New Pilots, Same Old Accidents
It will be some time before we have the statistics for 2005.
Indeed, we don't even have the Nall Report for 2004. But if history
teaches us anything, it teaches us that one year is much like
another, when you reduce it to numbers.
The only problem is, those numbers represent real people, real
pilots and real aircraft. It's easy to forget that a column of
numbers on a spreadsheet represents human hopes and dreams.
Once again, as so many times, the Air Carrier universe is
exposed as a Manichean universe with good and evil, or have and
have not. There are the Western, G8, First World, air carriers and
some other international carriers that strive for that standard,
and then there are the also-rans.
One of the most
gruesome accidents of 2005 took place when a 737 for a Cypriot
airline, Helios (named after the same Greek sun god that did Icarus
a bad turn), lost pressurization. It appears that a valve was
improperly set in maintenance, and then it, and several warnings,
were missed by the pilots in preflight and inflight. The aircraft
climbed to FL 340, and all aboard went to sleep, except for some
flight attendants with walkabout bottles. Minutes after passing
out, the passengers and crew members quietly died.
Miraculously, one of the FAs was a pilot with experience in
smaller planes, but he apparently was overcome by hypoxia when his
bottle ran out before he could unstick the jet from its
autopilot-programmed hold. Greek interceptors arrived to find a
Flying Dutchman orbiting in the hold pattern with not a living soul
aboard. The plane orbited until its tanks ran dry, and spiraled
down to impact.
The worst accident in terms of loss of life was the August 16
crash of West Caribbean Airways Flight 708 in Venezuela. 160 lives
were lost when a flight crew reacted improperly to ice. In
September, West Caribbean, which had another fatal accident in 2005
and a long string of fines and citations (not the positive kind)
from the Colombian air safety authorities, closed its doors.
Other mass-casualty accidents include the Kam Air crash in
Afghanistan in February (all 104 aboard), an Equatair AN-24 in
Equatorial Guinea (all 60), a TANS Peru 737 crash in Pucallpa (40
of 98 aboard died). A Mandala Airways 737-230 Advanced
crashed in Indonesia, killing 101 on the plane and 47 on the
ground; 16 on the plane survived. Two accidents in Nigeria in
October and December took 117 and 108 lives respectively; one
survivor from the second accident was reported. And an Iranian
C-130 carrying reporters to observe a military exercise crashed
into a building after reporting an engine out in early December.
All 94 aboard perished along with 12 on the ground.
The most gruesome Third World accident killed only two of 100
aboard the plane... but occurred when an evacuation after a landing
gear collapse on an Congolese An-12 turned into a headlong panic;
the two victims ran into the propellers.
First World carriers did have a problem with one circumstance:
runway length and weather. In August, an Air France Airbus A340,
Flight 358 service from Paris, overran Runway 24L at Toronto,
bursting into flame. Thanks to incredible work by the FAs, the 297
pax and 12 crew on board got out without major injury. The
investigation indicates that the pilot landed fast and long on the
rainswept runway.
Similar circumstances doomed a Southwest 737 at Chicago Midway
December 8th. In this case it wasn't a summer thunderstorm but a
winter ice storm that led to the overrun. In this case, the 103
folks on the plane came through all right, but a little boy in a
car hit by the jetliner was killed (the plane burst out of the
airport perimeter and ran into a busy road). It was the first
fatality in Southwest history.
In the world of general aviation, conversely, the basic news is
depressing -- as always, there are scarcely any new accidents, just
new pilots having the same old accidents. The NTSB database
reflects 413 fatal accidents in 2005. The first and the last were
to homebuilt airplanes, a Lancair that spun in from an apparent
aerobatic display in Arizona, and a Kitfox (file photo of type,
below) that appears to have stalled out of an apparent aerobatic
display in Colorado. Both accidents killed two persons on the
plane.
Safety Troops Fight Back
One of the best safety articles of the year was Rod Machado's
January column in AOPA Pilot (you are an AOPA member, right?).
Machado examined the idea that mishap pilots were different and
came up with the conclusion that, no, they might have been as good
as anybody -- just not that once.
Just at the end of the year, NTSB released the results of an
innovative study of GA accidents in IMC. For the first time in
memory, they used a scientific method designed to tease out the
differences between flights that ended in normal landings and
flights that ended in tragedy. They paired 72 fatal mishaps with a
control set of 72 similar flights that were completed safely. Aero-News featured the study
with a story, a download link and a Quote of the Day on Dec.
3rd. Reading through the study, the methodology looks a little
squirrely. The successful flights they pair with the unsuccessful
ones were mostly commercial flights flown by pros. They need to
compare Part 91 ops to Part 91 ops to get valid data, but they
didn't, so their data are skewed -- but the study is still an
interesting read.
In between, we linked to lots of good training resources from
NASA and AOPA Air Safety Foundation. Here's the ASF link.
The Lawyers Always Win, Except This Time...
One of the most
egregious post-crash lawsuits of '05 involved an accident by a
pilot who was an attorney, by all accounts a good guy. Inbound to
St Augustine from Ft. Lauderdale, he made three ILSes to minimums
at three airports before losing control. An attorney for the family
took a loopy theory that his loss of control was caused by him not
getting a .03 barometer change while on final (he hit the ground
hundreds of feet below MDA). And, of course, the loopy theory won,
winning the family something like $9 million from the FAA.
Money can't bring a dead man back to life, and we had to wonder
about the people that would take money from an innocent party over
his death... but family members indignantly wrote in our comments
section that "it was not about money."
We're still waiting to hear how they gave the money it was not
about to Katrina victims... or the Salvation Army... or the
taxpayers it was looted from by the incredible, random, lawless,
Third World legal system of these United States.
And Everybody Tries To Spin the NTSB
One of the more
egregious examples surfaced early in the year, when acting NTSB
Chairman Ellen Engleman Connors revealed that both Airbus and
American Airlines had held up the report on the 2001 crash of
AA587. Each was trying to hang the liability on the other guy.
While the report ultimately made AA's copilot the bad guy, most
pilots were shocked to find out that it was so easy to overload the
Airbus A300-600 and A310 composite tail -- and doubly shocked to find that the tail met
and exceeded certification standard like that.
As Aero-News reported in
2004, Airbus engineers knew that going from stop to
stop on the rudder pedals would have caused failure in the tail.
After the accident, a memo about the weakness came to
light.
A Personal Note
In 2005 we not only lost some friends in the air show community,
we lost some ANN Propwash readers. Getting a "please discontinue
the email as my husband is deceased" email from a widow is an
unpleasant surprise. Particularly when we're writing the story of
her husband's last moments.
So all y'all be careful out there, and if you're feeling punk
after a few ILSes, go someplace that's VFR, rent a car, and
apologize to your pax. We'd sure rather have you alive to read next
year's write-up than have you feature in it.
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