On the show ‘Air Disasters’, every crash results in changes being made (to laws, procedures, planes, or facilities) to prevent a crash like that happening ever again.
Are all air traffic incidents really handled this way, or does the series merely cherry-pick the incidents that triggered an improvement in air safety?
They say that nearly all safety regulations are written in blood. 
Not every incident results in policy changes, but the high-profile crashes often do. And high-profile crashes are the ones most likely to be chosen for a TV documentary.
I’m sure there are some plane crashes in developing nations that didn’t affect regulations at all.
It is also possible for a disaster (not necessarily airplane crashes) to lead to regulations that end up being harmful in another, future, disaster; unintended consequences.
While some folks do not like The Government, one of the agencies that does make our world safer is the NTSB, (National Transportation Safety Board).
It’s main goal, in theory, is not to grow itself, but it is to investigate accidents to determine what caused the accident to occur. The cause(s) are then studied so that we can figure out how to mitigate them so as to avoid another accident from the same causes. This process does make our skies, highways, water ways, & railroads safer.
One issue is that we do not always find out what the causes are. For example we really do not know what caused Malaysia Flight 370 to be lost at sea. At best, IMHO, we have an “educated” guess.
The NTSB does investigate ALL US air carrier accidents. In theory it also investigates all General Aviation, (GA), aircraft accidents. In practice, according to the NTSB the most common causation of GA accidents is “pilot error”. Which, IMHO, is an easy cop out that many of the NTSB investigators use all too frequently. Note: I said many, not all.
The problem is, to make the sky safer, we need to know the true cause. If Pilot error is the go-to cause, we are not able to mitigate the real cause. We assume that more training is what is needed. It may be that more training is needed, or it may not be.
If many of one Make & Model of aircraft have a single cause for multiple accidents, then the NTSB can, & often does, recommend to the FAA that these aircraft not be flown until the root cause is fixed. The FAA usually acts on the NTSB’s recommendations. Not always.
If the “fix” is too costly in time, then the FAA will often allow the aircraft to be flown for a limited time until it is prudent to effect the repair. Interim inspections will be required. For example if the engines would need to be disassembled to install a better part, the FAA will require that that part be replaced the next time that the engine would normally get disassembled. Think Overhaul time, or a “hot section” replacement, or for prop planes, a prop strike inspection.
One reason that the FAA does this is that the new, better part may not be available in sufficient quantities to refit the entire world’s fleet of that particular Make & Model. This delay gives the manufacturer of the new part time to build enough parts to refit the fleet.
Low profile crashes, or incidents out of the ordinary like a PAN PAN or a request for info from an airline to a manufacturer, can result in changes too.
But what can you do about some of the crashes ?
For example, January 25, 1990, there was bad weather at the east coast of USA. Colombian Avianca Flight 52 flies to New York. The airliner got put into a holding pattern three times by the eastern USA ATC’s. In bad weather, the route THROUGH was congested and they were held up far from their destination airport! It really should have requested priority landing … one reason they didn’t was that they feared being given an alternative airport to land at.
So they hung around in the holding pattern and then made one attempted landing, but along the way never told ATC that they were low on fuel. The first landing attempt resulted in a go around, and hindsite tells us they were critically low of fuel, and should have announced an emergency long before. As they were at low altitude when they ran out of fuel, they had no range to glide to a safe landing at some airport or even on water.
The ATC were already prioritising landing and giving priority to international aircraft which were running short and would need a northern East Coast airport landing clearance. As Avianca flight had come from the south, the ATC were not aware of its fuel status and didn’t think to let it land. It might have filled up at Cuba or something , ready to wait in holding patterns to get a landing at their intended airport.
One issue that ATC did cause was that ATC did not ask how long they had already been in holding patterns. Its understandable that aircraft have N hours of extra fuel… If flight 52 had said it had been in holding patterns for a long time ALREADY, ATC covering JFK might have given the flight a priority landing at JFK … ATC were expecting the pilots to announce a fuel shortage, but the pilots were expecting that announcing a fuel issue would result in being instructed to land at an alternative airport, so held off on that.
Pretty much as said above.
All air carrier accidents in most countries are thoroughly investigated. Assuming a causal chain can be reliably established the local safety authorities make recommendations to the local and international regulatory authorities on how to break that chain. Perhaps informed by other historical accidents.
Regulatory agencies don’t always take action. Sometimes the recommended fix is too amorphous, expensive, or technologically difficult. Or may arguably be worse than the disease. Likewise some accidents are inherently one-offs. Arranging a fix for that involves change without benefit. And change costs money and costs reliability.
This last is a key point. Boeing had a problem when a 737 fell out of the sky for no apparent reason. The had a bigger problem when a second one did something similar a couple years later. Once somebody connected the dots to determine the underlying mechanical cause, it took Boeing several years after that to develop a fix which was guaranteed to be safer than the existing parts that had had only a few identified failures in umpteen billion hours of operation.
When you’re already 99.999999% safe, it’s a lot easier to move that number South than move it North.
You didn’t ask, but …
Starting about 15-20 years ago we’ve moved beyond analyzing accidents. They’re now so rare that most of them have a large element of one-offness. Instead we track all the data on all the flights that are completely normal. Looking for the anomalies that aren’t accidents, aren’t even near-accidents, but are instead tiny seeds that might possibly grow into accidents given fertile enough conditions.
Most of these sorts of problems are procedural or training related. Which means they can be fixed at relatively low cost and that they can be experimented with in simulation and in small scale tests before being rolled out to the rest of the industry. In many cases “procedural” means ATC or airfield ops or aircraft maintenance or regulations or …; it doesn’t necessarily mean the piloting process.
On the mechanical side similar efforts are underway too.
It used to be that parts flew until they either failed or were removed at what the engineers had pre-determined was their expected safe lifespan.
Now many of the same parts can be made “smart” and monitored continuously in operation. A 787 generates about half a terabyte of diagnostic data per hour of operation. The result is that parts which “age” faster than the engineers’ expectations, or which are subjected to harsher than predicted environments are now detected much earlier in the lifecycle. And where appropriate improvements are made before the problem ever manifests in an actual failure. Much less in an actual accident caused by an actual failure.
Air travel is now so safe that in most cases reacting to rare one-off events makes little sense. Although it’s no comfort to the families of those who are unlucky enough to be among the rare casualties, it makes no sense to just throw money at additional safety measures in order that their deaths have “purpose” in saving others from a potential repeat of a statistically extremely rare event. Real safety improvements require a careful dispassionate analysis of the overall consequences. For example, on domestic routes, air travel is already about 2 orders of magnitude safer than road travel (per mile). Expensive additional safety measures that increase the cost of air travel may just give passengers an incentive to drive instead.
As LSLGuy said, the most appropriate targets for safety improvement are now likely to be subtle aspects of crew training, operational procedures or maintenance that involve little additional cost.
Mostly good responses, but I want to answer more simply, “yes, sort of.” If you watch the show attentively enough, you’ll see that they often mention that not all accidents are investigated as exhaustively as the ones they focus on. In particular, when the various people involved THINK they know why a crash happened, they often cut off the investigation early. Even with large aircraft and large loss of life. And as several of the shows have shown, sometimes the solution is already in place, and the accident was caused by the failure of the particular people involved to apply it.
Actually, in my experience anyway, MOST industries do the same thing, to a degree. But there are very few sufficiently spectacular incidents of massive loss of life, or dramatic near misses, to create an entire branch of government (not to mention a television show) to deal with the concerns.
Here’s an interesting case with a fresh update. This BFU Report on Dramatic Challenger Wake Vortex Accident - Aerossurance is a link to a blog post by an aviation risk management consultancy. It’s about a recent non-fatal mishap. In addition to a good explanation the blog entry has further links to background material and to the preliminary accident report from the German safety agency in charge of investigating.
Short synopsis is a bizjet and an A380 passed near each other in altitude and opposite in direction during cruise. A couple minutes later the bizjet hit the A380’s wake. Which flipped it ass over teakettle, failed one engine, and overstressed the airplane. The pilots got it under control, restarted the failed engine, and landed safely. The airplane’s a write-off and a couple people aboard were hurt pretty good. Fortunately they didn’t hit any other nearby airplanes during the melee.
The investigation is not complete, but one of the identified issues is that there are already regulatory and pilot procedures used in much of the world to limit the probability that big and small airplanes will pass closely directly above/below on directly opposite paths. Which procedure wasn’t permitted by the controlling government on that particular route for whatever reason.
But for that couple of keystrokes on each airplane’s nav computers, they’d have passed with a couple miles of lateral offset and nothing bad could have happened, much less would have.
Why is a costless and well-known safety procedure not permitted on that route? After all, it’s just an arbitrary line in the sky over an open ocean? I don’t know, but I bet one of the outcomes will be the procedure is expanded to more areas than it is now.
Commercial airline flights are no so safe that most of the accidents are caused by one-off issues, mainly:
And all of these are related to … MONEY.
bad weather – they don’t fly around it because that takes more fuel, and delays the flight, so passengers arrive late, miss connections and get upset.
pilot error – they don’t do more training & refresher training, and don’t give pilots more rest time between flights, because pilots’ time is so expensive.
mechanical problems (poor maintenance) – they don’t do more maintenance & inspections because it costs money. Many airlines are transferring maintenance work to third-world countries, where people will work for less money (and they are outside the jurisdiction of our aviation authorities).
So you could say that we already have all the airline safety that discount tickets can buy.
Here’s an airplane crash which wouldn’t have happened 20 years (before the current “improvements”):
Twenty years ago the captain with the assistance of other crew and passengers would have been able to break down the door and re-take control of the airplane away from the crazy co-pilot.
The Germanwings crash left the safety regulators with a dilemma. You cant simultaneously have a completely secure flight deck AND prevent a pilot from locking themselves in there. You have to pick which way you want to go. Given the rarity of pilot suicide and the current political climate, it is probably best to keep the flight deck secure and improve monitoring of pilot’s mental health.
And now that one-off pilot erros are a noticable part of the problem, people are starting to wonder “Shouldn’t we treat this as criminal?”
There is a substantioal body of popular opinion that sending people to jail, or even killing some of them, is the best way to reduce misbehaviour. IMO that would result in flights being less safe, but not everybody agreeas wih me.
I’m too lazy to back it up with stats, but I’d say that commercial aviation today is much safer than it was 30 or 40 years ago – and this is despite having one hell of a lot more air traffic compared to then and an aging air traffic control infrastructure.
This is a testament to the fantastic work of aviation accident investigators such as those who work for the NTSB, who really investigate each accident as though it were a crime scene and they get to the bottom of accidents. They do amazing work. So do investigators in other countries but NTSB is generally regarded as among the best.
There might be a solution in which we find a way to allow a back-up pilot access (combination lock codes or special keys). Of course if a pilot uses ligatures or some other device to physically disable a lock, then there’s not much that can be done. But perhaps that can be thought through.
And if a terrorist is back there telling the back-up pilot with his combination lock codes or special keys “open this door or you will die”?
Fair point - we’re just brainstorming here I reckon. Maybe he doesn’t have to dress up and make it obvious that he’s a relief pilot - kinda like an air marshal but one who can fly the plane.
Another idea I read was that perhaps there could be a mechanism that would kick in if the plane detected it was being flown erratically – like an automatic override system. Something like is probably years away, but it can at least be conceptualized now.
But honestly, I think it will always be the case that anyone who wants to commit mass murder on an airplane will find a way to do so provided that they don’t care about their own life or liberty. The real key, then, is to do what can be done - reasonably - to identify and prevent such people from flying. That being said, we all take our risks the moment we decide to get out of bed, step in the shower, get dressed, and leave our homes. And even lying in bed too long and being too sedentary leads to poor health. Nobody gets out of this thing called life alive.
The next big potential change in aviation might be doing away with pilots altogether.
Technology is probably already close to the point where pilotless aircraft could statistically be safer. The knee-jerk response to this is that pilots can deal with “unforeseen” situations, but manual override can also sometimes produce worse outcomes. Logically, when the calculus tells us that the net overall effect from allowing manual intervention is negative, we should do away with pilots.
There’s a strong psychological element that suggests that cockpits will be manned well past the point when allowing human intervention is a net positive. I wonder how much the terrorist element affects the reckoning one way or the other?