aviation

Safety Lessons with Moxie – Communication

Quin Bond, CEAS IIILeave a comment

Safety Lessons with Moxie

Learning to live with and train a very energetic rescue puppy has been a great refresher on a lot of safety topics that we all tend to talk about but don’t always put into practice.  I’ll be sharing some of the reminders that Moxie, our Australian cattle dog-beagle mix, has been teaching me over the next couple of weeks.  The first lesson that she has taught us is communication.

Communication

Weekly puppy training classes have been as much for us as they have been for Moxie.  The class instructor is very big on teaching both verbal commands as well as non-verbal commands. 

She spent a significant portion of the first class reminding us that the non-verbal commands are important because we may be in situations where verbal commands may either not be appropriate or effective.  In noisy areas, verbal commands may be lost to the ambient noise or just add to the confusion of the situation.  When I used to be part of a team performing Functional Capacity Evaluations as well as when I helped run a team doing motion analysis research, non-verbal communication via hand signals or facial expressions was a very important part of not adding distractions for the person being tested.  Sometimes, it would be to let a team member know to pay extra attention to a movement or a behavior.  In an industrial setting, the equipment may be too noisy to be heard above it.  Knowing what specific hand signals mean in that kind of setting can be the difference between working effectively and needing to call the emergency squad.

Moxie is working on learning to live with and listen to the four two-legged people in our house.  Working on Moxie’s training has also been a work in progress for the four of us in being consistent with the specific words that we use with her.  There are so many words that we as people can utilize to mean the same thing because we can interpret intent based on tone, volume, and setting.  That is not so easy for our four legged addition – two of the phrases that we are working on maintaining clarity of intent are “stay” and “wait”. 

“Wait” for dogs is a temporary command.  To a dog, it indicates that they need to temporarily hang out where they are until a command is given to them to be released.  It can be used to tell them to wait until you put a leash on/take the leash off or until you open their crate.

“Stay” is a more permanent command.  Stay is letting the dog know that it will be there, either sitting or laying down, until you come back to them.  It lets them know that it may be a while and not just the short period of time to click on a leash or put food in a dish.

A simple example, that often causes injuries in the workplace, it the confusion of the countdown when performing a task.  It always makes for a funny scene in a movie or sitcom when the count stops so that one person can ask the other if the lift is “on 1” or “after 1”.  Unfortunately, there are many fatal incidents every year that are due to communication errors.  One of the contributing factors to the crash of Avianca Flight 52 from Bogota to New York was a communication error regarding the fuel state of the passenger plane.  While most laypeople would take the phrase “we’re running low on fuel” to be a problem, that is not the common wording in aviation for declaring an inflight emergency. Because the flight crew didn’t accurately communicate their fuel state – which was dangerously low – to the tower, the tower did not know that Avianca Flight 52 was running on fumes. Avianca Flight 52 was unable to make their first landing attempt and had to go around for a second attempt. This second attempt ended when the plane ran out of fuel 20 miles short of the runway. Better communication of their dangerously low fuel state would have potentially allowed for a successful first landing attempt.

Over the last couple weeks, I’ve been getting better at interpreting Moxie’s verbal cues (barking) communication and her non-verbal (tapping, nipping at my elbow) to know when she is hungry, her toy has gotten stuck behind something, or that it is time for a trip outside for the bathroom.  I don’t have it all down yet, but I am getting there.

This was my failure in the use of the “Leave It” and “Drop It” commands.

What Should We Do Wednesday – 10/9/19

Quin Bond, CEAS III1 Comment

In the past, I have covered different incidents that point out how things could be done differently under the guise of “What Not To Do Wednesday” blog posts.  This morning, I read an article that was written after the safe resolution of a training flight that included a mechanical failure.  In “Elevator Failure at 4,500 Feet”, instructor pilot Rich Wyeroski recounts a flight in which the elevator on the horizontal stabilizer had a malfunction while the plane was in flight.  Wyeroski provides a solid recounting of the steps that he took to safely bring the plane down after the student pilot reported difficulty with the controls.  In the article, he states that his reason for writing the article is a concern that this incident, particular to Cessna 150 airplanes built between 1959 and 1970, could occur again without a hardware modification to upgrade the elevator hardware to the same standard as Cessna 152 planes as well as some Cessna 150 planes that were later.     He also discusses the importance of training to deal with potential emergencies such as this to ensure that pilots:

“Always try and stay calm during an emergency. Don’t do anything until you assess the situation and then react slowly. (The only time I would deviate from the above recommendation is if the aircraft is on fire!)”

Wyeroski, who is not only an experienced pilot, instructor pilot, and instructor for A&P mechanics, gave a great breakdown on how the flight was handled and possible solutions.  But, my reason for bringing up this aviation article was the comments section.  Some of the comments argued that a pre-flight inspection should have caught this and that a request for planes to have the attachment system for the elevators in the older Cessna 150 models is a little too much for something that happens rarely.

The thought process of those who stated that it should have been caught in the pre-flight inspection really stuck with me when I was reading the article.  Several people did note that it would be easy to miss (either by a lack of a thorough pre-flight inspection or by seeming ok during the pre-flight but loosening in flight).  The author noted in a comment that no issues were noted during pre-flight or during a recent annual inspection.

Without Wyeroski’s recount, this near fatal flight would not be a learning experience except for those who dig through NTSB case files.OLYMPUS DIGITAL CAMERA

One of the problems in safety and workers compensation is that all too often, only the incidents that cause injuries are reported/recorded and potentially used to effect some level of change within a worksite.  Sometimes, it is because only the people involved know about the incident because of not being required to report/record or even check in with occupational health.  But these “near misses” are important to take the time and look into more deeply.  Many times, the lessons learned from a “near miss incident”  can provide the information necessary to change either policies/procedures and or change/adjust equipment to prevent future incidents.  Wyeroski even notes in the comments that one lesson that he learned from this incident was to contact Air Traffic Control rather than the local Unicom operator to make sure that the Fire Department was ready and at the runway when he landed (apparently, the Unicom operator was unable to get the fire department to understand the urgency of the request and the risk of a fatal crash).

Photo by Adrian Pingstone, Wikimedia Commons