Annoying fallacies about the air quality on commercial planes simply will not go away. And it's especially regrettable when our most august and reliable news sources become part of the problem.
Case in point, the following is from the Sept. 17 issue of the Economist, in a feature titled "Breathing More Easily," about a new high-tech air filter developed by a pair of companies in the U.K.:
"Typically an airline will strike a balance by using a 50:50 mixture of fresh and recirculated cabin air," it says, "although pilots can reduce the amount of fresh air to save fuel. Some are thought to cut it back to only 20%."
My mouth dropped open when I read this.
To start with, pilots cannot tinker with a plane's air-conditioning systems (there are usually two, known as "packs," supplied by each engine or pair of engines) to modify the ratio of fresh to recirculated air. This ratio is predetermined by the manufacturer. It is neither arbitrary nor adjustable from the cockpit.
And I love that sentence, "Some are thought to cut it back to only 20%," with its oily overtones of conspiracy -- an insinuation that is not only a blemish on the magazine's standards, but is offensive to those of us who fly planes for a living.
In reality, here's how it works:
On modern aircraft, the rate and volume of airflow is pretty much automatic. On the Boeings that I fly, we have direct and accurate control over temperature, but only indirect control over flow. If you asked me to please "cut it back to 20 percent," I would politely inform you that this is impossible. The switches are set to automatic mode prior to flight, and the packs more or less take care of themselves. So long as both engines are turning and everything is operating normally, the flow is perfectly adequate. Only when there's a malfunction (an overheat, a recirculation fan failure, or some other glitch in the plumbing) are the settings changed. In over two years of flying 757s and 767s, this is something I have done exactly twice.
On the MD-80 that I previously flew, designed by McDonnell Douglas, we had two pack modes determining airflow: on and off. On is where they stayed. Even with two of them, shutting down a pack completely is a fairly big deal; it is not something done for fuel savings.
I am not as familiar with Airbus models, but let's talk to somebody who is.
"Airbus series aircraft, from the A320 through the much larger A380, do provide a way for pilots to vary airflow," says Dave English, an A320 captain. "But not in the way characterized by the Economist."
English explains that the Airbus controllers have three positions, labeled HI, NORM and LO. "Almost all the time you're in the center NORM position, which is automatic. The HI position is used when you need a rapid change in cabin temperature. The LO position does as the name implies. It provides some fuel savings, but they are minimal and this isn't used very often. Company guidance is to use LO whenever the passenger load is below a hundred. It's not a big change. Sitting in the cabin, it's almost impossible to notice the difference."
An Airbus pilot for United with whom I spoke says that his carrier requests switching to LO if the airplane is less than 60 percent full. He adds, "We rarely ever move the switch out of automatic."
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On a related and equally frustrating note, my old nemesis Diana Fairechild is back again. She was quoted last Friday in a CNN.com story about aggressive airline passengers.
Fairechild is the author of "Jet Smarter," a once-upon-a-time bestselling exposé that took the airlines to task over various safety and comfort issues. Fairechild was a flight attendant for many years at United and Pan Am, and in her book and through her Web site she assumes the role of passenger advocate -- a sort of Ralph Nader with a tray of pretzels.
One of Fairechild's regular and fraudulent talking points is the one about a supposed lack of oxygen in the passenger compartments of airliners. "Pilots reduce the fresh air in the passenger cabins," she reports on her Web site, "but not for themselves in the cockpit." And pilots, she says, "receive ten times more oxygen than passengers." What bastards!
Last Friday she was at it again. "There are more delays, fees and less fresh oxygen on board," Fairechild told CNN, "which can trigger angry behavior."
A provocative claim to be sure. The trouble is, it's ridiculous and untrue.
I'm with her on delays, but there is no less oxygen aboard commercial jetliners than there ever has been. Oxygen is determined by pressurization, and planes are not being pressurized any differently than in the past.
Pressurization, for those who don't understand it, is what allows you to breathe normally while flying at high altitudes. Using air bled from the compressor sections of the engines, it effectively squeezes the rarefied, high-altitude air back into sea level air (or something reasonably close to sea level; see below), increasing the density of oxygen. Crews set up the pressurization system (there's a main and a backup) before departure, dialing in the intended cruising altitude and/or elevation of the destination airport. The rest happens automatically. While en route, the cabin is held at the equivalent of anywhere from around 5,000 to 8,000 feet above sea level, depending on the aircraft type and cruising altitude. (Pressurizing all the way to sea level is unnecessary and would put undue stress on the airframe.) In other words, you're breathing as you would in Denver or Mexico City -- minus the pollution.
One of flying's most enduring myths, which people like Fairechild have made very difficult to kill, is the one claiming that pilots tweak pressurization levels as a way to save fuel, and at the same time, subject passengers to an oxygen-scarce environment that keeps them woozy and docile. Not only is this patently false, it would have quite the opposite effect on a plane's occupants. Although the symptoms of hypoxia can, at first, make a person feel giddy and relaxed, they also induce confusion, nausea and migraine-strength headaches (though not the "angry behavior" as Fairechild has it). I remember the multiday hypoxia headache I endured some years ago in Cuzco, Peru, an experience I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy, let alone a planeload of customers. (Do I look tortured in this picture? I am.)
And as I've reminded readers before, pilots are breathing the same air as everybody else on a plane. An aircraft fuselage does not contain separate compartments with different pressure values in each. The entire vessel is pressurized equally from the forward pressure bulkhead to the aft pressure bulkhead. This normally includes the cabin, cockpit and lower-deck cargo holds.
For the record, several of the points emphasized on Fairechild's Web page about cabin air, which you can read here, are grossly inaccurate.
Take, for example, this bogus extrapolation: "A study of office buildings found that the transmission of contagious diseases increases significantly when a large percentage of air is recirculated," she notes. "It seems logical to apply this finding to the airline cabin environment."
Maybe to her it does, but it's wrong. This is a terrible apples and oranges comparison (or, if you rather, peanuts and pretzels). It neglects to account for the hospital-quality HEPA filters used on commercial planes, and it omits the critical fact that there is a total changeover of air, both fresh and recirculated, every few minutes. The air in office buildings and other crowded dwellings is far more stagnant.
My own in-depth discussions on the facts and fiction of cabin air can be read here. And here.
As I point out, if you come down with an illness while flying, chances are it's through something you've touched, not through something you've breathed. Sneezed-on tray tables, soiled lavatory handles, etc., are the likely vectors for bacteria and viruses.
Fairechild's assertions are rubbish, and it's distressing to hear a network as influential as CNN repeating them.
(It strikes me, having laid all of this out there, that I should probably expect a backlash. Don't be surprised if I, and any pilots who might back me up, are strung up in Salon's letters section on allegations of playing shill to the airline industry. This happens almost every time I counter some counterfeit nonsense ordinarily held gospel by conventional wisdom. It's a bit rich, I have to say, the idea of pilots cravenly beholden to the financial overlords of their business, doing the dirty work for those who have cashed in while slashing wages and gutting pensions on the way out -- major airline pilots earn about 30 percent less than they did 10 years ago. If you think pilots are that naively allegiant, or that easily duped, you haven't been around them.)
Anyway, as for more reasonable causes of passenger violence -- air rage, as they call it -- it's interesting that Fairechild would mention oxygen ahead of, say, alcohol. No surprise, a report from London Guildhall University cites alcohol as the chief factor in 88 percent of violent on-board episodes. Of the incidents I have witnessed personally, the number is closer to a 100 percent.
Cramped quarters, airport security lunacy, screaming babies and the other stresses of flying do not bring out the best in people, particularly those predisposed to belligerence in the first place, or who've had a few.
The daily passenger total in the United States is close to 2 million riders, a vast demographic that has, on the whole, become a lot more varied and -- how to say this? -- less buttoned-down than it used to be. All things considered and regardless of the cause, I would argue that air rage is perhaps more notable in its absence than its presence.
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GO-AROUNDS
Good grief, it's been over a month since we last talked music. Even without an editor's decree, already I've broken my promise to close each column with a discussion about 1980s alt-rock. So here goes:
The other day I was asked by a reader what I thought of the Replacements' song "Waitress in the Sky," from the 1985 album "Tim."
It's OK, is what I think. Snappy and catchy, but nothing special. One interesting point: Listen carefully to the lyrics and you'll notice how the name of Republic Airlines was changed to the nonsense name "Reunion." This was presumably to avoid any libel issues. Somehow Paul Westerberg and the Stinson brothers weren't exactly ideal spokesmen for an airline.
The old Republic Airlines was based in Minneapolis, the Replacements' hometown. The company is today part of Northwest, which itself is about to become part of Delta.
On the whole I was never too impressed by the Replacements' later-career material. I'll say this, though: The band's first album, the irrepressible "Sorry Ma, Forgot to Take Out the Trash," from 1982, is the greatest garage rock album of all time. What band today could ever cut a song like "Raised in the City"?
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
Here's a good one: A friend of mine is passing through airport security at San Francisco International, and the Transportation Security Administration takes a toy away from his infant daughter. The toy is a sort of liquid-filled baby rattle, smaller than an ice cream cone. It's doubtful there is more than 3 ounces of liquid inside, but the guard "can't be sure," and so the toy goes into the garbage barrel, where it joins all the other highly dangerous liquids and pointy doodads hauled in by the screeners that day.
Bad enough, but now what if I told you that my friend is an airline pilot? Well, he is. On the day this happened, he was heading out of town on a short vacation, and his wife and daughter were going with him.
When he told me this story, all I could answer was, "I know, I know." It's right up there with the time that I had a butter knife confiscated from my roll-aboard crew bag. My own story is even more absurd, actually, since I was on duty in full uniform and the butter knife was no different from the ones given out to passengers during meal service. Not to mention, would an airline pilot at the controls of a jetliner really need the help of some dull-edged cutlery if he wanted to crash the plane? Just asking.
Mike pleaded his case at SFO, just as I had done in New York, but the guard wasn't the least bit impressed by his Federal Aviation Authority certificates or his airline credentials. In other words, common sense wasn't allowed into the picture. Simple common sense. That, perhaps above anything else, is what is so acutely missing from airport security.
There are, of course, two fundamental flaws in TSA's screening philosophy: The first is that it considers everybody who flies -- the old and young, fit and infirm, domestic and foreign, pilot and passenger -- a potential terrorist. The second is a foolish fixation with the tactics used by the terrorists on Sept. 11, and the subsequent fixation with weapons -- particularly knives and other sharp objects -- rather than the people who might use them. TSA will not acknowledge that the success of the 2001 attacks had nothing to do with the hijackers' ability to sneak weapons past airport security. For one thing, even a child knows that a sharp object as lethal as a box cutter can be fashioned from virtually anything. But more to the point, the attackers were exploiting a weakness in our mind-set -- that is, our expectations of how a hijacking would unfold, based on numerous earlier incidents -- rather than any weakness in airport security. The element of surprise, not box cutters, is what took control of those four aircraft. And even before the first of the twin towers had fallen to the ground, that element of surprise -- as well as the box cutters that went with it -- was no longer a useful tool. Paradigm over.
Combine these fundamental errors and you've assembled what is basically an impossible and unsustainable task: keeping any and all "weapons," from hobby knives to hair gel, out of the hands and luggage of 2 million travelers every day of the year. I'll remind you that tough-as-nails prison guards cannot keep drugs and knives out of maximum security cell blocks, never mind the folly of TSA guards trying to root out liquid-filled baby rattles at overcrowded airports.
(Apologies to my regulars. I've made these points numerous times in past columns, I know, but remember that a percentage of my readers each week consists of newcomers. This is a grass-roots effort and, dammit, one has to be tenacious.)
The proper course of action, need it be said, would be for TSA to overhaul its entire approach. For several reasons -- not the least of which is the traveling public's apparent eagerness to be subjugated, harassed and humiliated -- this is not going to happen. Is it too much to ask, in consolation, for the agency to exhibit a little common sense instead? How about a policy whereby a TSA inspector, encountering a fully credentialed airline pilot traveling with his young daughter, is able to, well, like, you know ... just let it go.
What TSA desperately needs is a bit of flexibility in its protocols. If we're to believe that TSA screeners are indeed well-trained professionals, can they not handle the responsibility of making an occasional judgment call, some on-the-spot decision making? "Our screeners are allowed to exercise leeway in some cases," says a TSA spokesperson. "They have the training, and the obligation, to exercise discretion in some cases."
I asked if those cases might include an airline employee and his child's playthings, but the spokesperson wouldn't get into specifics. As it stands, I'm not seeing much leeway and discretion. I'm seeing blind adherence to nonsensical rules. I'm seeing a draconian obsession with the exactness of container volumes and the precise dimensions of harmless objects. When that knife was taken away from me, a guard and supervisor actually took it aside to measure the size of its miniature serrations, as if they alone were the difference between unsafe and safe. Enforcement of this kind transcends mere tedium. Not only does it do nothing to improve safety, but it is also a national embarrassment.
Now, the reason I bring all of this up is because of the recent brouhaha over certain TSA "secrets" having been accidentally revealed to the public. Through an improperly redacted document that was posted online, we have learned, for example, that the nationalities of a traveler could be grounds for yanking that person aside for a more thorough secondary screening. If your passport happens to be the property of Yemen or Syria, say, rather than Iceland, you may be looked at more carefully. Profiling, you might call it. We also learned that airline crew members, with proper ID and in uniform (that was Mike's problem; he wasn't dressed the right way), are exempt from having to take their shoes off, and from some of those annoying restrictions on liquids and gels.
Is there anybody who didn't already know this?
Predictably, certain politicians and pundits are on the warpath, calling this lapse a "giveaway to terrorists." To me, what's worrying isn't that our enemies are suddenly privy to useful information that will help them bring down planes. They're not. What's worrying is the idea of a government agency that is unable to keep confidential data confidential. It's a bureaucracy issue, and potentially a privacy and civil rights issue, more than a public safety issue, per se.
Beyond that I have little to take away from the scandal, other than a feeling of extreme annoyance that this, out of all the things that airport security gets wrong, is the best that the general public and media can rouse themselves to be shocked about. We're reading headlines like, "Leaked TSA Guidelines Reveal Confidential Procedures." Here's a better headline: "Billions Wasted in Pointless TSA Screening Methods."
The agency promises to investigate and assures us that our safety has not been compromised. As I mentioned a couple of weeks ago, there's a new TSA sheriff in town. Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, was appointed by President Obama earlier this year. He replaces Kip Hawley, under whose tenure there was little in the way of clear thinking. Both industry and passenger groups seem to be fond of Southers, calling him a likely advocate for reform. We'll see.
But enough of that. Here we are a week before Christmas, and I'm going all Scrooge on you. I'm grumpy this holiday season and I can't help it. First, I had to work over Thanksgiving, and now it turns out I'll be working over both Christmas and New Year's Eve as well. Not all pilots get roped into flying on the holidays -- only we seniority-list bottom feeders. But I suppose I shouldn't mind holiday flying. The lines are longer, delays are longer, planes are more crowded ... I mean, what's not to like?
I'm joking. I really do enjoy it. Last year I spent Christmas in Egypt. The year before it was Hungary. Before that, Ghana. As I said, what's not to like?
My favorite holiday flying memory dates all the way back to Thanksgiving, 1993. I was captain of a Dash-8 turboprop heading to New Brunswick, Canada, and my first officer was the always cheerful and gregarious Kathy Knight. Kathy was one of only a few pilots I've known who'd been flight attendants before learning to fly. She'd spent a few years serving peanuts to passengers at Delta. Today, she was serving me. Literally, for she'd brought along an entire cooler packed with food -- huge turkey sandwiches, a whole pie, and plastic tubs of mashed potatoes. We assembled the plates and containers across the folded-down jump seat. Just one of those sentimental oddities a pilot files away in his mental logbook.
The real reason I'm grumpy this year, maybe, is because Peter Hughes, bassist from the Mountain Goats and an Ask the Pilot aficionado, neglected to remind me of his show here in Boston a few weeks ago. Instead of a guest-list invitation to see one of my all-time favorite bands, I got to sit home and watch Bill Moyers. Hughes did send me a Christmas present a few years ago. It was a flea market find, and here's a picture of it. It is what is appears to be: a small plastic doll, about 3 inches tall, encased in a transparent shell, like a miniature trophy case, adorned with '60s-era airline logos, including those of BOAC, Pan Am and the beautiful old JAL crane. The doll is supposed to be a stewardess, possibly. Beyond that, I'm hoping that somebody out there can explain where it originally came from or what its purpose might be. It says "Cragstan" across the bottom, which I take to be the name of the company that produced the item.
OK, staying on the Christmas theme, how about a stocking stuffer recommendation for the frequent flier on your list? Something funny, because travelers out there need a little take-along humor to keep from going berserk at the X-ray machine or renouncing their citizenship and moving to Denmark. And because I'm so tirelessly allegiant, and because there aren't any other funny travel gifts around, I'll make the same recommendation I made here in 2006: That'd be a copy of SkyMaul, the in-flight shopping parody magazine created by the San Francisco-based Kasper Hauser comedy troupe. It's 3 years old, but so what? I dig out my copy pretty regularly, and it gets funnier every time.
SkyMaul is the perfect sendup to a concept -- in-flight catalog shopping -- that was screaming to be sent up for a long, long time. The real SkyMall, which assumes that every American has an insatiable hunger for necktie organizers, remote-control pool toys and mail-order steak, is always just half a step away from self-caricature. The K.H. gang give it that last little nudge. With 120 pages of fodder, it's hard to pick a favorite "product," but I’m partial to, among many others, the bee thermometer ("There is only one way to know the true temperature of your bees"), the How I See Myself Stoner Trophy, and the Three Veterinarians of Nazareth figurines ("In ancient times, these beast-healers gamboled about the countryside, laying hands upon sick flocks. Here we see Japeth and Magog looking on as Tomargah nurses a lamb back to consciousness with his own man-breast"). And I've been known to use the pseudonym "Blaine Cardoza" when ordering Chinese food or signing for a FedEx package. (Get a copy and you'll understand.) My only gripe is that whoever designed the cover collage managed to cull some of the book's least funny highlights.
That SkyMaul hasn't been a staple at airport bookstores, where it surely would sell hand over fist, is impossible to explain. My own book was victimized by a similar exile. It was written explicitly for airline travelers, who by and large never saw a copy. To help us through our suffering, why not get a copy of each? Order "Ask the Pilot" through my home page, and get a complimentary autograph, which is sure to increase the book's value when you pawn it off on eBay or leave it on the sidewalk somewhere. Really, what could be a better under-$20 gift for a frequent flier than a signed copy of "Ask the Pilot"?
OK, to be honest, you might notice that I've lowered the price. And that's because, while I wish that I could tell you that my book has aged as well as SkyMaul has, I'd be lying. At 5 years old it's a little behind the times in the facts, stats and figures department. The bulk of the content dates to circa 2001-02, and it shows. How bad does it get? In a discussion about the use of electronic devices during flight I make reference to a Sony Walkman, and I refer to the Boeing 787 by its long-discarded preproduction name, "7E7."
As it happens, I've recently begun the process of updating and revising "Ask the Pilot." A fresh new edition should be out by summer, packed with loads of new information. There's a lot of work to do, and if this winter I'm occasionally absent from Salon on my normally allotted day, this is why.
By "loads" of information what I really mean is "some." That's how the publisher wants it, anyway. For reasons I don't fully understand, they aren't looking for a major overhaul, only a here-and-there update. I'm trying to abide by their wishes, but there's quite a bit that needs changing. I've been working on the thing for a month, and I'm yet to make it past Chapter 2. I think my editor is going to hate me.
Ah, that's right, the Boeing 787. Is it really true that the 787 made it into the air on Tuesday, Dec. 15, for its long-delayed maiden flight?
Don't ask me. I was traveling. I managed to catch some snippets on the CNN monitors* at the Atlanta airport, but at that point things were uncertain. The plane was taxiing around, testing its flaps and landing lights, but there were questions as to whether it would fly. Eventually I lost interest and went to Chik-fil-A.
(*Such every-so-often usefulness does not justify the existence of these infernal chattering devil-boxes, all of which deserve to be destroyed.)
The plane's inaugural is fairly exciting, though hardly on the scale of, say, the 707 or 747. Those aircraft essentially redefined air travel. The 787's advances, by contrast, are strictly technological. It is the first commercial airliner fashioned mostly from high-tech composites, and it promises remarkable operating economy for airlines. Passengers will appreciate such innovations as higher humidity levels, lower cabin altitudes, and (my favorite) larger windows. Airlines already have placed over 800 orders for 787s -- the most ever for an aircraft yet to carry a passenger.
I have to say it's a sharp-looking plane. It's not as distinctive as past Boeings (727, 747), but they don't design 'em like they used to, aesthetically, and we need to keep it in context. The tail is a little impotent, but I dig the scalloped engine nacelles, the sharply tapered wings and raked landing gear doors.
I'm joking again. I'm well aware that the 787 successfully completed its maiden voyage -- a three-hour loop from Paine Field outside Seattle on Tuesday afternoon.
Boeing's shares fell 38 cents.
And finally, speaking of falling stock ... I was a little dismayed by some of the comments posted in response to last week's column about Northwest 188 -- the flight that went AWOL over Minnesota back in October. I fail to understand some of the angry accusations that I was justifying, exonerating or otherwise excusing the flight crew's lack of attentiveness. I was doing no such thing. The point of the story was only to show that the incident was, in all likelihood, more complicated than people think; I was trying to give you insights into how such a thing might happen.
The pilots have openly admitted responsibility. For me to suggest they were not as blatantly negligent as is commonly assumed, and to advocate that they be allowed to fly again at some point in the future, is by no stretch giving them a "free pass," as one e-mailer inexplicably put it. Neither does it square with many of the posted comments, a few of which were downright hostile.
Other criticism was more measured and, I think, fair...
"To suggest that a loss of situational awareness does not put a flight in peril is simply wrong," writes Christine Negroni, New York Times correspondent and the author of "The Crash Detectives." It is important not to fall for the notion that simply because no one was hurt, the event is not serious. For years now air safety experts have been trying to underscore how important it is that events be investigated with as much attention as accidents, because only a single factor might separate such an episode from a disaster. Pilot inattention over a period of time, as occurred on flight 188, is a serious safety issue. Though I agree with you these pilots have learned a lesson they won't forget. Complacency is not going to be their sin in the future."
I've always had mixed feelings about the one-way nature of Salon's comments forum. Not all writers review their feedback, but I do, and it can be a frustrating exercise, especially now that Salon closes the letters thread a day earlier. Answering a simple question or providing a rebuttal is often impossible.
As a reminder, you can always write to me directly.
Happy holidays!
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
No, Gov. Mark Sanford, R-S.C., doesn't make our Crazy List because of that press conference, the political apologia to end all apologias. Of course, it was great theater: the admission of an extramarital affair by a conservative politician who, while in Congress, voted for the impeachment of Bill Clinton because of the president's "reprehensible" relationship with Monica Lewinsky. The Faulkner-cum-Fellini spectacle of this Southern presidential aspirant, flailing wildly on national TV without a script about his Argentine tryst, as curiously jubilant-looking young women beam in the background. The endearing performance by a tearful man who blamed it on "that whole sparking thing."
Look, we're suckers for love. The drama -- Sanford recklessly taking off to see his true love, causing a brief nationwide panic about his whereabouts, concocting a lame cover about being off the grid along the Appalachian trail before being caught at an airport by a reporter flying in from Buenos Aires -- was the stuff of Harlequin. Sanford made us recall Woody Allen's 17-year-old koan, "The heart wants what it wants." Our calloused hearts melted a tad more when his e-mails to his Argentine lover leaked to the press, in which he pleaded that "despite the best efforts of my head my heart cries out for you, your voice, your body, the touch of your lips, the touch of your finger tips and an even deeper connection to your soul."
Had it just ended there. But Sanford continued to talk. And talk. "This was a whole lot more than a simple affair, this was a love story," he told the AP. "A forbidden one, a tragic one, but a love story at the end of the day." It was like reliving the worst part about teenage love -- listening to your self-involved friend yammer endlessly about a stupid crush. Was he 4 rilz?
Maybe not. Wife Jenny Sanford released a statement that the couple had agreed to a trial separation two weeks before the whole spectacle. She knew about the affair, and he had some tough decisions to make. Later, Sanford had to repay the state for his travel to Argentina. His trip began to seem less like hopeless infatuation than selfish acting-out. And it recalled an earlier, more important lapse in Sanford's judgment this year: his cynical attempt to reject federal stimulus funds owed his beleaguered state. South Carolina's corridor of shame be damned -- for Sanford, it was an opportunity to shimmy for the GOP's tea-party right, and lay an early claim to the 2012 presidential nomination. Luckily, it didn't work.
Sanford has seemingly ducked impeachment. But while his wife has filed for divorce, the good people of South Carolina seem to be willing to stand by their man, to give him another shot. Romantic fools. They can't say they haven't been warned.
When, back in October, a Northwest Airlines flight went AWOL over Minnesota, dropping out of radio contact and wandering off course, I had the same reaction as most people. What happened was shocking and unacceptable, I felt. It was embarrassing to pilots everywhere. Moreover, I had a difficult time imagining how two professional airmen could allow such a bizarre thing to happen. How was it even possible? The majority of my colleagues felt the same way.
The problem was, all we had to go on was the media's condensed presentation of the event: Two pilots, focused on their laptop computers, lost track of where they were and overshot their destination.
But was it really that simple?
Imagine, for a moment, the following scenario:
Flight 188 is en route from San Diego to Minneapolis, somewhere around Denver, when a flight attendant calls the cockpit to let the captain know his crew meal is ready. The captain takes his tray, and uses the opportunity to step out and use the lavatory.
While he is out of the cockpit, the first officer receives a call from air traffic control, asking him to contact the next sector on a new frequency. The instruction for the change sounds something like this: "Northwest 188, contact Denver Center now on 125.9."
The first officer acknowledges by repeating the information back to the controller, then setting the new frequency into one of the VHF radios.
"Good evening, Denver Center," he says next. "This is Northwest 188 with you, level at three-seven zero [37,000 feet]."
Radio frequencies are at least five digits long (often six digits overseas), and as you might expect, it's not unheard of for a pilot to accidentally transpose a couple of numbers. This happens from time to time and is seldom if ever dangerous. The situation is normally corrected after a minute or two, often because the incorrect frequency is completely silent: The crew gets no response, and there is no chatter from controllers or other pilots.
Aboard Flight 188, the first officer mixes up the numbers and dials in a frequency for Winnipeg, Canada, instead of Denver. Let's call this Factor 1.
Winnipeg is hundreds of miles away, and controllers there do not hear him. They are unable to acknowledge his call or correct his error. At the same time, however, Flight 188 is at a high enough altitude that transmissions from other aircraft under Winnipeg's control are clearly audible in the cockpit. Thus there is plenty of chatter coming over the radio. This leads the pilot to believe he is on the correct frequency. Let's call this Factor 2.
A short time later the captain returns. He too hears the radio chatter and has no reason to think anything is wrong. Factor 3.
When a pilot comes back from a restroom break, it is customary for the other pilot to brief him of any changes, such as a new altitude or heading assignment, revisions to the routing, radio frequency changes, and so forth. In this instance, nothing is said. The captain is not told of the frequency change, or about the fact that nobody acknowledged the first officer's call. This would be Factor 4.
Neither does the first officer, having received no reply, make a second attempt to contact ATC. Factor 5.
Why he neglects to do these things isn't clear, but neither is it shocking. After all, few things are more routine than dialing in a new radio frequency and, as we say, "checking in." This can happen dozens of time over the course of a flight, and failure to get a response from ATC on the first call is not uncommon, especially when a frequency is busy. Occasionally, when the chatter is unusually heavy, you wait for them to contact you. In addition, the first officer is distracted by the commotion and security rigmarole required when opening and closing the flight deck door. It's possible that he's simply forgotten. Factors 6, 7 and 8.
Soon thereafter, back on the correct frequency, Denver Center is trying to get hold of Flight 188, wondering why it never checked in. They call many times, to no avail. Minutes later, there is a shift change at the facility. For reasons unknown, the new controller is not told about the failure to reach Flight 188. Had he known about this, there are steps he could have taken to help track down the wayward flight. But he didn't. Factor 9.
As they fly along, unknowingly out of contact, the captain and first officer then get into a long discussion about the airline's new scheduling system for pilots. The first officer takes out his laptop and gives the captain a short tutorial on how to bid his monthly schedule. The captain takes his computer out as well. Neither computer is on for more than five minutes, but clearly both crew members are distracted. Factor 10.
On they fly, still out of contact with ATC. Worsening matters is a hundred-knot tailwind, and the fact that the pilots have their navigational screens set to the highest mileage range, which compresses the distances and waypoints and makes any deviation less noticeable. Factor 11.
At one point Northwest attempts to contact the plane via the on-board datalink system known as ACARS. On some aircraft, an incoming ACARS message is indicated by an audible chime. But on this one there is just a small light, and it stays illuminated for only 30 seconds. The message goes unnoticed. Factor 12.
Eventually a flight attendant calls on the interphone to ask about their arrival time. At this point the flight is directly over Minneapolis.
Depending on traffic, runway use, etc., arrival patterns can sometimes take a flight several miles beyond its destination before turning back again, but this is different. The crew realizes something is wrong. They track down a Minneapolis frequency, establish contact, and begin to receive instructions for landing. ATC is naturally suspicious, and puts the aircraft through a long series of turns to be certain the pilots haven't been hijacked and are in full control. Finally Flight 188 is cleared to land.
When the Airbus gets to the gate, the FAA and FBI are among those waiting.
And we all know the rest.
This scenario is based on a secondhand account written by a pilot who happens to be a friend of Flight 188's captain. The pilot's letter has been cited in news articles and blogs. I've paraphrased here and there, and rounded things out for clarity. I cannot know for certain if the details are accurate, but certainly they take what was, on the surface, a startling and borderline implausible story, and make it plausible.
In other words, laptops were only part of what went wrong. This was more than a pair of pilots zoning out under the glow of their computers. It was something less overt: a combination of small errors and oversights, not all of them of the crew's doing, creating a loss of what a pilot calls "situational awareness."
When it comes to aviation incidents, things are seldom as simple as they first seem, or as the media frames them. Here on Salon I have made my living emphasizing that point. I should pay more heed, maybe, to my own advice. I'm annoyed at myself for not being more suspicious of this incident from the start.
I'm just as annoyed that this story made such a splash in the first place and has spent so much time in the media spin cycle. It never deserved it. The airplane and its occupants were never in peril. The deviation occurred during the cruise portion of flight, with the aircraft plainly visible on ATC radar and in no danger of colliding with other aircraft or the ground. When it landed in Minneapolis, the jet still had two hours of fuel in its tanks and was only 15 minutes behind schedule, including a 35-minute delay out of San Diego.
The pilots are by no means off the hook. The entire mess could have been avoided had the frequency error been caught early on, as it should have been, and clearly both succumbed to a needless distraction. But do they deserve to be publicly excoriated and banned from ever again flying?
The pilots had their FAA certificates stripped through emergency revocation almost immediately, prior to any formal investigation. Reportedly, not everybody at the FAA thought this was the best of course of action, but pressure to do so came all the way from the White House. The media firestorm dictated that somebody had to be punished, and fast.
In summary, the saga of Flight 188 remains an embarrassing error. But not as scandalous an error, or as reckless an error, as it first appeared.
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Which is all the more reason why our elected officials should back off and avoid pushing for federal legislation, as some have been doing, that would ban laptops and other devices from cockpits. Never mind that some carriers require pilots to carry laptops in the cockpit, for access to important charts and manuals; most of them already prohibit their recreational use. Is a federal law going to make any difference? Of all the things government could be doing to improve air safety, for any lawmaker to spend five minutes writing up legislation on computers is shameful.
As a general rule, anything a politician says or proposes about commercial air travel should be looked on with heavy skepticism. This isn't to say that every once in a while something intelligent and useful doesn't emerge from Washington.
Case in point: the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act of 2009, passed by the House of Representatives earlier this fall. If voted into law, the measure will bring welcome changes to pilot training and hiring protocols. Not everyone is convinced the measure will pass the Senate, but it soared through the House by a vote of 409-11.
The legislation comes on the heels of last winter's Colgan disaster near Buffalo, N.Y. Fifty people were killed when the Dash-8 turboprop, operating as Continental Connection Flight 3407, fell on a house after stalling in bad weather. In addition to highlighting fatigue issues, the crash revealed the controversial hiring standards of many regional airlines.
The new law would require that pilots possess an FAA airline transport certificate (ATP) in order to be eligible for a cockpit job with any commercial carrier operating under Part 121 of the Federal Aviation Regulations -- that is, almost all of them. Requirements for an ATP include a minimum of 1,500 hours of flight time (broken down over various categories), and the satisfactory completion of a written test and in-flight examination. In recent years, regional airline new hires have been coming on board with as few as 250 total flight hours.
Additionally, the law will somewhat redefine the ATP certificate, with a focus on the operational environment of commercial air carriers, requiring specialized training in things like crew coordination, cockpit resource management and so on.
You'd take that for granted, but believe it or not, the existing ATP requires no specific training in airline procedures, and no prior experience in large aircraft or those requiring more than one pilot. One needs to pass a written exam and in-flight evaluation in a multi-engine aircraft, but you can obtain an "airline transport pilot" certificate having logged 1,500 hours flying Pipers and Cessnas.
The changes will make it easier to weed out those pilots who lack the acumen for airline operations. For those who progress, it will allow an easier transition from general aviation to the high-demand training environment at a regional. It will lower their training costs and, ultimately, make for safer cockpits.
As I've written before, logbook totals aren't always a good indicator of skill or performance, but it's hardly unreasonable to set the acceptance bar at or near the ATP standard. And in many ways this would represent a return to historical norms. In years past, the typical civilian new hire needed to accrue between 1,200 and 2,000 hours to be taken seriously by a regional airline.
(One concern I have is for those pilots already hired into cockpits with qualifications that don't meet the new standards, including many who are currently on furlough. Can they be called back to duty under the old rules? I presume they will be grandfathered in, which is only fair.)
For a would-be pilot, obtaining an ATP will entail a financial investment approaching or exceeding six figures. Theoretically, at least, this should encourage the regionals to begin offering better wages and benefits if they want to attract and retain experienced crews. For the time being, average first officer pay begins at around $20,000 a year. (I say "theoretically," because pilots have a terrible habit of, shall we say, suffering for their art.)
Rep. Jerry Costello, chairman of the House Aviation Subcommittee, calls the Airline Safety and Pilot Training Improvement Act "the strongest aviation safety bill since the creation of the FAA in 1958."
That's pretty strong, but on the whole I see something good for everybody: airlines, pilots and passengers alike.
Let's start with a new video. In September I wrote a column on the facts and fallacies of air quality on commercial planes. I explained how cabin air is considerably cleaner than the traveling public assumes, and I went after the myth that pilots tinker with oxygen levels during flight. If you're still skeptical, I've uploaded a five-minute demo, taken in the cockpit of a 767, showing how air conditioning and pressurization are controlled. You can watch it here.
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As it happens, that video was shot during a flight over central Brazil, not far from the scene of a horrible midair collision three years ago. In September 2006, a Gol Airlines Boeing 737 bound from Manaus to Brasilia with 154 people on board collided with an executive jet carrying seven Americans. The smaller plane remained flyable and made an emergency landing at an air force base. The 737 plunged into the Amazon jungle -- in a region so inaccessible that indigenous Kayapo Indians used machetes to help emergency crews reach the scene. There were no survivors, making it the worst-ever crash in the long and storied history of Brazilian aviation.
The accident was covered extensively in this column, here and here.
Also covering it extensively was Joe Sharkey, business travel columnist for the New York Times. Sharkey was a passenger on the executive jet and survived to tell his story. He wrote about the incident in the Times and in his personal blog, and he was interviewed widely by the U.S. and international press (including yours truly for this October 2006 column in which he describes the collision in startling detail). Sharkey has been loudly critical of Brazil's handling of the investigation, and of its air traffic control system. The pilots of the executive jet were detained without charges for ore than two months, and indeed shortcomings in the Brazilian ATC, which is run by the country's military, appear to have been the chief culprit.
Well, in one of the strangest stories of the year, Sharkey is now being sued for defamation on the grounds that he insulted the national honor of Brazil. The plaintiff is Rosane Gutjhar, a resident of Curitiba, a large city in southern Brazil. Gutjhar, whose husband was killed in the crash, wants a retraction and $280,000 in damages. The suit is based on a provision of Brazilian law that permits private citizens to claim damages for perceived insults against the nation's dignity.
Gutjhar says that Sharkey described Brazil as "archaic" and called its citizens "idiots." Sharkey categorically denies this. The quotes cited in the lawsuit, he says, were falsely attributed to him through reader comments (made by Brazilians) published on a Brazilian news Web site. That ought to be easy to prove, and ought to be grounds to have the whole thing dismissed, but lawyers have told Sharkey that he needs to take the lawsuit seriously.
Should it continue, it presents serious implications for journalists.
"Brazilian judicial authorities should dismiss this case," said Carlos Lauría, coordinator for the Committee to Protect Journalists, in a statement. "Sharkey has the right to report on this tragic accident and voice his opinion on the ongoing investigation."
According to the CPJ statement, thousands of businessmen, politicians and public officials have filed lawsuits in recent years against media outlets and journalists as a means of controlling criticism. "The lawsuits are filed in a politicized climate in which lower court judges routinely interpret Brazilian law in ways that restrict press freedom," CPJ reports. Added Carlos Lauría, "The case again Joe Sharkey and the onslaught of civil and criminal complaints against Brazilian journalists are unbecoming of a robust democracy such as Brazil."
I couldn't agree more. If the Brazilians are concerned that others look at them as second-class world citizens, they should think twice. This is banana republic stuff.
"Such libel suits pose a threat to the free speech of American policymakers, scientists (lawsuits over research that someone doesn't like), travel reviewers, and even sportswriters who might 'offend Brazil's dignity' in the walk-up to the Olympics," said Sharkey in an e-mail. "Especially if they start writing about things like crime and infrastructure problems in Rio de Janeiro."
Meanwhile those two American pilots are currently being tried in absentia by a Brazilian court, while an investigation by the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board has cited faulty air traffic control protocols as the primary cause of the catastrophe.
I fly regularly to Brazil. The quality of air traffic control at and around the big cities is generally excellent and virtually no different from that of Europe or the United States. Over remote areas, however, things are more challenging. Amazonica Control is the agency in charge of most airspace over the immense Amazon basin. Here, radar coverage is limited and radio communications sometimes intermittent. Controllers can be difficult to reach, and often sound as if they're talking through a tin can and string. Transmitting and receiving even simple instructions can take multiple attempts.
On the whole, though, the problems I experience are more an inconvenience than a danger. VHF voice communications are always troublesome when flying over remote areas (this is one of the reasons they don't exist when flying over oceans), and I have never felt that conditions over Brazil were unsafe. If they were, dozens of daily flights operated by American, European, Middle Eastern and Latin American airlines wouldn't be going there. (As many as 10,000 people per day pass through Brazilian airspace aboard U.S. jetliners alone.) At the same time, no, Brazil's ATC system is not as good as it should be. Just as the country's authorities aren't coming clean about the collision, or being reasonable in their case against Joe Sharkey.
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Speaking of people in the media...
You know who makes me laugh? Richard Quest makes me laugh.
Richard Quest is the bespectacled, supercharged host of the CNN shows "Quest Means Business" and "CNN Business Traveler." He's definitely an acquired taste, and there are those who find him repellent. Personally, I find his thundering voice and over-the-top persona to be equally hilarious and riveting. He makes me tired just watching him. I wouldn't have that much energy if you poured a jug of kerosene over my head and lit me on fire.
Love him or hate him, Quest is one of the most knowledgeable sources out there when it comes to air travel. He knows his airlines, his planes and his airports better than anybody else on television.
He recently hosted an excellent segment about British Airways' new all-business class service between JFK and London City Airport. The route is flown by an Airbus A318 outfitted with 32 sleeper seats. The unusually short runway at London City entails substantial weight penalties for takeoff, requiring a fuel stop on the westbound leg. For this, B.A. has smartly chosen Shannon, Ireland. Not only is Shannon uncrowded and user-friendly, but passengers can clear U.S. Immigration formalities on site, eliminating the need to do so in New York. Quest took the opportunity to give a little run-through of the history of the Shannon airport, with historic photographs of Lockheed Constellations, de Havilland Comets and the like.
Back in the day, prior to the advent of long-haul nonstops, Shannon was a bustling refueling station for flights traveling between Europe and the U.S. Transit passengers would mill around the terminal, giving rise to what became the world's first duty-free shop. The airport is still used sporadically as a "technical stop," as the refueling gigs are called nowadays, mostly by military flights and the occasional charter. It's also a tourist hub for western Ireland, served by most of the big American carriers.
Shannon's history is similar to that of Gander, Newfoundland, another former stopover point for postwar propliners and 707s. But while Shannon has held its own, Gander has become a forlorn and deserted place. I dropped into Gander once or twice when I flew freighters for DHL. This photo, taken in 1998, I think tells it all. I don't know what the Newfoundland equivalent of tumbleweeds might be, but there should be lots of them rolling around the apron at Gander.
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Security follow-up
Erroll Southers, a former FBI agent, has been appointed by President Obama to lead the Transportation Security Administration. He replaces Kip Hawley, whose tenure fostered and entrenched some of the agency's worst policies. Southers' appointment has been welcomed by both industry and passenger groups, and he is widely seen as a likely advocate for sensible reform. TSA's screening rules are such a basket case of waste and folly that it's tough to be optimistic, but let's hope those observers are right.
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And in closing, something fun: While I'm constantly critiquing airline logos and liveries, it dawns on me that I've never critiqued airline alliance logos or liveries.
I'll make this quick.
The three big partnerships are SkyTeam (headed by Delta and Air France), Star Alliance (United, Lufthansa and Continental, among others) and Oneworld (American, Qantas, British Airways, etc.). All three utilize a circular logo.
SkyTeam's is the winner. The ribbon motif and arcing typeface are elegant and refined.
Oneworld's purplish blob is boringly corporate. (Plus, that name, "Oneworld," has such uncomfortable overtones.)
Star Alliance's is hideous -- a clunky assemblage of pyramids (triangles? diamonds?) that looks as if it had been designed by a sixth-grader. And the shape of texture of those faux diamonds are a dead ringer for the Delta "widget," which is a tad ironic since Delta belongs to SkyTeam, not to Star.
Member airlines have taken to painting select aircraft in full alliance colors. None of the three, in my opinion, looks particularly fetching when spread billboard-style over the side of a plane. Here's Star, Oneworld, and SkyTeam.
You be the judge.
Next time in Ask the Pilot: The inside story of Northwest 188. Plus, a new bill in Congress calls for big changes in pilot hiring practices.
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
William Langewiesche has a new book out, exploring last January's crash landing of US Airways Flight 1549 into the Hudson River. "Fly by Wire: The Geese, the Glide, the 'Miracle' on the Hudson"
Maybe that's a tad over the top, but it's hard for me to argue. As I've expressed before, nobody does a story better than Langewiesche. His work is immaculate and exhaustive, and he's an exemplary wordsmith to boot.
Nevertheless, there's a certain aspect of the Flight 1549 saga that nobody, not even Langewiesche, has really bitten into.
As the general public sees it, Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger saved the lives of everybody on board through nerves of steel and consummate flying skills. As Langewiesche sees it, the real hero wasn't Capt. Sully, but the electronic wizardry of the Airbus A320, which was able to deftly manage the angle and speed of its perilous glide pretty much on its own.
I submit that neither plane nor pilot deserves as much credit as they've been given. The most critical factor was nothing more than plain old luck -- specifically, the time and place where things went wrong. As it happened, it was daylight and the weather was reasonably good; there off Sullenberger's left side was a 12-mile runway of smoothly flowing river, within swimming distance of the country's largest city and its flotilla of rescue craft. Sullenberger performed admirably in the face of a serious emergency, as did his jetliner. He needed to be good, but he needed to be lucky as well. He was. Had the bird strike occurred over a different part of the city, at a slightly different altitude, or under slightly different weather conditions, the result was going to be an all-out catastrophe, and no amount of talent, skill or fly-by-wire technology was going to matter.
I dare suggest that if you could put a hundred crews, flying pretty much any modern airliner, in Sullenberger's exact situation, the results would be more or less the same. Thus the passengers owe their survival not to miracles, talent or the fail-safe genius of the A320, but to the less glamorous forces of luck and, to use a word I normally dislike, professionalism.
Sullenberger, to his credit, has been duly humble. He has acknowledged the points I make above, and has highlighted the unsung role played by his first officer, Jeffrey Skiles. The media pooh-poohs this as false modesty or self-effacing charm, when really he's just being honest. As for the magic of his airplane, Sullenberger told Christine Negroni of the New York Times that Langewiesche "greatly overstates how much it mattered."
Separately, Langewiesche's analysis, with its emphasis on the role of cockpit automation, is helping to perpetuate the stubborn and widespread belief that pilots are fast becoming obsolete. It is hardly the author's fault if a book reviewer misinterprets his conclusions, but consider this from Times book critic Dwight Garner:
"What the public doesn't understand ... is the extent to which advances in aviation and digital technology have made pilots almost superfluous ... Mr. Sullenberger's airplane, an Airbus A320, was nearly capable of guiding itself gently to the ground, even after losing both of its engines."
Wow. OK, timeout.
Incidentally, William Langewiesche, Christine Negroni and Dwight Garner all are fans of and/or occasional contributors to this column, and I'm hoping not to offend my influential regulars or the companies they work for. But hang on and let me circle the wagons.
I do a fair bit of myth busting in this column. It comes with the territory, I suppose. Air travel has always been rich with conspiracy theories, urban legends and crackpot notions. Where this all comes from is easy enough to understand: Commercial flying has exactly the right ingredients to nurture paranoia -- it's scary to millions of people and steeped in secrecy. Airlines, it hardly needs saying, aren't the most forthcoming of entities, and even the most elementary technicalities of flight -- how does a plane stay in the air? -- aren't understood by vast numbers of travelers.
I've heard it all. Nothing, however, gets me sputtering more than misunderstandings about cockpit automation -- the idea that modern aircraft essentially fly themselves, with pilots on hand merely as a backup in case of trouble. "Baby sitting a flying computer" as one smartass letter writer recently put it here on Salon.
This is so far from the truth that it's difficult to get my arms around it and begin to explain how. Baby sitting a computer? Really? I'll keep that in mind during my next recurrency training and simulator check; the next time I'm weaving around thunderheads over the Amazon; shooting a VOR approach in Africa in a rainstorm at 4 a.m., or setting up for an ILS in blowing snow and a quarter-mile visibility.
But never mind the extremes. If I were to take even the most routine, trouble-free and "automated" flight, from the preflight planning stage to block-in at the destination, and break it down event by event, explaining each of the hundreds of decisions and inputs made by the crew, big and small, from rote procedure to the unexpected judgment call, I would be typing for the next three days.
Would it do any good?
Forget about the New York Times for a minute. Two weeks ago National Public Radio ran a piece on "Morning Edition" looking at the Northwest 188 incident (the flight that wandered off course after both pilots became distracted by their laptop computers). The segment included this exchange between host Renee Montagne and guest Michael Goldfarb, an aviation consultant and former Federal Aviation Administration chief of staff:
Montagne: Now, for us passengers, the pilot says hello. He might alert us to turbulence during the flight, but we tend to think that the pilot and the copilot are flying the plane. What exactly does that mean, flying the plane?
Goldfarb: Well, it doesn't mean what it meant 30 years ago. There's so much automation in the cockpit that, literally, an aircraft taking off from Los Angeles and landing in New York can have very little attendance by the crew.
What total nonsense. And Montagne's comment, "We tend to think that the pilot and copilot are flying the plane." Tend to think? I have never been so insulted.
As I wrote in a column in October, a jetliner can, in theory, take itself laterally from waypoint to waypoint along a preprogrammed route -- a basic, skeletal outline of the flight. But the idea that a jet will "fly itself" to the destination without meaningful input from the crew is preposterous and downright offensive to anybody who flies for a living.
One of the media's big mistakes is a reliance on aviation academics and bureaucrats -- professors, directors, consultants, researchers, etc. -- rather than pilots, for its expertise. These people are bright and knowledgeable, but they're often highly unfamiliar with the day-to-day operational aspects of flying planes.
Having said that, pilots too are occasionally part of the problem. By grossly oversimplifying things, we paint a caricature of what flying is really like, at the same time undermining our value as employees. It's no wonder so many people think pilots are overpaid if we're saying things to the press like, "The plane will fly to its destination without any input from the pilot at all," to quote an American Airlines pilot talking to CNN a couple of weeks ago.
You might sometimes hear a pilot describe a given aircraft as "simple to fly." Indeed, a few months back, Miles O'Brien, CNN's former aviation expert and himself a pilot, made this very comment in reference to an Airbus A320. Simple, yes, but only in the context of an airline pilot's prerequisite level of expertise.
The analogy I'm fond of making is the one about aviation and medicine. Out in the field, automation helps a pilot in the same way that it helps a surgeon. It makes flying easier, but it does not make it easy. Like O'Brien and his Airbus, you might hear a surgeon make a comment about the "simplicity" of a certain procedure or operation. That in no way implies that the layperson could give it a go and be successful, and it does nothing to diminish the knowledge and experience required to perform at that level in the first place. The technology is advanced and expensive and ultimately engineered to keep your customers safe and alive. But to understand how this equipment works, and to use it properly ... well, you still need to be a doctor, or a pilot, first.
Even passengers get into the fray. A month ago I was sitting in economy class when our plane came in for an unusually smooth landing. "Nice job, autopilot!" yelled some knucklehead behind me.
Funny, I concede, but wrong. It was a fully manual touchdown, as the vast majority of touchdowns are. Most jetliners are certified for automatic landings -- "autolands" in pilot-speak -- but in practice they are rare. In any case, the fine print of setting up and managing one of these landings is something I could talk about all day. If it were as easy as pressing a button, I wouldn't need to practice them twice a year in the simulator, or need to consistently review those tabbed, highlighted pages in my manuals. It's there if you need it -- for that foggy arrival in Buenos Aires, with the visibility sitting at zero -- but it's anything but simple. Guess what: An automatic landing is, in most respects, more challenging, more complicated and more work-intensive than a manual one.
But at some point we won't be having these discussions, as pilots are phased out and airplanes become fully automated. Right?
On Oct. 27 I appeared on a local TV talk show here in Boston. I was one of two guests. The other was Missy Cummings, a former U.S. Navy pilot turned researcher/academic, now an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at MIT. Cummings is of the mind that pilots are becoming expendable, and that the jetliner as we know it will eventually be replaced by fully automatic aircraft controlled from the ground.
This is so laughably far from reality that, again, it's hard to get my arms around it and begin to explain. But apparently Cummings' reality is a different one, and she contended on air that it's "just a matter of time" before the crew is engineered out of the picture.
I became visibly annoyed at this, but it was two against one. The host, Emily Rooney, who I need to point out has no aviation background or expertise whatsoever, was in eager agreement with Cummings. "We don't need them," Rooney said flatly of pilots.
The conversation continued after the cameras were off. "Drop by my lab sometime," Cummings said to Rooney (by this point Cummings was refusing to speak or make eye contact with me). "And I'll show you how to fly a UAV with your iPhone."
UAV is "unmanned aerial vehicle," like the military drones used over Afghanistan and Pakistan. These highly sophisticated, remote-control craft carry no occupant and are guided from the ground. But to compare a UAV to a commercial airliner is ultimate apples and oranges. I am happy, assistant professor Cummings, that you are able to send commands to a robot plane using an iPhone. But I would like to see your iPhone perform a high-speed takeoff abort after a tire explosion, followed by the evacuation of 250 passengers. I would like to see your iPhone troubleshoot a pneumatic problem requiring an emergency diversion over mountainous terrain. I'd like to see it thread through a storm front over the middle of the ocean. Oh, heck, even the simplest stuff.
Point being, there are so many contingencies large and small, so many subjective decisions required on every flight -- situations that you simply cannot get a grasp of remotely. Never mind for a minute whether or not we can come up with a pilotless airliner. Why would we want to?
And what sort of time frame are we talking? (This past September a CIA drone went out of control over Afghanistan and had to be shot down.) Look, I am not a Luddite. But I also fly for a living. Yeah, that makes me an advocate, but it also gives me a very healthy sense of just how far-fetched this idea of pilotless planes truly is. Someday, perhaps. In our lifetime? No chance.
Of course, the only people more insufferable than assistant professors and aviation consultants are the desktop simulator buffs who think they can hop into a 767 and fly it like a pro. They were given some false confidence back in 2007 when the popular show "MythBusters" tried to find out if a nonpilot could land a plane. They got themselves a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a "generic commercial airliner" -- which is to say a rather unrealistic one. A seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructs the hosts via radio. On the first try, they crash. The second time, they make it.
But all they really did, essentially, is land a make-believe airplane in a contrived, tightly controlled experiment.
To be fair, the question of whether a nonpilot could land an actual jetliner depends somewhat 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, requiring all sorts of maneuvering, programming, communicating and configuring?
You've got a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won't become a cartwheeling fireball. But the scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly becomes incapacitated, and only a brave passenger, who has perhaps a little desktop sim time under his belt, can save the day. He'll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down.
Try this a thousand times and I reckon you'll have a thousand crashes.
Don't believe me? Let's try it. I need a willing participant who does not have a pilot's license or any formal flight training. We'll rent out a full-motion Boeing simulator and the instructor will set things up for 35,000 feet, somewhere over the middle of the United States. Ready, set, go. In you come and sit down. The rest is up to you. All of it.
If you crash, you foot the bill and I get to mock you in Salon. If you make it, I foot the bill and write a five-page retraction carefully detailing your heroics.
Any takers?
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Contact Patrick Smith through his Web site and look for answers in a future column.
First up, a brief statement regarding the United Airlines pilot detained in London after failing a Breathalyzer test. Erwin Washington, 51, was one of three pilots scheduled to operate United Airlines Flight 949 from Heathrow to Chicago's O'Hare airport when he was detained by authorities who were alerted by another United employee.
For those of us who fly for a living the timing of this couldn't be worse, what with last month's embarrassment of the two Northwest pilots who wandered off course after becoming engrossed in their laptops. Seems it only takes a minor scandal or two to wipe out all of the respect (and sympathy) previously accrued by way of our old friend Capt. Sully.
Believe me, a pilot showing up for duty under the influence isn't going to be held in high esteem by his colleagues. But more important, I need to make clear that although this isn't the first time such a thing has happened, it shouldn't give the traveling public the wrong impression. These rare and isolated incidents are not a symptom of some dangerous and unseen crisis. I understand and expect that passengers will worry about all sorts of things, rational and otherwise. But as a rule, whether your pilots are intoxicated should not be one of them. My own personal observations are hardly a scientific sample, but I have been flying commercially since 1990, and I have never once been in a cockpit with a pilot I knew or suspected was intoxicated.
The Federal Aviation Administration blood alcohol limit for airline pilots is .04 percent, and we are banned from consuming alcohol within eight hours of reporting for duty. Pilots must also comply with their employer's policies, which tend to be tougher. Most airlines impose a 12-hour consumption restriction. Drug and alcohol testing is random and frequent.
This is not something pilots tend to play fast and loose with. Why would they, with a career hanging in the balance? Violators are subject to immediate, emergency revocation of their pilot certificates.
And Britain's regulations are considerably stricter that those of the FAA. The legal limit is set at 20 milligrams of alcohol per 100 milliliters of blood. That's one-fourth the British limit for driving, and equates to about .02 percent blood alcohol level. It's possible for a pilot to be in full compliance with the time restriction and not feel any of the typical signs of intoxication, yet still be in violation. The same can sometimes be said for our own .04.
No, that is not an excuse for Washington or anybody else; I have no problem with a requirement that pilots abide by a higher, more conservative standard than others. If we need to be extremely careful, so be it, that's part of our job. But it's something to think about, and passengers should realize that "flying drunk" isn't as clear-cut, or as wildly negligent as it might seem.
It is also true that more than one airline pilot has been pulled aside after a passenger, Transportation Security Administration guard or other airport worker suspected intoxication, only to be vindicated after testing. Typically in such cases, the papers and TV news hastily report the initial suspicion, but not the eventual results.
Having said all of that, it should go without saying that alcoholism exists in aviation just as it exists in every other profession. To their credit, air carriers and pilot unions like Air Line Pilots Association have been very successful with proactive programs that encourage pilots to seek treatment. This has helped keep the problem from being driven underground, where it's more likely to be a public safety issue.
Not long ago I flew with a colleague who participated in the highly successful HIMS program -- an intervention and treatment system put together several years ago by ALPA and the FAA. HIMS has treated more than 4,000 pilots and records a success rate of approximately 90 percent, with only 10-12 percent of participants suffering relapses.
I asked that colleague if, prior to going into HIMS, he'd ever knowingly flown under the influence. He said, "No."
And I'll leave it at that.
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Let's move on, because what I really want to talk about this week is nothing.
And by "nothing" I mean the deafening silence that marked the passing of Thursday, Nov. 12, 2009. That was the eighth anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 near Kennedy airport in New York City -- the last large-scale crash involving a major U.S. airline anywhere in the world.
We've seen a handful of disasters involving regional planes since then -- the worst of them being the 2006 crash of Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Ky., and last February's Colgan Air tragedy outside Buffalo. But aside from a young boy killed when a Southwest 737 overran a snowy runway in Chicago in 2005, our largest airlines, operating some 10,000 daily flights between them, have been fatality-free. Eight years is a record going back at least to the dawn of the jet age a half-century ago.
Here we are amid what might be called the safest stretch in modern commercial aviation history, but you wouldn't know it listening to the media. Passengers learn instead of frightening-sounding mishaps like that of the United pilot and the totally overblown Northwest incident two weeks ago. Heck, a plane blows a tire and CNN will have its cameras out for live coverage of the touchdown, but I have yet to come across a single mention of the significance of yesterday's anniversary.
No news is no news, I guess.
This eight-year run (and counting) is owed to several things. Better training is not the least of them, along with improved cockpit technology and other aircraft safety enhancements. We have engineered away many of what used to be the most common causes of disaster.
Yes, we've been lucky too. And while I hate to say it, that luck will run out at some point. When the inevitable crash does come, I only hope that somebody besides me takes the time to point out the unprecedented streak that preceded it.
American 587 was an Airbus A300-600 bound from JFK to Santo Domingo, in the Dominican Republic. The plane went down on Nov. 12, 2001, after the first officer, Sten Molin, overreacted to an encounter with wake turbulence spun from a Japan Airlines 747 that had departed moments earlier. Molin's overzealous use of the plane's rudder caused the entire vertical fin to separate. Airborne for less than three minutes, the jet plummeted into the Rockaway section of Queens. All 260 passengers and crew were killed, along with five people on the ground.
The rudder is the large movable surface hinged to the aft edge of the vertical stabilizer -- that is, the tail -- used to control the side-to-side "yawing" motion of an airplane. It is controlled either through the autoflight systems or, if need be, manually through a pair of foot pedals at either pilot's station. Here is a view of the first officer's station of an A300-600.
The voice and data recorders show that Molin commanded a full deflection of the rudder. Fully deflecting a plane's rudder is somewhat akin to yanking a car's steering wheel 90 degrees, so most larger planes, including this one, are equipped with segmented rudders and automatic limiters, reducing the available rudder travel as speed increases. The faster you're flying, the less available movement. Even had the limiting systems somehow failed, Flight 587 was, at the moment of its doom, sufficiently below the speed at which maximum deflection, intentional or otherwise, should have damaged the structure. Pilots call this "maneuvering speed." Barring any structural anomaly, it seems there was no reason for Flight 587's vertical stabilizer to fail.
Except for two things. First, Molin applied maximum pressure rapidly and in both directions, repeatedly swinging the rudder to the left and to the right. A plane's airworthiness certification standards are not based on such unusual, alternating applications of extreme force. Second, the A300's rudder controls are unusually sensitive, and resultant movements, even at low speeds, may be more severe than a pilot intends. In other words, Molin didn't realize the level of stress he was putting on the tail.
Clearly he overreacted, but he didn't have reason to think his inputs were going to rip the tail off, and he was not the only pilot surprised to learn that full deflections below maneuvering speed, however irregular, are risking structural catastrophe.
There also remains the chance that the A300's carbon-fiber tail may have played a role in the accident. Carbon-fiber components are stronger and lighter than traditional metals, but damage tends to occur internally in a way that is hard to detect. And Airbus tails are built to withstand lesser -- though still quite forceful -- amounts of stress compared to Boeing jets.
In 1994 the same plane involved in the accident made an unscheduled landing in the Caribbean after it struck unusually rough air at 35,000 feet. Could this have resulted in a structural weakness, more or less undetectable, needing only the right set of circumstances to manifest itself? The recovered portions of 587's tail were put through advanced CT scanning and analysis, to no significant findings.
Flight 587 was well-known among New York City's Dominican community. In 1996, merengue star Kinito Mendez paid a sadly foreboding tribute with his song "El Avion." "How joyful it could be to go on Flight 587," he sang, immortalizing the popular daily nonstop.
For more facts and findings pertaining to Flight 587, please revisit this 2004 column. And in closing, since everybody seems to be in such a negative and morbid state of mind these days, here's a list.
History's 10 Worst Aviation Disasters Involving Major U.S. Air Carriers
Not Listed
Also, for what I think are sensible reasons, I've omitted those aircraft involved in the 2001 terrorist attacks.
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Do you have questions for Salon's aviation expert? Send them to AskThePilot and look for answers in a future column.
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