Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee, I am Captain Paul McCarthy, Executive Air Safety Chairman of the Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), which represents 55,000 professional pilots who fly for fifty-one commercial airlines in the United States and Canada. ALPA appreciates this opportunity for me to appear before you today to join with other members of the aviation community to discuss both the current and future architecture of the nation's Aviation Weather System, a system through which we collectively deal with aviation operations during severe or rapidly changing weather conditions.
Discussions like this, unfortunately, are not new. Virtually every time a commercial air carrier and its passengers are victims of a weather encounter, hearings are held, problems identified, and solutions rendered. The solutions do not always fix the correct problems, and the cycle repeats.
DISCUSSION
Pilots are the final stop in the operational decision tree. Without good information upon which to base them, decisions may be flawed. Each time the aviation community has gathered to analyze weather related accidents, the need for better information on the flight deck has invariably been identified. This was a conclusion following Eastern 66 at Kennedy in 1975, and again after Delta 191 at Dallas-Fort Worth in 1985. The conclusion was repeated after USAIR 1016 at Charlotte in 1994, after American 1572 at Bradley in Connecticut in 1995, and again after Delta 554 at LaGuardia in 1996. American 1420 at Little Rock has prompted the discussion once again. The problem is more frustrating now because in this age of electronic technology, everyone in the pilot's communications chain has better weather information than pilot and crew have available to them in the cockpit. In fact, an airline passenger seated in the back of an aircraft, equipped with a satellite digital cell phone and a lap top computer with a modem, can receive real time weather data that the crew flying the airplane can not receive in the cockpit. The time has come to institute a fundamental change in the approach to solving this problem. The solution is to provide flight crews with direct access to real time weather information that will help them with strategic decisions.
Aviation weather has been, and should continue to be, a fundamental factor affecting the efforts of all concerned to provide safe, efficient, and economical air transportation. The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the National Weather Service (NWS) share responsibility for well-timed dissemination of detected and forecast weather phenomena to the aviation community. Key factors influencing the success of this shared responsibility rest in the ability of the FAA Aviation Weather Directorate (ARW) to: 1) accurately identify operational weather requirements of the various National Airspace System (NAS) users; 2) develop appropriate programs and agreements between the agencies to satisfy system requirements and; 3) provide oversight necessary to insure overall effectiveness in the system.
Direct access to real time weather information in the cockpit has been stated above. ALPA feels that it qualifies as an operational requirement for the users. Members of the industry are working the data link issues to bring this about but the process is painfully slow. We continue to hear that the system is on the verge of providing the capability to simultaneously data link the same weather graphics to pilots, controllers, and dispatchers. Though each have weather displays that they utilize now to do their jobs, the information varies. Data link technology will ultimately allow standardizing that information and operating from the same data page. ALPA feels that it is time to develop appropriate programs and agreements between the agencies to satisfy system requirements. Development of this technology has been slow, partly because commitment to fund some levels of system development has apparently been hesitant. ALPA recommends that if a review of programs is necessary to eliminate any obstacles that are currently hindering final implementation of data link systems, then that review must be done.
Despite the fact that progress has been made with ground based radar systems to detect and identify hazardous weather, that data only arrives in the cockpit as second hand filtered information a significant period of time after it was identified on the ground. Forty-four of the busiest airports in the U.S. have Terminal Doppler Weather Radar Systems (TDWR), the leading radar system developed as a result of years of experience with wind shear accidents; and an enhanced Low Level Wind Shear Alert System (LLWAS), to help controllers further identify wind shear and hazardous weather events. The forty-fifth location will be a TDWR system sited to serve New York Kennedy and New York LaGuardia airports after political and environmental issues there are settled. Thirty-nine of the next busiest airports, Little Rock included, have only an upgraded LLWAS as their primary hazardous weather indicator. Finally, many of the remaining two hundred or more air carrier airports also have an upgraded LLWAS installed, but these are older systems that are programmed for eventual removal and for fiscal reasons will not be replaced.
Most approach control and airport air traffic control tower facilities have the ASR-9 Surveillance Radar installed for controlling traffic. The ASR-9 provides convective weather information as well as airborne traffic information, capable of identifying weather cells by their intensity. Some tower facilities, Little Rock included, still operate with the ASR-8 Surveillance Radar, a system somewhat inferior to ASR-9 in weather identification. All airports served by Part 121 air carriers utilize Automatic Surface Observation Systems (ASOS) to provide current weather observations. FAA/NWS qualified and approved weather observers augment the weather observation data.
All of that information is filtered to our cockpits in different ways. At Charlotte, ATC had a great deal of information that could have been shared with the pilots, but the NTSB report indicates that ATC failed to share some parts that were crucial. At Dallas-Fort Worth, none of the crucial weather information was passed on to the pilots of Delta 191. At Little Rock, ATC shared everything available, but may have been hampered by the inferior hardware. The Little Rock ASR-8 Surveillance Radar is less capable as a weather monitor than the ASR-9 system used at all of the busier airports. Under circumstances like these, crews may allow other information or past experience to super cede prudent decisions. All three of the crews above had seen the airport and runway environment and their decisions to attempt landings because of the visual contact may have been more compelling than the deteriorating weather.
In addition to a data link process of weather graphics to the cockpit for strategic planning, pilots need raw unfiltered data in the cockpit for tactical weather decisions. Airborne doppler weather radar would fill that requirement nicely. Airborne weather radar systems are required for all Part 121 air carrier aircraft, and that rule was written following weather related accidents many years ago. Unfortunately, some of the airborne systems operating today were developed when that requirement was written, and their capabilities show it. An airborne weather radar system with a Doppler capability to identify air mass and particle movement is a giant step in avionics systems development. Such a capability enhances the ability to identify and predict wind shear and turbulence, and perhaps paint a clearer picture of thunderstorms and associated convective activity. If technology has given us such a capability with ground based radar systems, airborne systems should be similarly capable.
HISTORY
Of 15 weather-related accidents identified during the past 27 years, over 70 pertinent safety recommendations were issued by the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The subject areas of these safety recommendations included airline weather training, airline weather acquisition and dissemination, flightcrew acquisition of weather information and fiightcrew reaction to adverse weather conditions, as well as Air Traffic Control (ATC) and National Weather Service (NWS) acquisition and dissemination of weather information. The subject areas also included airborne and ground based weather forecasting and identification systems. The accident history and identified causal factors clearly indicates a learning curve in which the aviation industry has made advances in the areas of system technology, adverse weather identification and weather information acquisition and dissemination. But, unfortunately the accident history also shows evidence of lessons learned but never acted upon. For example, on March 3, 1972, a Mohawk Airlines FH-227B accident occurred in Albany, New York. In 1974, as a result of this accident, the NTSB recommended that a system be implemented to "..relay severe thunderstorm and tornado warning bulletins expeditiously to inbound and outbound flights when such bulletins include the terminal area." This safety recommendation remained open until December of 1984, 10 years later. It was at this time that the NTSB determined the FAA's actions, which included the installation of a faster communications network to provide the Center Weather Service Units (CWSU) with additional and more timely data, were sufficient and classified it as Closed--Acceptable Action.
However, during this 10 year period in which this safety recommendation remained open, ten other weather related accidents occurred, at least 4 of which resulted in similar recommendations or referenced the original recommendation of the 1972 accident. In fact, recommendations dealing with weather information acquisition and dissemination were made as late as 1994 following the previously mentioned fatal accident in Charlotte, North Carolina. These interim recommendations, although related to ATC to flightcrew notification, were expanded to include other modes of notification (i.e. NWS - controller, controller - ATIS, etc.). Of the 74 total weather related safety recommendations identified, six remain classified by the NTSB as Closed - Unacceptable Response, five of which deal with weather acquisition and dissemination. A status of Closed - Unacceptable Response indicates that the FAA failed to adequately act upon an NTSB recommendation.
LESSON SUMMARY
What have we learned? How many accidents or incidents must be experienced to help us understand the lessons? Several years ago, after the wind shear accidents at New York, New Orleans, and Dallas, researchers, regulators and industry experts collectively cooperated to develop and produce detection and prediction equipment that could reduce the risk of operations where wind shear is a threat. The earliest versions of LLWAS were deployed, NEXRAD Doppler weather radar was developed and deployed for the National Weather Service, TDWR was developed and installed at 44 locations, and ASR-9 surveillance radar with superior weather detection capability was developed and deployed for the FAA, though not everywhere, with Little Rock as an example. Weather research continues, and complex projects to optimize and share information are being developed and tested throughout the system.
In virtually every case where a weather related air carrier accident or incident has occurred, detection or dissemination shortcomings have been identified, among other things, as contributing factors. In each case, National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) recommendations for corrective action were included in the accident investigation record to assist regulators and operators with avoiding repetition. Not every recommendation has been heeded, and many remain open.
CONCLUSION
Either we have reached a turning point from which we will expand our capabilities and reduce current risk levels; or we will continue on our present course, allow the frequency of incidents and accidents to grow, and continue to meet here to discuss our shortcomings.
Mr. Chairman, I appreciate the opportunity to share ALPA's views on this important matter, and I will be happy to answer any questions you and the other members of the Subcommittee may have.