Perhaps it is better onboard technology, or maybe it’s better trained personnel but pilot error is much less of a factor in US airliner crashes now than it was in the early 1980s, a new study says.
While the overall rate of airline mishaps remained stable, the proportion of mishaps involving pilot error decreased 40% said researchers at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.
The report was issued before NASA yesterday released partial results of a massive air-safety survey of airline pilots who repeatedly complained about fatigue, problems with air-traffic controllers, airport security, and the layouts of runways and taxiways. According to a Washington Post article, NASA released a heavily redacted version of the survey on its Web site after the agency heard tons of criticism about its initial decision to withholding of the results last month for fear of harming airlines' bottom lines.
NASA Administrator Michael Griffin told reporters in a conference call that the agency had no plans to study the database for trends. He said NASA conducted the survey only to determine whether gathering information from pilots in such a way was worthwhile. The NASA database, which included more than 10,000 pages of information, was based on extensive telephone polling of airline and general aviation pilots about incidents ranging from engine failures and bird strikes to fires onboard planes and encounters with severe turbulence.
Meanwhile, the Johns Hopkins study examined 558 airline mishaps between 1983 and 2002. The researchers also looked at the circumstances of pilot error, which they characterized as carelessness on the part of the pilot and crew, flawed decision-making, mishandling of the aircraft or poor crew interaction.
The researchers classified a mishap as being any U.S. airline safety event that the NTSB officially recorded as an accident, because it involved serious injury to one or more persons or significant damage to an airliner. It is likely that the reduction in pilot errors has continued since 2002, experts said though there have been accidents linked to pilot error since. Last year's Comair crash at Lexington, Ky. That killed 49 people was attributed to pilot error.
Other key findings of the study included:
· Mishaps related to bad weather—the most common decision-making error—dropped 76 %.
· Mishaps caused by mishandling wind or runway conditions declined 78 %.
· Mishaps caused by poor crew interaction declined 68 %.
· Pilot error was most common during taxiing, takeoff, final approach and landing of the aircraft. · The mishap rate increased the most when aircraft were being pushed back from the gate or standing still, but pilot error was least common in such mishaps.
· Mishaps during takeoff declined 70 %. While the overall rate of pilot error mishaps declined, the reductions were offset by increases in mishaps that did not involve error by pilots; some involved errors by air traffic control or ground crews. The researchers also noted that there is a need to improve safety during the times when the aircraft is motionless on the ground or being pushed back from the gate. The study found that mishaps during these times more than doubled from a rate of 2.5 to 6 mishaps per 10 million flights.
The findings are published in the January 2007 edition of Aviation, Space, and Environmental Medicine.
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So
Yes, pilot errors happen, driving errors happen, programming errors happen. Flying is still one of the most safe ways to travel and, statistically, safer than before. This has been all over the internet and I think the reporting has been "a little" too much on sensational, typical TV, style. I know a little of commercial airlines, ground support and air-traffic controlling, and what if the "root cause" is not the people but bad business practice and bad business decisions? Pilots are as little in control of their environment as for ex. programmers so why not to study what might be wrong with infrastructure first?
NASA Is Unsafe
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
January 2, 2008
Contact:
Tom Sullivan, “Quiet Rockland”: 1-845-480-1088, “http://www.quietrockland.com”
John J. Tormey III, Esq.: 1-212-410-4142
ROCKLAND COUNTY, NEW YORK CITIZEN GROUP “QUIET ROCKLAND” CALLS ON U.S. CONGRESS AND THE GAO TO INVESTIGATE NASA’S ISSUANCE OF ITS $11 MILLION, 16,000-PAGE “AIR SAFETY SURVEY”
Rockland County, NY - January 2, 2008: Livid that NASA and the FAA now appear to have acted in concert towards a common goal of concealing vital air traffic safety information from flyers and others on the ground, and in solidarity with a call for further hearings by Chairman of House Science and Technology Committee, Rep. Bart Gordon (D-TN), suburban New York activist group “Quiet Rockland” today called upon Congress and its investigative arm the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to examine and compel correction of NASA’s just-issued “Air Safety Survey”.
John J. Tormey III, attorney with “Quiet Rockland”, said: “NASA Administrator Michael Griffin admitted that his agency’s release of the Survey’s data occurred late on New Year’s Eve. He then assured all of us that NASA ‘didn’t deliberately choose to release on the slowest news day of the year’. Griffin and NASA doth protest too much. The NASA survey data was issued in a redacted and deliberately-indecipherable manner. NASA previously sought to withhold the totality of this same data at least once before, when NASA rejected a prior AP FOIA request for it. Of course NASA sought to bury its New Year’s information-release amongst the champagne corks and the dropping ball. Griffin’s suggestion otherwise insults the intelligence of the American public.
“In response, Quiet Rockland schedules this press release to arrive on what should be one of the busiest back-to-work news days of the new year. 2008 will be the year that we mandate transparency of government. We cannot trust NASA management to communicate fairly or candidly to the American people. It is pathetic that this once-majestic agency of the Apollo era, no longer able to put astronauts on the Moon, and facing difficulty keeping a number of its recently-launched spacecraft intact, now cannot even terrestrially adopt precision or seriousness of purpose beyond that of Captain Anthony Nelson, Major Roger Healy, and Barbara Eden’s ‘Jeannie’. How dare NASA play space games with our safety!
“The organizational ineptitude of NASA management is particularly threatening in light of yet another recent runway incident between two planes over the Holidays, once again at LAX, involving pilot miscommunications with an air traffic controller. NASA’s ostensible collaboration with its cousin-agency FAA towards concealing safety information from Americans, is confluent with the overall objective of the aero-mercantile complex to over-schedule flights and over-saturate our skies. With focus only upon the almighty buck, these un-checked rogue agencies continue to act at the expense of citizen and environmental safety and health. FAA’s “NY/NJ/PHL Airspace Redesign” is another component of this same harmful aviation special-interest plan. That Redesign must be and will be defeated by citizen outcry such as that voiced by ‘Quiet Rockland’, not to mention the pending federal court litigations and Congressional action against it, taken in the interests of making our skies and our homes safer.
“NASA and Administrator Michael Griffin indicate that they have no intention to analyze or study, much less further report to the public or press upon the 16,000-plus pages of raw data in the ‘Air Safety Survey’. ‘Quiet Rockland’ therefore asks that Congress and the GAO: (1) audit and investigate NASA’s purposeful mishandling and cheeky and contemptuous New Year’s Eve issuance of purposefully-obfuscated and misleading data; and (2) order NASA to marshal and digest the Survey data and report to Congress, the GAO, and the media on it, in a fully-intelligible writing, within thirty calendar days after the date of this press release. Given NASA’s proclivity to hide from the truth, ‘Quiet Rockland’ suggests Groundhog Day as the most fitting date imaginable for that next report’s issuance.
“Of the current Survey, Griffin says ‘It’s hard for me… to see any data the traveling public would care about or ought to care about’. ‘Quiet Rockland’ assures Griffin and NASA that anecdotes extracted from the current Survey such as “pilot difficulties in talking to controllers in busy airspace’; air traffic control “capacity inadequate to handle traffic load”; “too many people on the frequency…causing a safety problem”; and perhaps worst of all, “pilots asleep” on the “flight deck”, are most definitely “cared about” by the traveling public - and will indubitably also be “cared about” by the many travelers who comprise Congress, the GAO, and the federal judiciary.”