Cockpit Confidential, page 25
This same line of reasoning extends to the equally popular aircraftversus-aircraft debate. Which are more trustworthy, 737s or A320s? Answer: take your pick. Virtually every established airline, and every certificated commercial plane, is safe by any useful definition.
What about the safety of budget carriers?
See above. And what is a budget carrier, exactly? Southwest would probably fit that bill by most folks’ definition, yet its only fatality in forty-plus years of flying was a runway overrun incident in Chicago that killed a boy in a car. There is longstanding suspicion that young, competitively aggressive airlines are apt to cut corners. It’s an assertion that, while it feels like it makes sense, isn’t bolstered by the record. In the United States, a twenty-five-year lookback, encompassing every upstart carrier since the industry was deregulated in 1979, from PeoplExpress to jetBlue, reveals only a handful of fatal crashes and an overall accident rate in proportion to market share.
There are, and always have been, newer and smaller airlines that run highly professional, button-down operations up to the highest possible standards. Others have run looser ships and paid the price. At the same time, some of the world’s eldest and most respected carriers have, on occasion, been guilty of deadly malpractice.
What happens to pilots involved in mishaps? Do they get rewarded for saving a plane from disaster? And what of surviving pilots deemed at fault for something? What happens to their careers?
Commendations typically come in the form of flattering letters from your bosses, handshakes at a banquet, and maybe a plaque. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the industry’s largest pilots union, gives out awards each year for outstanding airmanship. Not that there’s anything wrong with a nice shiny plaque and a free buffet, to say nothing of the personal and professional satisfaction that comes from having performed well under pressure, but no, you don’t get a promotion or extra pay. You might earn some congratulatory time off, but nothing, not even saving the lives of hundreds of people, trumps the seniority system.
It’s the other kind of time off a pilot hopes to avoid. Minor infractions that do not cause damage or injury—accidental deviations from a clearance, for instance—rarely result in a harsh penalty, but in cases of serious negligence the sanctions range from mandatory remedial training to suspension to being fired.
FAA “certificate action” is independent of punishment levied by the airline. The agency issues letters of warning or correction—pilots call these “violations”—or your license can be suspended or revoked. You might get to keep your existing job, but any administrative action on a pilot’s record can be a huge, even fatal hindrance if seeking employment later on.
In the United States, airlines and the FAA have partnered in a program called the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), which permits crews to self-report small-scale deviations or inadvertent procedural breaches in exchange for immunity. ASAP protects pilots from punitive action and allows airline training departments and regulators to collect and monitor important data. Rather than looking to blame and punish somebody for every infraction, the idea is to spot unsafe trends and deal with them proactively. It’s a well-received program with benefits to all vested parties, including passengers, and the concept has spread to other industries, such as medicine and nuclear power.
I don’t know of any cases in the United States where pilots have faced civil action, as when a doctor is sued for malpractice (attorneys realize it’s the airlines and manufacturers with the deep pockets, not employees), but in many other countries pilots have been arrested and put on criminal trial for their professional mistakes. One prominent case involved manslaughter charges brought against the captain of a turboprop that crashed in New Zealand in 1995. In 2000, three pilots of a Singapore Airlines 747 were taken into police custody in Taiwan after a crash at Taipei’s Chiang Kai Shek airport. They were forced to remain in Taiwan for two months, facing up to five years in prison on charges of “professional negligence.” Pilots in Brazil, Italy, and Greece have dealt with similar situations. In 2001, a Japanese crew was interrogated by law enforcement after taking evasive action to avoid an inflight collision with another aircraft. Several people were injured during the maneuver, and police officers were sent to the cockpit after landing.
“Fortunately, in the United States and many other nations, the emphasis is on getting to the root causes of accidents and fixing the problem,” says an ALPA representative. “It doesn’t work that way in all countries, and that includes industrialized democracies where you’d think they’d know better. Pilots, controllers, and even company officials can do hard time for an inadvertent error that doesn’t come close to a reasonable definition of criminal negligence. You can imagine what a chilling effect that has on the accident investigation process.”
Watching planes land, it strikes me that their tires must endure a lot of stress. Are blowouts common?
They’re not common, but they happen once in a while. Blowouts of a plane’s forward nose gear tires are by nature pretty innocuous. Those involving main-gear tires beneath the wings and fuselage are a little different and potentially more serious.
The most probable time for a tire failure is during or shortly after any sort of high-speed braking event such as a takeoff abort or a sudden stop after landing. Heavy braking generates tremendous amounts of energy and heat, some of which is transferred to the tires themselves. Although airplane tires are filled with inert nitrogen and affixed with fuse plugs that cause them to automatically deflate rather than burst, failure of a main-gear tire at high runway speed can still induce all sorts of unpleasantness, from reduced braking capabilities to fire. Making things worse is the possibility of a single failed tire propagating the failure of those around it. A runway abort with multiple expired tires can be a dicey operation, and should a burst occur anywhere near takeoff speed the smartest course of action is to continue the takeoff and deal with the problem once airborne.
In 1986, a Mexicana 727 went down after takeoff from Mexico City, killing 167 people. An overheated brake caused one of the plane’s four main tires to burst, with shrapnel severing fuel, hydraulic, and electrical lines. It had been erroneously serviced with air instead of nitrogen. Inflation pressure too is important; a too-low tire can generate intense temperatures. In 1991, a Canadian-registered DC-8 crashed in Saudi Arabia, killing 261 people. A single, underinflated tire transferred energy to a second one, and both came apart during takeoff. Bits of material then began to burn after gear retraction, spreading fire through the cabin as the plane circled back. And the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000 was linked to a fuel tank puncture brought on by a burst tire.
Though, to be clear, the vast majority of blowouts, even at high speeds, turn out to be harmless. Modern airliners are protected by highly effective anti-skid systems, brake temperature readouts in their cockpits, and wheel-well fire suppression systems in the gear bays. The catastrophes above involved models now obsolete.
One of them was a DC-8, a plane that I’m all too familiar with, having worked aboard a freighter version for the better part of four years (see “North Latitude”). Late one night in 1998, we were prepping for takeoff out of Brussels, Belgium, at our highest allowable tonnage when the ground controllers gave us a long, circuitous route to runway 25R. Rolling along the apron in predawn darkness, we suddenly heard a bang and felt a shudder. A small pothole, we concluded, and kept going, as otherwise the aircraft felt normal. Just as we turned onto the runway and were cleared for takeoff, we heard a second bang, followed rapidly by a third, and then a fourth. And with that, the airplane—all 355,000 pounds of it—seized and wouldn’t move.
The first noise we’d heard was one of the DC-8’s eight under-wing tires violently giving up the ghost. At max weight and after several sharp turns along the taxiways, it was only a matter of time before the adjacent one met a similar fate. With two gone, stress on the remaining two sent them popping as well. We were glad things happened when they did, and not at 150 knots. The runway was closed until the plane could be unloaded, de-fueled, and towed away for repairs.
What are the chances of a nonpilot safely landing a jetliner? If the entire cockpit crew became incapacitated, could a person with no formal training somehow get the plane on the ground?
There’s a ladder to this. Do you mean somebody who knows nothing at all about flying? How about a private pilot who has flown four-seaters, or a desktop simulator buff who has studied a jetliner’s systems and controls? The outcome in all cases is liable to be a catastrophe, but some would fare better than others. It depends too on the meaning of “land.” Do you mean from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway, with someone talking you through it? Or do you mean the whole, full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown?
Even a rube has a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won’t become a cartwheeling fireball. In 2007, the Discovery Channel show Mythbusters set things up in a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a “generic commercial airliner.” Hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman took the controls, while a seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructed them via radio. On the first try, they crashed. The second time, they made it.
But all they really did was land a make-believe airplane from a starting point already close to the runway. The scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly falls ill, and only a brave passenger can save the day. He’ll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down. For somebody without any knowledge or training, the chance of success in this scenario is zero. This person would have to be talked from 35,000 feet all the way to the point where an automatic approach could commence, complete with any number of turns, descents, decelerations, and configuration changes (appropriately setting the flaps, slats, and landing gear). I reckon that would be about as easy as dictating organ-transplant surgery over the telephone to somebody who has never held a scalpel. It’d be tough even for a private pilot or the most obsessive desktop sim hobbyist. Our would-be hero would have a hard enough time finding the microphone switch and correctly configuring the radio panel, let alone the maneuvering, programming, navigating, and configuring it would take to land safely.
A few of you might remember the film Airport ’75. A 747 is struck near the flight deck in midair by a small propeller plane, and all three pilots are taken out. I almost hate to say it, but dangling Charlton Heston from a helicopter and dropping him through the hole in the fuselage wasn’t as far-fetched a solution as it might sound. It was about the only way that jumbo jet was getting back to earth in fewer than a billion pieces. The scene where Karen Black, playing a flight attendant, coaxes the crippled jumbo over a mountain range was, if less than technically accurate, useful in demonstrating the difficulty any civilian would have of pulling off even the simplest maneuver.
A few years ago, here in New England, after the lone pilot of a Cape Air commuter plane became ill, a passenger took over and performed a safe landing. The TV news had a field day with that one, though the passenger was a licensed private pilot and the aircraft was only a ten-seat Cessna. Otherwise, there has never been a case where a passenger needed to be drafted for cockpit duty. I guess that means either it never will happen, or it is destined to happen soon, depending how cynical you are about statistics.
All right, but what of the hijacker pilots on September 11, 2001? Doesn’t their success at steering Boeing 757 and 767 jets into their targets contradict what I’ve just said and demonstrate that not only can a nonpilot fly, but fly well?
No, not really. The hijacker pilots, including Mohammad Atta, were licensed private pilots, and he and at least one other member of the cabal had purchased several hours of jet simulator training. Additionally they had obtained manuals and instructional videos for the 757 and 767 (the planes used in the attacks), openly available from aviation supply shops. In any case, they neither needed nor demonstrated any in-depth technical knowledge or skill. The intent was nothing more than to steer an already airborne jetliner, in perfect weather, into the side of a building. And their flying, along the way, based on radar tracks and telephone calls from passengers, was violent and unstable.
Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour, at the controls of American flight 77, was a notoriously untalented flyer who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater. Yet, according to some, he is said to have pulled off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon. But when you really look at it, his flying was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his erratic loops and spirals above the nation’s capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the building squarely he needed a bit of luck, and he got it. Striking a stationary object, even a large one with five beckoning sides, at high speed and at a steep descent angle, is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon’s lawn. If he’d flown the same profile ten times, seven of them he’d probably have tumbled short of the target or overflown it entirely.
Maybe this is a crazy question, but why don’t commercial planes carry parachutes for each passenger? Granted a novice skydiver would be risking life and limb, but it’s a better option than hitting the ground at 400 miles per hour.
Ignoring for a moment the issues of cost and weight and the likelihood of killing yourself as you leap from a plane with no prior experience, consider the nature of aviation disasters. They tend to occur with little warning, and usually during takeoff or landing, meaning that chutes would seldom be helpful. Normal skydiving takes place under tightly controlled parameters. To even entertain the idea of jumpers making it safely to the ground from a passenger jet, the plane would need to be in very stable flight and at a low-enough speed and altitude—yet high enough for a chute to properly deploy. How many times, in the history of civil aviation, has a crew known for certain that a serious crash was imminent, yet still had enough time and control to prepare for a coordinated mass evacuation? One that comes to mind, maybe, is the 1985 Japan Air Lines catastrophe (see worst disasters). After a bulkhead rupture and rudder failure, the Boeing 747 floundered about for several minutes before going down near Mt. Fuji. Had chutes been aboard, we can speculate that some of the passengers may have survived.
A few single-engine private planes have built-in parachutes for use in certain emergencies, such as an engine failure over rough terrain. I know what you’re thinking: imagine that crippled JAL 747 floating to the ground under a giant chute. But that type of accident was highly atypical, and the size and weight of jetliners would make any commercial application extraordinarily difficult.
With the skies as crowded as they are, how grave is the danger of a midair collision?
Airplanes do, on occasion, breach the confines of one another’s space. Usually this is a brief, tangential transgression. Almost always the mistake is caught, and safeguards are in place to minimize any hazard. Pilots are required to read back all assigned headings and altitudes, for example.
As a backup, airliners today carry onboard anticollision technology. Linked into the cockpit transponder, Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS, pronounced Tea-Cass), gives pilots a graphic, on-screen representation of nearby aircraft. If certain thresholds of distance and altitudes are crossed, TCAS will issue progressively ominous oral and visual commands. If two aircraft continue flying toward each other, their units work together, vocalizing a loudly imperative “CLIMB!” instruction to one and “DESCEND!” to the other.
In 1978, a Pacific Southwest Airlines 727 collided with a Cessna while preparing to land at San Diego. In 1986, an Aeromexico DC-9 plunged into a Los Angeles suburb after hitting a Piper that had strayed, sans permission, into restricted airspace. Ten years later, a Saudi Arabian 747 was struck by a Kazakh cargo jet over India. Tragedies all, but these accidents occurred when TCAS was not yet standard equipment and when ATC protocols were not as sharp as they are today. Through technology and training, the threat of midair collisions has been greatly reduced.
But, for everything to work as it should requires the cooperation of both human and technological elements, bringing to mind the 2002 collision between a DHL freighter and a Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 over the border between Switzerland and Germany. An ATC error had put the two planes on a conflicting course. A Swiss controller eventually noticed the conflict and issued a command for the Bashkirian crew to descend. At the same time, both airliners’ TCAS systems correctly interpreted the hazard, issuing their own instructions in the final seconds. TCAS told DHL to descend, and Bashkirian to climb. DHL did as instructed and began to lose altitude. The Bashkirian crew, however, disregarded the TCAS order to climb and chose instead to descend, in compliance with the controller’s original request. This was a mistake. Standard procedure is that TCAS, being the last word on an impending collision, override previous ATC instructions. Had the TCAS alarm been obeyed, the jets would have been sent on safely divergent vectors. Instead, they descended directly into one another, killing 71 people.
