Cockpit Confidential (34 page)

Even a rube has a fighting chance with the former. The touchdown will be rough at best, but with a little luck you won't become a cartwheeling fireball. In 2007, the Discovery Channel show
Mythbusters
set things up in a NASA simulator stripped down to represent a “generic commercial airliner.” Hosts Adam Savage and Jamie Hyneman took the controls, while a seasoned pilot, stationed in an imaginary control tower, carefully instructed them via radio. On the first try, they crashed. The second time, they made it.

But all they really did was land a make-believe airplane from a starting point already close to the runway. The scenario most people envision is the one where, droning along at cruise altitude, the crew suddenly falls ill, and only a brave passenger can save the day. He'll strap himself in, and with the smooth coaching of an unseen voice over the radio, try to bring her down. For somebody without any knowledge or training, the chance of success in this scenario is zero. This person would have to be talked from 35,000 feet all the way to the point where an automatic approach could commence, complete with any number of turns, descents, decelerations, and configuration changes (appropriately setting the flaps, slats, and landing gear). I reckon that would be about as easy as dictating organ-transplant surgery over the telephone to somebody who has never held a scalpel. It'd be tough even for a private pilot or the most obsessive desktop sim hobbyist. Our would-be hero would have a hard enough time finding the microphone switch and correctly configuring the radio panel, let alone the maneuvering, programming, navigating, and configuring it would take to land safely.

A few of you might remember the film
Airport '75
. A 747 is struck near the flight deck in midair by a small propeller plane, and all three pilots are taken out. I almost hate to say it, but dangling Charlton Heston from a helicopter and dropping him through the hole in the fuselage wasn't as far-fetched a solution as it might sound. It was about the only way that jumbo jet was getting back to earth in fewer than a billion pieces. The scene where Karen Black, playing a flight attendant, coaxes the crippled jumbo over a mountain range was, if less than technically accurate, useful in demonstrating the difficulty any civilian would have of pulling off even the simplest maneuver.

A few years ago, here in New England, after the lone pilot of a Cape Air commuter plane became ill, a passenger took over and performed a safe landing. The TV news had a field day with that one, though the passenger was a licensed private pilot and the aircraft was only a ten-seat Cessna. Otherwise, there has never been a case where a passenger needed to be drafted for cockpit duty. I guess that means either it never will happen, or it is destined to happen soon, depending how cynical you are about statistics.

All right, but what of the hijacker pilots on September 11, 2001? Doesn't their success at steering Boeing 757 and 767 jets into their targets contradict what I've just said and demonstrate that not only can a nonpilot fly, but fly well?

No, not really. The hijacker pilots, including Mohammad Atta, were licensed private pilots, and he and at least one other member of the cabal had purchased several hours of jet simulator training. Additionally they had obtained manuals and instructional videos for the 757 and 767 (the planes used in the attacks), openly available from aviation supply shops. In any case, they neither needed nor demonstrated any in-depth technical knowledge or skill. The intent was nothing more than to steer an already airborne jetliner, in perfect weather, into the side of a building. And their flying, along the way, based on radar tracks and telephone calls from passengers, was violent and unstable.

Hijacker pilot Hani Hanjour, at the controls of American flight 77, was a notoriously untalented flyer who never piloted anything larger than a four-seater. Yet, according to some, he is said to have pulled off a remarkable series of aerobatic maneuvers before slamming into the Pentagon. But when you really look at it, his flying was exceptional only in its recklessness. If anything, his erratic loops and spirals above the nation's capital revealed him to be exactly the shitty pilot he by all accounts was. To hit the building squarely he needed a bit of luck, and he got it. Striking a stationary object, even a large one with five beckoning sides, at high speed and at a steep descent angle, is very difficult. To make the job easier, he came in obliquely, tearing down light poles as he roared across the Pentagon's lawn. If he'd flown the same profile ten times, seven of them he'd probably have tumbled short of the target or overflown it entirely.

Ignoring for a moment the issues of cost and weight and the likelihood of killing yourself as you leap from a plane with no prior experience, consider the nature of aviation disasters. They tend to occur with little warning, and usually during takeoff or landing, meaning that chutes would seldom be helpful. Normal skydiving takes place under tightly controlled parameters. To even entertain the idea of jumpers making it safely to the ground from a passenger jet, the plane would need to be in very stable flight and at a low-enough speed and altitude—yet high enough for a chute to properly deploy. How many times, in the history of civil aviation, has a crew known for certain that a serious crash was imminent, yet still had enough time and control to prepare for a coordinated mass evacuation? One that comes to mind, maybe, is the 1985 Japan Air Lines catastrophe (
see worst disasters
). After a bulkhead rupture and rudder failure, the Boeing 747 floundered about for several minutes before going down near Mt. Fuji. Had chutes been aboard, we can speculate that
some
of the passengers
may
have survived.

A few single-engine private planes have built-in parachutes for use in certain emergencies, such as an engine failure over rough terrain. I know what you're thinking: imagine that crippled JAL 747 floating to the ground under a giant chute. But that type of accident was highly atypical, and the size and weight of jetliners would make any commercial application extraordinarily difficult.

Airplanes do, on occasion, breach the confines of one another's space. Usually this is a brief, tangential transgression. Almost always the mistake is caught, and safeguards are in place to minimize any hazard. Pilots are required to read back all assigned headings and altitudes, for example.

As a backup, airliners today carry onboard anticollision technology. Linked into the cockpit transponder, Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS, pronounced
Tea-Cass
), gives pilots a graphic, on-screen representation of nearby aircraft. If certain thresholds of distance and altitudes are crossed, TCAS will issue progressively ominous oral and visual commands. If two aircraft continue flying toward each other, their units work together, vocalizing a loudly imperative “CLIMB!” instruction to one and “DESCEND!” to the other.

In 1978, a Pacific Southwest Airlines 727 collided with a Cessna while preparing to land at San Diego. In 1986, an Aeromexico DC-9 plunged into a Los Angeles suburb after hitting a Piper that had strayed, sans permission, into restricted airspace. Ten years later, a Saudi Arabian 747 was struck by a Kazakh cargo jet over India. Tragedies all, but these accidents occurred when TCAS was not yet standard equipment and when ATC protocols were not as sharp as they are today. Through technology and training, the threat of midair collisions has been greatly reduced.

But, for everything to work as it should requires the cooperation of both human and technological elements, bringing to mind the 2002 collision between a DHL freighter and a Bashkirian Airlines Tu-154 over the border between Switzerland and Germany. An ATC error had put the two planes on a conflicting course. A Swiss controller eventually noticed the conflict and issued a command for the Bashkirian crew to descend. At the same time, both airliners' TCAS systems correctly interpreted the hazard, issuing their own instructions in the final seconds. TCAS told DHL to descend, and Bashkirian to climb. DHL did as instructed and began to lose altitude. The Bashkirian crew, however, disregarded the TCAS order to climb and chose instead to descend, in compliance with the controller's original request. This was a mistake. Standard procedure is that TCAS, being the last word on an impending collision, override previous ATC instructions. Had the TCAS alarm been obeyed, the jets would have been sent on safely divergent vectors. Instead, they descended directly into one another, killing 71 people.

An even worse catastrophe happened over the Amazon in 2006. A Boeing 737 collided with an Embraer executive jet. The latter managed a safe emergency landing, but the Boeing plunged into the forest, killing everybody on the plane. The investigation revealed a chain of procedural mistakes made by Brazilian controllers, compounded by evidence that the executive jet's TCAS system may have been switched off inadvertently.

But what of dangers here in the United States, home to the world's most crowded airspace? Isn't our air traffic control system outmoded and much of its equipment obsolete? Aren't improvements badly needed? To some extent, yes, and with more planes in the air than ever before, the terminal area—airspace in and around airports, where collisions are most likely to occur—has never been busier. At the same time, a need for ATC improvements does not imply that the system is rickety and rife with collision hazards. Measured year to year, the rate of airspace incursions in the United States occasionally spikes. While this can sound scary, only the rarest incursion is the sort of close call that should make people nervous. Overall our record is an excellent one, and a testament to the reliability of our ATC system, clunky and maligned as it is.

Chances are you've come across one or more recent stories about the rise in so-called runway incursions at airports across America. That's a euphemism for when a plane or other vehicle erroneously enters or crosses a runway without permission from air traffic control, setting up a collision hazard. The vast majority of incursions are minor transgressions, but the numbers are going up and a handful of incidents have resulted in genuine near misses.

The problem isn't the volume of planes per se, but the congested environments in which many of them operate. La Guardia, Boston, and JFK are among airports that were laid out decades ago for a fraction of today's capacity. Their crisscrossing runways and lacework taxiways are inherently more hazardous than the parallel and staggered layouts seen at newer airports. That does not imply that these locations are unsafe, but they present challenges both for crews and air traffic controllers, particularly during spells of low visibility.

The FAA has been working fast and furious on new programs and technologies to reduce the number of mistakes and/or mitigate the consequences when they occur. These include an upgrade of tarmac markings and mandatory anti-incursion training programs for pilots and controllers. Under testing are improved runway and taxiway lighting systems and an emerging, satellite-based technology known as Cockpit Display of Traffic Information (CDTI) that will provide pilots with a detailed view of surrounding traffic both aloft and during ground operations. And a growing number of airports are outfitted with sophisticated radar that tracks not only planes in the air, but those on runways and taxiways.

Those are all good ideas, but the FAA has a habit of over-engineering complicated fixes to simple problems. There will be no magic technological bullet. At heart this is a human factors issue. The FAA's most valuable contribution to the problem might be something they've already done: stirred up awareness. When it comes right down to it, the best way to prevent collisions is for pilots and controllers to always be conscious of their possibility.

Meanwhile, not to close on a morbid note, but I'll remind you that aviation's worst-ever catastrophe, at Tenerife in 1977, involved two 747s that never left the ground (
see Tenerife story
).

Among my vivid memories of that morning is that of the enormous black cockroach I saw crawling across the platform of the Government Center subway station at 7:00 a.m. while waiting for the train that would take me to Logan Airport. Once on the train, I would chat briefly with a United Airlines flight attendant, whose name I never got and, who knows, may have been headed for flight 175. I was on my way to Florida, where I'd be picking up a work assignment later that day. My airplane took off only seconds after American's flight 11. I had watched it back away from gate 25 at Logan's terminal B and begin to taxi.

About halfway to Florida, we started descending. Because of a “security issue,” our captain told us, we, along with many other airplanes, would be diverting immediately. Pilots are polished pros when it comes to dishing out euphemisms, and this little gem would be the most laughable understatement I've ever heard a comrade utter. Our new destination was Charleston, South Carolina.

I figured a bomb threat had been called in. My worry was not of war and smoldering devastation. My worry was being late for work. It wasn't until I joined a crowd of passengers in Charleston clustered around a TV in a concourse restaurant that I learned what was going on.

I'm watching the video of the second airplane, shot from the ground in a kind of twenty-first century Zapruder film. The picture swings left and picks up the United 767 moving swiftly. The plane rocks, lifts its nose, and, like a charging, very angry bull making a run at a fear-frozen matador, drives itself into the very center of the south tower. The airplane vanishes. For a fraction of a second there is no falling debris, no smoke, no fire, no movement. Then, from within, you see the white-hot explosion and spewing expulsion of fire and matter.