Source: USA TODAY
Terrifying incidents of bad pilot behavior like a JetBlue pilot’s meltdown this week are not unprecedented in the history of commercial aviation and have sometimes caused deadly crashes.
Nevertheless, the list of incidents resulting from unprofessional pilot behavior over a 50-year history and millions of flights show that “it’s a very rare thing,” says aviation safety expert Aaron Gellman of the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University. “And even with what’s happened in the past, it’s the safest mode of transportation by far.”
Tuesday’s JetBlue incident, where the FBI alleges captain Clayton Osbon started speaking nonsense to his first officer and was later tackled and restrained by passengers, is extremely unusual. But airline procedures, which require two pilots and locked cockpit doors, protected the public, Gellman says.
Some previous incidents of bad behavior by pilots have been fatal, showing that airline procedures cannot save lives when pilots choose to ignore them.
•On Feb. 12, 2009, Colgan Air Flight 3407 iced up and crashed in Buffalo, N.Y., after a series of mistakes by tired pilots, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. Both the captain and first officer had traveled for hours before taking controls of the plane in Newark, and the young first officer, Rebecca Lynne Shaw, was heard on the flight recorder saying she had little experience dealing with icy conditions. When ice caused the flight to stall, captain Marvin Renslow erred and made the stall worse, crashing the plane and killing 50 people, according to the NTSB. The board also concluded that Shaw and Renslow had been chitchatting in the cockpit.
“They weren’t properly trained and weren’t able to handle the situation,” Gellman says.
•In 2008, an Air Canada co-pilot was forcibly removed from a Toronto-to-London flight, restrained and sedated after having a mental breakdown and speaking to God while behind the controls at 30,000 feet. The plane landed safely in Ireland.
•On Oct. 31, 1999, Egypt Air Flight 990 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean off the Massachusetts coast due, according to the NTSB, to the deliberate action of first officer Gameel Al-Batouti. The Boeing 767 crashed with dozens of Egyptian military officers aboard who were returning from helicopter flight training in the USA at a time that the Egyptian government was at war with radical Islamists. Al-Batouti, an Islamist sympathizer, “wanted to get rid of the helicopter pilots and crashed the airplane,” Gellman says.
•On Oct. 14, 2004, two pilots taking an empty airliner from Little Rock, Ark., to Minneapolis decided to explore the limits of their Pinnacle Airlines plane. Captain Jesse Rhodes and first officer Peter Cesarz took the plane to 41,000, the maximum approved altitude for the plane, and then failed to follow proper procedure when the plane stalled and the engines shut down, according to the NTSB. After trying unsuccessfully to restart the engines while gliding, they crashed behind several homes 2½ miles from an airport. Both crewmembers were killed.
•A 1956 mid-air collision that investigators blamed on pilots trying to give passengers better views of the Grand Canyon resulted in a revamping of the role of the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) in patroling the airways.
The pilots were maneuvering around cloud formations over the canyon and collided, killing 128 people.
“It was a watershed event because it changed the whole approach to air traffic control,” Gellman says. Congress reacted by increasing funding for the FAA, giving it the capability to monitor aircraft “in the airways not just in the terminal,” Gellman says.
Investigations of deadly accidents over the years have resulted in safety procedures, such as requiring two pilots and locking cockpit doors, which helped preserve lives in the JetBlue incident, Gellman says.
“Even if the captain had insisted on making trouble in the cockpit, I think the first officer would have been able to handle it,” Gellman says. “That’s why we have two people in there.”
Dave Funk, a retired Northwest Airlines captain now an aviation consultant with Laird & Associates, says the JetBlue flight might have been saved by the co-pilot, who barred an incapacitated Osbon from the cockpit. “The first officer recognized the gravity of the situation and solved the problem,” Funk says.
The co-pilot’s quick thinking on that flight is analogous to captain “Sully” Sullenberger landing a US Airways flight on New York’s Hudson River with no lives lost, Funk says. “We gave him a bunch of broken eggs. He made scrambled eggs. He didn’t make eggs over medium.”
Funk says pilots today face more worries than they did years ago, when airlines like TWA and now-defunct Pan Am projected an image of employees who have “this wonderful life, have great benefits, fly around the world, fall in love, all in their 20s.”
Instead, he says, pilots today are dealing with “the crappy economy, the political fights each day. Is Washington going to get attacked? That’s going to create stress.”
Pilots, in particular, have to deal with a lot more stresses in their job because of the intense security situation, Funk says.
“It’s the greatest job in the world when you get to the end of the runway,” Funk says. “All the crap you have to get through to make it to the runway doesn’t make it worth it to a lot of us anymore.”
Contributing: Nancy Trejos
