Wednesday, Jul 9, 2008
When airplanes collide, who is responsible? Are we doing enough to prevent such disasters?
Aug 9, 2002 | What happened when those two planes collided in midair in Europe last month? Were the pilots or the system at fault?
On July 1, 1986, as a young private pilot, I was nearly killed in a midair collision over Nantucket Sound. I simply looked up, and there in front of me was the other plane. It was a twin-engine propeller plane, a four-seater not much bigger than mine, coming head-on. I did not react. There wasn't enough time; my brain never processed any left, right, up or down resolution. Only luck -- the slightest difference in our respective altitudes and alignment -- prevented our two machines from hitting.
The whole event, from when I saw the airplane until it was safely behind me, lasted, probably, two seconds. Our closure rate was about 300 miles per hour. And this marks the only time in more than 15 years of flying that I've been close enough to another aircraft to clearly make out the shape and colors of a human being inside -- in this case the lone pilot sitting in his seat, buzzing past in a blur of blue-and-white aluminum.
What's ironic about distinguishing the other pilot is how often I hear airline passengers claiming a similar feat. "We were landing at O'Hare," somebody might recall excitedly. "Another plane was right next to us, and it was so close you could see the people inside!"
While landing on parallel runways or crossing perpendicularly at high altitudes, airliners often pass within close proximity. But close proximity, in the meticulously orchestrated doings of air traffic control, is measured in miles, or thousands of feet. To an anxious flier with emotions revved by adrenaline, distances and sensations are distorted. Trust me, you have never been anywhere near close enough to another plane to see faces through those small, oval windows.
The same cannot be said, however, for the 71 people aboard two jets that collided on July 1 over the Swiss-German border. On this evening -- the 16-year anniversary of my own flirtation with mortality -- A Boeing 757 freighter flying under contract for DHL Worldwide Express, and a Russian-built passenger jet operated Bashkirian Airlines, smashed into each other at 35,000 feet.
There are various frightening buzzwords commonly invoked by passengers, most of whom know very little of what these situations truly entail. Wind shear. Turbulence. Another one is "near-miss." The idea of airplanes coming dangerously close to each other, even hitting each other in flight, is shocking -- a virtual rape of the sanctity of the sky. How does it happen? How often? To address these concerns, both the philosophy of safety and the technical workings of the airways must be examined.
For starters, we should learn to accept the reality of error. Passengers are uncomfortable with the inherent perils of flying, and tend to assume a delusional "zero tolerance" notion of air safety. In fact, no flight is ever a perfect one, and minor, ultimately harmless errors occur with a fair amount of routine. It has always been this way, and shall remain so, just as the odds of your plane going down, no matter how bad a day a pilot or air traffic controller might be having, shall remain ridiculously in your favor.
In keeping with the laws of fallibility, airplanes do, on occasion, breach the confines of one another's protective space. Such incidents usually involve brief transgressions, a tangential grazing of restricted territory. Sometimes a crew has misread an instruction. A pilot may turn to the wrong heading or assume an incorrect altitude. Sometimes the controller issues an incorrect command. Almost always, however, the mistake is caught. Safeguards are in place for just these sorts of trespasses. Read-backs of headings and altitudes must be verified. Controllers work in pairs. Alarms are cocked to sound if flights venture too close to one another. And so on.
But then, every once in a while, something goes terribly wrong.
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