By Gp Capt Kapil Bhargava - Indian Air Force ( Retd.) The pilot is dead. Long live pilot-error… The second prototype of the Saras crashed on March 6, 2009 near Bidadi, 40 km from Bangalore. The crash killed two test pilots and a flight test engineer. All three serving Air Force officers were from Aircraft & Systems Testing Establishment (ASTE). The aircraft was designed and built by National Aerospace Laboratories (NAL), also of Bangalore. The report on the crash originally promised in about a month is yet to be released after more than eight months. The immediate conclusion from this extreme delay is that a scapegoat has yet to be found. We can rest assured the final answer is likely to be that the crash was the result of pilot error. This conclusion has the great advantage to allow everyone to carry on as before and it is also the normal escape route for the people actually responsible. The pilots obviously did commit a very major error - to fly the aircraft at all. This was compounded by their receiving briefing for the critical test flight from NAL which obviously knows little or nothing about flight testing and how to undertake it correctly and safely. The NAL is a laboratory under the Council of Scientific and Industrial Research (CSIR). It is not a PSU under Ministry of Defence and is not funded or controlled by it. The NAL is India's pre-eminent civil R&D establishment in aeronautics and allied disciplines. But neither NAL nor other units of CSIR are industrial organisations. The NAL has done sterling work in developing technologies, especially for aerospace, to be applied by the industry. Its attempt to design and develop an aircraft for the civil sector does not fall within its charter of duties. The hazards in this extrapolation of its main functions have come home to roost in the crash of the Saras. The days are long gone when two brothers manufacturing bicycles could make and fly an aircraft. Aircraft have grown in complexity and have in fact become remarkably safe and efficient. Today an aircraft design needs a team which must grow into its job. This applies to modern trainers, fighters, bombers and of course civil airliners. Hence, it is not clear why or how NAL is into aircraft design. It has no designers with any design experience. At most it might have re-employed some of them retired from HAL. There is no young and dynamic team to handle the projects. Its only objective seems to be to garner personal glory for a few scientists, who are not necessarily technologists. There is no production facility or a flight test group to plan or brief aircrew. This is an unworkable situation in the modern context. Instead of acknowledging its handicaps and the risk they pose, NAL is now rumoured to be designing a seventy seat airliner. If this gets to the stage of actually carrying passengers in (say) twenty years, it is sure to kill more than just three aircrew. Its cost would be astronomical as the Hansa has clearly demonstrated. The production technology is likely to be primitive, incapable of being used to manufacture aircraft in numbers within a reasonable cost and time frame, with the minimum requirement of men and material. Considerable experience is essential to make a commercially viable product. NAL's solution today is to declare that it has designed a brilliant aircraft, now it is for others to test and certify it. In fact the Saras is a slightly smaller CBA 123 Vector designed and abandoned in the 90s by Embraer of Brazil, before it was privatised. The situation is compounded in that the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGCA) has virtually no experience in certification of newly designed aircraft for non-military use. Its experience of issuing routine certificates of airworthiness is limited to aircraft already built and cleared abroad. Its rule effective 1st February 2007, including Revision 12, dated 23rd April 2009 says: - 2. Issuance of Certificate of Airworthiness: 2.1 Accepted Airworthiness Standards 2.1.1 Each aircraft, either manufactured in India or imported into India for which a Certificate of Airworthiness is to be issued or validated, shall conform to the design standards and be in a condition for safe operation. To be eligible for issuance of Certificate of Airworthiness, an aircraft must be Type Certified by DGCA in accordance with Rule 49. The design standards specified in CS/ JAR 23 and CS / JAR 25 of Europe and FAR 23 and FAR 25 of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) of USA are generally acceptable for light and transport category aircraft. For helicopters, design standards followed by FAA as specified in FAR 27 & 29 are acceptable for light and transport category helicopters, respectively. Under threat of disqualification to fly to USA by its Federal Aviation Administration, DGCA is only now to increase its staff significantly. A group might then be created to formulate criteria for testing and certifying indigenously designed and constructed aircraft. At the moment FAR, or rarely JAR, are blindly applied by DGCA. Amazingly, for many aspects of design, NAL advises DGCA on the fitness for certification. In view of this it is highly questionable how the Saras has ever been cleared even for flight tests. But DGCA is an organisation with few or no checks and balances. It can always issue a new rule, unquestionable by anyone, that an aircraft such as designed by NAL is certified fit for carrying out test flying. At the moment the DGCA has no equivalent of Federal Aviation Regulations, FAR mentioned above, or JAR, Joint Airworthiness Requirements of Europe. Its only experience in over half a century was on the Pushpak and later the crop spraying Basant, both types manufactured by HAL. The Pushpak was a blatant copy of the Aeronca Super Chief. It was easy to allow it to carry out test flying. Later in a grand gesture it was issued a type certificate by DGCA. The Basant was required to concurrently meet both FAR and Australian Airworthiness Requirements. Gliders, Revathi and Swati produced by DGCA's Technical Centre are best forgotten. It has no trained staff to handle the work equivalent to CEMILAC and its regional representatives for inspection and certification of indigenously designed and built prototype aircraft. If NAL must continue designing aircraft, it should be made into an aircraft factory with a design organisation, flight testing department, including aircrew and a system to get the aircraft certified. Otherwise, money is simply being wasted just because some politicians and bureaucrats believe that today we have more funds than we need. There is no doubt that HAL needs competition. But the answer is not another Government laboratory or undertaking. Since there seems to be more than enough money available for such efforts, a joint venture with the private sector should be launched, with the Government as non-controlling junior partner. If no business magnate takes up such an offer, it should warn the Government that it is simply throwing away good money for no return. The accident of the Saras is not entirely the fault of NAL and DGCA. IAF has been remiss in managing its flight testing. Aircraft & Systems Testing Establishment (ASTE) was never envisaged to carry out prototype testing ahead of manufacturers. Its test crew have tested prototypes in the past but strictly limited to the stage already cleared by the manufacturer. Since the design expertise of NAL and the knowledge and experience of DGCA to certify and clear a prototype are quite inadequate, ASTE should never have been involved in this task in the first place. In fact, the interest of IAF in this project defies all logic. As pointed out in a recent article in Defence Review, the aircraft was not designed to any requirement of IAF. It will certainly be a white elephant in the Air Force inventory. No politicians in power, bureaucrats or senior military officers are likely to agree to travel in it. Flight testing of Saras in ASTE does not seem to have been given adequate attention. Most test pilots graduating from ASTE come from the fighter stream, apart from helicopter specialists. Just because a test pilot graduates does not make him fit for prototype testing. Allowing this is similar to a young MBBS suddenly being permitted to carry out a coronary arterial bypass operation. Such surgery is likely to kill the patient. But inadequately experienced and briefed test pilots kill themselves, and any crew on board. While fighter pilots can switch to transports relatively easily, the reverse is not always true, though there have a few notable exceptions. Test pilots need to be extremely well groomed. with experience and knowledge to handle prototypes testing. A good briefing must cover all hazardous situations, not just concentrate on the actual test points to be covered. Otherwise, crashes are inevitable at some stage or another. Almost certainly these essential preliminaries were not adequately covered for the doomed flight of the Saras. In the Saras there is much work yet to be done before it comes anywhere near NAL's ambition to meet FAR Part 25. There are a few clearly identifiable hazardous areas in its testing which require very careful preparation. Test pilots are taught a discipline named Failure Mode Analysis to try and prepare plans of action to cater for all imaginable contingencies. Test pilots in IAF can and do manage this for aircraft after in-house repair and overhaul or offered with new modifications. For prototype aircraft this study is first carried out by manufacturer's test pilots who must brief service pilots on likely emergencies and the methods of coping with each of them. For a service test pilot facing an emergency such as on the Saras, it would be impossible to work out what to do after it crops up. Almost certainly this is what happened to cause the crash. Adequate preparation would have shown how to cope with what actually happened. Perhaps it is time that IAF should tell NAL to make its own arrangements for testing and certifying the Saras and later designs, if any are yet to emerge from NAL's design stable. For LCA, the National Flight Test Centre (NFTC) was raised. Maybe it should now live up to its name and manage flight testing till certification of new designs by NAL, DRDO or other Government agencies. Obviously, NFTC would need to be duly expanded, manned and equipped to handle such tasks. Flight test crew and ground based staff should preferably see a project through from its maiden flight to its certification. It is unlikely that IAF can continue manning NFTC to meet this requirement. The solution must lie with agencies harbouring ambitions of designing aircraft for non-military use. |