Cockpit Confidential, page 26
An even worse catastrophe happened over the Amazon in 2006. A Boeing 737 collided with an Embraer executive jet. The latter managed a safe emergency landing, but the Boeing plunged into the forest, killing everybody on the plane. The investigation revealed a chain of procedural mistakes made by Brazilian controllers, compounded by evidence that the executive jet’s TCAS system may have been switched off inadvertently.
But what of dangers here in the United States, home to the world’s most crowded airspace? Isn’t our air traffic control system outmoded and much of its equipment obsolete? Aren’t improvements badly needed? To some extent, yes, and with more planes in the air than ever before, the terminal area—airspace in and around airports, where collisions are most likely to occur—has never been busier. At the same time, a need for ATC improvements does not imply that the system is rickety and rife with collision hazards. Measured year to year, the rate of airspace incursions in the United States occasionally spikes. While this can sound scary, only the rarest incursion is the sort of close call that should make people nervous. Overall our record is an excellent one, and a testament to the reliability of our ATC system, clunky and maligned as it is.
What about collision hazards on the ground?
Chances are you’ve come across one or more recent stories about the rise in so-called runway incursions at airports across America. That’s a euphemism for when a plane or other vehicle erroneously enters or crosses a runway without permission from air traffic control, setting up a collision hazard. The vast majority of incursions are minor transgressions, but the numbers are going up and a handful of incidents have resulted in genuine near misses.
The problem isn’t the volume of planes per se, but the congested environments in which many of them operate. La Guardia, Boston, and JFK are among airports that were laid out decades ago for a fraction of today’s capacity. Their crisscrossing runways and lacework taxiways are inherently more hazardous than the parallel and staggered layouts seen at newer airports. That does not imply that these locations are unsafe, but they present challenges both for crews and air traffic controllers, particularly during spells of low visibility.
The FAA has been working fast and furious on new programs and technologies to reduce the number of mistakes and/or mitigate the consequences when they occur. These include an upgrade of tarmac markings and mandatory anti-incursion training programs for pilots and controllers. Under testing are improved runway and taxiway lighting systems and an emerging, satellite-based technology known as Cockpit Display of Traffic Information (CDTI) that will provide pilots with a detailed view of surrounding traffic both aloft and during ground operations. And a growing number of airports are outfitted with sophisticated radar that tracks not only planes in the air, but those on runways and taxiways.
Those are all good ideas, but the FAA has a habit of over-engineering complicated fixes to simple problems. There will be no magic technological bullet. At heart this is a human factors issue. The FAA’s most valuable contribution to the problem might be something they’ve already done: stirred up awareness. When it comes right down to it, the best way to prevent collisions is for pilots and controllers to always be conscious of their possibility.
Meanwhile, not to close on a morbid note, but I’ll remind you that aviation’s worst-ever catastrophe, at Tenerife in 1977, involved two 747s that never left the ground (see Tenerife story).
What were your experiences on September 11, and how, from a pilot’s take, has flying changed since then?
Among my vivid memories of that morning is that of the enormous black cockroach I saw crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m. while waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got and, who knows, may have been headed for flight 175. I was on my way to Florida, where I’d be picking up a work assignment later that day. My airplane took off only seconds after American’s flight 11. I had watched it back away from gate 25 at Logan’s terminal B and begin to taxi.
About halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I’ve ever heard a comrade utter. Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.
I figured a bomb threat had been called in. My worry was not of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn’t until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant that I learned what was going on.
I’m watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.
To me, had the airplanes crashed, blown up, and reduced the upper halves of those buildings to burned-out hulks, the whole event would nonetheless have clung to the realm of believability. Had the towers not actually fallen, I suspect our September 11 hangover, which rages to this day, might not have been so prolonged. It was the collapse—the groaning implosions and the pyroclastic tornadoes whipping through the canyons of lower Manhattan—that catapulted the event from ordinary disaster to historical infamy. As I stand awestruck in this shithole airport restaurant in South Carolina, the television shows the towers of the World Trade Center. They are not just afire, not just shedding debris and pouring out oil-black smoke. They are falling down. The sight of those ugly, magnificent towers collapsing onto themselves is the most sublimely terrifying thing I have ever seen.
And pilots, like fire fighters, police officers, and everyone else whose professions had been implicated, had no choice but to take things, well, personally. Four on-duty crews were victims. They were disrespected in the worst way, killed after their beloved machines were stolen from under them and driven into buildings. John Ogonowski comes to mind, the good-guy captain of American 11. Of the thousands of people victimized that day, Captain Ogonowski was figuratively, if not literally, the first of them. He lived in my home state; his funeral made the front pages, where he was eulogized for his philanthropic work with local Cambodian immigrants. Maybe it’s melodramatic to say I felt a direct bond or kinship with these eight men, but I did feel an underlying and wrenching empathy.
In the ten-second bursts it took them to fall, I knew something about the business of flying planes would be different. It’s hyperbole to speak of the world, or for that matter flying, having been “changed forever,” but yes, for sure, things are different now—albeit for reasons we don’t always own up to. More than any clash of civilizations, the real and lasting legacy of Mohammed Atta is something more mundane: tedium. Think about it. The long lines, searches, and pat-downs; the color-coded alerts, the litany of inconvenient rules and protocols we’re now forced to follow—all this meaningless pomp in the name of security. Of all of modern life’s rituals, few are marinated in boredom as much as air travel. “Flying” is what we call it. How misleading. We don’t fly so much as we sit and stand around for interminable amounts of time. And most distressing of all, we seem to be okay with this. The terrorists have won, goes the refrain, and perhaps that’s true. It isn’t quite what they hoped to win, but they’ve won it nevertheless.
Why can’t commercial jets be fitted with an exclusive side entrance into the cockpit, making it impossible for a potential skyjacker to gain access?
First, you can’t simply cut a hole into the side of a plane and add an extra door. Doing so would require a large-scale and extremely expensive structural redesign. And you’d presumably need to add a lavatory to the cockpit. And what about rest facilities? Long-haul flights carry augmented crews working in shifts (see crew rest), and the off-duty pilots require a suitable place to relax. You’d be doubling or tripling the size of the average cockpit, which in turn would take up space already used for galleys, storage, and passenger seats. In addition, there are times when it’s beneficial for pilots to have direct access to the cabin—for checking out certain mechanical problems, helping flight attendants deal with passenger issues, and so on.
Even if this were an easy or affordable thing to do, which it’s not, would it really be worth the trouble? Strategically, the September 11 suicide takeover scheme was a one-shot, one-time formula. Hijacking protocols are different today (see security essay), and the awareness of passengers and crew, together with armored cockpit doors, does about as good a job as is necessary, in my opinion. Long and short: having the crew barricaded up front is going to cause more problems than it solves.
How worried should we be about shoulder-launched missiles? Should airlines install measures to defend against them?
The hazard of portable rockets—they are often referred to as MANPADS, a horrible acronym formed out of the words Man-Portable Air-Defense Systems—has become a hot topic, provoked by media stories about possible, even imminent, attacks using these weapons, which are small and easily concealed. An estimated half a million such rockets exist worldwide, with more than thirty terrorist organizations and other rogue groups possessing them. Some experts have opined that all U.S. airliners should be installed with electronic antimissile devices, as are some military and VIP planes. Systems are available for about $1 million per unit, and the U.S. government has pressed ahead with a feasibility study.
What hasn’t been widely reported, for one, are the weapons’ technical shortcomings. They are difficult to use, and when fired at short range are unlikely to score anything other than a close miss. Two Soviet-made Strela-2M missiles were fired from a truck at an Israeli charter plane taking off from Mombasa, Kenya, in 2002. Both missed. Even a direct hit would not necessarily destroy a plane, as proven by a DHL Airbus struck over Baghdad in 2003, and a DC-10 that survived a shot in 1984. Granted, we shouldn’t disregard this or any other threat because it probably won’t result in a disaster. Trouble is, we’re again chasing the chimera of absolute security, price tag be damned. Of all the air safety ventures on which we could spend tens of billions of dollars, I don’t think this is the right one in terms of cost-effectiveness and the number of lives it might save.
It has been proposed that onboard software be developed to physically prevent hijacked planes from being guided into restricted airspace or over cities.
“Soft walls,” this idea is called, and it’s one of those things that keeps the writers at Popular Science busy. More power to them, but it’s on par with the idea of establishing colonies on Mars: within our engineering abilities, extremely expensive, and then only vaguely useful. Reading comments from people at work on these ideas, one is struck by how consumed and infatuated they are not with the promises of safety or practicality, but with technology alone. That’s not a bad thing by itself, and it’s a fine testament to anyone’s devotion as a scientist or engineer, but the application of these concepts is limited. It’s sci-fi show-and-tell. In another way, it gets back to our greater national fetishizing of safety. Believing we can protect ourselves from every last direction of attack, we now wish to string coils of virtual barbed wire among the clouds. To me, there’s a beautiful and poetic futility to the idea of securing the very air above our heads.
Almost every high-profile airplane crash is trailed by a conspiracy theory of one sort or another. Could you clear up lingering doubts and suspicions concerning a few of these?
Where to start? Conspirobabble stretches back to the death of Dag Hammarskjöld and the heyday of the Bermuda Triangle. The modern era got going with the 1983 shoot-down of Korean Air Lines flight 007 by a Soviet fighter. Since then, the Internet has become a potent incubator of myth and misinformation, spreading pseudo-truths with the lackadaisical tap of a Send button. Five minutes with a keyboard and mouse, and you’re privy to more feverish speculation than the old Grassy Knollers ever could have dreamed of.
Prior to 2001, the 1996 TWA tragedy was probably the most mulled-over disaster in the minds of the intellectually eccentric. Flight 800 blew up like a giant roman candle in the July twilight off Long Island, the result of a short circuit igniting vapors in an unused fuel tank. What came next was a sideshow of at least four books and enough web chatter to power a 747 through the sound barrier. Even mainstream commentators registered intense skepticism that flight 800 could’ve crashed the way it did. After all, fuel tanks don’t simply explode.
Except, under very unusual circumstances, they do. It’s not likely, but it’s neither impossible nor unprecedented. There have been fuel tank explosions on at least thirteen commercial planes, including a Thai Airways 737 that burst into flames while parked at the gate in Bangkok, killing a flight attendant. TWA 800, an older 747-100 destined for Paris, had been baking on a hot tarmac up until departure, superheating the vapors in its empty center fuel cell (a 747 does not need full tanks to cross the Atlantic). Later, an electrical short deep in the jet’s mid-fuselage bowels provided the ignition. Per FAA behest, airlines have begun phasing in a system that uses nitrogen as an inert filler in vacant tanks.
We heard more whispering after American 587 went down in New York City less than two months after the 2001 terror attacks. Officially, the crash was caused by crew error, compounded by a design quirk in the A300’s rudder system, but the mongers had another idea: a bomb destroyed the plane, and the government, along with the airlines, fearing paralysis of the economy, decided to pass off the crash as an accident.
Then we have September 11 itself. If you haven’t been paying attention, cyberspace is awash with claims that the attacks were an inside job. The specific assertions are too numerous and complicated to list here exhaustively. They vary website to website, overlapping, underscoring, complementing, and contradicting one another to the point of madness. The Pentagon was struck with a missile, not a 757; the planes that hit the World Trade Center were remotely controlled military craft; the real flights 11, 175, 77, and 93 never existed or were diverted to secret bases; controlled demolitions felled the Twin Towers. And so on.
The same technological magic that makes the spread of wild conjecture so effortless should, you would think, make countering and dismissing it no less easy. Strictly speaking, indeed it does. But it depends who’s paying attention, and the human proclivity for believing in conspiracies is a lot stronger these days than our proclivity for analyzing and debating them. Maybe that’s human nature, or maybe it’s some perverse/inverse fallout of technology. Either way, there are lots more people around hungry to make us believe something than make us not believe something. A pro-conspiracy website is certainly a lot more exciting and will garner a lot more hits than an anti-conspiracy website. Both kinds are out there, but it’s the conspiracy traffickers, regardless of their credibility, who believe more passionately in their cause and consequently garner more attention.
It’s not beyond reason that some aspects of the 2001 attacks deserve more scrutiny than the 9/11 Commission granted them. But those who most urgently wish us to believe so have done themselves no favors by expanding the breadth of their contentions beyond all plausibility: particulars of the conspiracy theories fall anywhere from compelling to lunatic. I’m genuinely curious about why surveillance video from the Sheraton hotel near the Pentagon was confiscated and never made public—if, in fact, that’s true. On the other hand, I’m told that the aircraft that struck the World Trade Center were artificial images projected by laser and that the real flights never existed. There’s so much flak out there, it’s difficult to tell what’s genuinely mysterious and worthy of a closer look and what’s nonsense. (I haven’t the room for it here, but on my website, I tackle several of the airplane-related 9/11 myths, point by point.) I propose a conspiracy theory that the conspiracy theories are themselves part of a conspiracy, intended to discredit the idea of there being a conspiracy—and to divide and conquer those who might sleuth out certain facts.
I don’t deny that, at times, important truths have been concealed from public view. But we also need to remember Carl Sagan’s famous quip about extraordinary claims requiring extraordinary proof. It’s distressing that so many people become married to a preposterous idea based on little more than erroneous interpretations of some pictures and selective, manipulative use of evidence. We see this with September 11, with the “chemtrails” theory (don’t get me started on that one), and still others. And I’ve learned to be wary when attempting to reason with such people. Ultimately, it’s like arguing religion. Evidence, or a lack of it, has little to do with what motivates many believers, and contradictory facts are simply not accepted. At the heart of their convictions is something only partially subject to reason. It’s faith.
We Gaan: The Horror and Asburdity of History’s Worst Plane Crash
Most people have never heard of Tenerife, a pan-shaped speck in the Atlantic. It’s one of the Canary Islands, a volcanic chain governed by the Spanish, clustered a few hundred miles off the coast of Morocco. The big town on Tenerife is Santa Cruz, and its airport, beneath a set of cascading hillsides, is called Los Rodeos. There, on March 27, 1977, two Boeing 747s—one belonging to KLM, the other to Pan Am—collided on a foggy runway. Five hundred and eighty-three people were killed in what remains the biggest air disaster in history.
