From Sully – to Sullied

A lot of pilots like me spend more time than they probably care to admit reading aviation accident reports. I am not sure what draws us to them. There is some technical curiosity to be sure, there is the hope we can learn a thing or two from the mistakes of others, and to be frank, I suppose there is a component of Schadenfreude that lurks beneath the surface. After all, since we are alive, we therefore must be smarter and better pilots…right? Or maybe it’s just porn for propeller heads.

In all the years I have scoured these reports, read the transcripts of the cockpit voice recorders and the accident narratives as if they were page-turning suspense novels – I have never stopped being stunned by how blind and deluded we humans can be as we hurtle blithely to our own demise.

There are many  examples of shockingly bad, stupid, arrogant or complacent decisions leading to disaster in the air. Off the top, I think of of KLM 4805 in Tenerife…Avianca 52 in Long Island…or Comair/Delta Connection 5191 in Lexington, Kentucky.

But I cannot recall reading a CVR transcript that painted a grimmer, scarier picture of poor pilot performance than the one that came out of the black box found in the smoldering wreckage Continental/Colgan 3407 in Buffalo one year ago.

And that is what comes through loud and clear in the final report from the National Transportation Safety Board. The headline you likely will likely remember is PILOT ERROR CAUSED BUFFALO CRASH.

And that is precisely what the airline industry wants you to think. It is always good to blame dead pilots. They can’t defend themselves and it limits an airline’s liability. They want you to believe some bad pilots slipped through the cracks and the crash was an odd aberration. An act of God – or at least God-awful piloting. No more.

Now there is some truthiness to this – and that is why the airlines get away with it. There is no doubt Marvin Renslow and Rebecca Shaw did just about everything wrong on that flight that from Newark to Buffalo. They both were very tired (the CVR captured plenty of yawns) and Shaw complained of a head cold – and the transcript is littered with “[sound of sniffles]”.  And it seemed as if they used their flight deck as the platform for a lengthy shoptalk/bitch session – right up until the moment the airplane started falling out of the sky.

And when the impossible to ignore stick-shaker violently awakened them to the fact that they were not paying any attention to an airplane that was about to stall – they responded in precisely the opposite way they had been trained. Renslow should have pushed the throttle forward to the fire-wall –  and pushed hard on the wheel – or yoke – to point the nose down so the plane would gain airspeed. This stall recovery procedure is drilled into a pilot’s head since about lesson number three – part of Piloting 101.

As the NTSB put it: “the captain’s response to stick shaker activation should have been automatic, but his improper flight control inputs were inconsistent with his training and were instead consistent with startle and confusion.”

[youtubevid id=”vMy8kZ2_TMs”]

Shaw’s actions – which were apparently unilateral – were also dead wrong. As the plane shuddered, she retracted the flaps – which reduces drag – but also lift – meaning the plane was now in deeper trouble. Their fate was sealed.

Such a horrifying scenario. An airplane running perfectly – in good weather conditions (the small amount of ice they had picked up is not listed as a factor) drops out of the sky purely because the flight crew was not paying any attention to the critical task at hand. So how could a professional flight crew be so horribly – unprofessional?

N200WQ - the Colgan Q400 that crashed in Buffalo On February 12, 2009

Was it just something about these two pilots? A horrible confluence of minimal experience (Renslow had only about 100 hours on the de Havilland Canada DHC-8-402 Q400 – Shaw about 700) – fatigue and illness? Was fate the hunter in this case? Or were there deeper contributing causes?

A month before we had all watched and marveled as Sullenberger and Stiles ditched that Airbus so deftly in the Hudson River. Continental/Colgan 3407 was the negative image of that event. From Sully – to sullied.

The two crashes offer cases in point for the consequences of a fundamental change in the way we fly in this country that you probably have not noticed. Since deregulation in the late seventies, the large, legacy carriers have outsourced much of their flying to smaller commuter – or regional – carriers. Now more than half of the airline departures in this country are flown by the regionals.

They operate under the same FAA rules than their bigger benefactors play by, but the  latter generally exceed those the minimums in nearly every category – while their smaller contractors squeak by right where the bar is set.

The livery and logo on that airplane was all Continental – and the passengers probably all thought they were getting Continental levels of service and safety. But they were really flying on a airplane operated by a company called Colgan Air. And Continental? The company makes it a point to stay out of their business – so long as they fly the routes on time. McDonald’s cares more about how their franchisees cook their french fries.

At the regionals, the crews are less experienced, the hours are longer, the pay is much less and the training is not as extensive. And paradoxically, they are flying the most demanding routes in the airline business – lots of time in the weather, in high traffic areas – and lots of segments. It’s the kind of flying you’d like to have a Sully doing for you. But instead, you are getting Renslow.

The FAA and the airline industry insists there is one level of safety among all the airlines – large or small.

But look at the last six fatal airline crashes in this country. All of them were regionals. An unfortunate coincidence?

You decide after you hear from the regional pilots producers Rick Young and Catharine Rentz and I spoke with for the upcoming PBS Frontline documentary “Flying Cheap”. You can see a preview here. And I will tell you more about what we learned tomorrow.

A Dark and Windy Night…

7O-ADJ – the A310 that crashed on approach to Moroni – airliner-pictures.net

A lot of travelers boarding an Airbus today might be thinking twice. After all, yet another Bus is at the bottom of yet another ocean – and another 153 souls have gone west.

Could the European airliners be a latter-day DC-10? – That is, a flawed design – and thus a (relatively) dangerous way to fly?

For the entire Airbus airliner fleet (more than 5400 of them are in service globally), the numbers do not support the conclusion. In July 2008, Airbus’ bitter rival Boeing released a “Statistical Summary of Commercial Jet Airplane Accidents” from the dawn of the jet age in 1959 through 2007.

At the time of the study, the A330 still had a flawless record: no fatal accidents in the course of a million departures. A month ago, Air France 447 changed that record – but the airliner remains very safe statistically.

Over the years Airbus A300’s have had three crashes that caused deaths. That equates to a rate of .47 airplanes lost per million departures. The A320 series has had eight fatal crashes – or .23 hulls per million departures. And the A340 has never had a fatal crash.

The record is not as good for the A310 – the model of airplane that plunged into the sea trying to land at the capital of the Comoros Islands – Moroni. It has crashed and killed people eight times now (six times on the event horizon of the Boeing study). That equates to a fatal accident rate of 1.42 airplanes for every million departures.

The infamous – and much maligned – DC-10 crashed with fatalities a dozen times for a rate of 1.36 fatal crashes per million departures. Pretty much  a dead heat (if you will pardon the expression).

[It is worth noting that these fatal accident rates have come a long way (baby). Back in the day, the early jet airliners – the 707 and DC-8 – logged fatal accident rates of 4.21 and 4.03 per million departures respectively.]

But take a look at the accident reports for the A310 crashes. There are two common threads. First, they are all attributed to pilot error – trying to land in a thunderstorm, botched use of thrust reversers on rollout, improper stall recovery, spatial disorientation on a dark stormy night, a botched missed approach, and the most infamous of all, the captain who allowed his son to take the controls – leading to a stall and spin.

The second is the airlines were all flagged in third world/emerging nations [Maybe the Russians might quibble with that characterization, but over the years Aeroflot has logged a third world quality record.]

This is why you are hearing so much talk about the so called “blacklist” of airlines that are banned from flying to Europe or the US.

Airlines have to be pretty sloppy (and scary) to get on this roster.  It means they lack:

•    the regulations to properly certify airplanes
•    the technical expertise and resources to oversee them
•    adequately trained technical personnel
•    adequate inspectors to insure they comply with minimum international standards
•    and insufficient record keeping to document what they are doing (or not).

All that said, Yemenia Airlines is not on the European blacklist (now 194 airlines long). But the crashed 19-year-old/17,300 cycle airplane  (7O-ADJ) apparently was – at least in France. In 2007, it was banned because inspectors there found long list of squawks.

So why so many pilot error crashes by crews flying the A310 for third world airlines? Is it shoddy training? Is it simply that the A310 is a cheap, widely used aircraft for thinly endowed airlines? Is it the flying environment in the countries where these planes fly  – with fewer, less sophisticated navigational aids and less air traffic control coverage and expertise?

Could the highly automated Airbus design be ill-suited for these crews/airlines/airports? Or has it saved untold lives in accidents that never happened? These are hard questions to answer.

But unlike Air France 447, we should know the answer to the riddle of this crash fairly soon – as searchers have already found the black boxes.

But the man in charge of the airline claims he knows what happened.

“We never had problems with the plane,” Yemenia Chairman Abdulkalek Saleh Al-Kadi told Bloomberg. “It was purely weather.”

What about the weather? Here is the weather picture (in pilot parlance, a METAR) for MORONI/Prince SAID IBRAHIM (FMCH) airport:

FMCH 292300Z 21025G35KT 9999 FEW020 25/16 Q1017 TEMPO 18015G30KT

Translated – it means the wind was coming out of the southwest (210 degrees) at 25 knots (28 mph) gusting to 35 knots (40 mph). There were a few clouds 2,000 feet. So it was windy and the sky was nearly clear – albeit totally dark  – the crash occurred just before 2 AM local time – and moonset that night was 12:23 AM.

With that in mind, let’s try to imagine ourselves on that Yemenia flight deck. The Moroni airport has one runway that allows planes to land either toward the northeast (20 degrees) or the southwest (200 degrees). Airplanes nearly always land into the wind, especially when it is blowing as strong as it was at FMCH that night.

But there is only one precision instrument approach to the airport – and it is for the opposite runway. The crew was forced to fly a visual approach to runway 20 on a dark night over water – approaching an island that probably does not have many lights blazing at that hour.

PAPI Lights – Wikipedia

To add to the challenge, runway 20 does not have a Precision Approach Path Indicator (PAPI). This is an array of focused light beams that sit beside a runway  and give a pilot a visual indication of where his craft is relative to the ideal glide path.  A four light PAPI – as you see here will show the pilot two red and two white lights when he/she is at the correct altitude for a safe approach. More red – and you are too low…more white and you are too high. It is truly pilot-proof.

But without those lights on that dark night over the water, the crew would have had a hard time judging how close they were to the ground (or the surface of the sea). It is called “spatial disorientation” and it kills a lot of pilots and passengers (including John F. Kennedy, Jr., his wife and sister-in-law).

They apparently tried to land once – but aborted the approach – turning around in a “black hole” – itself a perilous maneuver – especially for a crew that would be a bit rattled and distracted by their predicament – and were, no doubt, dog tired after a long day of flying.

It is the perfect recipe for losing focus on your gauges – and forgetting which way is up – and how far is down.

A Dark, Stormy Night over the Atlantic

Photo of F-GZCP - the airliner that crashed - from JetPhotos.Net

So what happened to Air France Flight 447? It is early and speculation at this juncture is often wildly wrong. And remember, there are usually several factors that conspire to bring an airliner down. But here is what we do know for sure. Keep this in mind as you process the often inaccurate reporting on aviation that is so prevalent in the mainstream media.

The Timeline – The flight, carrying 216 passengers and 12 crewmembers, left Rio de Janeiro at 2203 GMT (7:03 PM local time). It flew beyond radar coverage 3 hours and 33 minutes later (at 0133 GMT). A half hour later (0200 GMT) – now four hours into the flight – the plane encountered heavy turbulence. Fifteen minutes later (0215 GMT), now a long way out to sea, it transmitted automated signals indicating the plane was in serious trouble.

“A succession of a dozen technical messages (showed that) several electrical systems had broken down,” according to Air France CEO Pierre-Henry Gourgeon. He described the failures, which included (most ominously) the pressurization system as “totally unprecedented situation in the plane.”

Weather over Atlantic during crash - From Naval Research Lab

It was a dark and stormy night – in a place that is home to the world’s worst thunderstorms. Just as it disappeared, the Airbus A330-203 was flying into a thick band of convective activity that rose to 41,000 feet. This equatorial region is known as the Intertropical Convergence Zone – it is where Northeast and Southeast Trade Winds meet – forcing a lot of warm, moist air upward – which condenses – an efficient thunderstorm producing machine.

The crew had “Sully-esque” seasoning – The Captain had 11,000 hours total time (1700 in the Airbus A330/A340). One Copilot had 3,000 hours total time (800 in the Airbus A330/340) and the other Copilot had 6,600 hours total time (2,600 in the Airbus A330/340).

The Airbus A330 has a good record – and this was the first crash of a twin-engine A330 in revenue service in its history. In 1994, seven employees of Airbus died when a 330 went down during a test flight. The accident report says it was a case of pilot error. The airplane that crashed last night – tail number F-GZCP – had no accidents or incidents in its history. It went into service on April 18, 2005 and had logged 18,870 hours. In 2006, it’s wing collided with the tail of an Airbus A321 on the ground at Charles de Gaulle Airport – the damage was classified as “minor”. It was last in the hangar on April 16, 2009l for routine maintenance. No serious squawks reported.

No reason to believe terrorism – While you cannot take the possibility of a bomb off the list just yet, no groups have claimed any responsibility for downing the plane. What good is a terrorist attack if the perpetrators don’t, well, terrorize us?

So consider this as a possible scenario: The crew is flying toward a line of storms in the dark, out of range of land-based radar. They are equipped with on board weather radar however – and can use it to thread their way through the bad cells if need be.

It is quite likely the airplane was struck by lightning – or it could have triggered lightning by the mere act of flying at Mach .8 through storm clouds. It is not impossible that could have sparked a fuel fire – but that is highly unlikely. In fact, it has been four decades  since lightning alone caused an airliner crash in the US. A lot of time and effort is spent protecting airplanes from this clear and present danger (interesting piece here). And airliners get hit by lightning all the time – you don’t hear about it because nothing bad happens. Remember, it is seldom just one thing that brings a modern airliner down.

Many of those airliners that get hit by lightning are so called fly-by-wire aircraft (meaning the controls in the cockpit are linked to the movable surfaces on the airplane by electrical wires and computers). Airbus pioneered FBW control systems in commercial airliners and the engineers in Toulouse have gone out of their way to demonstrate their products are safe in stormy weather. There are four fully redundant electrical systems on an Airbus – and if the worst happens, a manual flight control system that allows the crew to fly the plane (barely) using the rudder, differential thrust on the engines and horizontal stabilizer trim. [You may recall that is how the crew of United flight 232 managed to get a DC-10 on the ground in Sioux City, Iowa in 1989 after a complete hydraulics failure]

Ironically, one of the systems most vulnerable to lightning strikes is the on-board weather radar located in the nose cone. It cannot do its job if it is shielded from lightning like the rest of the airplane is – and so it is more likely to go down when bolt strikes (which is, of course, when you need it most). So it is possible this plane was hit by lightning, knocking out the radar.

You can imagine the crew was suddenly preoccupied with multiple electric failures that left them in the dark, over the ocean and without weather radar as they hurtled toward some epic cumulus nimbus thunderheads. This would have been a serious emergency that should prompt a pilot to do a 180 and head for the nearest suitable size slab of concrete.

The fact that the airplane sent automatic warnings that it had an electrical problem means, by definition, that it was not a total, instant failure. But did things cascade from there? They might have found themselves inside a huge storm only able to control the airplane manually – which means minimally – with the rudder primarily.

And then there is the Airbus rudder. You may recall the crash of American Airlines flight 587 on November 12, 2001 as it departed New York’s JFK airport. The plane encountered some wake turbulence and the copilot apparently stepped too hard on the rudder pedals – breaking off the graphite vertical stabilizer and rudder (the tail).

As long as we are talking about pilot inputs leading to broken airplanes, consider this important point: when the Airbus FBW system is up and running as it should, there are all kinds limits placed on the pilot’s ability to move the control surfaces of the airplane. It’s sort of like a governor on a car engine. If you move the controls too far, too fast in any direction, the computer, in essence, ignores the human being’s commands and keeps the plane inside the flight envelope. This is designed to stop a plane from stalling, spinning, gaining too much speed or pulling too many “G’s” because a pilot is over-correcting (which of course, is not correct at all).

But as the electrical systems start failing, the machines lose their authority to trump the humans fairly quickly. Depending on how many multiple failures of redundant systems there are, the so called flight control laws change to “Alternate”, “Abnormal Alternate” and finally “Direct Law”. At each level, the pilots get more authority to move the control surfaces without the machines intervening. So a combination of loosened fly-by-wire reins, cruise speed and extreme turbulence would increase the potential for an in-flight breakup.

AA 587 crash site in Queens - from NOAAEven today’s advanced - seemingly invincible - airliners are no match for Mother Nature on a bad night. If a big airplane ends up in the teeth of a powerful thunderstorm, it could be torn to pieces in an instant.

We do know whatever happened on that airplane in its last few minutes was nothing short of horrifying. It is hard to imagine the kind of turbulence that would break up an airliner. My heart goes out to the passengers and crew.

Will we ever know what happened? This one will be hard. The wreckage will be likely strewn over a wide area – and locating the Flight Data and Cockpit Voice Recorders won’t be easy since they are likely at the bottom of the sea – possibly 24,ooo feet below the surface. Even if they are transmitting their homing signals, you would need a lot of luck and a pretty stout submersible to retrieve them. But that may be moot – as simply knowing where to search will be difficult.

One thing which may help: those automatic messages indicating system failures – which are designed primarily to give mechanics a heads up about problems so they can turn a plane around on the ground faster – no doubt contained much more information than is now in the public realm.

Which brings me to this wild idea: why not send steady streams of telemetry from airliners to the ground all the time – ala the space shuttle? This effectively places the “black boxes”, safe and sound – on the ground. Imagine how invaluable that much data would be right now – given the the distinct possibility this could remain an unsolved mystery.

We all need to know what happened to Air France 447. Is there something that makes the A-330 fleet unsafe in certain conditions? In the absence of real facts, will conspiracy theorists spin a tale of terrorism and government cover ups? Did the flight crew make crucial errors in judgment? Or was this an unavoidable scenario – bad luck with odds so long that nothing or no one is really to blame?