Aircraft Accident Investigator: Forensics with a Splash of CSI

The job that Aerospace Engineering alumnus Doug Stoltz does for Pratt & Whitney involves “forensics with a splash of CSI.”

Determining the causes for aircraft accidents is the bailiwick of Stoltz, who was the first in a series of speakers the AE Graduate Student Advisory Committee (GSAC) invited to campus last fall. As Chief of Flight Safety and Mishap Investigations, Stoltz, BS 99, MBA 09 Carnegie Mellon University, talked about the skills and tools the aerospace manufacturer uses in investigating gas turbine accidents.

Stoltz has worked 12 years for Pratt & Whitney’s Engineering and Customer Support, with 10 years in safety. He has worked over 20 on-site mishap investigations across all military engines product lines (10 engine models).

Upon arriving at an accident scene, the atmosphere is “pure chaos,” Stoltz told students gathered for his talk. Often, 15 to 20 people are at the site, including company officials, government officials and investigators, pilots, doctors, accident recorders, and engine technical experts like him.

“There’s a lot of tension when you first encounter a crash,” he said. “You take a deep breath and bite off a little piece at a time. You take a systematic approach and locate the parts. The hardware can still tell you why (the accident happened).”

A typical investigation requires a month’s work: one week onsite, one week in tearing down the evidence, one week in analyzing the evidence, and one week writing the report.

“As a student, I hated technical writing, but it’s by far the most useful thing for what I’m doing now,” Stoltz said. “We need to produce concise, factual technical reports without bias.”

Roughly half the single-engine aircraft accidents he has investigated have been operations (aka pilot), and half, mechanical (a large portion of those engine-related).

“When the accident is not because of a mechanical problem, usually the pilot is extremely injured or is a fatality,” Stoltz said. The typical causes of pilot fatalities are G-induced loss of consciousness, spatial disorientation and controlled flight into terrain. There are a number of built-in safety features to avoid such accidents but pilots receiving warnings must do so automatically, without thinking. “We don’t want pilots to believe they are infallible,” he said.

It’s usually a number of factors that can lead to engine problems and, once discovered, the impact can be fleet wide, Stoltz said. Determining corrections for such problems requires diplomacy and objectivity. “For starters, you never want to blame people,” he said. “We want to know where the process broke down.”

GSAC established the series of inviting industry representatives to give in-person or webinar talks so that students can learn about the types of careers open to them. The talks are intended to allow graduate students to interact with people from industry and learn about particular projects of individual companies, according to GSAC organizer Daniel Uhlig.