I was reading Cockpit Confessions of an Airline Pilot by Stephen Keshner and I read a passage which bothered me very much:
This is fucked up. If that maintenance supervisor’s negligence did indeed contribute to the plane crashing (if the pilots had been unable to fix the problem,) should he have been charged with a crime? Criminal negligence, manslaughter, or something else? I just can’t see allowing that kind of omission, for cost-saving measures, to go unpunished.
Has anyone here worked in the airline industry? Does stuff like this happen on a regular basis? :eek:
I’m not a professional level pilot, just a private pilot. From what I’ve seen of aviation such things are not common but they do happen.
There ARE penalties for negligence in aviation, be it the mechanic, the guy fueling or de-icing a plane, or the pilot. If people are lucky those penalities are those made by man, involving money or jail time. If not… the laws of physics show no mercy to either the guilty or innocent.
That sort of incident is why I’m obsessive about pre-flights and why, on take off as well as landing, I want the passengers quiet and I’m paying attention to what’s going on. Yeah, I’ve had stuff go wrong that, without exaggeration, would have killed me if I hadn’t taken prompt and proper action. The stakes only get higher as your aviating becomes more complicated. I am happy to see airline pilots get six figure incomes if they take care of this stuff in such a manner that I arrive safely and, as a passenger, never have an inkling. Even better, though, if this sort of thing never happened at all.
Mistakes sometimes happen. Crazy stuff described in that article may sometimes happen, but it’s rare to non-existent in my personal experience.
There’s a written chain of responsibility. When an aviation accident is investigated, especially when an airplane has recently come out of maintenance, the records are scrutinized. Every job performed on the airplane is signed off by a mechanic. So there’s a lot of vested interest in doing proper work.
That said, I’m always careful with airplanes that have recently been in the shop. But sometimes stuff happens. I had a maintenance abort just the other day. Nobody’s fault, it just happens.
If your car conks out mid-drive, you can usually make it over to the side of the road. Even if you can’t, most of the time you just wind up causing a traffic jam and maybe getting honked at by some jerk. If an airplane conks out at 35,000 feet–well, passenger planes have been known to glide remarkabledistances–but any serious mechanical failure in an airplane clearly poses a major risk of sudden and violent death for all aboard.
Your car will typically contain you, and maybe a handful of passengers. Passenger airplanes routinely carry from dozens to hundreds of people.
Humans are irrational in what we fear. Most people routinely climb into automobiles (which kill more people every year than airliners do in decades) without giving it a second thought; yet many of those same people have reactions ranging from nervousness to sheer panic at the thought of getting on an airplane. A car accident with fatalities will be buried in the inside pages of the local news section of the local newspaper, but a minor incident involving a commercial airliner that doesn’t kill or even seriously injure anyone can wind up being reported in newspapers all across the country.
For all three of those reasons, airline mechanics and the airline industry in general are far more tightly regulated and overseen than auto mechanics are.
Because mechanical problems with planes are much more likely to cause tremendous disaster than mechanical problems with cars. A plane carries hundreds of people thousands of feet in the sky. A car carries 1-8 people on the ground.
I can hardly believe that the pilot’s preflight inspection didn’t reveal that the instrument panel had no screws. I mean, when I was flying, there wasn’t a checklist like, Test alternator; Avionics off; Battery on; Throttle off; Jiggle dashboard; Mixture rich…
My father tells a story from his time flying for the Air Force in Korea. A South Korean plane went down, and it was attributed to mechanical failure, the fault of the ground grew.
They brought out the ground crew onto the tarmac, and shot the crew chief.
Just to be pedantic, incompetent does not mean negligent. An incompetent mechanic should be fired. A negligent mechanic - who might be very competent - is another matter.
This story does bring up a lot of common issues. Common in that the ethics and legal issues are commonly found in many areas of life.
Not only does it ask about the criminal liability of the mechanic, but there is a deeper set of ethical issues that were swept under the carpet.
One of the prime ethical precepts in any sort of safety critical profession is that you never undertake work that you are not competent to do. Neurosurgeons don’t do cardiac surgery. Engineers don’t design things they don’t have the competency to design. And aircraft mechanics don’t undertake work they are not competent to do. In industries like aviation there are certification systems that are supposed to control this. Without certification on a given aircraft to perform work of a given nature, a mechanic is minimally breaking the law to do the work, and would be liable if the work undertaken caused an accident.
But as noted above. The story isn’t about competence in terms of technical knowledge. The mechanic is a drug user. He isn’t competent in the more broad meaning of the word. Even if he is fully certified to perform the work. Legally this is much more messy. Ethically he should recognise he isn’t fit to do the work and quit. But life never works like that. But it gets worse. Was the issue reported? If the mechanic was known to be a drug user, what was done about it? The pilots are now very much in the ethical firing line. They have clear knowledge that the mechanic is endangering people. They have no reasonable ethical option. They must ensure that the mechanic is removed from working on any aircraft. This gets them into whistle-blower territory. What if the manager doesn’t want to hear about the complaint? All too hard, too hard to get someone else, cutting costs, will cause delays in flights as there won’t be enough mechanics to keep them all flying. And so on. The pilots have an ethical duty to escalate the issue, and escalate it to whatever government authority is needed to get the mechanic fired. If they don’t they are ethically just as, if not more, complicit than the mangers, or even the mechanic. It is hard.
Imagine the pilots get on another plane that has just seen routine maintenance by the same mechanic. They see his signature against maintenance of a safety critical item. Do they fly? Or do they simply get up, walk off the plane, and take the heat? What action should the duty manager take? What action should the airline owners take? What would you bet really happens?
Drug addicts are a serious problem. Almost by definition they are incompetent to make rational decisions. As to the legal ramification of a drug user performing maintenance, you probably need to ask the question: is drug addiction a criminal or a medical problem? If the mechanic was suffering from an undiagnosed bipolar disorder would you treat them differently?
Do you have any idea how many screws there are on an airplane? If they were made of marijuana seeds the world would be a mellower place.
General Aviation fuel tester cups have screw drivers on the end of them so you can tighten stuff as you walk around the plane. Yes, maintenance is an ongoing problem and it’s consumer driven. People get on their computer and click on the cheapest ticket listed. It doesn’t matter that it’s cheaper than a bus ticket. There’s nowhere on the computer screen with a choice for planes with engines that WEREN’T overhauled by technicians who are not certified mechanics. A lot of work is farmed out to specialty shops and is done under supervision of a mechanic. The idea is that if the repair is narrowed to very specific items it can be done as effectively as if done by mechanics who are trained with a broader range of knowledge.
Yes, I do. An excellent idea. If you were doing a preflight in an aircraft, don’t you think that there’s a pretty good chance you notice if there were zero screws in the instrument panel? I have a hard time seeing that between checking circuitbreakers, turning on avionics, checking the yoke for freedom of movement, etc., there’d be some indication that the panel wasn’t attached.
Since I don’t think the Captain brought extra screws on-board I imagine that they were some kind of captive screw that stays with the unit. When the dash panel is swung back in place they look attached because they don’t stick out. The pilot wouldn’t see it and if the mechanic was interrupted it would also be easy to miss. I’ve gotten into the habit of verbally calling out the final inspection of anything I work on with my own plane and it’s damn near the simplest one on the planet. Top plug #1 torqued with washer, plug wire #1 tightened and cap nut tightened etc… Repeat 7 more times for a simple plug change.
Sometimes that takes longer than the maintenance itself. On top of that is the paperwork involved. Aviation maintenance is a very demanding job when done in real time.