While poring through rafts of reports on accidents and serious incidents in the course of our investigations as members of the Flight Safety Foundation (FSF) Approach and Landing Accident Reduction (ALAR) Task Force, the same questions occurred over and over: Why didn’t the flight crew follow standard operating procedures? Why didn’t they fly their instruments? Why didn’t they hear and respond to the ground-proximity warning system (GPWS)?
Poor decision making in many cases was caused by stress overload that resulted in the narrowing of crew focus to the point that warnings were not heard, recognized or acted upon.
In the course of working with accidents similar to those in this article, we noted that many times the pilots seemed to lack knowledge of the design criteria for the instrument approach procedures that they were conducting.
In both the U.S. Standard for Terminal Instrument Procedures (TERPS) and the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) equivalent, Proced…
