Ask the pilot

A crash in Thailand raises questions about wind shear, aging planes and the safety of budget airlines.

By Patrick Smith

Read more: Technology & Business, Business, Ask the Pilot

Reuters/Stringer

Rescue workers stand at the site of a plane that crashed at Phuket airport in Thailand Sept. 16, 2007, killing 89 people.

Sept. 21, 2007 | You'd have to call it ironic that two days after I published a column on ridiculous airline names, a One-Two-Go Airlines jetliner crashed on a Thai resort island. It would almost be funny, if not for the 89 people who lost their lives.

One What Who? Yeah, I'd never heard of it either. Turns out the company is a division of something called Orient Thai Airways, itself an oddly named entity. Orient Thai, a charter outfit, has been around since 1992. It operates a fleet of 10 Boeing 747s. One-Two-Go, its low-fares offshoot, started flying about four years ago.

Flight 262 crashed on Phuket, a popular tourist destination known for its idyllic beaches and high-end hotels. (The island was badly hit by the 2004 tsunami, and some of you might remember it as the setting for Spalding Gray's "Swimming to Cambodia.") The aircraft, a twin-engined McDonnell Douglas MD-82, was attempting to land during stormy weather after a short flight from Bangkok. Based on eyewitness accounts, including those of survivors, the plane was at or near the point of touchdown when it suddenly tried to climb again. Apparently out of control, it barreled off the side of the runway, plowed through a retaining wall, broke apart and caught fire. Eighty-nine of the 130 passengers and crew perished, including both pilots.

In this space a few weeks ago I described how the maneuver of converting a landing back into a climb is, in the vast majority of cases, perfectly routine. The transition can be abrupt and rough on the senses, but it's perfectly natural for an airplane. I have personally been at the controls for dozens of such maneuvers over the years, in airplanes large and small; they occur for any number of reasons, few of them imminently hazardous. In some instances the airplane will actually make contact with the runway before again lifting off. Even a full-on, unintentional bounce, though it doesn't happen often, is recoverable. Depending on the situation, the crew can opt to save the landing and bring the plane back down, or apply power and climb away. So long as parameters of airspeed and attitude (i.e., alignment and position) are maintained, safety is more or less assured.

But what happened at Phuket was not your typical go-around or bumpy touchdown. The plane encountered highly unstable conditions from which escape was either difficult or impossible. How it got there is the question.

Officials are citing wind shear as a possible reason. "Wind shear" is a frequently heard buzzword in the aftermath of air disasters, but not everybody understands what it means. Allow me to borrow from a previous column:

Wind shear is a sudden change in the velocity and/or direction of the wind. Garden-variety shears are very common and rarely harmful, but a particularly virulent form, called a microburst, can be dangerous. Microbursts are localized, downward-flowing columns of air, typically encountered at low altitudes -- even while still on the runway -- in and around powerful storms. As the air mass descends, it disperses outward in different directions. Planes are not "slammed to the ground," as you'll sometimes read, but can suffer dangerous loss of airspeed and lift if a headwind suddenly shears to a tailwind during takeoff or landing. During the 1970s and 1980s, microbursts were accountable for a trio of tragedies in the United States that helped usher in a new generation of wind-shear detection technology.

The worst wind shears are now relatively easy to avoid, but the technology is not foolproof and the judgment of pilots remains important. Reportedly, the pilots of One-Two-Go had been issued a wind-shear advisory by the Phuket control tower. Additionally, the MD-82 is equipped with an onboard wind-shear warning system. The plane crashed anyway. Why? Apparently the airport's on-site detectors were inoperative, leaving the controllers to provide a less precise caution based on simple wind readings. Did the crew knowingly continue into dangerous conditions, or had they made a sound decision, based on the available information, only to be victimized by a rogue downburst they may not have reasonably expected? Or was it something else entirely? Nobody knows for sure.

As the investigation goes on, the media will continue its condensing of the facts, not wasting valuable space with nuance or useful explanations. We will be told that wind shear "caused" the crash, or that stormy weather was likely "a factor." Indeed it likely was, but lousy weather alone doesn't bring down planes. Lousy judgment during lousy weather is the more precise culprit.

While we're at it, let's hit the newspapers and clarify a few other distortions.

Next page: Trustworthy airlines come in all shapes and sizes. Some are new, others have been flying for decades