Safety worries take front seat as rusty pilots make errors back in the air
- Many pilots haven’t flown for over 18 months and as travel gradually resumes, concerns are growing that a lack of proficiency or confidence could lead to tragedy
- A Qantas pilot said rustiness can cause minor errors, while a Lion Air captain scaled back his own flying hour after being worried about his colleagues’ flying ability
Another pilot, fresh from a seven-month lay-off because of the pandemic and descending to land early in the morning, realised almost too late he hadn’t lowered the wheels and pulled out of the approach just 800 feet from the tarmac.
Weeks earlier, a passenger plane leaving a busy airport headed off in the wrong direction, flown by a captain who was back on deck for the first time in more than six months.
These potentially disastrous errors all took place in the US in recent months as pilots returned to work. In every case, crew blamed their oversight on a shortage of flying during Covid-19, the most deadly pandemic since the 1918 influenza outbreak and certainly the only one to have wreaked such havoc on what was a burgeoning global aviation industry.
The last thing the industry needs now is a bad accident
The incidents are among dozens of mistakes, confidentially declared by out-of-practice pilots since the start of the pandemic, that are stored on a low profile database designed to identify emerging safety threats. The monitoring programme, funded by the US Federal Aviation Administration, is decades old but is now flashing warning signs as planes return to the skies across the world.
Deep cuts by airlines left some 100,000 pilots globally working skeleton hours or on long-term leave, according to consulting firm Oliver Wyman. Many haven’t flown for more than 18 months. But as rising vaccination rates allow travel to resume, concerns are growing that a lack of proficiency, confidence, or simply one moment of forgetfulness could lead to tragedy.