Ask the pilot

Nov. 12 was the seventh anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587.

On Nov. 12, 2001, American 587, an Airbus A300 bound for Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic, went down shortly after departure from Kennedy airport in New York, killing everybody on board.

Seconds after takeoff, the Airbus had encountered a virulent burst of wake turbulence spun from a Japan Airlines 747 that had departed just ahead of it. The wake itself was nothing deadly, but the first officer of Flight 587, who was at the controls, overreacted, repeatedly moving the widebody jet’s rudder back and forth to maximum deflection. (The rudder is a large hinged surface attached to the tail, used to aid turns and help maintain lateral stability.)

Planes can take a surprising amount of punishment, but airworthiness standards are not based on such rapid applications of extreme force. In addition, the A300's rudder controls were designed to be unusually sensitive, meaning that pilot inputs, even at low speeds, could be more severe than intended. In other words, first officer Sten Molin didn't realize the level of stress he was putting on the tail. The ferocity of the back-and-forth movements caused the entire tail to fracture and fall off.

Quickly out of control, the plane plunged into the Belle Harbor neighborhood of Queens, a skinny section of Rockaway only a few blocks wide, with ocean on both sides. All 260 passengers and crew were killed, as were five people on the ground. It remains the second most deadly aviation accident ever on U.S. soil, behind only that of American Flight 191 at Chicago, in 1979.

What makes this seventh anniversary so important has nothing to do with the disaster itself, but with the remarkable streak that has followed it. Eighty-four months have passed since then. That’s 2,555 days and counting. In that span, our carriers have transported approximately 5 billion people and made more than 51 million takeoffs and landings. Yet the crash of Flight 587 was the last large-scale mishap involving a major U.S. carrier -- the longest such streak since the advent of the jetliner five decades ago.

Don’t get me wrong: There have indeed been fatal incidents on U.S. soil. The worst of them was the wrong-runway takeoff crash of Comair Flight 5191 in Lexington, Ky., in 2006. Forty-nine people perished in that one. Others include the 2003 crash of a US Airways Express turboprop in Charlotte, N.C., in which 21 people died, and the October 2005 crash of Corporate Airlines Flight 5966 near Kirksville, Mo., which killed 13. Less than a week before the Kirksville incident, a Pinnacle Airlines regional jet went down near Jefferson City, Mo., during a repositioning flight, killing two crewmen. In December 2006, the crash of a vintage seaplane killed 20 in Florida. And at Chicago’s Midway Airport in December 2005, a Southwest Airlines 737 overran a snowy runway and collided with a car. Although none of the 103 occupants of the aircraft were seriously hurt, a 6-year-old boy, a rider in the crushed car, was killed.

Duly noted. (Each of the above received due attention in this column.) But when it comes to the streak, I emphasize both "large-scale" and "major carrier." For those are the ingredients that constitute air disasters as we tend to think of them, and as history records them.

If you insist otherwise, well that’s fine too. Parse it however you like, but the past seven years have been astonishingly safe by any measure. (Not just domestically, but globally as well. The raw number of crashes is up, but the accident rate, the number of fatalities per miles flown, has steadily declined.)

With all the anti-airline vitriol out there, rarely if ever is this streak acknowledged. And neither, I am afraid, will it be acknowledged when the inevitable accident comes. It will pass unmentioned by newscasters and reporters, caught up in what will surely be an orgy of hype and fear.

In the meantime, perhaps you’re wondering what, exactly, is responsible for such a run of good fortune. Better training and technology, mostly. We have engineered away the most common causes of past accidents. But another thing has played a role, much as I hate to admit it: a long stretch of very good luck.

So you can argue that we're due, and I suppose we are. Can I say that, without triggering panic among those of you skittish about flying? Truly, I don't mean to suggest a catastrophe is imminent, or that you should forgo that vacation. Flying will always be safe, even on the very day of our next terrible tragedy.

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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.