NTSB Most wanted

The NTSB has some good ideas with their most wanted lists. Their idea is that by putting out what they see as the cause of too many accidents and their ideas on how to fix them. If I were to rank their 2016 Most wanted Improvements I would do them like this.
1. Prevent Loss of control in flight
2. Fatigue related accidents
3. Medical Fitness
4. Reducing distractions
5. Cockpit image recorders.

The reason that I think that Loss of control (LOC) Prevention should be at the top, is because it is really scary to think that someone could fly very little and in very specific situations, can load up a plane full of people and fly into conditions that could be far and above their skill level and lose control and kill everyone on the plane and even people on the ground. There have been over 1200 deaths in the last six years contributed to Loss of Control (NTSB, n.d.) LOC accidents are not only a GA problem. Look at the Colgan Air crash or the Air France flight, both of those aircraft entered textbook stalls, and the pilots reacted in the worst possible ways and crashed the airplane.

The second one on the list is kind of the dirty little secret of aviation. I spent a year flying cargo, and not even that hard of flying, we were out at 6am sat in a hotel room all day and flew back around 6 pm. I was off duty by 9:30 PM every night, but there wasn't one day that I wasn't at least tired, if not fully fatigued. And I know that most of the other pilots felt that way.  I know that 121 carriers are a little better at giving their pilots more rest than 135 operators, but just the lifestyle of living out of a suitcase, in hotels, and the demands of the job make pilots much more fatigued than people that put in 9-5 jobs. The rules that are in place are meant to be a bare minimum, but most if not nearly all commercial operations just copy and paste the regs into their schedule, the thought being that if its legal it must be safe, but that is just not the case.

They have medical fitness on here, but I think that really there should be ways to improve the medical reporting without risking losing your licence. As we saw on the German Wings crash last year, the fear of losing your medical and with it your entire flying career, is enough to make people hide very important medical information. It is the fear of the swift and decisive action that follows disclosing a medical problem, that keeps pilots mum on things that could be a small problem and prevents them from getting help while it is still a small problem.

Distractions in the cockpit can be a problem, but I don't see it as huge problem. Flying on autopilot, day in and day out over the same route can be boring, so what is the difference if a pilot is reading his phone or a book? But when its time for sterile cockpit, I would doubt that you would see any PEDs out.

Lastly, I think the idea of having image recorders in the cockpit would do very little to improve safety. The idea makes more sense in a train where things can jump out at you, but with the voice recorders and the flight data recorders, the investigators get a pretty good idea what happened.

Again I don't think that Cockpit image recorders are necessary for airplanes. There just isn't enough situations that having the image recorded would help in the investigation of accidents. As well as if video of a crash would get out, it could greatly hurt the aviation industry, by letting people see the final moments of a crash.

One thing I would like to see on the list, is an improvement of stick and rudder skills for 121 pilots who spend way too much time on autopilot that they lose the skills to actually fly the airplane if the situation calls for it.

As far as what I think the FAA will actually address, I think that they are working on the medical fitness and I have seen many forums on the Loss of Control issue. LOC is becoming what runway incursions were when I was starting out in the pilot world. Where there is intense focus on the causes and ways to keep them from happening, from training to recognition and prevention.

NTSB. (n.d.). prevent loss of control in flight in general aviation. Retrieved April 10, 2016, from http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/mwl/Pages/mwl6-2016.aspx

NTSB. (n.d.). disconnect from deadly distractions. Retrieved April 10, 2016, from http://www.ntsb.gov/safety/mwl/Pages/mwl5-2016.aspx