Editorial: Feds could improve aircraft safety - Crashes involving private aircraft are all too common

Greenville News editorial 
3:38 p.m. EDT June 25, 2014 

Intensive federal investigations by the National Transportation Safety Board have made commercial airline crashes almost nonexistent in the United States. The last major fatal commercial airline crash in the United States was on Feb. 12, 2009, when a Colgan air regional airplane crashed outside Buffalo, N.Y., killing 50 people. The more than five years between major commercial accidents is an impressive stretch that results from hard work by federal investigators to accurately determine why planes crash and by a federal government that changes regulations to address known dangers.

The same care is not taken in the general aviation sector, where there are hundreds of plane crashes every year, many of which receive only a cursory investigation. The fatalities in the general aviation sector come in smaller bunches, but far exceed the number of fatalities in commercial airline crashes. In fact, the numbers are breathtaking and certainly argue in favor of changes that will improve the safety record of the general aviation sector.

In the past 50 years, more than 44,000 people have been killed in private plane or helicopter crashes; that is more than nine times the number of those killed in commercial airline crashes. The NTSB conducts thorough investigations of just 15 percent of the more than 1,000 general aviation crashes each year. In 2013 alone, there were 1,199 such crashes that claimed a total of 347 lives and injured 571 people. The general aviation crash rate has not gone down for 15 years.

There are multiple reasons the general aviation crash rate has remained steady for so long.

The first is that the sheer volume of general aviation incidents far exceeds the NTSB’s ability to conduct the level of investigation that it conducts on much-rarer commercial incidents. The NTSB’s investigations of general aviation accidents often are done by telephone and are dependent on manufacturers who are asked to find problems with their own parts, USA Today discovered. It is certainly plausible that it could be difficult for a manufacturer to remain objective in such a role given that finding fault with its own product could make the manufacturer liable for the crash and at the very least cost it a lot of money in fixing a known flaw.

The investigation process can and should be more objective and more intensive. Yet, this is perhaps the most difficult improvement. Since 1982, there have been 64,000 general aviation accidents; federal investigators have done a “significant” amount of work in just 15 percent of the cases. As one official told USA Today, more thorough investigations are possible, but it would be an expensive proposition. That is a fair warning in a country that has a tremendous federal debt and a seemingly endless list of federal agencies that want more funding.

At the same time, when thorough investigations are done, they need to be genuine and unbiased. The newspaper presented extensive anecdotal evidence of crashes in which pilots were blamed, but later investigations or reviews either proved or suggested that equipment problems were to blame. One example was the nearly 1,200 people that were killed since 1985 in incidents involving lightweight home-built aircraft. The NTSB blamed 72 percent of the crashes on pilots, but discovered in a 2012 special study that many of the crashes resulted from engine failure, inadequate flight testing that didn’t uncover design flaws or malfunctions, and insufficient flight manuals.

Quoting from the USA Today report, “Federal accident investigators repeatedly overlooked defects and other dangers of private aviation as they blamed individual pilots for the overwhelming number of crashes of small airplanes and helicopters.”

Shortcuts do not lead to safer aircraft. If an investigation is launched, the federal agency conducting that investigation has a duty to exhaust its resources to find the genuine cause of the accident. Pilots and airplane manufacturers rely on accident investigations to make planes safer, and failing to uncover findings about faulty equipment can create a false sense of security, and certainly can delay needed changes to aircraft that could save lives.

Finally, the FAA could improve the rules for airplane manufacturers. Many aircraft in this country are “grandfathered” under old safety rules. The FAA’s rules require that an airplane only meet the safety requirements that were in place when the plane was designed. Thus, minor revisions to aircraft are not required to meet 21st century safety standards. For example, the most popular private planes today — the Piper Cherokee and the Cessna Skyhawk — must only meet safety standards from the 1960s and 1970s, USA Today found. That standard should be changed. All new aircraft should have to meet new safety standards.

Crashes involving private aircraft are all too common. The federal government, to the best of its ability, should set an exacting standard for investigating these crashes and fixing known problems so that pilots of these small aircraft are just as safe as pilots and passengers of commercial aircraft in which crashes, thankfully, are an increasingly rare event.

Source:  http://www.greenvilleonline.com/opinion/editorial