by It was only when I tried to make small talk with my visibly uneasy seatmate on a flight from Raleigh-Durham to New York that I realized it was me causing that horrified look on his face, instead of the slight turbulence we had been experiencing since takeoff. I thought a friendly chat might help him distract himself from the anxiety of running away. But then I realized that his eyes, wide with fear, were fixed on my computer screen, which displayed an investigation report on a plane crash that he had been reading.
I slammed the laptop shut, stammered an apology, and mumbled about how these detailed crash reports were, in fact, very comforting, and I’d simply forgotten where I was, and I hadn’t meant to sow worry…
Well, forget it.
But it is true. An investigative report from the National Transportation Safety Board reads like an instruction book for achieving miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew faith in what humanity can achieve. Yeah We apply our intellectual capacity and our resources to it.
But they also remind us that, like freedom, these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual enemies: greed, negligence, failure to adapt, complacency, revolving agency doors. regulators, etc.
Someday I will have to read two more reports (one from the Japan Transportation Safety Board) about two incidents in just one week, but both events are already full of lessons.
On January 2, a Japanese Coast Guard plane and an arriving Japan Airlines Airbus A350 collided. The Airbus became a ball of fire as it sped down the runway before coming to a stop. about half a mile away. Remarkably, all 379 people aboard the Airbus emerged safely before the entire plane was engulfed in flames and reduced to a smoldering wreckage. (Five of the six people on the Coast Guard plane died.)
And then on Friday, a plug in one of the unused emergency exit doors on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 plane exploded a few minutes after takeoff, causing the plane to undergo rapid depressurization. Passengers told media that the teenager sitting near the hole had his shirt torn off by the force of the wind while his mother clung to him. The plane turned around and landed safely in Portland, Oregon, and no serious injuries were reported.
Both incidents could have been much worse. And that all the passengers on both planes left is indeed a miracle, but not the kind most people think of. They are miracles of regulation, training, specialization, effort and constant improvement of infrastructure, as well as the professionalism and heroism of the crew.
But these brave, professional men and women stood on the shoulders of giants: competent bureaucrats; forensic investigators sent to crash sites; large folders (today digital) with hundreds and hundreds of pages of meticulously compiled details of every aspect of accidents and near misses; constant training and retraining not only of the pilots but also of the cabin, ground, traffic control and maintenance personnel; and a determined ethos that if something goes wrong, the reason will be identified and fixed.
Consider the evacuation of Japan Airlines.
Commercial airliners carry a lot of fuel and quick evacuations are essential to avoid trapping everyone in a fireball if something goes wrong. Pretty little is left to chance.
Some of this is visible to us passengers and even a little annoying. But it’s actually a federal law that all tray tables must be placed upright and seats upright during takeoff and landing. While accidents are indeed rare, takeoffs and landings are statistically the most dangerous stages of flight, so you don’t want anything to stop passengers from moving quickly. That is why large objects must also be put away: to clear the possible evacuation path.
As footage of passengers in Japan evacuating without reaching for their luggage shows, it would be nice if more airlines followed Japan Airlines’ lead and used their safety videos to explain the logic behind the rules, as their own envelope does. what should be left luggage. back in case of emergency.
Even so, the evacuation lasted longer than the 90 seconds that Airbus had to demonstrate as possible to obtain certification. And that day the obstacles were many. Only three of the eight emergency exits were usable and the plane was filling with smoke. The plane had tilted forward because the front landing gear had collapsed, impeding the passengers’ progress. The intercoms were not working and the crew was forced to use megaphones to direct passengers. And yet, the crew evacuated all passengers.
Passengers also had other allies: today, airplanes are designed to slow the spread of fires; many of those improvements, including seats that can withstand impacts and fire-retardant designs and materials, are painful. learned lessons of the accidents of the 1980s and 1990s. In fact, the plane withstood the worst effects of the flames for well over 90 seconds, until everyone was outside.
The Boeing 737 Max line contains other lessons. After two eerily similar consecutive crashes in 2018 and 2019, which killed 346 people in total, the planes were grounded. At first, some were quick to blame inexperienced pilots or software gone wrong. But the world soon learned that the real problem had been corporate greed that had taken too many shortcuts while regulators had failed to resist the attack.
At first glance, there is little reason to assume that the departure gate plug failure on the Alaska Airlines flight is related to the previous accidents. The plane is very new, has been in service for about eight weeks, and the incident occurred at a relatively low altitude, suggesting a manufacturing and assembly process. problem or inadequate supervision – in which case, corporate culture could once again come under scrutiny. However, to know the real facts, we will wait for the safety board’s report.
But what happened after the door fell is textbook: The pilot declared an emergency, air traffic control quickly arranged a clear runway, the plane turned around and landed in just about 15 minutes.
We’ve since learned that all of this may not have come as a total surprise. The NTSB told reporters that a pressurization warning light had come on on this plane. in three times before, at least once in flight, during its short time in service. Maintenance crews had checked and cleared the light, but Alaska Airlines fortunately restricted the plane to flying over land so it could quickly return to an airport if it came on again. Phew. If the gate had exploded at high altitude and over the ocean, we may not have had the same happy ending.
And not everything was easy on the way back to the airport. The cockpit door opened due to depressurization, jammed against the bathroom door, and one pilot lost his headset.
Still, you’d hardly know all that from listening to the communication between pilots and ground: just calm, competent professionalism on the way back to the gate.
The plane’s quick return to the airport, although much less dramatic, has similarities to the “Miracle on the Hudson” that took place 15 years ago next Monday, when the now-famous Captain Sully landed a plane in the Hudson River after losing his engines due to a bird strike. , saving everyone on board. It’s what pilots train for and it shows.
Listening to the calm and collected communication between Captain Chesley Sullenberger and the control tower during the four short minutes between the loss of all engine power and the ditching in the Hudson, one might not realize the magnitude of what was about to happen: that he was about to attempt to land a cylindrical object weighing approximately 150,000 pounds on a narrow waterway next to one of the largest cities in the world.
But pilots train for these types of emergencies.
“One way to look at this might be that, for 42 years, I’ve been making regular small deposits into this bank of experience: education and training,” Sullenberger told Katie Couric shortly after the incident. “And on January 15, the balance was enough to be able to make a very large withdrawal.”
Even if the pilot is at fault, NTSB investigations are conducted as “no-fault” processes: the goal is to identify the problem so errors are less likely in the future. This encourages people to be forthright, in stark contrast to accountability-driven cultures that encourage people to hide their mistakes and authorities to look for scapegoats rather than solutions.
As the facts emerge, there will be more questions about what went wrong: United Airlines and Alaska Airlines found loose bolts on grounded Boeing planes. That coast guard plane in Japan was in the wrong place. But progress is made by recognizing these failures and working to make them even less likely in the future.
Those NTSB investigative reports I appreciate reading represent precisely that kind of buildup. Year after year, investigation after investigation, incident after incident, commercial flights have become remarkably safe despite the complexity of the operation with so many moving parts on a global scale: humans, software, weather and metal objects flying through the sky.
Most of the time it works so well that we don’t notice it, which is perhaps the true miracle of a well-functioning infrastructure: it becomes invisible. Sometimes it’s good to make visible the many invisible people who keep us safe.
