UPS is making a series of safety enhancements in the aftermath of the September 9 NTSB hearing into the crash of UPS Flight 1354 at Birmingham, Ala., in August last year.
During the hearing, the NTSB’s Steve Magladry explained that the Honeywell enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) on the freight airline’s Airbus A300-600 was operating as designed, but that a free software enhancement available from Airbus had not been installed on the aircraft. That update, he said, could have improved proximity alerts by sounding a “Too Low, Terrain” alert 6.5 seconds earlier than did the version installed on the accident aircraft.
“Flight simulator sessions indicated that the aircraft could have avoided terrain had a CFIT [controlled flight into terrain] avoidance maneuver been executed within 2.4 seconds of this earlier alert,” according to Magladry.
UPS told AIN via e-mail that the company plans to “build upon the lessons learned from this accident and work to improve operations and safety” and improve its “training and automation standard enhancements, call-outs, pilot monitoring duties, stabilized approaches and [no-fault reaction to] go-arounds.”
NTSB member Robert Sumwalt said the aircraft’s excessive rate of descent close to the ground (1,500 fpm) might have negated the value of the earlier alert. “But it [the software update] would have given the crew the opportunity to avoid this crash.” Mentioning a 2010 IATA-published safety article about EGPWS, Sumwalt commented, “To get the most CFIT risk reduction possible, the airlines need to give GPS position direct to the EGPWS unit, which UPS did not do, and to keep the latest software and database up to date, which UPS did not do.”