Posted on 08/30/2006 6:52:38 AM PDT by Ready4Freddy
Taipei, Taiwan
THE crash of a Comair jet in Kentucky on Sunday ended the longest safety streak in aviation history: it’s been almost five years since a passenger died in a commercial airline jet accident in the United States.
Crashes are actually very crude gauges of the safety of air travel because they remain so rare. We must pay attention instead to the little events that happen every day in the skies and on the ground that very, very slightly increase the risk of another disaster.
For instance, a pilot attempts to talk to an air traffic controller but is unable to get through. A plane flies higher than the air traffic controller requested. Or a pilot turns onto the wrong runway for takeoff, as happened in Kentucky. To prevent devastating accidents, we need to monitor these little events and find ways to reduce their frequency.
Amazingly, a federal program has been doing just that for years, but the data are being kept under lock and key, and the program is quietly being ended.
In 1997, the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security set a goal of reducing the risk of air travel accidents by 80 percent over the next 10 years. Federal agencies soon realized, however, that they had no way to measure progress toward this goal. Airplane black boxes yield colossal amounts of data that can’t be analyzed easily or quickly. And on-board computers can’t detect many risk-increasing events, especially those involving human behavior in the cockpit and air traffic control tower.
(Excerpt) Read more at nytimes.com ...
ping
I am a commercial airline Pilot myself. We are just human. Yet we are expected to fly our entire careers without ever making mistakes. Even the "computers" on board make errors that we can catch and correct. Sadly some errors result in fatalities.
And many mistakes are made by the ATC staff. To err is human......
I wonder if they had a GPS display on board?
The author is an idiot.
There was a crash in Charlotte 2 or 3 years ago.
28 dead. Maybe the author didn't think that was enough to count.
Yep. He shaped his claim to include "commercial airline JET accident." The crash in Charlotte was a fully-loaded Beechcraft 1900D, a 19-seat turboprop flying from Charlotte to Greenville-Spartanburg, SC.
}:-)4
The crash in Charlotte was a commercial flight.
Mesa Air.
Even more recent than that were the SWA accident at Midway that killed a six-year-old boy, although he was not on the aircraft, and the Chalk's plane that crashed in Miami killing 20 on December 19.
So that crash doesn't count?
I've seen the 'almost 5 years since...' mentioned in a number of articles, some of them posted on FR.
OK, just found articles saying that the March, 2004 Charlotte crash was a Beech 1900D turboprop, not a jet. Perhaps a distinction without a difference in this context?
I sure think it counts, as does the Chalk's Turbo Mallard crash in Miami. Obviously, the NYT author thinks they don't count for some reason. Maybe folks that live on Central Park West think propellers are just for the bumpkins in flyover country that don't have major international airports in their backyard.
I can't remember what the cause of the Charlotte crash was--I think it was a mechanical issue with the elevators or the elevator trim on the aircraft, something to do with maintenance. The Chalk's crash is still under investigation but early signs were pointing to metal fatigue in the wings.
And yes, somebody else mentioned it, but he did also (conveniently?) forget the Southwest 737 that slid off the runway at Chicago Midway back in the winter, rolled out into the street and killed a child when it hit a car. That one's almost certainly going to end up being pilot error.
}:-)4
I've been in several fender benders in a lifetime of driving, and witnessed a major accident. In every case but one, the accident required both drivers to make mistakes at the same time.
It appears that the Kentucky crash involved several missed opportunities for avoidance.
I'll wholeheartedly agree with you there. When you think about it, our air travel system, and the people in it, are pretty amazing. But there's always room for improvement.
A lot of people have mentioned it here since Sunday, and it's the truth--something like Comair 191 is never caused by a single huge mistake. It's a cascade of smaller things. Inattention by the tower controller, the recent change in taxiway and runway layout, lighting issues, signage issues, darkness, pilots not cross-checking their heading when they take the runway...break that chain at any single point and 49 people are still alive.
}:-)4
I'm type-rated on this airplane (a CL-65) CRJ and have over 4000 Hours in type and yes it has GPS standard. More accurately it's a Collins Pro-line 4 series Avionics suite. It has a Collins FMS with GPS built in. The GPS coordinates are not usually displayed unless you go into one of the FMS menus. The MFD (multi-function display) shows the aircraft location plus some other data. We hardly ever look at the compass. The AHRS is more accurate.
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