Safety lessons from near-disasters

Everything is unprecedented until it happens for the first time

It was only when I attempted to make small talk with my visibly squirming seatmate on a Dubai to Singapore flight that I realised it was me causing that look of horror on his face, rather than the slight turbulence we had been experiencing since takeoff.

A friendly chat, I had thought, might help distract him from flight anxiety. But then I noticed his eyes — wide with fear — were fixed on my computer screen, which displayed an investigative report on an aeroplane crash I had been reading.

I slammed the laptop shut, stammered an apology, and mumbled about how these detailed crash reports were highly comforting. It had just slipped my mind where I was, and it wasn’t my intention to spread worry …

Well, never mind.

But it’s true. A National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) investigation report reads like a how-to book for pulling off miracles and achieving seemingly incredible levels of safety. These reports renew one’s faith in what humanity can achieve if we apply our brain power and resources to it.

But they also remind us that these exceptional levels of commercial airline safety require eternal vigilance against the usual foes: negligence, failure to adapt, complacency, revolving doors at regulatory agencies, and so on.

Someday, I’ll have two more reports to read (one by the Japan Transport Safety Board) from two incidents in just one week — but both events are already full of lessons.

On Jan. 2, a Japanese Coast Guard plane and an arriving Japan Airlines Airbus A350 collided. The Airbus turned into a fireball as it sped down the runway before stopping about half a kilometre away. Remarkably, all 379 people aboard the Airbus got out safely before the entire plane was engulfed in flames and reduced to a smouldering wreck. (Five of the six people on the Coast Guard plane died.)

Then on Friday, a plug on one of the unused emergency exit doors on an Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 Max 9 plane blew out a few minutes after takeoff, causing the plane to undergo rapid depressurisation. Passengers told news outlets that the child sitting near the hole had his shirt torn off by the force of the wind while his mother clung to him. The plane turned around and landed safely in Portland, Oregon. No serious injuries have been reported.

Both incidents could have been much worse. And that everyone on both airliners walked away is, indeed, a miracle — but not the kind most people think about. They’re miracles of training, expertise, effort, constant improvement of infrastructure, as well as professionalism and heroism of the crew.

Consider the Japan Airlines evacuation.

Commercial airliners carry a lot of combustible fuel, and quick evacuations are essential to avoid trapping everyone in a fireball if something goes wrong. Fairly little is left to chance.

Some of this is visible to passengers, and even a little annoying. But it’s an airline regulation that all tray tables must be put up and seats made upright during takeoff and landing. While accidents are really rare, statistically, takeoffs and landings are the most dangerous stages of flight, so you don’t want anything preventing passengers from moving quickly. That’s why large items have to be put away, as well: to clear the potential evacuation path.

As images of the passengers in Japan evacuating without reaching for their luggage show, it might be good if more airlines followed Japan Airlines’ lead and used its safety videos to explain the logic behind the rules — as its own does for why luggage must be left behind in an emergency.

Still, the evacuation took longer than the 90 seconds that Airbus had to demonstrate as possible to get certified. On that day itself, the obstacles were many. Only three of the eight emergency exits were usable, and the plane was filling with smoke. The plane had tilted forward because the nose landing gear had collapsed, the steep angle hindering passengers’ progress. The intercoms were inoperable; the crew was reduced to using megaphones to direct passengers.

The passengers had other allies, too: These days, planes are designed to slow fires’ spread — many such improvements, including seats that can withstand impacts and fire-retardant designs and materials, are painful lessons learned from the accidents of the 1980s and 1990s. Indeed, the plane resisted the worst effects of the flames much longer than 90 seconds, until everyone was out.

The Boeing 737 Max line holds other lessons. From the looks of it, the plane is very new, about eight weeks in service, and the incident happened at a relatively low altitude. But what happened after the door fell out is textbook. The pilot declared an emergency, the air traffic control quickly arranged a clear runway, and the plane circled right back and landed in just about 15 minutes.

The NTSB report said that a pressurisation warning light in the plane had come on three times before, at least once in flight, during its short time in service. The maintenance crews had checked and cleared the light, but Alaska Airlines thankfully restricted the plane to flying over land so it could return rapidly to an airport if it came on again. Whew. If the door had blown out at high altitude and over the ocean we may not have had the same happy ending.

The plane’s quick return to the airport, while much less dramatic, had similarities to the “Miracle on the Hudson” 15 years ago last Monday, when the now famed Captain Chesley Sullenberger (Sully) landed a plane on the Hudson River, New York after losing its engines to a bird strike, saving everyone aboard. It’s what pilots train for, and it shows.

“One way of looking at this might be that, for 42 years, I’ve been making small regular deposits in this bank of experience: education and training … And on Jan. 15, the balance was sufficient so that I could make a very large withdrawal,” Sully described the incident in his 2009 memoir.

Those NTSB investigation reports that I enjoy reading represent just that kind of accumulation. Year by year, investigation by investigation, incident by incident, commercial flying has become remarkably safe despite the complexity of operation with so many moving parts at a global scale: humans, software, weather, and metal objects flying through the sky.

Most of the time, it works so well that we don’t notice it — which is perhaps the true miracle of infrastructure that works well: It becomes invisible. Sometimes, it’s good to make visible the invisible many who keep us safe.

DISCLAIMER:

The views expressed here are those of the columnist and do not necessarily represent the views of New Sarawak Tribune.