Web Exclusive

Reality Check for TSA: GA is Not the Problem

The office of the Inspector General (OIG) is one of those things about American democracy that gives me some faith that his 233-year-old experiment might be workable after all. Unlike any other part of the government, the Inspector General's Office doesn't do government business: it acts as a watchdog to see that other in government are going about theirs legally, ethically and efficiently. Few would argue that they have their work cut out for them. (This really is about airplanes, I promise.)

A couple of weeks ago the OIG issued a report on the Transportation Security Administration's (TSA)efforts intended supposedly to keep us all safe by keeping a close eye on General Aviation.

The report was a vindication of what we at Flying and pilots in these pages have been saying for too many years. GA poses a very limited security threat and that if the TSA were to enact sweeping programs to regulate GA, there would be little or no effect. You can read the report here:  OIG Report on the TSA's GA Security Programs.

I'd go a step further, and say that the programs that the TSA has been proposing (and trying to implement) are losing propositions. One person who responded to my blog last week wrote that the attacks of 9/11 inflicted damage on us. Since that time, the damage we've suffered has been largely self-inflicted, in the form of lost rights, huge bills and reduced mobility.

The last thing that GA needs is a sweepingly restrictive access program designed to combat threats that the Inspector General has found to be "hypothetical."

He did not say that the threat was non-existent. But one has to ask, what are the threats associated with  a plan like the TSA's airport ID card security program that will target overwhelmingly American citizens trying to go about their daily business with no known or suspected connection to any kind of illegal activity whatsoever?

And while we're at it, we might want to ask, just how many of our rights are we willing to give up in the name of fear before we say, "Enough is enough." 

Robert Goyer

Light Airplanes and Security: Absurd Fears Even from Experts

As a country, how far have we come since September 11th, 2001, in our concern over the potential role of small airplanes in launching terrorist attacks?

Sadly, not far at all.

A recent op ed piece in the New York Times by Lawrence M. Wein, a professor of management science at the Stanford Graduate School of Business, underscores the ignorance prevalent among people who fancy themselves expert at national security. 

In his piece (A Threat in Every Port) , Wein evaluates in flow chart fashion the routes that terrorists could use in getting a nuclear weapon to the United States and the ways that weapon could then be delivered to its target.

His ideas about how to stop delivery of a weapon by a vehicle--a 20 year old minivan has many times the payload capacity of my Cirrus, by the way--were vague, talking about "creating a detection architecture that cannot be easily be bypassed by a vehicle." Given the number of potential targets and routes to them--the Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, for instance, was at the top of nobody's list--it's hard to take this suggestion as anything more than hopeful rambling. It is in no way a plan, that's for sure.

"What about attack by a small plane?" Wein asks. He exposes his ignorance further, saying "Given the impracticality of shooting down a tiny aircraft before it could detonate a bomb from the air, the best approach is to begin screening all domestic departures of small airplanes." What utter nonsense. There are thousands of small airports in the United States. Who would "screen" all of these flights? And even if that were possible and affordable and workable, and it is not, what would prevent a terrorist from simply bypassing the "screening" process that we'd spent, presumably, billions to develop. Moreover, when the target is the middle of any good-sized city, the use of an airplane to deliver a nuclear device on target is needlessly complicated. A Dodge Caravan will do.

I wonder if Mr. Wein has ever visited a small airport, if he's ever given the subject of airport security more than a passing thought, and if he's ever tried to determine just how many dollars it would take to implement these plans he so recklessly proposes.

It is the nature of flying, I suppose, to live among people who just don't get what we do. It is a complicated and, therefore, misunderstood activity. And because it's so mysterious, it's also scary to many people. The job of every pilot is to do whatever we can whenever the opportunity arises to set the record straight so that people like Mr. Wein will think twice before uttering such nonsense.

Robert Goyer

The Fear: Was Air France 447 a Computerized Crash?

There is little known about what actually happened to Air France Flight 447, a non-stop from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, that never made it.

But already the camps are forming, and this is shaping up to be one of the formative philosophical battles of the modern era, pitting those who have faith in the technology that works the systems we use every day in every walk of our lives, and those who do not have such faith. And this is not just an aviation issue.

There is a long-simmering debate over the question of whether Airbus aircraft utilize too much technology to keep their airplanes safe from harm, thereby preventing the pilots from taking corrective action in the case of a malfunction. The first crash of an Airbus, at an airshow in 1988, has, in the view of many, never been satisfactorily explained. The A320-111 was executing a low pass and never gained altitude, as it settled into trees at the end of the runway. Three of the 130 onboard died in the crash, and the data from the flight recorders was compromised, so questions will remain. But many, including French pilots' unions, believed the safety systems, prevented the pilots from adding power and recovering the airplane. French investigators eventually ruled the crash was solely due to pilot error.

And whether we ever know just what happened to Flight 447 will depend on whether searchers recover the airplane's recorders, and today, with listening and recovery vessels on site or on their way, there is hope that they will be found.

Already we know, from automated messages sent by the airplane, that there were inconsistencies between the airspeed readings on the different displays, and we know that Air France is busy replacing those sensors fleet wide at this time. But what we don't yet know is why those sensors failed, if indeed they did. Was it because of icing? And what was the response of the autoflight system to those faulty inputs? We do know that the autopilot shut down, but by then was it already too late? Had the faulty speed readings already prompted the autopilot to fly the airplane into a regime of flight that human pilots couldn't fly back out of? The argument will be--and you will hear this, if you haven't already--that the envelope protection on the A330 prevented the human pilots from saving the flight, that technology in this case was lurking around the corner, like a trained wolf, seeming to be our friend but secretly waiting for an opportunity to leap at our throats.

Before we leap to any such conclusion, though, I think it's important that we look at the conditions that the Airbus encountered. Anyone who's ever wandered too close to a thunder storm--and several years ago I was a passenger on a US domestic flight that did just that-- knows that there are forces contained in a strong storm that stagger the imagination and can defeat any airplane and any crew.

If the storm that 447 encountered was as fierce as it seemed, for all we know the autoflight system merely delayed the inevitable. And if the autopilot were fooled by faulty readings, and that is certainly a possibility, the question needs to be asked: Just how well would the human crew have fared in handling the challenge of flying an airplane in the dark in the middle of a raging storm with bad primary flight data? We do know that they were unable to recover once the autopilot disconnected. Was it too late by then? Maybe.

But we should keep the facts straight here. Airbus jets are built to hand control of the airplane back to the pilot, depending on the "laws" of the situation. The computer normally determines what current law applies, but pIlots can manually take direct control of the airplane, disabling all of its envelope protection. So any argument that the airplane prevented the pilots from doing their job is hard to believe.

Moreover, there has been a great deal of discusson about the fly-by-wire system. Could a strong strike have disabled it? Highly unlikely. The reliability and redundancy of fly-by-wire controls is phenomenally good.

So did electronics doom Flight 447? it is very unlikely.

If we do recover the recorders and successfully extract their data, we will know much more. But even before then, it's clear that the crash of Air France 447 occurred at the intersection between technological and human input.

And I have no doubt that we will be discussing this accident, and its probable or possible causes, for many years to come, and I have little doubt that those discussions will inform our future decisions about what we ask machines to do for us and what we don't. How solidly those decisions are based on fact and not fear remains to be seen. 

Robert Goyer

The Lonely Truth about Air France Flight 447

We don't know what happened to Air France Flight 447, which disappeared in areas of intense thunderstorms a day ago while en route at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic on a flight from Brazil to France. And we might never know. It will all come down to finding the flight data recorder, the so-called Black Box, which records hundreds of flight parameters and which could, doubtless, shed much light on the event or events that presumably brought the big airliner down.

But in the aftermath of the tragedy--and to his credit French President Nicolas Sarcozy is not offering false hope to the families of the victims--there is sure to be a realization among politicians and the public at large of a hard truth: Airliners carrying hundreds of people across oceanic tracks in the Atlantic and Pacific are essentially on their own for much of their flights. 

The way we track airplanes in North American airspace (and throughout most of the world) is by radar, an approach that works nicely on land but is impossible to implement for oceanic flights. Instead, control is achieved by requiring a great deal of separation between airplanes (to increase safety margins) and relying on position reporting (some automated some done through high frequency radio) to 
make an educated guess about where the airplanes are. Computer models are even used to fine tune these guesses. 

Consequently, searchers looking for clues to the fate of Flight 447 were left without a starting point. Instead they pieced together what few clues they have to narrow their search to an area small enough to be promising, and they found the first wreckage within a day. Finding the flight data recorder will not be easy, but it will likely get done. Modern recorders can survive at depths of up to 20,000 feet or greater, sending out its electronic "ping" for weeks before its battery wears out.

Why do we still use such an antiquated method of air traffic "control" over the oceanic tracks that allows airplanes to be on their own for long periods of time? Because, frankly, it works. Airplanes, more than a thousand flights a day, routinely make their way across the seas. And they have been doing this safely for decades.

But the tragedy of Air France 447 underscores an essential fact of travel, that the earth is a big planet, and the oceans comprise two-thirds of it. They are remote and lonely places.

And had we been in instantaneous communications with Flight 447, perhaps through a multi-billion-dollar satellite communications system for tracking oceanic flights, what difference would it have made? We might immediately have  known the nature of what had happened to the ill-fated Airbus 330-200, but we would have been powerless to provide timely help.

The real hope here is not to create a new oceanic air traffic control system, though there will doubtless be calls to do just that. Instead we should hope to discover just what happened to the Airbus on that stormy night, and if something in the huge web of safety that keeps us safe in the air needs to be fixed, direct our attentions there.

By Robert Goyer