2005 -- Year-In-Review: Safety | Aero-News Network
Aero-News Network
RSS icon RSS feed
podcast icon MP3 podcast
Subscribe Aero-News e-mail Newsletter Subscribe

Airborne Unlimited -- Most Recent Daily Episodes

Episode Date

Airborne-Monday

Airborne-Tuesday

Airborne-Wednesday Airborne-Thursday

Airborne-Friday

Airborne On YouTube

Airborne-Unlimited-10.28.24

Airborne-NextGen-10.29.24

Airborne-Unlimited-10.30.24

Airborne-Unlimited-10.24.24

Airborne-Unlimited-10.25.24

Sat, Dec 31, 2005

2005 -- Year-In-Review: Safety

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.

FMI: www.ntsb.gov, www.faa.gov2005 Year-in-Review Comments?

Advertisement

More News

Senator Pushes FAA to Accelerate Rocket Launch Licensing

States That Current Process is Damaging National Aerospace Development US Senator Jerry Morgan is pushing the FAA to speed up the process for rocket launch licensing. He argues tha>[...]

Classic Aero-TV: RJ Gritter - Part of Aviation’s Bright New Future

From 2015 (YouTube Edition): Model Aviator Aims For Full-Scale Career While at the 2015 Indoor Electric RC Festival, referred to as eFest, ANN CEO and Editor-In-Chief, Jim Campbell>[...]

Aero-FAQ: Dave Juwel's Aviation Marketing Stories -- ITBOA BNITBOB

Dave Juwel's Aviation Marketing Stories ITBOA BNITBOB ... what does that mean? It's not gibberish, it's a lengthy acronym for "In The Business Of Aviation ... But Not In The Busine>[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (10.27.24)

Aero Linx: Cardinal Flyers Online The Cardinal Flyers Online Web site was created and is maintained by me, Keith Peterson. My wife Debbie and I have owned a 1976 RG since 1985. Wit>[...]

ANN's Daily Aero-Term (10.27.24): Clearance Void If Not Off By (Time)

Clearance Void If Not Off By (Time) Used by ATC to advise an aircraft that the departure release is automatically canceled if takeoff is not made prior to a specified time. The exp>[...]

blog comments powered by Disqus



Advertisement

Advertisement

Podcasts

Advertisement

© 2007 - 2024 Web Development & Design by Pauli Systems, LC