Monday, October 11, 2010

Fear of Flying?


The Black Box: All-New Cockpit Voice Recorder Accounts of Inflight Accidents, edited by Malcom MacPherson (TL553.5 .B23 1998). is a collection of transcript excerpts from twenty-eight cockpit voice recorder tapes from the 1980s and '90s. At first the premise of the book seemed unbearably ghoulish. But as a reviewer for The New York Times says, “Once the book has caught your attention, it is hard to throw off its spell."

The editor, a novelist and journalist, began collecting the flight records in a not surprisingly unsuccessful attempt to alleviate his fear of flying. Each chapter contains a description of the situation within and outside the airplane before the accident, excerpts from the actual transcript, and finally an explanation describing what caused the accident and how many people died.

Metal fatigue is the most common cause of the disasters. There are also mid-air collisions, birds, being shot down by the Russians, flying into a mountain, pilot inattention, fires in the cargo hold, and undetermined. One pilot, although aware he was low on fuel, for some reason didn’t want to let the air traffic controllers know this.

The pilots, co-pilots, flight engineers, and flight attendants are reassuringly serious about their work even before the planes get into trouble. In most cases, there’s little banter and a lot of pre-flight checklisting, which would be boring except that we know what the flight crew does not: that really bad trouble is just a few seconds away.

It’s hard for me to imagine how the crew members maintained their composure moments before disaster, but even most of the pilots who are clearly to blame seem relatively unflappable, with only one crew reacting as I would have done:

CAPTAIN: Four twenty-seven, emergency!
COPILOT: [Screams]
CAPTAIN: Pull …
COPILOT: Oh …
CAPTAIN: Pull … Pull …
COPILOT: God …
CAPTAIN: [Screams]
COPILOT: No …

The last chapter is the longest: MacPherson explains that he has ended with the 1989 Sioux City, Iowa, disaster because “of what it says about the professionalism and sometimes heroism or airlines’ crews.” Of the pilot, he says,
He knew the predicament, yet he rose above it, especially when a representative of United Airlines’ System Aircraft Maintenance in San Francisco refused to believe what the crew of Flight 232 was telling him; his insistence that all three hydraulic systems could not have been destroyed became a running joke for the flight crew in the ongoing emergency.

MacPherson points out what we all know—that flying is far safer than driving. There are some years when no one at all dies in a commercial airplane in the United States.The book also confirms something else I’ve long suspected: that flying is much more difficult than driving, and it’s a good thing that the people who do it have a lot of training and experience.

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