November 18, 2024

ON NOVEMBER 12, 2001, two months after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, American Airlines flight 587 went down after takeoff from Kennedy Airport in New York. The Airbus A300-600 slammed into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, killing all 260 people on board, plus five others on the ground. This was, and remains, the second-deadliest airline accident ever to happen on U.S. soil, after the American flight 191 disaster, in Chicago, in 1979.

It also was 23 years ago. More than two full decades have passed since the last major air disaster involving a U.S. carrier — the longest such streak by far.

I was impressed when we made it to five years; amazed when we made it to ten; shocked when we hit 15, then absolutely astonished when we got to twenty.

And still the streak goes on. We’ve grown accustomed to it. Even I have. This year, the November 12th anniversary slipped right past me. I’m publishing this post almost a week later, after an emailer reminded me of the date.

Tens of millions of Americans were born, raised, and reached adulthood in this 23-years span. Tens of millions more were children at the time of the 587 crash. My point being: a huge portion of citizens have no real memory of commercial aviation prior to the early 2000s. Fewer and fewer people realize just how common large-scale accidents once were, year after year after year, both globally and in the United States. More than twenty air disasters occurred in 1985 alone. In 1974, the U.S. major carriers recorded five crashes, including two within three days of each other.

Training, technology, and regulation have all had big roles in what changed. So has luck, and it hardly needs saying that our streak at some point will end. Maybe in five months, maybe in five years, maybe tomorrow.

I have no idea what might cause the next big crash — who or what will be to blame. What I do know is that the ensuing media frenzy will be unlike anything we’ve ever seen. This is both because and in spite of how rare crashes have become. The smallest aviation mishap these days generates a remarkable amount of buzz, to the point where aviation is perceived to be a lot more unsafe than it actually is. I can’t imagine what the reaction would be — and will be — with a death toll in the dozens or hundreds.

Fifty years ago, in 1973, a Delta DC-9 crashed into the seawall at Boston’s Logan International Airport, killing 89 people. The incident barely made the front page of the New York Times, running below the fold, under an article about transit bonds.

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March 4, 2024

HERE’S THE perfect segue from last week’s post. If you missed it, we were talking about the hype and hyperbole that seem to follow every minor incident these days, a phenomenon that I blame, in part, on the dearth of legitimately serious accidents. It often feels as if flying is getting more dangerous, when statistically we’re safer than ever.

To wit, according to the annual report just released by the International Air Transport Association (IATA) 2023 goes down as one of the safest years in commercial aviation history. Not a single fatal accident was recorded involving a commercial jet. Not one.

Combining jet and turboprop operations, IATA says there were 37 million commercial flights last year. Among those, the only deadly crash was that of an ATR turboprop in Nepal last January. If I’m counting right, this puts last year as the second-safest on record, bested only by 2017.

This is nothing if not astonishing. And to glean a sense of how astonishing, you need to flip through the history books. You need to look at the accident archives of the 1960s, the 1970s, the 1980s and 1990s, when multiple disasters were the norm, year after year after year.

For example, in 1985, twenty-seven major accidents killed almost 2,500 people. That included the JAL crash outside Tokyo with 520 fatalities; the Arrow Air disaster in Newfoundland that killed 240 American servicemen, and the Air-India bombing over the North Atlantic with 329 dead.

In 1974 there were ten disasters, including the Turkish Airlines catastrophe outside Paris that killed 346 people. Among the other nine were two Pan Am 707s, two TWA jets (one of which was bombed), and an Eastern DC-9. That’s five U.S. legacy crashes in the same year. Eastern and TWA had crashes within three days of each other.

And so on. Those were particularly bad years, but you get the picture.

I’ve mentioned all of this before. Apologies to those who are sick of me talking about it. But it always bears repeating, because so few people really understand how safe flying has become.

How we got here is also something I’ve discussed in the past. It’s been a combination of things: better technologies, better training, and, believe it or not, better regulation and oversight. For more, see the links below.

And yes, luck has played a role as well. We closed out 2023 with a near-perfect record, but not without a few close calls. Which is what makes posts like this so frustrating. Because sooner or later our luck will run out; there will be another major crash, right here on U.S. soil. As good as we are, we’ll never be perfect. And when it happens, nobody is going to care how long it’s been since the last one. History won’t matter, perspective won’t matter, stats won’t matter. The result will be hysteria and a media firestorm like no other.

It’s precisely because of how rare crashes have become that we’re guaranteed to overreact to the next one. Which is both fair and unfair, I suppose.

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Upper photo by Pedro Pinheiro
Center photo by Michael Saporito
Lower photo by the author

February 26, 2024

SO, LAST WEEK, a passenger videoed a damaged wing slat on a United Airlines flight headed from Denver to Boston. Learning of the problem, the crew conferred with its dispatch and maintenance team, and a decision was made to divert the Boeing 757 into Denver.

Copyright issues prevent me from re-posting videos or images, but you can easily Google it. The upper part of the slat, along the front of the wing, inboard of the right engine, appears shredded and chewed. it’s a composite material, and somehow it delaminated and fragmented. How, exactly, is unknown.

Well, no surprise, the pictures are all over media and social media — so much as those things are different nowadays — accompanied by a barrage of terrifying headlines: “Passenger Sees Wing Coming Apart.” “Passenger Horror as Wing Comes Apart.” And so on.

The wing, in fact, did not come part. What “came apart,” if we can call it that, is a portion of a slat. There are several slats per wing, sectioned along the leading edge. Like the trailing-edge flaps along the back of the wing, these devices are deployed in stages to increase lift at low speeds. You’ll see them extended during takeoff and landing, then retracted during cruise.

It’s a terrible look for sure, but the danger here was minimal. One small hazard might’ve been broken material striking the rear stabilizers. Worst case would’ve been the slat breaking apart further, or detaching completely, unlikely as that might be, but even this wouldn’t crash the plane, so long as the stabilizers or tail weren’t struck and badly damaged.

There may have been a discussion about whether or not to deploy the slats for landing. There’s no way to isolate a specific slat, so keeping the broken one retracted would’ve meant a “no flap landing,” where all of the high-lift devices, both flaps and slats, remain stowed. A jetliner can land just fine this way — it just needs to do so at a higher speed, requiring more runway.

A few months ago, due to a malfunction, a 757 I was piloting made a no-flap landing in Colombia. We came in fast, as our checklists dictated (I can’t recall the exact speed), and used about two-thirds of the runway, as our calculations told us to expect. But otherwise the landing was routine. In most ways, what happened to me was more serious than what the United pilots had to deal with, just not as photogenic and so it got no attention.

As it happened, the United pilots deployed the slats and flaps as they normally would, and the plane landed safely. To nobody’s surprise. Certainly not mine.

Segmented slats line the leading edge of a wing, shown here fully retracted. They are operated hydraulically.

I suspect the choice to divert was a practical one as much as anything. Denver is one of United’s biggest hubs, and the plane would need lengthy repairs; grounding it in Boston was going to trigger a cascade of logistical complications affecting hundreds of passengers. In Denver, an airplane swap could be handled expeditiously, with all the needed maintenance resources on site.

Nothing to fret about, all in all. But if the viewer comments on various media sites are any indication, the public is alarmed. “What’s going on in the skies these days?” Asks one reader, his sentiments echoing those of others. “Yet another close call.”

Not really. What’s actually happening is a matter of exposure. These sorts of minor incidents have always been with us. What’s different is the media environment in which they’re occurring. In the old days you never heard about them. Today, everything is photographed and everything is shared. The smallest mishap is on Instagram and other platforms within minutes, visible to millions. A landing gear problem; a compressor stall; a pressurization malfunction. The sky is falling.

Except it’s not. As I’ve talked about in prior articles, major airline disasters are far, far more uncommon today than they used to be. A dearth of them has led to us putting undue focus on relatively harmless incidents instead.

I’m unsure which is more to blame, social media or actual news sources. They seem to feed off one another, so maybe it’s a moot point.

The fact that the 757 is a Boeing model has only made things worse. Thanks to the controversies surrounding the 737 MAX, anything involving a Boeing jet now gets extra scrutiny, deserved or not. No matter that the 757 is a 42 year-old design with an excellent safety record. The B-word is what counts.

Let’s face it, everyone is looking for attention, for views and hits, be it FOX News or the Times or a 16 year-old Instagrammer. Few things, meanwhile, garner more attention or stoke more fear than plane crashes. The mere suggestion of one, realistic or not, is an automatic go-to for eyeballs. And so, here we are.

For more about slats, flaps, and the other doodads than help a plane fly, see chapter one of Cockpit Confidential.

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Photos by Asato Hisada, courtesy of Unsplash.

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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