1 in 10^9 Could Happen to You

Are You Ready?

by Crista V. Worthy

Recently, we boarded a Boeing 767 direct from San Francisco International (SFO) to Kona International (KOA) on Hawaii’s big island. Spirits were high: a tropical vacation was in store and the big jet was half-empty, so everyone had room to stretch out. Two flight attendants were serving their final workday before retirement. Parties awaited them in Hawaii, but they didn’t get there that day.

A couple of hours into the flight, the aircraft began an almost-imperceptible right turn. I tracked it against the scattered clouds hovering over the ocean from my right-side window seat. After 30 degrees, I thought it meant we had problems and as we neared 180 degrees, the first officer (F.O.) made an announcement. With a shaky voice, he told us the aircraft had lost all its navigation systems, including backups, and we were on our way back to SFO. An emergency had been declared with ATC. We were climbing to a “VFR altitude” of 34,500 feet to maintain traffic separation until a wide enough path could be cleared.

Immediately I felt a knot in my stomach. Did we have enough fuel to get all the way back? Never had the Pacific seemed so vast. I asked, and was told we took off with seven hours of fuel, which was enough... if we didn’t get lost. Still, with no radar coverage over the ocean, we were on our own, and I had no desire to discover whether our captain was as good at ditching as Captain Sullenberger. Obviously now hand-flown, the jet made numerous small corrections right and left all the way back.

Fortunately it was VFR at SFO. The emergency vehicles were waiting, but all was fine. After landing, I congratulated the captain and F.O. on a great job. I told them I was a pilot and asked how they navigated back. The grinning captain replied, “Whiskey compass!” I was just going to ask which specific instruments failed when an FAA inspector stepped into the cockpit and ushered me out.

I contacted the airline numerous times but they repeatedly offered “no comment,” so I cannot report on the actual failure. Two uninvolved 767 captains that I know will not speculate, but said that if the claim that all nav was lost was correct, it’s possible that both Flight Management Computers (FMCs) failed, or the Inertial Reference

Units (IRUs). They told me these jets have two FMCs, which receive data from their IRUs, VORs, and DMEs. Over the ocean, only IRU data is available and of course radar coverage ends about 30 minutes past the shoreline. They emphasized that a dual FMC failure is an extremely rare event.

That same week, a Citation X landed at Hartford, Conn., with its entire Honeywell Suite dark, apparently due to data corruption. These larger bizjets have more extensive and reliable backups than even the fanciest glass panels in a single-engine piston airplane. And airliners have double or triple backups for almost all systems. Yet this is the fourth time I have experienced an emergency landing in an airliner due to a major systems failure... and I don’t fly airlines much. As another aviation editor observed, “Ten to the ninth seems to be coming early these days.”

Thousands of pilots are flying or learning to fly with glass cockpits, believing the technology is virtually fail-proof. It is not. The big red Xs or the useless black screen could happen to you. Or you could be happily humming along when your GPS suddenly loses one satellite, then all of them. Perhaps there’s nothing wrong with your GPS or airplane and everyone else in the air is having the same problem as you because the entire Global Positioning System just went belly up. Worse, ATC wouldn’t be able to find you either if they’re using ADS-B, which relies on GPS instead of radar. Solar flares, due to peak early in 2013, can cause GPS outages and the system is known to be vulnerable to jamming or spoofing attacks by anyone from bored teenagers to terrorists. On some airplanes with integrated systems, losing GPS for any reason can cause a cascade of other failures, sending the aircraft’s capabilities into the relative Stone Age. Take the time to learn what else might fail on your aircraft if your glass system crashes.

Still, when all the fancy stuff went kaput on our 767 to Hawaii, the pilots successfully used dead reckoning to traverse some 1,500 miles of featureless ocean before they flew into radar coverage. Have you taken a good look at your compass lately and checked it for accuracy? Can you navigate VFR over unfamiliar territory using pilotage and dead reckoning? Do you carry current charts with you? Do you recall how to make position reports, tune and identify VORs, and inter cept and track radials? If you still have an ADF, can you use it? Are you comfortable relying on steam gauges with their different ways of displaying airspeed, altitude, and vertical speed?

And IFR pilots, can you fly long stretches in actual IMC without an autopilot? Have you done your 30-day VOR check? Do you keep current enroute charts with you when you fly IFR? Can you accurately enter and fly a procedure turn or hold as published or when instructed to by ATC, accounting for wind, without the moving map display? Are you practicing NDB, localizer, and ILS approaches, as well as missed approaches, using timing or DME when required, instead of GPS-derived data and graphics? Are you comfortable breaking out and circling just under the clouds, as often required on circling approaches?

If you answer “no” or “maybe” to any of these questions, set aside some study time. Then bring your CFI, CFII, or proficient safety pilot along and practice until you feel confident you can handle a complete glass failure. It’s challenging work, but amply rewarding and your margin of safety will improve considerably. And give your compass a salute: after the wheel, the sail, and the wing, I’d say the compass stands among the greatest inventions of all time.

Crista made it to Hawaii on a later flight. Read about her Hawaiian adventures in an upcoming issue of Pilot Getaways.