Cockpit Confidential (33 page)

Whether the fortunes of some of these carriers attest to exemplary levels of oversight and professionalism or merely to luck is somewhat open to argument. Royal Brunei Airways, to pick one from the list above, is a tiny outfit with only a handful of aircraft. Compare to American Airlines, with hundreds of planes and thousands of daily departures. American has outcrashed Royal Brunei 5–0 since 1980, but plainly the comparison is lopsided. Nonetheless, any unblemished legacy lasting thirty years is impressive on its own accord, particularly when the setting is an underdeveloped nation with substandard facilities and infrastructure.

In America, the FAA, whose penchant for safety is outdone only by a fondness for annoying acronyms, has come up with the International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) program to judge standards of other countries, using criteria based on ICAO guidelines. Classifications are awarded to nations themselves and not to individual airlines. Category 1 status goes to those who meet the mark, and Category 2 to those who do not “provide safety oversight of air carrier operators in accordance with the minimum safety standards.” Because the categories pertain to countries and not specific companies, and because the restrictions apply unilaterally, IASA has its critics. Category 2 airlines can still operate to and from the United States, but may not add capacity. Yet reciprocal service is unaffected. Robert Booth finds the program's logic flawed. “If a country's oversight is supposedly inadequate, how come our airlines can fly there without penalty, but theirs can't fly here?” Booth recommends a bilateral capacity freeze to level the field and encourage governments to meet better standards.

In 2005, the European Union began compiling its own airline blacklist. Renewed every three months, it bans select airlines from various countries, as well as all carriers from some of them, such as Congo, Benin, Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, and Gabon. But importantly, the vast majority of the forbidden operators are airlines that a typical traveler wouldn't ever fly on in the first place. They consist mainly of marginal cargo outfits, most of them based in West and Central Africa. To give you some idea, the
highest
profile names on the blacklist have belonged to Indonesia's national carrier Garuda, North Korea's Air Koryo, and Afghanistan's Ariana. The latter is a company with a storied history going back more than fifty years, but for obvious reasons, it lacks the resources to currently meet European standards.

That's the myth, perpetuated far and wide—and which, no surprise, Qantas doesn't exactly rush to dispel. Let the record show, however, that the history of Qantas is scarred by at least seven fatal incidents. All of these, to be fair, took place prior to 1951, and the carrier has been perfect ever since. So while the details aren't quite right, the gist of the Qantas legend stands: its record is an outstanding one.

Qantas stands as a kind of anti-Aeroflot. Whereas many people's perceptions of Aeroflot are based on silly caricature—vodka-swilling pilots at the controls of patched-together Cold War rust buckets, with brutish babushkas shouting at passengers—an even greater number have fallen for the myth of the Immaculate Qantas. This false history was even immortalized by Hollywood, through an exchange between Tom Cruise and Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 movie
Rain Man
.

“All airlines have crashed at one time or another,” Cruise says to Hoffman. “That doesn't mean that they are not safe.”

“Qantas,” responds Hoffman. “Qantas never crashed.”

I love that exchange because it's Cruise's character, not Hoffman's, who makes the more accurate and valuable point.

I'm hit with this question all the time. I do not have an answer because there isn't one. Considering just how rare crashes are, such comparisons are little more than an academic exercise. The nervous flyer's tendency is to make distinctions in an abstract, purely statistical sense rather than a practical one. But these distinctions aren't particularly meaningful when a small handful of incidents is spread over thousands or even millions of departures. Sites like
Airsafe.com
happily serve up airline-versus-airline safety data, but why drive yourself crazy poring over the fractions of a percentage that differentiate one carrier's fatality rates from another? Really, is airline A, with one crash in twenty years, a safer bet than airline B, with two crashes over that same span? If you feel more comfortable picking United over Aeroflot, or Lufthansa over China Airlines, go for it. Will you actually
be
safer? Maybe, when hashed out to the third decimal place, but for all
reasonable
intents and purposes, they're the same. Price, schedule, and service are the only criteria you really need to bother with.

This same line of reasoning extends to the equally popular aircraftversus-aircraft debate. Which are more trustworthy, 737s or A320s? Answer: take your pick. Virtually every established airline, and every certificated commercial plane, is safe by any useful definition.

See above. And what is a budget carrier, exactly? Southwest would probably fit that bill by most folks' definition, yet its only fatality in forty-plus years of flying was a runway overrun incident in Chicago that killed a boy in a car. There is longstanding suspicion that young, competitively aggressive airlines are apt to cut corners. It's an assertion that, while it
feels
like it makes sense, isn't bolstered by the record. In the United States, a twenty-five-year lookback, encompassing every upstart carrier since the industry was deregulated in 1979, from PeoplExpress to jetBlue, reveals only a handful of fatal crashes and an overall accident rate in proportion to market share.

There are, and always have been, newer and smaller airlines that run highly professional, button-down operations up to the highest possible standards. Others have run looser ships and paid the price. At the same time, some of the world's eldest and most respected carriers have, on occasion, been guilty of deadly malpractice.

Commendations typically come in the form of flattering letters from your bosses, handshakes at a banquet, and maybe a plaque. The Air Line Pilots Association (ALPA), the industry's largest pilots union, gives out awards each year for outstanding airmanship. Not that there's anything wrong with a nice shiny plaque and a free buffet, to say nothing of the personal and professional satisfaction that comes from having performed well under pressure, but no, you don't get a promotion or extra pay. You might earn some congratulatory time off, but nothing, not even saving the lives of hundreds of people, trumps the seniority system.

It's the other kind of time off a pilot hopes to avoid. Minor infractions that do not cause damage or injury—accidental deviations from a clearance, for instance—rarely result in a harsh penalty, but in cases of serious negligence the sanctions range from mandatory remedial training to suspension to being fired.

FAA “certificate action” is independent of punishment levied by the airline. The agency issues letters of warning or correction—pilots call these “violations”—or your license can be suspended or revoked. You might get to keep your existing job, but any administrative action on a pilot's record can be a huge, even fatal hindrance if seeking employment later on.

In the United States, airlines and the FAA have partnered in a program called the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), which permits crews to self-report small-scale deviations or inadvertent procedural breaches in exchange for immunity. ASAP protects pilots from punitive action and allows airline training departments and regulators to collect and monitor important data. Rather than looking to blame and punish somebody for every infraction, the idea is to spot unsafe trends and deal with them proactively. It's a well-received program with benefits to all vested parties, including passengers, and the concept has spread to other industries, such as medicine and nuclear power.

I don't know of any cases in the United States where pilots have faced civil action, as when a doctor is sued for malpractice (attorneys realize it's the airlines and manufacturers with the deep pockets, not employees), but in many other countries pilots have been arrested and put on criminal trial for their professional mistakes. One prominent case involved manslaughter charges brought against the captain of a turboprop that crashed in New Zealand in 1995. In 2000, three pilots of a Singapore Airlines 747 were taken into police custody in Taiwan after a crash at Taipei's Chiang Kai Shek airport. They were forced to remain in Taiwan for two months, facing up to five years in prison on charges of “professional negligence.” Pilots in Brazil, Italy, and Greece have dealt with similar situations. In 2001, a Japanese crew was interrogated by law enforcement after taking evasive action to avoid an inflight collision with another aircraft. Several people were injured during the maneuver, and police officers were sent to the cockpit after landing.

“Fortunately, in the United States and many other nations, the emphasis is on getting to the root causes of accidents and fixing the problem,” says an ALPA representative. “It doesn't work that way in all countries, and that includes industrialized democracies where you'd think they'd know better. Pilots, controllers, and even company officials can do hard time for an inadvertent error that doesn't come close to a reasonable definition of criminal negligence. You can imagine what a chilling effect that has on the accident investigation process.”

They're not common, but they happen once in a while. Blowouts of a plane's forward nose gear tires are by nature pretty innocuous. Those involving main-gear tires beneath the wings and fuselage are a little different and potentially more serious.

The most probable time for a tire failure is during or shortly after any sort of high-speed braking event such as a takeoff abort or a sudden stop after landing. Heavy braking generates tremendous amounts of energy and heat, some of which is transferred to the tires themselves. Although airplane tires are filled with inert nitrogen and affixed with fuse plugs that cause them to automatically deflate rather than burst, failure of a main-gear tire at high runway speed can still induce all sorts of unpleasantness, from reduced braking capabilities to fire. Making things worse is the possibility of a single failed tire propagating the failure of those around it. A runway abort with multiple expired tires can be a dicey operation, and should a burst occur anywhere near takeoff speed the smartest course of action is to
continue
the takeoff and deal with the problem once airborne.

In 1986, a Mexicana 727 went down after takeoff from Mexico City, killing 167 people. An overheated brake caused one of the plane's four main tires to burst, with shrapnel severing fuel, hydraulic, and electrical lines. It had been erroneously serviced with air instead of nitrogen. Inflation pressure too is important; a too-low tire can generate intense temperatures. In 1991, a Canadian-registered DC-8 crashed in Saudi Arabia, killing 261 people. A single, underinflated tire transferred energy to a second one, and both came apart during takeoff. Bits of material then began to burn after gear retraction, spreading fire through the cabin as the plane circled back. And the fiery crash of an Air France Concorde in 2000 was linked to a fuel tank puncture brought on by a burst tire.

Though, to be clear, the vast majority of blowouts, even at high speeds, turn out to be harmless. Modern airliners are protected by highly effective anti-skid systems, brake temperature readouts in their cockpits, and wheel-well fire suppression systems in the gear bays. The catastrophes above involved models now obsolete.

One of them was a DC-8, a plane that I'm all too familiar with, having worked aboard a freighter version for the better part of four years (
see “North Latitude”
). Late one night in 1998, we were prepping for takeoff out of Brussels, Belgium, at our highest allowable tonnage when the ground controllers gave us a long, circuitous route to runway 25R. Rolling along the apron in predawn darkness, we suddenly heard a bang and felt a shudder. A small pothole, we concluded, and kept going, as otherwise the aircraft felt normal. Just as we turned onto the runway and were cleared for takeoff, we heard a second bang, followed rapidly by a third, and then a fourth. And with that, the airplane—all 355,000 pounds of it—seized and wouldn't move.

The first noise we'd heard was one of the DC-8's eight under-wing tires violently giving up the ghost. At max weight and after several sharp turns along the taxiways, it was only a matter of time before the adjacent one met a similar fate. With two gone, stress on the remaining two sent them popping as well. We were glad things happened when they did, and not at 150 knots. The runway was closed until the plane could be unloaded, de-fueled, and towed away for repairs.

There's a ladder to this. Do you mean somebody who knows nothing at all about flying? How about a private pilot who has flown four-seaters, or a desktop simulator buff who has studied a jetliner's systems and controls? The outcome in all cases is liable to be a catastrophe, but some would fare better than others. It depends too on the meaning of “land.” Do you mean from just a few hundred feet over the ground, in ideal weather, with the plane stabilized and pointed toward the runway, with someone talking you through it? Or do you mean the whole, full-blown arrival, from cruising altitude to touchdown?