Blog 68 Simulate now to make the future safer

If you need to travel and want to arrive safely, then fly. With some stiff competition with the rail network, your chances of being killed during your flight are the least per distance travelled of any mode. This was not always so. Whereas by the middle of the last decade, the fatality rate associated with commercial flight was around a measly 100 per trillion per revenue passenger kilometre, a mere 40 years prior it was a staggering 40 times higher.

It is probably not a coincidence that the sophistication and prevalence of flight simulators started to increase exponentially in the 1970s (and hasn’t slowed down since). More inexperienced pilots were exposed to more and better simulation training. This meant that they made, understood and practiced recovering from causes for which the ultimate consequence may have been a crash. As a result, they were much less likely to respond poorly at 30,000 feet.

There have, however, been some recent instances where the opportunity to train in this way was not provided, perhaps contributing to disaster. In response to being caught flat footed by the surprise launch of Airbus A320neo in 2010 and the associated record sales at the 2011 Paris Air Show, Boeing initiated a program to develop a new competing model on an existing base – the 737 Max. This route to a new aircraft had the advantage of being much cheaper than creating one from scratch, Furthermore, one of the attractions for both Boeing and its customers was that if the regulators deemed that this model was indeed an evolution from an existing one, Pilot Simulator Training was not required; merely a short amount of Computer Based Training.

The US Federal Aviation Authority granted the Max its Amended Type Certification. Just months later, the program’s chief pilot, Ed Wilson, stated that pilots rated on previous versions of the 737 could switch to the Max with just “2 ? hours of CBT”.

However, in order to manage the propensity of the new, heavier engines (which had to be repositioned), to push the aircraft nose up and potentially stall, a software program called Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) would adjust trajectory to mitigate the risk. Unfortunately, it was reliant on one sensor – which failed on two planes where the pilots had not had the benefit of Simulator Training. The result – 2 crashes and avoidable 346 deaths.

Polyethylene was invented by ICI in the 1930s. The initial process involved extremely high pressures (~2000 atmospheres) and accordingly was expensive. By the 1980s, lower pressure and more cost-effective production methods had been developed, including BP Chemicals Fluidised Bed technology, which operated at 20 barg. BP decided to licence the technology and had considerable success – within a few years several licences had been sold and the first facility was ready to start up by 1989. However, at the petrochemical site where the technology was based and had been conceived (Lavera in the south of France), the early pilot and production facilities had initially been vulnerable to operational deviations leading to runaway reaction and polymer agglomeration, resulting in prolonged production outages.

Accordingly, this first start up was prolonged and raised questions about the operational viability of the technology. BP recognised that this was in part due to the challenges of imbuing the operator skills necessary to react appropriately to agglomeration causing deviations and addressed it by specifying and procuring a DCS (Distributed Control System) simulator. The first of these were sited at Lavera and Grangemouth, where BP Chemicals were building a new plant. The company also recognised that, in order to service the commissioning requirements of the growing number of licences sold, their Equipe Demarrage (Commission Team) needed more members, which, in March 1990, included me.

I trained at Grangemouth, then support start-ups at licenced plants in Japan, China and India. I was also tasked with developing, preparing and presenting an operator training program for licensees at Lavera then for a BP joint venture in Indonesia (where I had the pleasure of collaborating with Total’s Head of Process Safety Francois Germain).

For the next 3 decades, BP and then INEOS made hundreds of millions of dollars continuing to sell the technology, underpinned by, amongst other factors, their ongoing support for simulation to transfer necessary learning to new operators.

What do the two above examples illustrate? For me, a common theme is that where high hazard technology is developed and evolves, simulation can be an extremely cost-effective means to manage the transformations safely and effectively. The HAZOP technique has been saving future lives and improving company balance sheets for over 50 years. Currently (and for the foreseeable future) its traditional execution environment is compromised due to COVID19 and many planned reviews have moved partially or completely online. However, this sudden shift has turned experienced engineers into cyber novices, dramatically ramping up the risk of costly and perhaps deadly outcomes. It stuck me that a Remote HAZOP simulator could help ease this evolution. So, we decided to make one.

In autumn 2020, Process Safety Matters will launch what may be the world’s first Remote HAZOP simulator, so that HAZOP can continue to do what it does best – protecting the bottom line and enabling workers to go home at the end of every day.