FAA Publishes Safety Alert on Flap Configurations

An FAA safety alert issued last week–SAFO 14005–urges flight department managers to raise awareness of flap misconfiguration events during all training programs. While such misconfigurations are rare, they do occur, according to the Aviation Safety Information Analysis and Sharing program, which looked at crew attempts to depart with no flap deployment, as well as takeoffs during which the crew corrected a flap misconfiguration while accelerating down the runway.

The alert said it is imperative that pilots exercise proper checklist discipline to prevent takeoff misconfiguration and added, “Approximately half of the misconfiguration events…resulted in rejected takeoffs. In others the takeoffs were continued and the flaps were moved during the takeoff roll.”