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Part II
In the present “total system" era, significant improvements in aircraft design, operating procedures and air navigation systems have made air transport one of the safest modes of transportation. As stated previously, air transport safety improved during the human, technical and organisational eras of evolution in accident prevention.
Modern day commercial aircraft are highly automated and require less human input by pilots. The onboard flight management system (FMS) is fundamental to an aircraft's avionics and consists of a specialised computer which integrates a wide range of sensors. FMS accepts aircraft position information from the GPS and ground-based radio navigation, temperature from sensors at various parts of the airframe and engines, weight of fuel from in-tank sensors and airspeed from pitot static probes.
With integrated inputs, the FMS can guide an aircraft along the flight plan. Pilots control the FMS through a control display unit consisting of a small touchscreen, similar to the typical tablet computer.
Pilots actively monitor flight progress on these electronic flight instrument system navigation display screens.
As it is a single-point management tool, other flight data. such as altitude, heading, speed, engine parameters, wind speed and direction, weather radar data and other aircraft within a 30-mile radius. is presented at the touch of the screen.
This level of automation has reduced the workload of flight crew to the point that most commercial aircraft no longer require flight engineers or navigators. The cockpit is now largely a two-person operation.
On the ground, communication navigation and surveillance systems, coupled with air traffic management (ATM) systems, provide the safe separation of aircraft from gate to gate. Advances in air-traffic control tools such as automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast (ADS-B) are replacing conventional radar as the primary means of aircraft surveillance.
ADS-B broadcasts the main attributes of an aircraft’s flight at a rapid rate (usually every second) to air-traffic control centres where the information is displayed in real time for controllers. ATM software has safety features that "red-flag" potential breaches of safe separation between aircraft in flight.
However, there are environmental safety hazards, such as wind shear and terrain, which cannot be eliminated and therefore must be avoided.
Strong outflows of wind from thunderstorms create rapid changes in wind speed and direction close to ground level. Wind shear in the form of microbursts is a severe hazard to aircraft during take-off, approach and landing. Such outflows can cause headwinds or tailwinds that present misleading airspeeds. Engine power would be decreased or increased to maintain speed if the crew is unaware of the wind shear. This can lead to an accident if the aircraft is too low to effect recovery befor
