Operational Safety Issue

The SISG secretariat has been warned by an Air Navigation Service Provider of several cases of lateral deviations from the published Standard Instrument Departure Procedures;

This scenario has a clear safety impact, which can be even more severe in an environment of parallel runway operations;

Historically, there has been a set of causal factors often associated with SID deviations. These include:

• Complexity of SIDs and the operating environment;
• Inefficient or lack of crew departure briefings;
• Inefficient crew inter-cockpit coordination and communication;
• ATC clearance issued during high workload taxi phase;
• ATC clearance issued too far in advance, requiring further re-clearance during high workload phase;
• Late Departure Runway and/or SID Change during high workload taxi phase;
• Pilot-aircraft interface issues, including errors in the operations of Flight Management System and Electronic Flight Instrument System;
• Air-ground communications issues, including wrong read-back, hear-back, callsign confusion.

Recent Experience with Potential New Causal Factors

After an investigation made by an ANSP, there is a hypothesis for causal factors not cited before:

• Method of FMS operation, programming the SID into the FMS in a format of waypoint-track-waypoint. Recent experience in a particular operational environment with FMS format of waypoint-waypoint suggests decline in the reported events.

EUROCONTROL Navigation Domain

Area Navigation Systems applications in terminal areas began to proliferate during the latter half of the nineties following the publication of design criteria for VHF Omnidirectional Radio Range (VOR)/Distance Measuring Equipment (DME), DME/DME and basic Global Navigation Satellite System instrument flight procedures; Recently published RNAV Procedures indicate that States are continuing to develop RNAV procedures which cannot be consistently coded into ARINC 424 for RNAV application.

Disclaimer

© European Organisation for Safety of Air Navigation (EUROCONTROL) May 2005. This alert is published by EUROCONTROL for information purposes. It may be copied in whole or in part, provided that EUROCONTROL is mentioned as the source and to the extent justified by the non-commercial use (not for sale). The information in this document may not be modified without prior written permission from EUROCONTROL. The use of the document is at the user’s sole risk and responsibility. EUROCONTROL expressly disclaim any and all warranties with respect to any content within the alert, express or implied.