Okay, I'm going to slaughter a few sacred cows here today,
because if there is one thing I am awfully damn tired of hearing, it's how many
hours an airline pilot had before he did something INCREDIBLY FUCKING STUPID
before flying his airplane into the ground in a completely AVOIDABLE accident
and usually (but not always, thank God) killing people.
I've seen this happen with my own two eyes more times than I
care for, and heard stories about far too many more. Yes I'm a pilot, though I
haven't flown in some time. I was also a Flight Test Engineer for Grumman
aerospace, then General Dynamics, then Lockheed. I did that for about seven
years. Dealing with accidents (though I never had to deal with a fatal one) was
part of my job. Whenever there was an 'incident' and the pilots were told that
the 'company representatives need to talk to you', I was one of those
'representatives' on the other end of the phone.
Now this little rant is because they announced the
preliminary findings on the crash of B-17G '909'. After listening to this,
anybody who knows anything about B-17's knows exactly what happened. Unless
they change the preliminary findings, if what they said was true, it's
blatantly obvious what happened.
But before we get into that, I've heard bandied about,
several times now, that the PIC (Pilot In Command) had over 20,000 hours.
People say that like it means something. Well you know what? Ralph Kramden had
over twenty years as a bus driver! In
NYC no less! So let's put him in a formula one race car and make him drive at Indy
and see how he does!
Some of you may find that to be a bit facetious, but it's
not. An airline pilot is a bus driver. No more, no less. That's all you are,
and in this day and age it takes even less skill than driving a bus, because
everything is automated. Korean Airlines, which you may recall flew into the
ground at SFO, did so because between the pilot and the copilot they had landed
that aircraft less than a dozen times COMBINED. Now yes, KAL is a bit of an
extreme example, their pilots are hands down the worst in the world, but they
prove the point. Flying a modern airliner is easy.
Now, another quick aside here. My father flew in B-17's,
B-24's, and B-29's. He was a gunnery instructor during WW2 and he had thousands
of hours in all of those aircraft. He knew a lot about flying them, and he saw
a lot of them crash. The biggest problem was that with the training aircraft,
it was not uncommon for them to lose an engine on takeoff during training. As they'd
train the pilots while training the gun crews and the bombardier so every
flight took off heavy weight. If you banked into the dead engine, the plane
would crash and everyone onboard would DIE.
You'd think having been taught that, and told that many
times, it wouldn't happen. Yet my father saw it happen several times. But those
were green pilots, right? And this was before ANY safety regulations for flying
existed. Little known fact: More Army Air Corps crew were killed during WW2 in
training than fighting the war. A lot more. When the war ended they were still
losing something like 10,000 men a year. That's when it was discovered that
training was where they lost everyone, and not over Germany (something that
they could cover up during the war, but not afterwards — think about that a moment).
So, let's get back to the issue at hand. We have a pilot in
909 who has 'over 20,000 hours as PIC'. But apparently no one ever taught him
how to deal with an in flight emergency? Apparently he never had a safety
brief? And apparently he didn't really know all that much, for all of his hours
flying, about B-17's.
How can I say this? Let's make it simple: He fucked up by
the numbers.
Now, getting over whether or not he should have even taken
off (magneto problems), I want you to think about this: He's taking off in a
B-17 that is either heavy, or damn close to it. It has eleven people on board,
and being Americans, you can pretty much guarantee that the average weight of
those people is over 200lbs. So he's flying with over a ton of cargo. That's a
lot of weight. On take-off, one of the more dangerous phases of flight in an
aircraft he loses an engine.
He doesn't declare
an emergency. That right there probably would have cost him his license for the
rest of his life. He's in a heavily loaded airplane with eleven people. A B-17
has problems climbing out with all four engines running, he just lost one, and
he doesn't declare an emergency? What the hell! Is there a commercial jet in
the world today that if you lose an engine you don't declare an emergency? I
can't think of one, if someone else can, please tell me.
Now why didn't he declare an emergency? To me it's obvious:
He didn't want to do the paperwork. He didn't want the airplane to be grounded.
He didn't want to have to give those eleven people their money back. He didn't
want to do a lot of things and that right there is why he shouldn't have been flying that airplane. Why he shouldn't have
been flying any airplane! He had
stopped putting the safety of his passengers and aircraft first.
There is no other explanation. Don't tell me he 'forgot to
declare an emergency', he's got 20,000 hours! Right?
This brings us to the moment he doomed the airplane to crash
and killed the 6 people onboard — and lets not sugar coat it. HE killed them.
Through his negligence and yes, stupidity. It's harsh to say that, especially
about the dead, but when it comes to preventable accidents that kill a lot of
people, I'm not much for giving slack. So here he is, he's got an engine out on
the right side of the airplane. Anyone with a brain knows that if you bank into
that engine, YOU'RE GONNA CRASH. Okay? That's not a 'possibility' it's a cold
hard fact. You are going to crash.
People are going to die.
But he can't bank left. It's a right-hand pattern; he has to
turn right, into the dead engine. Now if he had, oh I don't know, DECLARED AN
EMERGENCY, he would have been able to turn LEFT like he SHOULD HAVE. But you
know what, there's all that paperwork, the refunds, the plane being grounded...
Nah, I have 20,000 hours! It'll work THIS time, for ME!
Yeah, well it didn't. The aircraft continued to sink (lose
altitude) until it crashed. I'm personally amazed he made it as far around as
he did before he hit the ground. I'm also amazed he put the gear down. You're
barely flying, and you have to know you're gonna crash, and you put down the
drag? WTF? Yes, I know it's common for a lot of pilots to think that they're
going to make it, right up to the moment they crash and die. I've read more
than enough cockpit voice recorder transcripts from dead pilots. You keep
working the problem. But when you caused the problem, maybe you should take a
moment to reconsider your choices? Sure a gear up landing sucks, especially in
a propeller driven airplane. But you can fix
that.
So yes, 909 was 100 percent pilot error. I don't know if no
one ever told him that you can't bank any WW2 era bomber into the dead engine
and expect to keep flying. If not, they have a serious problem that needs to be
addressed. But the bigger problem here was that the pilot threw safety out the
window, fucked up by the numbers, and crashed the airplane killing 6 people.
Makes me wonder about how he survived those previous 20,000 hours, right?
And it also shows that those 20,000 hours don't mean shit.
You take a bus driver and put him in a finicky high performance vehicle, and
you sure don't expect him to go out there and win the Indy 500. You don't even
expect him not to crash. Hours in airliners don't translate to hours in other
aircraft. To date I have witnessed three crashes in person — one of which
almost killed me. All three of those pilots had over ten thousand hours of
experience. But the amount of experience they had in the airplanes that they
crashed, under the conditions that they were flying in, it was a lot less than
that. And it showed. Because they did stupid shit, which in one case got 11
people on the ground killed and dozens more injured.
Too many airline pilots think that because they have lots of
hours, they have lots of skill. I've seen this too many times and once even had
some gal tell me that she knew more because she flew an A-380, when we were
discussing flight characteristics in a small single engine airplane.
Well I gotta lot of skill sitting on my couch at home, and
guess what? It's directly transferable to damn near any airliner out there.
This isn't to say all airline pilots are unskilled, I've met a lot who I would
trust to fly any kind of aircraft. But that's because they fly airplanes other than an airliner. They learned on
many different aircraft, transitioned through many different aircraft, and have
found themselves in many different and difficult situations. But let's be
honest here: Flying is easy. It's so
easy that anyone can do it. But flying is also inherently unforgiving of
mistakes. You can't just pull over to the curb. You have to land, and there are
only certain places where you can land safely.
Because of this, there are a lot of rules when you're
flying. There are also a lot of rules that apply to each and every type of aircraft.
When you start breaking these rules you are literally taking your life into
your own hands. In some cases you are literally committing suicide. Now that's
fine if it's just you, but it's not fine if other people are counting on you.
And when you start putting ANYTHING before the safety of your passengers:
You're done.
That guy who was flying 909? Yeah, I met him once. I thought
he was an okay guy. I even flew in that very airplane. So I gotta ask myself:
How the hell could he have been so damned stupid? And I think that the
foundation that owned that airplane needs to sit down with all of their pilots
and tell them that if they're not putting the safety of the passengers and the
aircraft first — paperwork be damned
— then they shouldn't be flying for them. Or perhaps, anyone.
