Story ID: 111172014safety
FSF Releases Flight Path Monitoring Guide
By: AIN Staff
Caption: Monitoring guide offers 20 recommendations to improve the skills of the monitoring pilot.
Word Count: 206
The Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) last week released a new guide to help pilots monitor their flight paths more carefully. The Practical Guide for Improving Flight Path Monitoring, published on November 13, is based on the work of FSF’s Active Pilot Monitoring Working Group, which looked closely at aircraft accidents with causes related to ineffective monitoring of an aircraft’s flight path.

The group’s nearly three-year effort identified a number of barriers to effective monitoring: human factors limitations, time pressures, lack of feedback to pilots when monitoring lapses occur, the design of flight deck systems, standard operating procedures, pilots’ inadequate mental models of autoflight system modes and corporate cultures that do not support an emphasis on monitoring.

The group developed 20 recommendations organized into four categories: practices, procedures and policies; autoflight systems; training; and evaluating monitoring skills. One of the key recommendations was the need to clearly define the role of the pilot monitoring. Another is the need to create and practice intervention strategies that maintain effective monitoring or–in the event the monitoring pilot becomes distracted–return his attention to the job at hand. The guide offers an illustrative PowerPoint training aid (linked online through Appendix B).