Boeing’s battery mishaps on their 787s at the beginning of this year may have emphasized the future role of sensory stimuli such as smoke and smell in flight emergency simulators. According to an NBC article, one of the pilots noticed an “unfamiliar smell.” According to an ABC account, the firefighter who tried to extinguish the second battery malfunction couldn’t see through the smoke to effectively put out the flames. If a firefighter struggled with clearing the smoke, what would the effects of smoke be at 30,000 feet in the air?
Some of the reasons the Boeing 787 became an initial favorite is the carbon fiber skeleton, greater control over cabin air pressure, larger windows and longer endurance compared to other airplanes. Even the battery seemed infallible: “It was thought that the only way the battery would burn would be if it was overcharged,” according to one NTSB report, which cited Boeing’s earlier testing.
Although Boeing has been creating and conducting stringent battery tests for the lithium ion issues, they still don’t know exactly what sparked the battery malfunctions during both emergency situations in the first place. The kinds of battery improvements Boeing is developing involve adding insulation to each battery cell to prevent a short circuit in one cell from spilling over to the next, enclosing them in stainless steel boxes rather than the more heat sensitive aluminum ones and adding monitors to measure the temperature and activity in each cell. However, the question begs that if testing and technology aren’t enough, why not focus on more effective and residual emergency flight training simulators?
What has been mentioned but not emphasized is that it was the smell of the battery malfunction that triggered the response in Japan. Dealing with battery fires, electrical fire hazard safety measures and prevention is an obvious necessity after these most recent incidents but what about adding these kinds of stimuli into flight simulation training?
Current training for emergency situations for commercial flights involve engine stalls/failures, wing stalls, loss of communication, weather problems like navigating through sudden storms and turbulence, dealing with panic in an enclosed area and optimizing mental alertness but the emphasis is often how the aircraft works rather than potential sensory preludes to emergencies (e.g. smells and smoke).
No matter what safety measures are in place it is a fact there are going to be failures – failures in technology, failures in safety measures and, of course, failures brought on by human fallibility. Emergency response is only as good as the fidelity of the simulation training. So commercial flight trainers should be focusing on the emergencies that will happen no matter how much prevention is in place. Learning how to navigate through smoke or identify unfamiliar scents can be taught through sensory training. Recreating smoky cabins, the smell of battery fires or even identifying an electrical fire by smell should be fiercely integrated into emergency flight simulator training. By using smell and smoke effects / generators during emergency response training it takes on a whole new sensory aspect to enable personnel to recognize and detect potential emergencies as early as possible.