By Andy Pasztor
Over the past 12 years, U.S. airlines have accomplished an
astonishing feat: carrying more than eight billion passengers
without a fatal crash.
Such numbers were once unimaginable, even among the most
optimistic safety experts. But now, pilots for domestic carriers
can expect to go through an entire career without experiencing a
single engine malfunction or failure. Official statistics show that
in recent years, the riskiest part of any airline trip in the U.S.
is when aircraft wheels are on the ground, on runways or
taxiways.
The achievements stem from a sweeping safety reassessment -- a
virtual revolution in thinking -- sparked by a small band of senior
federal regulators, top industry executives and pilots-union
leaders after a series of high-profile fatal crashes in the
mid-1990s. To combat common industry hazards, they teamed up to
launch voluntary incident reporting programs with carriers sharing
data and no punishment for airlines or aviators when mistakes were
uncovered.
The pioneers bucked deep-seated doubts from some insiders and
outright opposition from pilots' groups worried about disciplinary
blowback. By the end of the 1990s, the Federal Aviation
Administration, plane maker Boeing Co., labor representatives and
the largest U.S. airline trade association all endorsed the
unified, data-driven safety agenda. Together, they devised steps to
make it happen.
Their approach was simple in its fundamentals but wickedly
difficult to implement at the start, requiring unprecedented levels
of trust among the participants. During the early stages,
representatives of pilots and carriers grudgingly agreed to share
information with each other, as well as with the government,
regarding budding hazards and near-crashes. Tentative cooperation
was dependent on FAA pledges that good-faith mistakes and
procedural violations wouldn't result in enforcement actions.
The results have been remarkable. In 1996, before the safety
reboot began, U.S. carriers had a fatal accident rate of roughly
one crash for every two million departures. That year alone, more
than 350 people died in domestic airline accidents, including 230
in the infamous fuel-tank explosion on TWA Flight 800 that sucked
scores of passengers out of the fractured fuselage. Within 10
years, the fatal accident rate had been reduced by more than 80%,
beating a goal set by a White House commission.
Today's travelers are benefiting from another decade-plus of
improved safety for U.S. carriers, and the fatality rate has been
driven down to one for every 120 million departures. (The single
passenger death in the past dozen years was from an engine fan
blade coming apart during a 2018 flight.) Yet neither the scope nor
the significance of the underlying changes, expanded year after
year with little fanfare, is generally recognized by the flying
public.
"The magnitude of the improvement has far exceeded my
expectations," said Randy Babbitt, head of the FAA from 2009 to
2011, who previously championed many of the early advances as
president of North America's largest pilots union. The payoff
turned out to be so dramatic overall, he added, "It's almost like
buying a lottery ticket for 10 bucks and winning the jackpot."
Leaps in technology played a role, dramatically enhancing jet
engine reliability over many years. Electrical and other aircraft
systems became more durable and trouble-free due to upgraded
designs and components. Improvements in cockpit automation provided
stronger safeguards against crew errors, while increasingly
sophisticated ground-based simulators made aviator training more
rigorous and realistic.
But other factors produced the greatest progress. Overseas,
where new-generation aircraft proliferated but voluntary reporting
wasn't embraced, safety numbers have improved but to nowhere near
the degree among American carriers. The astonishing safety record
in the U.S. stems most of all from a sustained commitment to what
was at first a controversial idea. Together, government and
industry experts extracted safety lessons by analyzing huge volumes
of flight data and combing through tens of thousands of detailed
reports filed annually by pilots and, eventually, mechanics and
air-traffic controllers. Responses led to voluntary industry
improvements, rather than mandatory government regulations.
Recently, Boeing's 737 MAX jet debacle has partly overshadowed
the results of this safety revolution. Two MAX crashes less than
five months apart in 2018 and 2019 created a crisis for the
Chicago-based plane maker and rekindled public fears about
commercial aviation. But those accidents involved overseas carriers
and primarily foreign victims, leaving the safety record of
domestic airlines intact.
The safety shift in the U.S. began after a series of airborne
tragedies leading up to the peak in 1996. Accidents in 1994
involving widely used Boeing and McDonnell Douglas jets operated by
USAir, as well as two smaller turboprop aircraft, took 252 lives
altogether. Then in December 1995, an American Airlines jet slammed
into a mountain while approaching Cali, Colombia, killing 151
people. A Valujet aircraft caught fire and plummeted into the
Florida Everglades five months later, with 110 deaths. Two more
fatalities stemmed from an engine failure on a Delta Air Lines
MD-88 taking off from Pensacola, Fla.
Regulators and industry players recognized that changes were
essential. "We were seeing the same mistakes made over and over,
but nobody talked about them" until it was too late, according to
Mr. Babbitt, who was then president of North America's largest
pilots union.
High-level safety officials from Boeing, union chiefs at the Air
Line Pilots Association and leaders of the U.S. industry's main
trade group sketched out a startling trend. If accident rates
remained the same while global passenger traffic continued growing
at projected rates, on average there would be at least one major
jet crash a week by 2015, producing hundreds of fatalities
somewhere around the globe.
So the principals set about developing new tactics to counter
incipient dangers long before they turned into headline-grabbing
tragedies. Ultimately, mechanics and air-traffic controllers
embraced similar self-reporting programs. "It was an incredible
breakthrough," according to Ray Valeika, former head of engineering
and maintenance at Delta. "We actually patted people on the back"
for divulging mistakes. "But if management found it and you didn't
tell us," he added, "then you could lose your job."
Early successes revealed common pilot errors, such as veering
from assigned altitudes due to distractions or failing to properly
position wing flaps and other flight-control surfaces for takeoffs.
Some solutions were as simple as having the flight crew physically
point to cockpit computers -- which control altitude changes, for
instance -- while both pilots double-checked out loud that the
correct information had been entered.
Voluntary revisions to internal airline rules proved faster and
less obtrusive than changes imposed by regulators. The new
strategies coincided with recommendations of the blue-ribbon White
House commission, led by then-Vice President Al Gore. The
commission's 1997 report supported the concept of voluntary data
sharing, endorsing industry-government partnerships to better
coordinate information by "seeking to replace confrontation with
cooperation."
Airlines later developed more complex solutions to prevent
dangerous piloting errors in which planes approached runways too
fast, descended too rapidly or landed too far down runways to brake
safely. Strict self-imposed rules by carriers required crews to
abandon approaches under such conditions, leaving enough time to
safely climb away from the field.
The promise of the approach was best summed up by Nick Sabatini,
the FAA's top safety official from 2001 to 2009, who would reassure
audiences at safety conferences: "The data will set you free." He
urged greater reliance on information gleaned from routinely
downloading and examining incident details from flight-data
recorders. As the efforts gained momentum, airlines could compare
themselves with competitors or the entire industry.
Predictably, there were squabbles and threats to scale back or
end voluntary reporting. Delta, for example, temporarily pulled out
of voluntary arrangements, contending the FAA was reneging on
promises to forego enforcement cases. Some high-ranking FAA
officials who succeeded Mr. Sabatini angered pilots by complaining
that voluntary, non-punitive reporting agreements sometimes
amounted to a "get out of jail free" card for careless
aviators.
Such programs take time to build, "but one false step can really
bring them down in a day," Gabriel Acosta, head of global safety
for the leading international airline trade group, told a
conference last month.
Despite stumbles, collaborative arrangements survived and
thrived. Delta rejoined the partnership after a couple of years,
and participants got better at meeting the challenges of handling
an avalanche of data. Over time, the efforts turned into ever more
sophisticated data-collection and dissemination programs. The focus
continued to be the pinpointing of accident precursors -- such as
inappropriate pilot responses to engine problems, or loss of
control caused by unusual maneuvers.
Part of the industry's motivation was self-preservation. A lone
jumbo jet crash with mass fatalities, according to industry
estimates, can amount to a financial hit of nearly $1 billion,
including insurance payouts, additional legal liabilities, lost
business and reputational damage.
In 2006, the data-driven method publicly demonstrated its value
following the deadly crash of a Comair commuter plane trying to
take off from the wrong runway at Lexington, Ky. The FAA scrubbed
various databases to evaluate the extent of comparable hazards
elsewhere. After analyzing years of pilot reports of similar runway
confusion at other fields, the agency ordered improved signs,
better tarmac markings and extra pilot warnings to prevent crews
from inadvertently lining up for departure on an incorrect or
dangerously short strip.
As the number of accidents dwindled, however, each one sparked
more public scrutiny. In February 2009, distracted and inadequately
trained pilots of a Colgan Air turboprop failed to recover from a
stall approaching the Buffalo, N.Y., airport. The otherwise
perfectly functioning aircraft plunged to the ground, killing 50
people.
That was the last deadly U.S. accident until April 2018, when a
fan blade on a Southwest Airlines Co. jet ruptured at 32,000 feet.
The engine's front cover was blown off and shrapnel punctured the
fuselage; the plane landed safely but a passenger seated by a
window sustained fatal injuries. There have been no fatalities on
U.S. carriers since then.
Both accidents, nine years apart, prompted intense publicity,
congressional criticism and a flurry of regulatory action. But
throughout the period, a second industry-government safety push was
intensifying. Safety experts further expanded data sharing by
combining detailed written reports from pilots with radar
information from air-traffic control and other data. This entailed
analyzing information from tens of millions of flights and many
more radar tracks, spanning multiple years.
As this follow-up initiative launched, "there was a high degree
of skepticism that it would ever succeed," says Hassan Shahidi,
president and chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a
global, nonprofit advocacy group. He was previously at Mitre Corp.,
which oversees the storehouse of voluntary safety information
submitted by airlines and their employees. The common refrain from
both industry and labor, Mr. Shahidi recalled, was "we will give
you 24 months." By then, "we need to have a few examples of
actually identifying and mitigating risks."
Soon enough, the stepped-up data analysis prompted changes to
questionable flight paths that sometimes brought jetliners
dangerously close to hilltops on approaches to Oakland, Calif. The
result was new approach procedures and more accurate topographical
data loaded into the collision-warning systems on planes.
All told, the FAA has established a total of 10 separate,
voluntary reporting or data-sharing programs, covering everyone
from airport workers to FAA engineers to technicians who maintain
the agency's traffic-control equipment. Voluntary changes adopted
in the U.S. include, among other things, more extensive pilot
training to understand warning signs when flight-control computers
are set improperly or when airplanes are approaching an incorrect
runway, how to adjust engine settings to prevent internal ice
buildup and using cockpit radars more effectively to avoid
turbulence in clear weather. Over the years, airlines also have
refined data systems to help spot troublesome engine reliability
trends earlier and alleviate hazards posed by pilot fatigue.
From Europe to Asia to Latin America, Mr. Shahidi said
"everybody is now trying to copy the U.S."
Recently, however, some red flags have appeared. Airlines and
independent safety experts have warned that the manual flying
skills of many pilots are eroding, primarily because most crews
rely on autopilots for all but a few minutes of each trip. Experts
believe that overreliance on autopilots can reduce the hand-eye
coordination of pilots and their confidence in the unlikely event
that automated systems go haywire.
For all its usefulness, data sharing remains vulnerable to
abuse. Last year, the Transportation Department's inspector general
sharply criticized Southwest Airlines management for impeding FAA
oversight. Management and agency lapses resulted in Southwest
carrying roughly 17 million passengers on more than 150 jets with
suspect maintenance records, the auditors found. The same report
disclosed repeated hazardous landing attempts by a Southwest jet
amid gale-force winds that ended with both wingtips striking a
Connecticut runway in 2019. FAA investigators complained about the
airline's level of cooperation. A Southwest spokeswoman said the
carrier maintains a culture of compliance and transparency with the
FAA, including mechanisms to report concerns without fear of
repercussions, "recognizing the safety of our operation as the most
important thing we do."
Other carriers have sought to keep FAA officials from fully
participating in data exchanges or probes of potentially dangerous
operational slip-ups. Outside safety experts contend that excluding
regulators violates the spirit of voluntary reporting and could
result in creeping industry complacency.
Despite the sterling record of U.S. airlines, FAA chief Steve
Dickson has stressed the need to expand voluntary reporting to
include the design and manufacture of jetliners in order to shore
up public confidence in the wake of the 737 MAX tragedies. "I don't
think that you ever stop trying to earn the trust of the public,"
he told reporters in September after personally test-flying the
revamped MAX.
"No matter what we have done in the past, or what we are doing
now," he said "that's never going to be good enough."
Mr. Pasztor, who is writing a book about the history of air
safety, recently retired from The Wall Street Journal, where he
covered aviation since the mid-1990s.
(END) Dow Jones Newswires
April 16, 2021 11:20 ET (15:20 GMT)
Copyright (c) 2021 Dow Jones & Company, Inc.
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