Human error

Quote: Nareed

That was the cause of the disaster at Tenerife in the 70s.

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I highly recommend the mother of all airline books: Fate is the Hunter, by Ernest K Gann. The final chapter is riveting.

Thanks! I was going to ask for recommendations. Speaking of which, do you have any other recommendations?

Through a complete coincidence I found this article today, while looking for something else:

The Devil at 37,000 feet


Two books in which planes crashed but many passengers and crew survived:

Crash! What I find fascinating is that this is a really great book, and Rob and Sarah Elder never published anything else, ever, singly or as a team. But that is just interesting, this is a great book about Eastern Airline's Flight 401 crash into the Florida Everglades on the night of December 29, 1972. I've read it probably 3 times, each time I am impressed, and I've lent it out countless times, my copy has been read so often the spine is broken.

Nine Minutes Twenty Seconds, by Gary Pomerantz. The title refers to the time between when the engine blew and the plane hit the ground. Or as one reviewer put it, "...the amount of time the 29 passengers and crew aboard flight 529 from Atlanta to Mississippi had to say their prayers, watch their lives flash before their eyes and prepare themselves for the inevitable crash after the airplane's left engine failed." This is also a great book, not just about crashing but about humans facing disaster and ordinary human resiliency.

(Edited to add especially for you, Nareed, that Gary Pomerantz has also written an AWESOME book about the Steelers: Their Life's Work: The Brotherhood of the 1970s Pittsburgh Steelers, Then and Now Having lived in Pittsburgh for much of my life, and during all of the 1970s, it has my highest recommendation.)

I was re-reading some Tony Hillerman books : ) and in the most current one that I perused, the story line is about the crash over the Grand Canyon that helped start the FAA. http://twaseniorsclub.org/memories/contrails/tragedygrandcanyonTW-UA.html

Hillerman series about mostly two Navajo cops [Chee and Leaphorn] on the big res are great entertainment, this one is "Skeleton Man"

Thanks!!

Quote: Mosca

Through a complete coincidence I found this article today, while looking for something else:

You should have said "by accident" ;)

I'll look them up.

The problem is foreign aviation wherein cockpit resource management is alien to all that they believe in.
I've used the example before about the Turkish pilot who wanted all his crew to walk directly behind him like ducklings. How do you get cooperation out of a society grounded in obedience?

Pilots move from being fighter jet jockeys to commercial airliners but attitudes don't always change.

Indonesian traffic is growing but the airports are often dirt runways with people and animals crossing them.

India has endemic fraud. Pilots with six months experience are tripped up by inability to fasten a seat belt or by attempting to land an airliner on the nose wheel.

Quote: Mosca

Through a complete coincidence I found this article today, while looking for something else:

The Devil at 37,000 feet

That was an awful read.

Oh, I appreciate it, but it's hard to read how a series of stupid mistakes result in the deaths of so many people.

There's a novel called "The Intruders" by Stephen Coonts. It's about the adventures and misadventures of Jake Grafton, an A-6 Intruder pilot onboard a carrier in the Pacific, just after the Vietnam War (or after the US got out of it at any rate). It's a sequel to Coonts' "Flight of the Intruder," which is about the war and also features Grafton in the lead.

Anyway, in "Intruders," as part of the background plot, there are many incidents during the cruise, many of them involving Grafton. There's a near miss with a flight of F-4 Phantoms (actually, technically Phantom IIs), a FUBARED launch from the carrier, a FIRE warning on both A-6 engines right after takeoff, and more.

I think there's a note in the book saying all these incidents are fictionalized accounts of actual, real incidents.

Quote: Mosca

Through a complete coincidence I found this article today, while looking for something else:

Colliding With Death at 37,000 Feet, and Living written by a passenger on the Legacy and journalist.



Once again in keeping with earlier themes, it is a combination of failure. While setting the flight plan is the primary failure the transponder was inadvertently switched off on the Legacy, thereby disabling the collision avoidance system on both aircraft.

while I quite agree with the "chain of events" theory, I think that alarm systems are inadequate for monitoring purposes.

the terrain warning klaxon and "pull up" is loud, but the inadvertent turning off of 'altitude hold' is a mild middle c chime about equal in attention getting to the coffee is cold and the stewardess is ugly signals.

turning a transponder off is a serious matter.

fukishima and three mile island would never have taken place if the engineers had adopted the values of an eight year old boy who mounts even a stationery bicycle with an audible 'varoom, varoom'. a sterile control room has lights indicating commands sent to a pump and the pump's response. If the eight year old boy doctrine is followed, the controller would KNOW the results from hearing that mighty pump start up and feeling the vibration.... but in a sterile remote control room its nothing but lights and alarms.

One plane was vectored on approach onto a heading that was the same as the active runway from which planes were taking off. Now most controllers do not vector arriving traffic and departing traffic to head directly for each other and the pilot and copilot debated amongst themselves what to do. they did NOT include in that debate the errant controller but fortunately the controller soon corrected his error with a "223" instead of "123". Pilots need to know what errors are significant and clarify a read back. If the data link was electronic rather than verbal, the computer could check for it first.

One european controller got a sudden visit from a radar and telephone maintenance crew.... and all he had to do was tell them "No, before you start disabling systems here, you go look in some of those outer rooms for the guy who is on an hour long break and bring him in here, then start your tinkering".

we may have to return to the victorian era of a one legged stool. If the hours and hours of boredom lull you into a sleepy complacency, you fall off the stool and wake up.

Quote: Nareed

Quote: Mosca

Through a complete coincidence I found this article today, while looking for something else:

The Devil at 37,000 feet

That was an awful read.

Oh, I appreciate it, but it's hard to read how a series of stupid mistakes result in the deaths of so many people.

I agree, I kept wanting to step into the story and turn the transponder on, toggle the microphone, anything. Riveting nonetheless.

Quote: Mosca

I agree, I kept wanting to step into the story and turn the transponder on, toggle the microphone, anything. Riveting nonetheless.

Likewise.

I also keep thinking what needs to change. If you make all alarms loud and obnoxious, they become the child who cried "wolf." You simply stop paying attention to them. You save those for the important things that are life-or-death, like "STALL" or "TERRAIN." But something crucial like the transponder shouldn't be able to just go out and then go unnoticed.

If an obnoxious alarm is too much, maybe a flashing light and a beep?

Lastly, the TCAS needs a backup or failsafe sub-system which will at least detect planes without transponders.

Speaking of the Gol collision, should air accidents be criminalized?

In one large sense, they shouldn't simply because there is no criminal intent at all in any of them. Computing the wrong fuel, failing to see warnings, making the wrong navigational move, installing the wrong part, etc. are at worst negligence.

ON the other hand, chronic slipshod repairs in old equipment does border on criminal negligence. This goes beyond cutting corners now and then, to pretty much gambling with the lives of the crew and passengers. But, sensationalizing media to the contrary, these are not common practices.

There are incidents where a pilot deliberately brings or tries to bring down a plane, like the Austrian airliner recently, and one Fed-Ex flight some years ago. But these are criminal cases regardless of the outcome, and if the perpetrator succeeds there's no one to charge with anything anyway.

Overall, absent malice or really extreme negligence which can be considered criminal (like overworking the pilots, drunk or otherwise incapacitated pilots, chronic bad maintenance, chronic failure to heed warnings), no, accidents should not be a criminal matter.