Today, Nov. 12, 2011, marks the 10th anniversary of the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 near Kennedy Airport. Flight 587, an Airbus A300 bound for Santo Domingo, went down in the Belle Harbor section of Queens moments after takeoff from JFK airport killing 265 people. The first officer had overreacted to wake turbulence produced by a Japan Airlines 747 ahead. This, combined with a peculiarity in the sensitivity of the plane's rudder control system, ripped off the tail and sent the plane plummeting into a residential neighborhood.

I was flying back from Europe that afternoon, and my plane was one of the first to land after JFK reopened to traffic. Smoke was still rising from the crash scene. Only a few miles beyond the gray plume I could see the vacant chunk of sky that had been occupied by the World Trade Center.

Continue Reading...

The most effective, and probably the most fun way of making my point, I think, would be through a demonstration in a flight simulator. Cost and practicality make that pretty much impossible, however, and so you're stuck with me writing about it.

And in doing so, either I'm a lousy wordsmith or my audience is a lot more stubborn than is healthy or reasonable. Because as hard as I try, I just can't put the skeptics out of their misery.

"Well, you are an airline pilot," emailed one reader, whose doubt was so palpable I could feel it oozing through the screen. "So I suppose we should take your word for it as to how planes are flown."

No, really. Take my word for it.

Most readers aren't as cynical (or insufferable), and are willing to trust me -- though not always fully.

Continue Reading...

Onward to more timely things ...

Later in the week I'll be getting to the Air France 447 findings. In particular, I'll be looking at the media's garbled interpretation of them. European investigators released their report on July 29, and I've received a blizzard of emails from a confused public. Here's some advice for the time being: Ignore pretty much everything you see or read about this. What they're telling you about the report isn't what the report actually says.

Continue Reading...

Better than Tony Robbins or a self-help book, Michael Bay's movies are an advanced class on dealing with life when it hands you lemons. Lemons that are actually grenades and you have two minutes to deactivate before the whole country goes ka-BLAM!

Welcome to Michael Bay's stress management guide. Now take a deep breath, and go to your calm place...

Lesson 1: Keep your mantras simple

Everybody's had those days when life seems determined to weigh you down. While you might be inclined to give up and throw a pity party complete with a "Teen Moms" marathon and a bucket of ice cream, it's good to remember those wise words of Yoda: "Do or do not. There is no try." Though if you don't like taking advice from a short green guy, how about Sean Connery, who paraphrases the famous "Star Wars" line to a whiny Nicholas Cage in "The Rock."

Continue Reading...

Flight 447 was the Airbus A330 that went down in the Atlantic on a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris two years ago, killing everybody on board. The data and voice recorders were recovered earlier this month, and late last week investigators released their preliminary findings. The key word being "preliminary." There is much we don't yet know.

This hasn't stopped the media, however, from taking the ball and running. Coverage of the findings has been thus far abysmal, bursting with caricature and gross oversimplification of what was a complicated incident. We're reading, among other nonsense, that the jetliner "literally fell from the sky."

Which it did not.

Much is being made, too, about the fact that Flight 447's captain was not on the flight deck when things began unwinding. "Captain not in the cockpit," sang one headline. An especially ridiculous NPR headline (later amended), read, "Report: Air France Pilot Resting as Plane Plunged." Another yelped incredulously at how the "copilot was at the controls."

Good grief, a copilot at the controls!

Continue Reading...

Brazilian authorities maintain that Lepore and Paladino had -- inadvertently or otherwise -- switched off their jet's transponder, in turn rendering an anti-collision alarm, called TCAS, inoperative as well. The two pilots deny this, though pilots of the commercial variant of the Legacy have noted that the location of transponder controls makes accidental shut-offs relatively easy. This could explain why neither crew received a TCAS warning as the planes closed in on each other.

Continue Reading...

What makes this such a tough and perhaps unsatisfying story, however, is that the "cause" of the accident won't be anything simple. People want an easy, all-in-one explanation: Turbulence crashed the plane. A sensor malfunction crashed the plane. The pilots "lost control." But it won't be any of those things. Or, more correctly, it's liable to be all of them, laced together in a cascade of events that was as complicated as it was unlikely. The technical aspects alone are something we could talk about all day. The air data sensors on an Airbus A330 are not the same as those on a Cessna.

Continue Reading...

Worldwide last year, approximately 2.4 billion people flew safely on 36.8 million flights. There was one accident for every 1.6 million flights. That's a 42 percent improvement compared to what it was 10 years ago.

Mind you, even "accident" doesn't mean a fatality. IATA is talking about so-called hull losses -- an incident in which the aircraft is substantially damaged and is not subsequently repaired. Globally, among what we'd consider major airlines in 2010, there was not a single fatality.

And, sure, this is only a single-year snapshot, but the trend over the past quarter-century has been one of consistent improvement. This is especially notable when you consider the exponential growth of air travel in places like India, China, Brazil and elsewhere in the developing world.

Continue Reading...

The single-engine Cirrus SR22 went down at about 12:10 p.m. Thursday into a horse corral behind a barn in Agua Dulce, county fire Inspector Matt Levesque said. The plane caught fire but was quickly doused, he said.

The plane had departed from Van Nuys Airport and was headed to Parker, Ariz., when it went down, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The crash site was about a mile west of the Agua Dulce Airpark.

Three horses in the corral were killed and a fourth was injured, Levesque said.

Neighbor Scott Strickland told KCAL-TV he was inside his house when he heard a big explosion, then ran to the crash site.

"The two horses are on fire and I just see smoke everywhere," Strickland said. "I saw somebody yell 'grab a gun.' Somebody grabbed a gun, came over and put the horse out of his misery 'cause he was just on fire, you couldn't do much after that," he said.

The skies were overcast at the time of the crash, Gregor said.

Continue Reading...

As the media would have it, miracles and heroes are a dime a dozen these days, which doesn't seem right. Indeed, not only have these terms become meaningless through repetition, but we've changed their very definitions to feed an endless societal feel-good fix.

Miracles first: A miracle isn't what's expected to happen, it's what's expected not to happen. As a pilot, when I watch an airplane coming in with a stuck landing gear, I fully expect a casualty-free, if perhaps photogenic, finish to the affair. Moreover I am not surprised when, even in more serious incidents, a large number of passengers -- all of them, perhaps -- emerge unscathed.

I love a happy ending as much as the next guy, but such outcomes are a testament not to the guiding hand (a random and unfair guiding hand as it might be at times) of an unseen deity, but to the progress of air safety -- to ever-improving crew training, engineering and survivability standards. People make it out because they're supposed to, and we have ourselves, not our gods, to thank for that.

Continue Reading...

Lexington County Sheriff's spokesman Maj. John Allard told reporters the Cessna 182 Skylane had left Columbia Metropolitan Airport for Macon, Ga., on Tuesday afternoon when the pilot had to land several hundred feet away from the runway.

The plane came down on Highway 302, but authorities had no immediate details about the emergency landing.

Airport spokeswoman Lynne Douglas says the pilot was treated for minor injuries at the scene. Another person on board was not injured.

State and federal authorities are investigating.

Continue Reading...

The plane circled for a while as the crew attempted to troubleshoot the malfunction. Failing to get the errant gear deployed, they opted for a landing on Kennedy's Runway 31L. The flight originally had been bound for White Plains, N.Y., but JFK's so-called "bay runway" is one of the longest in the country, and together with the airport's advanced emergency response team, this was the better and safer option.

The Canadian-built CRJ-900 touched down on its left-side gear, decelerated, and eventually the unsupported right wing made contact with the pavement. Moments later the jet came safely to a stop and was evacuated. There was no fire, no major damage, no injuries. 

The press and TV took it from there, spinning this minor event into a near-catastrophe that never was. The biggest mistakes and distortions were the usual and predictable ones: They got the airline wrong, they grossly overstated the danger, and once again we are led to think that jetliners are flying around with only one qualified person -- "the pilot" -- at the controls.

Continue Reading...

Fortunately, Saturday night's Delta Flight 4951 did not end in tragedy. In a happy resolution reminiscent of last year's "miracle on the Hudson," Capt. Jack Conroyd shepherded his crew and 60 passengers onto the runway with a few bumps and sparks but no injuries. And the story, compelling enough simply as a narrative, has gained even more attention in the ensuing days thanks to not one but two dramatic passenger videos.

Continue Reading...

The French-built ATR-42 from the state airline Conviasa slammed into a lot used by the state-run Sidor steel foundry, leaving its smashed fuselage among barrels and shipping containers.

The governor said 33 people survived and were being treated at hospitals.

The plane, a twin-engine turboprop, was carrying 47 passengers and four crew members, Rangel Gomez said.

He said that Conviasa Flight 2350 had taken off from Margarita Island and crashed shortly before reaching its destination, the airport of Puerto Ordaz.

It was unclear what caused the crash.

The state airline, Consorcio Venezolano de Industrias Aeronauticas y Servicios Aeros SA, began operations in 2004. It says it serves destinations in Venezuela, the Caribbean, Argentina, Iran and Syria.

Continue Reading...

The French-built ATR-42 from the state airline Conviasa crashed about 6 miles (10 kilometers) from the eastern city of Puerto Ordaz at about 10 a.m. (1430 GMT), Transportation Minister Francisco Garces told state television. He said the plane went down on the property of the state-run Sidor steel foundry.

Rescue workers were tending to injured victims, and at least 23 survivors were taken to hospitals, Bolivar state Gov. Francisco Rangel Gomez told the Venezuela-based television network Telesur.

Two of the injured died, while 21 others were being treated, hospital official Yanitza Rodriguez said.

Continue Reading...

One point that I wish I had emphasized more strongly is that of the design of modern commercial planes. The latest-generation aircraft are constructed with survivability in mind, and are much safer than they used to be, thanks to things like greater fire resistance and seats that are able to withstand 16 times the force of gravity. Cabin crew training and evacuation protocols also have evolved. Together these improvements have likely saved thousands of lives over the past several years.

On the day my "miracle" piece ran, Alan Levin, over at USA Today, published a somewhat similar story, emphasizing the engineering aspects that have made certain accidents less lethal.

His article included this quote, from FAA deputy safety chief John Hickey: "I cringe when I see these headlines that this was a miracle. We as engineers and scientists don't believe that this is a miracle. We are totally convinced that the work that we did in the 1980s has proven its value."

Continue Reading...

We witnessed an earlier miracle, or so we were told, back in May, when a 10-year-old boy was the sole survivor of an Afriqiyah Airways A330 that crashed in Tripoli, Libya.

In 2009, a young girl became the lone passenger to escape a Yemenia Airways crash in the Indian Ocean. Miraculous, yet again.

Shortly before that, of course, we had Captain Sully and his "Miracle on the Hudson."

Shall we keep going? Five years ago this month, an Air France A340 overran a runway in Toronto. Similar to Monday's Aires mishap, catastrophe was narrowly averted following a botched landing in stormy weather. The jet went careening off the end of the runway and caught fire -- but not before every one of its 309 occupants made it out alive. On CNN, host Aaron Brown gifted us with perhaps the gaudiest playing of the miracle card to date. In one broadcast, he repeated the noun at least three times in a groaning whisper of incredulity -- "a miracle; a miracle; a miracle" -- infusing the word with a spiritual oomph. Brown's next guest may as well have been a Catholic priest. The piece had everything except heavenly harp music and a choir of angels.

Continue Reading...

One person was killed as the plane skidded down the runway and broke into three large pieces while landing in stormy weather. One hundred and thirty passengers and crew escaped.

Predictably, that all but one person survived is being called a "miracle." We hear this word virtually every time there's a survivable accident. In fact most airplane crashes have survivors. Doest that mean most crashes are miraculous?

The 737 landed hard and broke apart, but did not catch fire. Luck, not some unseen guiding hand, was more likely at work.

Anyway, in this most recent case, it is far too early to know what happened, but a few things jump out at me.

First off, you can probably discount the various reports that lightning may have contributed to the accident.

Continue Reading...

The automatically generated advertisements on the Huffington Post's story on the deadly plane crash that reportedly claimed the life of former Senator Ted Stevens are all for radio controlled airplanes. Because, you know, if you're reading about this, you are probably an airplane enthusiast.

(I know no humans are directly responsible for this sort of thing, but at this point the internet advertisemement robots should be taught not to place airplane ads on plane crash stories.)

Continue Reading...

[Update 2: Reuters reports that Dittman has released a second statement saying that Stevens death "has not been confirmed."]

[Update 3: The Associated Press has confirmed that Stevens was killed. The status of O'Keefe is still unknown.]

Former U.S. Senator Ted Stevens and former NASA administrator Sean O'Keefe were both in a deadly plane crash near Dillingham, Alaska last night. Officials so far will not confirm if Stevens and/or O'Keefe are among the five dead (out of eight passengers).

Continue Reading...