a major problem and a big challenge for the future.
I will turn now to other emerging issues. You are probably aware of the term FOQA, fight operations quality assurance. British Airways uses a system called BASIS, British Airways Safety Information System. They have used this for a number of years. It applies the methods of quality assurance to flight operations, just as the title FOQA indicates. FOQA has been adopted substantially in Europe and the U.K., where each flight is analyzed to look for situations that have gone outside the standard practice. They are called exceedences. FOQA has not been adopted in the United States because of strenuous opposition by the pilot community, who believe that it will be used or abused for disciplinary purposes and so on. Because I firmly believe that the country to the south of us is highly litigious in nature, unless they clarify their regulations, this will lead to a lot of difficulty in the courts.
In Canada, there was a proposal a number of years ago to undertake a FOQA study. Unfortunately, I was not on the winning team in the bid for doing the study and, as a result, I have not followed the progress. However, I do not think there has been much progress.
ADS-B stands for automatic dependent surveillance broadcast. For those of you who are not familiar with this handy little acronym, what it means is that an aircraft equipped with an ADS-B system broadcasts continuously, or every few seconds it rebroadcasts, its position, its speed, and its direction. The broadcast is done on a relatively weak signal so that, if you are more than two or three or four miles, maybe five miles away, you will not hear it. However, a nearby aircraft that is equipped with an ADS-B system will receive the broadcast and be able to determine the location of the aircraft, where it is going, and vice versa. What it means is that airplanes can "see" each other in the sky, even though they may be in cloud, and this will assist air traffic controllers in maintaining proper separation between aircraft in flight.
One of the difficulties that we have and will continue to have as the traffic levels increase is a mixture of aircraft that operate under instrument flight rules, where the aircraft are controlled at all times and separation is provided by the air traffic control system. However, there are also visual flight rules aircraft flying around, if visibility is good, and they depend upon a see-and-be-seen, see-and-avoid concept to prevent collision.
ADS-B will support and assist in preventing collisions between aircraft. It is moderately expensive, but certainly something that I think people will begin to use more and more seriously. I believe that Fed Ex, for example, is equipping their fleet with ADS-B because they find it very useful.
The third item on the list is UAVs, unmanned aerial vehicles. Although we do not see many of these around, they are something that will be around in the future, I am sure, in large numbers. It is 15 years out anyway before these become a commercially viable operation. However, I understand, from talking to one of my colleagues at Boeing a few weeks ago, that Boeing visualizes entire fleets of courier and cargo-type aircraft operating unmanned aircraft, 727s, DC-9s, old airplanes in which they simply replace a pilot with a bit of electronic magic and away they go. I do not foresee unmanned aircraft carrying passengers in my lifetime.
You may be interested to know that UAVs have been used a great deal in the Balkins conflicts over the last number of years as surveillance aircraft. They have been very effective and they have managed to put aircraft in surveillance positions where you would not want to put a human.
A few weeks ago, when I was in England, I heard an address by a very senior RAF officer who said that the present RAF policy is that, in future, putting a person in an airplane in a combat situation has to be defended. In the past, it was always assumed; now you have to defend why you are going to do that.
The next subject I will address is safety culture. To me, probably the most important thing that we can do as we move into increased traffic situations is to ensure that a safety culture is thoroughly embedded in all operational aviation situations. Professor Weiner, who is at the University of Florida, I believe it is, presented this notion of the four Ps.
The idea here is that the operating company must develop a philosophy that is safety-based. It is not good enough for the president of Air Canada to say, "We are going to have safe airplanes" and then go off and play golf somewhere. He has to impose that, live it, breathe it, and make sure that everybody understands that that is his personal philosophy.
I cannot speak for Lamare Durette, and I do not want to, but I believe that is what has to be done with the CEOs of air carriers.
This then translates into policies that the people who work at the next level generate for operating the aircraft, which then translates into procedures, and finally into practices, which are the things that happen on the flight deck and the things that happen on the flight line.
One of the problems that we have is that unless the culture permeates from the top down, there will be a large difference between procedures and practices. The practices that occur on the flight deck often involve shortcuts that are different from the procedures. These can, in some places, lead to unusual and accidental situations.
Therefore, safety culture is one of our big safeguards, I believe. We must insist on doing that through whatever means we have. It is wise to operate a safe airline. The bottom line is better if you operate a safe airline. However, there is a lot of pressure on people to cut corners in trying to get people where they are going.
I was asked to mention regional issues briefly. However, it is probably not my area of greatest strength.
In Canada, there has been over the years, and certainly when I was in the regulatory business, enormous pressure applied by some of the operators in the north to be granted certain exemptions from rules that were generally applicable throughout the rest of Canada. The reasons that were argued were partly that the rules in Alaska are a little bit different from the rules that apply in the lower 48 contiguous United States. In other words, the Alaskan operators received a little bit of benefit from the FAA, and were granted a few exemptions because of the nature of the climate, the nature of the geography, and so on. The climate and geography is a little bit more hostile, as Senator Adams certainly can tell me better than anyone else can. In any event, the argument was they have to have a few breaks from the rules that apply to the Toronto folks.
The position that I took at that time, and I would continue to take, is that every Canadian, regardless of where they live, deserves the same level of safety. That was my position then and continues to be my position. It is a debatable point. There are people who will argue very eloquently in the other direction, but that is my own personal feeling.
In the global situation, the final overhead shows the way in which accidents are distributed. I took 1998's accident survey, which included fatal and non-fatal accidents, scheduled and non-scheduled, and divided them up into the groupings that you see there: Western Europe; North America; South America; Middle East, Africa, East Europe; Asia, which is primarily China and India; and Asia-Pacific, which includes Australia and New Zealand, among other things.
I discovered some interesting things. In some cases, North America does not look good. The problem is that in some of the remote and less developed regions of the world accidents and incidents are not reported religiously. Therefore, any statistics that you look at like this can be somewhat biased. You will notice, if you examine this in detail, that there are parts of the world where you probably would not want to fly. Personally, and I guess I would be on the record with this, South American airlines are not among my favourites, and Africa is not generally a good place to fly, for a variety of reasons. China is emerging rather better. India still has some problems and parts of Southeast Asia have problems as well.
Senator Perrault: What about the Russians?
Mr. Marsters: Part of the problem, as you know, is that in many countries around the world governments are not oriented towards the health and safety of their citizens. Therefore, they have not taken the precautions that we have in the western world to protect their citizens. Some of them have a pretty lackadaisical attitude about how they approach things.
It turns out that just recently a Russian heavy lift helicopter was approved for commercial use in Canada for the logging industry out west. It took something like 8 or 10 years of work with the Russians to get them to adjust their standards upwards to the standards that we apply in the West. They have treated many of the things that they have built more as farm machinery than as sophisticated aeronautical equipment.
There are regions where governments are not citizen-oriented and, therefore, they do not regulate, or do not know how to regulate, or do not want to regulate, or just plain cannot afford it.
I provided the secretary with a copy of a cover page of a book that reported on an aviation safety conference in the Netherlands a couple of years ago. The title of one of the articles was "If I was a rich man," and the sub-title was "I would not have many accidents." If you go to some of the very, very poor areas in the world, stay on the ground or be very cautious.
There is an accident report, I think it was 1997 in the Ukraine, where 28 or so people died in an accident involving an aircraft that was supposed to carry 12 passengers. Colleagues of mine have told me stories about flying in the Ukraine where, if you can get on and the door gets shut, sort of like the high-speed trains in Japan, then you can go fly. Whether or not you have a seat is immaterial. In a situation like that, where there are 28 people in a 12-passenger aircraft, which means that a number of people did not have seats, it is best to stay on the ground, or maybe even stay home.
That concludes my prepared remarks. I do not know whether I have looked quite as far in the future as you want, but I would be happy to stay and discuss this at your pleasure.
The Chairman: You have given us a sense of the future, and let me thank you for that. I am very pleased that you touched on the development of a safety culture, because it is a matter of some concern to the committee.
You made the interesting comment that every Canadian is entitled to the same level of safety in general aviation. What about the Canadians who now fly into the places that are on your last chart? Do we have some responsibility for enhancing the safety of their travel in those areas where there is perhaps want of good air navigation, bad runways, poor communications and different climatic conditions than we might be used to in North America? Do we have a responsibility through institutions like CIDA to say, for example, that 25 per cent of the accidents in this area could have been avoided had there been a good map system in place? Do we have a responsibility as we try to enhance the safety of Canadians flying to spend that money?
Mr. Marsters: Mr. Chairman, I will answer that in two ways. First of all, the most positive effect we can have on behalf of Canadians who want to travel in those places is to work through the International Civil Aviation Organization. The ICAO has established a review system to look at the safety systems that exist in countries around the world. It is probably the best instrument that we have at the moment for doing that. I am not sure that we have pushed the levers at the ICAO as strongly as we should, and perhaps there should be encouragement to our mission or our delegates to the ICAO to promote the work that they are doing. The ICAO has some problems because it is a consensus-building organization, and if you have a large consensus of people who do not care, then you have a problem.
The United States has taken a much more proactive approach to this. They have in fact established an oversight group that visits countries who fly into the United States. They visit their facilities and do an audit or an assessment of them. Should their standards not be up to par, the group will say, "We do not want you flying into the United States because your systems do not meet existing ICAO standards." Sometimes that translates into "Your systems do not meet FAA standards." Sometimes it translates into "We are protecting our industry in the United States and we do not want you to fly. We want to go to your place and back." Therefore, there is protectionism, among other things, involved in this.
I do not think Canada is in a position to take that strong a move, but working through ICAO is the right way.
The second answer is that we have a responsibility, up to a point, but it is difficult to enforce or to implement. Currently, I believe that the Department of Foreign Affairs advises Canadian citizens not to visit certain troubled places, that if they do they could get hurt. As such, I believe that it is possible for the department to provide the same sort of service to potential travellers, to say that the risks are higher in certain places than others. That would be a relatively passive service. However, I do not know that we can prevent Canadians from visiting a place they really want to visit.
Senator Roberge: Should we also advise them, as a responsibility as a government, on the individual airlines that have borderline safety measures?
Mr. Marsters: That is an awkward thing to do, unless we are prepared to actually carry out an audit and establish that a particular airline is not doing the things that it should be doing, that it is not living up to standards.
From experience, we know that there was a period of time when an aircraft flying in from Cuba, say, or into Gander from the former Soviet Union would land short and take out a bunch of runway lights, and they would take away a damaged airplane. Things are improving, however. To be able to say, "Do not fly Airline X" would require that we had a very strong case. That becomes a serious thing. We would have to do an audit, I believe, to establish safety concerns.
Senator Perrault: Your presentation was very interesting. Based on the statistics, you say we can look forward to increasing fatalities as a result of air accidents. Is it is true that safety technology is advancing? Is the gap going to be quite as large?
I lost a great uncle in an air crash. He was a pioneer flyer in the United States. Today, the storm that killed him would probably have been detected and he might not have crashed.
Mr. Marsters: You are absolutely right. I believe that safety technologies are advancing but probably not as fast as the growth in air travel. The reason that there is concern, I think, is that the plateau that I spoke of -- 1 or 1.5 or 2 major hull losses per million departures -- has been steady for quite a number of years. There has not been much change, which is the reason I use the term "plateaued."
What we have to do is drop that down and keep it steady for another ten years. It is dropping that down that is difficult.
We have to take additional steps in terms of training, in terms of CFIT awareness, in improving our landing aids and the sophistication of our landing aids, in ensuring that absolutely every pilot is on top of situational awareness. Somehow or other we have to keep these guys engaged in the job they are doing because it is terribly boring.
Senator Perrault: Flying by wire it is just a matter of sitting and doing practically nothing.
Mr. Marsters: There is a story that says that in the future there will be two on the flight deck -- a pilot and a dog. The purpose of the dog is to bite the pilot in case he tries to do anything.
Senator Perrault: Germany has launched another Zeppelin. Do you see any future for the Zeppelin as a work force of Canadian industry or any other industry?
Mr. Marsters: This has been an on again-off again situation for many, many years. Part of the difficulty with lighter-than-air vehicles, Zeppelins, balloons, or whatever, is that they are susceptible to high wind conditions. If the top speed of a vehicle is in the neighbourhood of 30 knots and the winds are at 40 knots, the vehicle is going to go with the wind.
There have been many proposals to use these things for heavy logging and so on. They are safe. They are remarkably safe. They have helium gas in them and, because the volumes are so large, they can survive a very large rip and for a long time before they begin to descend. Therefore, they are safe from that point of view.
I have not been a proponent of lighter-than-air vehicles for some long time. We have looked at them. Certainly when I was in the regulatory business we looked at the regulation of them. There was one flying around Toronto, at one time, over the CNE and downtown, but that venture, as far as I know, has stalled. Their big use in the United States is looking at football games.
Senator Perrault: The Good Year blimp.
Mr. Marsters: The Good Year blimp, that is right.
Senator Adams: I want to touch on safety culture. Aircraft built today are very fast and not like a Single Otter or Twin Otter. That is what is meant by safety culture. Around the 1960s, I started flying into the community up North. I was an electrician, and the only way I would get somewhere to do maintenance and stuff like that was in an aircraft. It used to take me two days to get somewhere to do two hours work.
I have been flying to and from Ottawa since 1977. I used to fly in Single Otters and Twin Otters, and now they are flying 737s. The new pilots coming in now have to have so many hours of training. Today, the computer does everything. After you take off, you just punch in on the computer.
I used to sit in the cockpit and the pilot would say, "Willy, take over steering for me. I have to put some notes on here." Today you cannot do that.
Referring to the Fredericton accident, according to the safety board that co-pilot did not have enough experience in landing in bad weather. Every time I go in an airplane, I wonder about whether or not the pilot is safe, what his experience is, because I do not know that pilot.
Mr. Marsters: We are stuck with the idea of placing our confidence and our trust in a combination of the regulatory authorities and the honesty and forthrightness of the operating companies. The regulations, it seems to me, were just a little bit too vague in the case of the Fredericton accident because there was a lack of experience there. The pilot did not have the experience to do the job that he was supposed to be doing.
You have an interesting problem -- well, we do, but you in particular -- because you have to operate in and out of the north a lot. It is a hostile climate and you are dealing frequently with very inexperienced people. Typically what happens is that someone who wants to become a airline pilot will get a licence and then go up north and build up their hours on single-engine Otters and Beavers. Therefore, the pilot who is driving the single-engine Otter that your may be on may not have very much time or experience at all. He is building time so that he will have enough hours in his log book to say to Air Canada that he is an experienced pilot. He is getting good experience at your expense. We just have to hope that the regulations and the forthrightness of the companies are enough to keep these operations safe.
We have been pretty lucky, I guess, over the years. There is a component of luck here. At the same time, if you were to say that we have to make the regulations more stringent, then that would have some very, very serious economic impacts on the north. There has to be a safety culture, but there has to be some sort of balance between the requirements to keep people alive and well in the airplanes and the requirements to keep communities alive and well from an economic point of view.
Senator Maloney: You mentioned that there were pilots with 300 hours flying time flying in the States. Are you satisfied with the training that the pilots who are with the main companies in Canada are getting at the moment?
Mr. Marsters: Yes. I would say that our regulatory structure is good. I was a little surprised when the accident results of Fredericton came out, and this fellow with relatively little experience attempted to do a difficult landing. In that case, the captain should have taken control of the aircraft, under those circumstances, and done the landing. It is possible that he would have run into the same problem as well. It is not clear.
The mistake that was made was to continue with that landing. That suggests that there is the possibility of people getting through the system and arriving at positions where they are driving an airplane without enough experience. In general, however, our regulatory structure in Canada is in good shape.
I did not touch on this before, but, on the regulation side of things, one of the things that concerns me somewhat is that Canada has emerged as a major nation in building airplanes. Bombardier is the third largest builder of whole airplanes in the world. The rules for building airplanes, the standards for design and so on, are primarily written in the United States. Since Canada is now a major player in building fairly large jet transport airplanes, it should also be a major player in the development of regulations, and it turns out that we are not. We are not because we do not have the capacity within the regulatory agency, that is Transport Canada, to be a major player. Along with everybody else, they have suffered from cutbacks.
At the moment, there is a new development. The vertical takeoff and landing rotating propeller aircraft that is being developed by Bell requires a whole new set of design standards and regulations. Canada should be part of the development of those, but because we do not have the manpower to do it, we are not at the table. Hence, we will have those regulations handed to us. The tilt rotor design requirements are being written now by the FAA and we do not have a place at the table, to the best of my knowledge. I have talked to the airworthiness group recently about this and that is a problem.
Senator Perrault: Is that a type of helicopter?
Mr. Marsters: It is a helicopter when it lands and it is an airplane when it is flying.
Senator Perrault: It is like the British fighter plane then?
Mr. Marsters: Yes, but that is jet driven. This is turbo prop. In horizontal flight, it looks like an airplane. The propellers are very large but they are doing the right thing. When you land, you tilt the engines and you now have a helicopter with twin rotors.
Senator Perrault: Great for certain landing strips.
Mr. Marsters: It is an answer to a lot of problems, but it is expensive and there are some design features that need to have great care taken.
Canadian airlines in general are safe. They are being well regulated and, although I do not look to these companies for altruism, they are operating safe operations.
The Chairman: We have had evidence on two separate occasions from Mr. Hueppner, who is doing the work for President Clinton on what was a $40 million study -- the last time we talked I think it was pushing $300 million, and no end in sight -- to achieve that simple thing that it is blue sky up. Have you monitored his work?
Mr. Marsters: No, I have not.
The Chairman: They are examining how you prove President Clinton right, that we can avoid a massive hulk at the end of a runway every ten days or so. Flyers all over the world are hoping he is absolutely correct.
If you were just starting out in Canada, with your aeronautic bent, is there a university, an academic centre that you would choose? I am getting at your last comment in response to Senator Maloney, that we do not have the resources within the public sector. Maybe the resources are there in the institutional sector and in the private sector, but we have not developed centres of true excellence. Is that perhaps one of the answers? It may not necessarily always be government that has to dig down and the taxpayers shell out.
Perhaps the greater expertise can come from a gentleman like yourself who has a forensic interest in the progress of safety.
Mr. Marsters: To the best of my knowledge, sir, there is no centre in Canada that currently exists, nor do I see one emerging. If somebody asked me, "Would you undertake to set up a centre that concentrated on aviation safety?" I would first have to try to define which components, because there are many components.
My first approach would be to say that I have to work with the human factors side of the business. It is the human component interacting with a machine that is where I would have to do the work.
At the moment, the only places that I know where one could perhaps graft on an organization that would deal with that are either the University of Toronto Institute for Aerospace Studies -- but they are inclined more to the manufacturing side, to the hardware side of the business -- or York University, where there are people who have been doing interesting studies in human-factors-related areas, cognition and so on. One might find the possibility of establishing a centre of excellence there, but it has to be motivated in some way.
However much I would like to do it, I do not have the personal wealth to do that. It would have to be motivated in some way. It would certainly require the moral support at least of the major air carrier operators in the country. I do not see that as something that would be easy to come by. They are preoccupied with getting their job done a lot of the time.
It is a wonderful idea. If we could find a benefactor with very deep pockets, that would be very useful.
Senator Roberge: Do you think that this committee should make recommendations that the latest technological advances such as CFIT and the ADS-B that you were talking about should be installed on all or a certain degree of passenger airlines in Canada?
Mr. Marsters: It is early days for ADS-B. It is a marvellous concept and there is a proof-of-concept operation going on in the United States now. It is too early to say that that should be a requirement.
If you asked me about a recommendation, I would recommend that Transport Canada evaluate ADS-B with the view to determining whether or not it should be required for passenger-carrying aircraft. It is too early to say, "Yes, let us build this thing in now." It is a good idea but there is more work to be done before it is finalized.
Mr. Bruce Carson, Senior Advisor to the Committee: In our discussions with Mr. Hunter in the United States, one of the main characteristics or conclusions that he has come up with is collegiality on the flight deck, that everybody is involved in making decisions and that sort of thing. Could you comment on that?
Mr. Marsters: For a number of years, the idea of CRM, cockpit resource management or crew resource management, has been an important component in the training of airline crews. It used to be at one time that the captain was the captain and there was never any question about the fact that he was the captain. Occasionally he might even speak to his first officer. He had four rings on his sleeve and he was very important. There was a serious divide between the captain and the rest of the crew. It was not normal for the guy in the right-hand seat to question or comment on what the captain was doing or not doing. The key word to describe that was arrogance.
The whole idea of CRM is to get rid of that arrogance, to develop a measure of collegiality on the flight deck, including any other members of the crew who may be having problems in the back end of the airplane, to be able to speak to each other, to be able to challenge each other, to be able to work effectively together. In the final analysis, in an extraordinarily difficult situation, democracy is not the right way to run the flight deck. Somebody has to make the decision and do it.
I believe that if we were to spend more time analyzing cockpit voice recorder tapes we would get a better measure of whether crew resource management is working. Unfortunately, the Transportation Safety Board people are the only people who are allowed access to the cockpit recorders, so a review and analysis of these things is not possible.
It is interesting to speculate -- and this is pure speculation -- on the Swissair accident about how much crew resource management was going on in that accident. Some of the things that I have read in the press lead me to believe that there is still some remnant of the attitude, "I am the captain and you are not." I may be doing the captain a disfavour by saying that, but some of what I read sounded like he was running the show without taking advantage of all of the resources. However, the situation they were in was intolerable and the result was tragic.
Crew resource management has been an important tool and it will continue to be important to work in that area.
Mr. Carson: On one of your slides you list the three challenges: controlled flight into terrain, situational awareness, and training. Would those be the three areas of safety that concern you the most?
Mr. Marsters: I would have to answer yes. There is no question that CFIT is a major cause of death in passenger aircraft. We have to do something about CFIT. It ties into the situational awareness thing. If you are aware of the situation, you should not fly into the ground. Hence, situation awareness and CFIT are linked. Because there is such a large number of fatalities due to CFIT, then I would say, yes, that is definitely the top issue.
The training issue, in my view, relates to the idea of relatively low time with right-hand seat crew members, not as much rigor, I think, in the training as you might want to have, and the lack of training pilots to cope with unusual aircraft attitudes.
The Chairman: In conversation with an individual who had a little over 30,000 hours of flying experience, he told me that it was rare but not unheard of to have a co-pilot in the right-hand seat who does not believe that a pilot could fly an aircraft without the wire and without all the hydraulics. The co-pilot had not been trained to have any confidence in the mechanics of flying a big aircraft. This is a jumbo jet. That is a reflection on training. We do not spin aircraft in training pilots any more.
Mr. Marsters: Not any more.
The Chairman: I still want to put parachutes on light ultras. My colleagues think I am nuts.
Mr. Keith Miller, Transport Consultant to the Committee: Dr. Marsters, I think you opined that when you were in the regulatory business you were in favour of the same regulations in the south as in the north. Are the regulations relating to the transportation of hazardous materials the same in the north as in the south?
Mr. Marsters: I do not think I can answer that, sir. Frankly, I do not know. I would guess that there are waivers and adjustments, maybe not so much about hazardous materials, but the limited experience I have had in mountainous regions and in the north, where you are moving people around who live quite differently from the way we live in cities in the south. I was a visitor in one exercise where we were moving firefighters from one fire fighting camp to another in British Columbia. I was surprised that these guys all lined up and each of them had one or two rifles with them, which normally we do not put on airplanes. In this case, we were able to stow them in the cells of the aircraft rather than take them onboard.
I would presume that in the north it would be much more common to carry ammunition onboard. For example, if I tried to get on an airplane in Toronto with a pocket full of ammunition, I probably would not be successful. I might even wind up being in an uncomfortable place for a while.
But in the north, I would guess that, by nature and virtue of the operations there, the rules are relaxed or waivers are granted. Beyond that, I cannot answer other than that.
Mr. Miller: When we were in Yellowknife last year, there were some complaints by the local airplane operators about these regulations. I have been unsure ever since and I have not cleared it in my mind what exemptions exist in Transport Canada. However, we will follow that up with Transport Canada.
You wrote an article in The Ottawa Citizen recently relating to safety audits in foreign countries. You offered the opinion that you thought that Canada should not follow the U.S. in their system of safety audits of foreign countries. This issue has been of some concern to the committee. The opinion has been expressed several times that for safety audits in foreign countries we should rely on ICAO.
In 1997, I believe, there was a conference of directors general in Montreal where they recommended mandatory safety audits in all countries or all member states and that these safety audits be extended to include the activities on the ground side. Am I to understand from your remarks that, if we are to try to ensure the safety of foreign carriers operating into and out of Canada, we should expand our efforts in trying to get ICAO to expand its staff to conduct these safety audits?
Mr. Marsters: Yes, sir, that is my feeling. Canada is a relatively small nation with limited resources for doing these things, and our most proper forum would be ICAO. The U.S. approach through the Federal Aviation Administration has been, in the view of some people, somewhat heavy-handed at times. I favour working through ICAO and supporting the efforts they have.
Part of the problem with ICAO is that it is a consensus organization and a lot of what goes on there is voluntary. However, as I understand it, most recently and since I wrote the article, the ICAO has put more teeth into their audit review system. Frankly, with our position in the world state, I do not think we have the ability to do what the FAA has done, nor do I think that is what we should do. That is my personal view.
Mr. Miller: Thank you, Dr. Marsters. I am very interested in that opinion.
The Chairman: Doctor, we have learned a lot in the last hour. You have been helpful to the degree that you have confirmed some of the thought processes that we are pursuing. I might wish only that we had had you on day one and not day 400. My other wish is for Canada to develop a centre of excellence so that we can take a place in general aviation throughout the world.
We have built airports, for example, in Barbados, not because the old one was not safe but because it was inefficient. We have put in traffic control systems. We have a great capacity to do that type of thing. It is not expensive
The committee adjourned.