The
first time I saw JungleBus, I was a Q400 FO at Horizon, who had recently lost
their Frontier JetExpress flying only three years into a supposed 12-year
contract. As our CRJ-700s came back from Frontier they were being put on
inefficient routes like Portland-Seattle, and so the factors that would
eventually lead me to leave Horizon were already evident. In Spokane, I saw a
Republic JB in Frontier colors taxiing into the gate, and my initial reaction
was profound dislike. It looked like a child's pudgy plastic toy airplane to
me, and the fuzzy baby animal on the tail added to the impression. My critique
of the airplane's aesthetics never entirely changed even after I was flying it.
But that first impression was likely tinged by jealousy and frustration over my
stalled career at Horizon. Six months later I was in class at NewCo, learning
to fly that pudgy toy plane.
The
training began with a home self-study CD-ROM, which seemed awfully slim on
in-depth systems knowledge. I figured the classroom systems lectures would go
into greater detail, but when I got to Montreal the ground instructors seemed
to know even less about the plane than we did. Alarmingly, the same was true of
our simulator instructors. The checkride examiners asked plenty about each
control and button's function and system logic, but very little about the
underlying systems themselves. I entered OE feeling like I knew less about this
airplane than any I'd ever flown before - and despite that, got through in only
25 hours feeling pretty comfortable with line operations. And that wasn't me
being superpilot; everyone was
getting through with 25 hours of OE. I realized then that the lack of systems
instruction wasn't a byproduct of a new airline or a relatively new type, it
was an integral feature of a design meant to remove pilots and their pesky
human failings from its operation to the greatest degree possible.
The
JungleBus is in fact a fairly complex airplane, but from the flight deck it is
simplicity itself. The overhead panel features a few rows of large,
rarely-touched "dusty buttons" which select the systems to
"Auto" or "Off." When everything is selected to its normal
(auto) position, the switchlights are dark. The ram's horn yokes are
beautifully ergonomic and nicely balanced, which they well should be since
they're not connected to much of anything - it's all computer-augmented fly by
wire with the exception of the ailerons, which actually have control cables
running to their hydraulic actuators. The FADEC-controlling thrust levers glide
smoothly from idle to the rating detent, which you seldom feel since the
autothrottles are generally engaged before you ever get close to it. The
secondary controls - Flaps, Spoilers - are big and unmistakable, and protect
themselves by refusing to deploy when they shouldn't. The real heart of the
cockpit, the Flight Guidance Panel, has quite a few easy to understand and use
modes for lateral and vertical guidance - the most commonly used of which are
the FMS-derived LNAV and VNAV. When everything is working, it's a rather easy
airplane to fly.
But
what about when things break, you ask - what then? Again, the airplane makes it
as simple for the pilot as possible. Most major systems go through extensive
self-tests, transparent to the pilot, on aircraft power-up. If they fail their
self-test, they display an error message and you call maintenance. The only systems
the pilot tests himself are the fire protection, annunciator lights, and trim
switches. After startup and proceeding through the flight, the EICAS system
inhibits many faults, discreetly sending minor ones directly to the
airline and displaying others after landing or shutdown. Only outright failures
are shown on the EICAS display in real-time or close to it (most are inhibited
between 80 knots and V1), and then the system prioritizes the order of their
display so that malfunctions most likely to be the root cause of secondary
faults are addressed first. You just pick the highest priority message and run
the associated QRH checklist. Nine times out of ten, the checklist tells you to
select the system off, wait sixty seconds, and turn it back to auto, and nine
times out of ten this resolves the fault – the aeronautical equivalent of
Ctrl-Alt-Del. If the QRH leaves any room for confusion, you can bring up the
appropriate system schematic on the Multi-Function Display (MFD), and the
status and relationship of every component in the system is displayed. If our
instructors never placed much emphasis on knowing exactly what is powered by
each hydraulic system, for example, their laxity makes a little more sense when
you realize that the hydraulic synoptic page shows exactly what is being
powered at any given time, no rote memorization required. My colleagues and I
have often theorized that this airplane was designed to be flown in challenging
third-world conditions by inexperienced, occasionally fatigued crews, and most
of the time it will keep even this “lowest common denominator” crew out of
serious trouble.
Of
course, JungleBus’ front-end simplicity is achieved through a great deal of
back-end complexity of the electronic variety, and this means it is still prone
to human error – but these errors can lay hidden within layers of code or
imbedded on circuit boards for months or even years before surfacing in unexpected
ways. In six years I’ve seen this airplane do some truly mind-boggling things,
like spontaneously change a pilot-entered VNAV descent angle from a reasonable
3.5 degrees to an untenable 6 degrees, or abruptly turning 20 degrees off
course upon crossing an intermediate fix where the airway didn’t bend. A good
friend had a baffling situation where the pneumatic synoptic page showed that
both pack valves had closed themselves and the cabin altitude was rapidly
increasing. He quite reasonably made an emergency descent and subsequently
diverted to our maintenance base in Louisville, where subsequent investigation
showed that it was an indication error – both packs were working correctly and
cabin altitude had actually remained steady at 8000 feet! I personally
experienced a current surge event in one of the Secondary Power Distribution
Assemblies (SPDA) that fried multiple circuit boards in one fell swoop,
creating a puzzling array of seemingly unrelated faults; this fortunately
happened on the ground, during the Power-On Self Test.
These
type of events are not a slight against the JungleBus’ basic design; they
happen in every modern airplane, and I dare say more often in many than in the
JungleBus today (early on it had many more bugs to work through). I would say
they are notable in the JungleBus primarily because most of the time the
airplane does work so well that it lulls crew into less
active monitoring than they might practice in a less reliable design. This
complacency is the easiest way to get into trouble in a JungleBus, and usually
not because of some insidious bug hidden deep in the software. Most of the time
JungleBus crews screw up, they do it to themselves with bad input, and
subsequently fail to catch the error through lax monitoring. Too often when the
error is finally discovered, they attempt to fix the automation in a hurried,
panicked manner rather than simply flying the airplane and having the other
pilot fix the automation when time allows it to be done methodically. And this
problem, I would argue, is a direct
result of JungleBus’ design philosophy and the resulting way we have trained
her crews. If you take so much of an aircraft’s operation out of a pilot’s
hands, encourage him to continually use full automation, and keep him in the
dark as to much of what his aircraft is doing, you cannot reasonably expect him
to remain alert and engaged in the aircraft’s operation over countless
uneventful hours, and you cannot expect him to become instantly attuned when
something does go amiss. It goes against human nature. The FAA and the airlines
have become quite aware of this and the pendulum is finally swinging the other
way across the airlines and across fleets, toward a greater emphasis on manual
flight skills and automation shedding when appropriate.
Fortunately,
many of us who’ve been flying JungleBus for a while recognized her potential
for creating automation dependency early on, and took our own steps to ward it
off. We hand flew whenever appropriate, and occasionally turned off the
autothrottles and flight director too. We backed up the VNAV with good old
3-to-1 ratio mental math (which saved my bacon on that spontaneous path angle
change incident). We talked amongst ourselves and learned some of the more
insidious “bad input, bad output” scenarios, like accidentally hitting PREV
twice and setting ourselves up for an offside-localizer capture and subsequent
reversion to ROLL HOLD mode. We talked to our mechanics and learned the nuts
and bolts behind the Auto mode buttons. We opened the QRH in cruise with
synoptic pages displayed on the MFD, unraveling the reasoning behind the
procedures. We followed our progress across the country and played the “if
everything goes blank now, where do I
go?” game.
Fortunately,
none of us ever had those “everything goes blank” scenarios actually happen. Everything
generally worked very well. When JungleBus did throw us a curve, we usually
caught it early on. When I made dumb inputs, my FOs almost always caught them
before agreeing to “Activate.” Once in a while the autopilot and/or
autothrottles would do something funky and I’d turn them off, and I’d
appreciate all over what a wonderfully honest, smooth-flying airplane it is
when you just fly the damn thing – a big Cherokee, really. JungleBus never did
anything to put me or my ticket in danger, as long as I just paid attention. I finished my stint at the regionals with a
clean record and about 7000 accident-free, violation-free, and mostly
uneventful airline hours. I have useful training & prior experience, great
coworkers, and two very different but ultimately very good airplanes to thank
for that. Goodbye, JungleBus. I’ll miss you.
