Aircraft Upset - Overview

Overview

Prior to the fatal 1994 crash of USAir Flight 427, the U.S. NTSB "...had issued a series of safety recommendations over a 24-year period, asking the FAA to require air carriers to train pilots in recoveries from unusual flight attitudes. Throughout this period, the Safety Board was generally not satisfied with the FAA’s responses to these recommendations; specifically, the Board disagreed with the FAA’s responses that cited the inadequacy of flight simulators as a reason for not providing pilots with the requested training. However, after the USAir Flight 427 accident and the October 31, 1994, ATR-72 accident involving American Eagle Flight 4184 near Roselawn, Indiana, the FAA issued guidance to air carriers, acknowledging the value of flight simulator training in unusual attitude recoveries and encouraging air carriers to voluntarily provide this training to their pilots."

Some carriers did implement their own voluntary training programs, following those accidents, and the NTSB regarded those programs as "excellent."

In October 1996, the NTSB issued a formal Safety Recommendation (A-96-120), which requested the FAA to require all airlines to provide simulator training for flight crews, which would enable them to recognize and recover from "unusual attitudes and upset maneuvers, including upsets that occur while the aircraft is being controlled by automatic flight control systems, and unusual attitudes that result from flight control malfunctions and uncommanded flight control surface movements."

In 2004, the U.S. FAA issued its first Airplane Upset Recovery Training Aid. The second revision of that document was released in 2008 and is available at the FAA's website.

New FAA rules are expected to be finalized in 2010, requiring specific training for pilots to recover from aircraft upset incidents. New training programs may be known under the term advanced maneuver - upset recovery training (AM-URT).

In 2009, the Royal Aeronautical Society formed a new group of experts, who will form documentation to allow better simulations of aircraft upset conditions, and thus better training programs.