By Alan Levin - Jun 19, 2012
The last fatal airline crash killed 50 people when a Colgan Air flight slammed into a
neighborhood near Buffalo, New York, in February 2009. Private-plane
wrecks since then have killed 30 times as many.
The crash rate on
private-pilot flights -- up 20 percent since 2000 -- contrasts with a
roughly 85 percent drop in accidents on commercial jetliners, said Earl
Weener, a member of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. The
disparity is a dark spot on decades of aviation-safety improvements, and
the board is weighing how to make non-commercial flying less hazardous.
Many
accidents have resulted from pilots’ inattention to basics, according
to research by a group created by industry and the federal government
last year. Pilots have overloaded planes, failed to check weather
reports, and made flying mistakes that caused planes to lose lift or go
out of control.
“More often than not it is human factors or a
piloting problem,” Weener said in a phone interview ahead of today’s
start of a two-day safety board hearing.
Since the 1990s,
commercial-airline crashes due to icing, inadvertently hitting the
ground, mid-air collisions, wind shear and other causes have been almost
wiped out with improved technology and pilot training, according to
NTSB accident statistics.
Sudden Maneuver
A
crash May 9, 2009, in Minden, Nevada, that killed five people
illustrates that those safety enhancements haven’t taken hold in the
small-plane world the NTSB will examine. A pilot took four friends on a
flight and flew the Beech 95 twin-engine plane low over the conference
they’d been attending, according to the safety board.
The
58-year-old pilot, who had almost 5,000 hours of flight experience, made
an abrupt, steep turn that caused the plane’s wings to lose lift, the
investigation found. All five people on the plane died when it
nose-dived to the ground.
Such sudden maneuvers are a known hazard that can cause severe loss of control, according to an NTSB report.
The accident rates on non-commercial flights known as general aviation, including corporate and instructional flights, have changed little since 2000, according to safety board data.
The accident rate for all
general aviation has been about 7 per 100,000 flying hours from 2007
through 2010, Weener said. By comparison, accidents involving private
pilots in their own or rented planes, mostly small, single-engine
aircraft, averaged about 12 per 100,000 flight hours during the same
period, according to Weener. He broke out those numbers from the broader
general-aviation statistics.
Private Flying
The
rate of deadly wrecks in such private flying has grown faster than
general-aviation accidents as a whole, up 25 percent since 2000. About
1,500 people have died on general-aviation flights since the crash by
Pinnacle Airlines Corp. (PNCLQ)’s Colgan, Weener said.
“That’s
part of the reason for the focus” of the NTSB’s inquiry, Weener said.
The board, which has no regulatory power, recommends safety improvements
to government agencies and industry.
Seeking ways to stem the
fatalities, industry groups and the U.S. Federal Aviation
Administration, which regulates private flying and sets safety
standards, last year created the General Aviation Joint Steering
Committee.
Losing Control
The group found
that the largest category of accidents are those in which pilots lose
control during flight, Bruce Landsberg, head of the safety arm of the
Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association, an advocacy group based in
Frederick, Maryland.
Landsberg, co-chairman of the steering
committee, said the panel endorses working with the FAA to make it
cheaper for small planes to install a device that warns pilots when
wings are in danger of losing lift. Such devices are standard on
commercial airliners.
Other frequent crash causes are inadvertently flying into the ground, loss of power and weather-related issues, Landsberg said.
Human error underlies the majority of personal flight crashes, Landsberg and Weener said.
An accident cited on Landsberg’s AOPA Air Safety Institute’s website highlights how pilot miscalculations can be deadly.
On
Feb. 15, 2010, a Cessna T337G twin-engine plane crashed near Monmouth
County Executive Airport in Farmingdale, New Jersey, as family members
of those on board watched. The three adults and two children on the
plane died.
Airfield Buzzed
After buzzing
the airfield at high speed, the plane pulled into a climb and a section
of the right wing came off, according to the NTSB’s findings. The plane
was overloaded and flying too fast for such a maneuver, the agency
found.
Landsberg said the general-aviation community doesn’t see a need for additional regulations.
“I
don’t think you can crash an airplane unless you have broken one and
possibly two regulations,” Landsberg said. “If everyone flew to the
private-pilot practical test standards, we would have a pretty good
system.”
He also pointed to the fact that, however tragic, the
numbers of fatalities in plane crashes are far outstripped by those in
accidents on the nation’s highways --32,885 in 2010, compared with 450
in general aviation.
Source: http://www.bloomberg.com
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