Lucky and Good
March 20, 2023
A FLURRY of recent close calls finds us nervous. There were near misses on runways in New York, Boston, and Austin. A United Airlines jet plunged to within 800 feet of the ocean after takeoff from Maui. And so on.
The billion-dollar question is, are these incidents symptoms of something gone rotten, or a spate of bad luck? Are they harbingers of disaster, or outliers?
Much discussed are staffing woes both at the airlines and air traffic control. The post-pandemic aviation world is operating at maximum capacity, but with lesser levels of experience and expertise. The job losses during COVID aren’t just measured in raw numbers; there was a brain-drain as well, as many senior employees took early-retirement packages. Now, thousands of new-hire employees are being taken on: pilots, cabin crew, controllers, dispatchers, schedulers, mechanics. They find themselves in a high-stress environment where learning curves are steep and mistakes can be unforgiving or worse.
Whatever the root causes, it’s been alarming enough to gather the FAA and airline officials in an aviation safety summit taking place this week in Washington.
And that’s a good thing. Surely it’s better to be digging into things now, rather than after there’s a catastrophe that kills 250 people. It’s all about being proactive; identifying weaknesses in the safety chain, and fixing them.
Our vantage point is a remarkable one. Twenty-one years have passed since the last major crash involving a legacy U.S. airline. That’s by far the longest such streak in commercial aviation history. Whether you look at it nationally or globally, never has commercial flying been as safe as it’s been over the last two decades.
For a sense of how true this is, all one needs to do is flip through the accident annals of the 1960s through the 1990s, when multiple deadly crashes were the norm year after year after year, killing 200, 300, even 500 people at a time. In some years we’d rack up ten or more mishaps worldwide. In 1985, perhaps the deadliest year on record, we saw a major crash on average of once every two weeks! Even with vastly more planes in the sky, accident rates are a small fraction of what they were.
It’s not easy, I know, for the average person to keep this in perspective. The media certainly doesn’t help. Precisely because there aren’t as many serious crashes to steal the headlines, there’s a tendency to hyper-focus on even the most insignificant events, inflating and sensationalizing them. This creates an atmosphere in which it can feel like flying is becoming riskier, when really the opposite is true.
Over at that safety summit, the focus is on preventing runway collisions. At least three of the most recent incidents involved so-called “incursions,” where planes were on active runways when they shouldn’t have been. Scary, sure, but when you look at the FAA data, the number of incursions so far in 2022 and 2023 match those from 2018 and 2019 almost exactly. The numbers aren’t going up, but the attention they receive is.
It’s a double-edged sword, to a degree. The safer we are, the more obligated we are to keep it that way. Near-misses like the ones we’ve seen draw so much talk both because and in spite of how reliable flying has become. And while it’s easy to see them as warning signs, they end up making us safer in the long run.
Sure, we’ve been lucky. There’s no denying we’re overdue, and accidents, including really bad ones, will continue to occur from time to time. But also we’ve been pretty damn good, having engineered away what used to be the most common causes of crashes. Better training, better technology, and better oversight have brought us to where we are.
And so, while maybe it sounds bizarre, or disingenuous, the way I see it, for the FAA to be holding an emergency summit underscores not how overdue we might be for a crash, but rather how safe it is to fly. We’re living in an age when major disasters, once commonplace, are virtually unheard of. What they’re trying to do is keep it that way.
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33 Responses to “Lucky and Good”
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In reply to Lynne S. (the “Reply” button doesn’t work for me):
First of all, no, you do *not* fly an aircraft by “feel.” You fly it using your intelligence, reason and training. When the instruments say your attitude is X and you “feel” that it’s Y, following your feelings rather than the instruments is likely to get you killed, especially in IFR.
Second, using an autopilot is not just “punching in numbers.” While you’re not using the same “stick” skills¹ as when hand-flying, you still need to understand just as well and use the same principles of flight and how you orient and guide your aircraft; bad autopilot inputs will crash you just as well as bad stick inputs. And in fact flying with an autopilot requires significantly *more* knowledge than stick-only flying because you need to understand how the autopilot will fly the aircraft when you enter your commands.
I find really annoying that people who would be utterly stumped by something as simple as having to choose between FLS (IAS) mode and VS mode when commanding a descent think that an autopilot, rather than the pilot, is flying the aircraft. That’s like saying cruise-control is driving a car, rather than the driver.
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¹ I do agree with others that stick skills should be maintained. But they’re not the be-all and end-all of flight; and intelligent use of automation makes flight significantly safer.
As has been said before on other social media, pilots aren’t learning how to fly a PLANE, but instead learning how to fly a COMPUTER.
YOU have learned how to know and FEEL exactly how a plane flies.
Others have learned how to punch in numbers.
As if there weren’t enough reasons to hate social media.
Thanks for replying and YouTube tip, will defently watch! I only saw the one on Nat Geo so far.
A comment on the instagrammers would be interesting, but perhaps not suitable? 😉
I keep seeing a lot of Instagram photos of very young pilots, both male and female – and I remember you said it was required to have approx 5000 hours of flight experience to get a job at one of the major airlines in the US.
Are we seeing a growth of “flight simulator” pilots getting jobs now? I remember with horrow the Air France accident (outside Brazil) where the pilots were the cause of the crash. They simply didnt understand the basics of flying.
These days it seems like posting an Instagram photo from the cockpit is the most important thing. Yieks.
Thoughts?
Your concerns aren’t unwarranted. However, you should watch the “Mentour Pilot” documentary on the Air France crash, on YouTube. It’s the best examination of the accident I’ve seen. And it’ll show you how complicated and confusing that scenario was. Blaming it on a lack of basic flying skills is really oversimplifying it.
Um, could we have a translation of SPM’s comment? For those of us who aren’t pilots, just interested travellers, there’s so much jargon that it makes no sense.
Precisely because airline pilots are so well trained and disciplined in the cockpit! A FedEx crew safely over fly’s SW on the runway, a jet rejects on 04L JFK – accident free for all the above. Remarkable feats of skill.
It’s clearly due to ATC Boomers retiring as well as Airline pilots.
Now there is a NPRM on the books which can turn around all the 135 horrors by 1) prohibiting retaliation by management for pilots reporting safety concerns 2) requiring all pilots practice CRM, SA (display those EFB’s darn it) and Threat Management. All standard fare in a 121 cockpit.Standardize those briefs and put all pilots in the company Paper tiger to learn them. 3. Add an exercise looking up a “NoGO” item right after engine start in the MEL. 4. Those nutty corp jet checklists -as many as 3 or 4 under 10,000. Egads.
Just hire retired 121 pilots as Dir of Safety for 135 Ops.
It should be One Level of Safety for every pilot flying for hire in this country – but esp 135 Charters, and Pt 91 ops. Also the hostility for Airline guys is everywhere – I think ALPA once referred to it as “Anti Authority
Personalities”.
In the time since the last major air crash with major US carriers, traffics accidents have claimed about 500,000 lives – great we are focusing on air travel, but maybe a little more on road travel wouldn’t hurt? We have the technology to improve that
The last 20 years were the safest. That’s when I was a captain!
Great article as always Patrick. I was on a recent thread on social media where a woman was absolutely adamant that she is driving, that way she was totally in control of what happens to her. It was like speaking to cement telling her how save air travel is and how NOT in control she is of everything that happens when driving. All we can do is try to educate – from all sides.
Good points! Runway incursions are one (important)thing. But when a tug driver turns the wheel the wrong way and one wingtip clips the one next to it, its piling on if local broadcasters open the nightly news with “another aviation incident.”
The fastest way to recover after the MCAS upset would have required to instantly reverse what triggered the incident, the retraction of the flaps to 0 degrees. Even 2 degrees of flaps would have turned MCAS off but I am sure that few pilots would have had that insight in the heat of the moment, especially as that would also have required disconnecting the auto-throttle (to prevent a potential flaps overspeed) situation something that non-US pilots rarely do. I wonder if in the heat of the moment whether even someone as experienced as Patrick would have put two and two together when confronted with the startle reflex.
Well written and a good reality check. One thing I still wonder about though: Is the industry bumping up against constraints of existing infrastructure? I haven’t seen any news about large new commercial airports being built or even talked about.
“The NTSB has opened an investigation into the Dec. 18 incident in which a United Airlines 777 lost altitude before recovering shortly after departing Kahului, Hawaii, on a flight enroute to San Francisco. A preliminary report is expected in 2-3 weeks.
3:46 PM · Feb 14, 2023”
https://twitter.com/NTSB_Newsroom/status/1625597311060418571?s=20
We’re a little past three weeks.
I understand that there were thunderstorms in the area. A thunderstorm gust front from behind the aircraft could create a similar situation; has this been reviewed?
DC9, B727, B757
Not sure if you have seen it, but your interview with the Boston Globe was published today. Finally, a solid article regarding aviation. https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/03/09/lifestyle/sky-is-not-falling-air-travel-is-still-safe/
Patrick is right. Just check out the database of plane crashes on Aviation Safety Network and take a look at the number of pages for each year in the 1970s (three or four pages). Compare with the number of pages for each year after 2010 (sometimes two pages). When you think of the number of planes in the sky now and compare it to the much smaller number of the 1970s, you begin to realize how much safer flying is nowadays.
A reply to Mr Taplinger and others trying to attribute the 737MAX crashes to non-American pilot error:
Soon after the downloads of the flight data recorders, the accident scenarios were repeatedly flown in a simulator. Many experienced pilots failed – including Americans and others from so-called first world airlines.
MCAS was a non-redundant system with a lethal failure mode that violated the “Prime Directive” of airliner design: A SINGLE FAILURE MUST NEVER EVER RESULT IN LOSS OF THE AIRPLANE.
A single MCAS failure could and did crash the airplane and kill everyone on board – 346 people
TWICE
In its original version MCAS should never have been installed nor certified
To argue otherwise (like blaming the pilots’ nationalities) is trying to justify a catastrophically negligent and stupid Boeing design blunder
Maui no ka oe. I spent 5 days there at Napili Bay in November 1967 on R&R from Vietnam. Did my first snorkeling there, followed later by world travel, SCUBA instruction, and over 3000 dives worldwide, tho most in Texas lakes. Good times!
I can’t wait to hear what the investigators find out.
It’s helpful to remember that no first-world airline pilots had a MAX crash. Second-world airline pilots were less successful at dealing with Boeing’s rush to production, lack of oversight, lack of MCAS training, and bone-headed corner-cutting. Before the grounding, ALPA stated they were against grounding.
Incidents such as this are very valuable in keeping pilots aware of the importance of following routines and procedures. Before I retired I sailed on ships as an officer. We were late to adopt bridge resource management abd even after it was adopted it was not followed. Numerous maritime disasters have occurred since then but it’s not publicized as it is usually cargo, things not people.
I had a commercial license many years ago with over 1000 hours of time until the money ran out so I have respect for the training needed.
Though I know cockpit resource management can be a PIA I feel very safe flying with my family on international flights, usually. There have been times I have looked in the cockpit and wondered if the pilots needed burping before departure. They didn’t look to have been alive long enough to have much experience. I rest easy when there is some gray haired guy sitting in either seat while we cross an ocean.
Lena says “More speculation – rampant Covid spread has left people with brain damage (as shown by numerous studies)?”
Wouldn’t rule it out. Or free-spike damage from an mRNA vaccine. Or premature senility. Speculation is interesting, but a trifle futile. We’ve all made boneheaded mistakes we can’t explain, & that long before covid.
Hi Patrick, good read as always. Here’s a question I’ve always wondered that relates to what your wrote about in this piece. Why aren’t all takeoffs done with maximum flaps? Isn’t using the minimum amount of runway the goal to leave as much distance as possible to stop should a takeoff need to be aborted?
Hi Patrick,
Not that I know anything about this first hand, but what I heard was that the altitude selector was set to zero and when the autopilot/VNAV was engaged, the plane went for that altitude.
Also, as you know, it would be kind of difficult to move a Boeing flap handle to up without encountering a gateway on the way up.
Anyway, food for thought.
Maybe I’ll see you out there somewhere, someday.
Dudley
More speculation – rampant Covid spread has left people with brain damage (as shown by numerous studies)?
United released a statement that as a result of the investigation the pilots were given “additional training.” Sure sounds like they screwed up somehow.
Sensationalism. Understandable.
The two recent 737MAX disasters may not have been American Airlines but they were American planes so I think your satisfaction with current safety levels is unfounded.
Ah, safe. But some are concerned that it’s less safe, perhaps due to reduced hiring standards. Woke hurts?
At this point it must be a matter of being constantly mindful of Murphy’s Law, since sooner or later those SwissCheese holes WILL align. Naturally this is true of life in general (& the Universe & Everything). But I hope a good safety record won’t lead to the Michael O’Learys of this world seriously entertaining thoughts of single-pilot operation.
On youtube, Mentour Pilot just put out a video (How Toxic Culture Doomed One-Two-Go Airlines) with an example of just how things can go awry bit by bit.
My respect for Petter Hörnfeldt, aka Mentour Pilot, can’t be overstated. His presentations and analyses are the best I’ve ever seen — better than any of the commercially produced documentaries.