“Aircraft do not crash of themselves.” Tough love? Too harsh? Nevil Shute did include designers and managers in his paradigm of human error. Quote from Slide Rule: The Autobiography of an Engineer, 1954.
Tag: crash
This Hits Close
A new episode of the National Geographic Air Crash Investigation TV show, titled Killer Attitude is hard for me to watch. It describes the crash of a perfectly good Northwest Airlink Jetstream 31 from MSP to Hibbing, MN, on 1 December 1993. I was flying out of MSP that night, same airplane type, same airline. I knew the captain, Marvin. I remember …
1 in 5 Biz Jet Pilots are Stupid?
Ripped from the aviation press headlines: One in five business jet pilots don’t do a full flight-control check before takeoff. Actually one in five is a bit of an exaggeration. The would be 20%. The more precise number is 17.66%. And that’s actually a per-flight percentage, so maybe the percentage of pilots is a little less. But WTF Batman! 17.66%? …
It’s No Accident — It’s a Crash
Interesting article yesterday in the New York Times, titled ‘It’s no accident: Advocates want to speak of car ‘crashes’ instead’. It’s about safety advocates changing language use from a car accident to a car crash. The AP recently revised their style guide. Dr Rosekind of the US National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is on board, saying, “When you use the …
Airmanship at a Distance
This is a sad story. But important to think about. For we are all our brother’s keeper. The news headline this weekend was ‘Flight school sued over death of student‘. Fox5 reported: A 21-year-old’s dream of becoming a pilot was cut short when during flight school his plane came crashing down, killing him, according to a lawsuit filed Friday in …
We Will Not Accept Any Kind of Lapses
It became public this month that Qatar Airways has fired all four pilots in the cockpit when their Boeing 777 tail broke a set of runway lights during takeoff from Miami International last September. They mistakenly left from an intersection thousands of feet short of the planned full runway length. It was a serious accident, no doubt. There was a visible …
You Don’t Want to Fly Like Donald Trump
Donald Trump might not want to take up flying. I say this knowing nothing about the gold-plated multi-millionaire’s eye-hand coordination or his ground school scores. What triggers this is a single word I’ve found while researching NTSB accident reports—all of them sad events where a pilot destroyed a perfectly good airplane. The word that links these accidents isn’t about bad weather, …
Harrison Ford Talks (Some) Flying
“When the engine quit, my training had prepared me to deal with it in a way. I really didn’t get scared. I just got busy. I knew what I was going to do, and I knew how to do it. The mantra aviators carry around in our heads is: Fly the airplane, first thing. Fly the airplane — even if …
“We’ll Get That Straight When We Get Airborne”
It’s better to look a little stupid now, than a lot stupid later. The US NTSB has released full investigative notes on last year’s crash of US Airways flight 1702, an A320 taking off from Philadelphia International airport. We can learn a lot from this crash of a fully airworthy Airbus. It actually got into the air, and then the captain …
Flight Controls Free and Correct?
You have a religion that says if I want to live, I’m going to run the checklist. Robert Hulse Last week the NTSB released lots of details on a fatal accident that will keep lawyers and human factors academics busy for years. It involves rich high-profile (newspaper publisher) passengers, an iconic Gulfstream IV jet, the failure of a basic airplane …