Anatomy of a plane crash
The terrible fate of Ethiopian Airlines flight ET 302 is a reminder that for 110 years people have been dying in plane crashes
‘The aeroplane seemed to tip sharply for a fraction of a second, then it started up for about 10 feet [3m]; this was followed by a short, sharp dive and a crash in the field. Instantly the dust rose in a yellow, choking cloud that spread a dull pall over the great white man-made bird that had dashed to its death.”
That was the New York Times account of a plane crash in Fort Myer, Virginia, on September 17 1908, which injured the pilot and killed his passenger, a young Army Signal Corps lieutenant named Thomas Selfridge.
The small irony of the accident — which marked the first time a person had died in a plane crash — was that the pilot was Orville Wright, one of the two brothers who had brought powered flight to the world on a windswept North Carolina beach just five years before.
Tens of thousands of passengers and air crew would follow Selfridge into that bitter hall of fame, most recently last Sunday when a brand-new Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737 Max 8 plunged to earth just six minutes after taking off from Addis Ababa’s Bole Airport, killing all 157 people on board.
Thanks to the unwinning combination of implacable gravity and human frailty, Sunday’s crash will not be the last.
Within two hours of the accident, rumour and speculation were in spate on aviation forums — indeed, one of the forums is called the Professional Pilots Rumor Network. Mixed in with stupefaction and horror was the usual social media bile, with such comments as Ethiopian being a “chicken airline”.
Much of the chatter hoped to link Sunday’s tragedy to the crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 Max 8 into the sea off Jakarta, Indonesia, in October last year. In that disaster, a faulty sensor feeding data to one of the aircraft’s flight management systems, designed to prevent the aircraft from stalling in flight, seems to be the major culprit.
That two brand-new aircraft of the same type should crash in apparently similar circumstances shortly after take-off caused an outbreak of hysteria. Passengers cancelled flights. China grounded its Max 8s. Other countries and airlines followed, including our own Comair, which has one of the new planes and seven more on order.
US President Donald Trump weighed in on Wednesday. “Airplanes are becoming far too complex to fly,” he said. (It’s worth noting that Trump — who briefly owned a failed short-haul passenger airline called Trump Shuttle — happily oversaw a $12.7bn (R183.4bn) deal during his visit to Hanoi last month in which Vietnam was to buy 100 Boeing 737 Max planes, so CNN said.)
The president’s comment misses the point that the supersonic pace of technological advance in aviation has, in fact, made flying safer, simply by reducing the human factor.
For as any air crash investigator will tell you, accidents are rarely the result of a single thing. Usually they are a series of often unimportant events that begin stacking up until the aircraft plunges out of the sky.
Being who we are and unable to fly, we have this prurient fascination with disasters. Rubbernecking is an intensely human trait.
Hanging in the air
My father was a commercially rated pilot and the safest pilot I ever knew. He was fond of telling us kids that there are old pilots, and there are bold pilots, but there are no old, bold pilots. Even so, one rainy day at Margate, KwaZulu-Natal, he made a decision that nearly killed us.
It was 8am on a winter Monday. Three US travellers — a couple and their young daughter — urgently needed to get back to Joburg.
The cloud base was 150m off the deck. Curtains of rain swirled over the airport.
“Met” — the pilots’ weather information service — said the filth extended from sea level to about 2,700m. The conditions meant there was an excellent chance of icing, in which moisture freezes on an aircraft’s wings and propeller and can disrupt the airflow until the aircraft simply stops flying.
Dad was instrument-rated. Still, most days like that he would have taken one look at the sky and said, “No flying today.” But the Americans were insistent. Couldn’t be too bad, could it?
We climbed into the six-seat Piper Cherokee Six — me in the middle row with the anxious little girl — and took off into the gloom.
And so the holes in the Swiss cheese began to line up.
Seconds after take-off, all visual contact with the ground was lost. Rain streaked the windscreen. Looking out of my window, I could barely see the red navigation light on the wing tip.
On and on we climbed. I remember thinking the cloud had to end soon, and still we droned on through the murk.
We were abeam Ladysmith — an hour after take-off — when the Six broke through into clear skies. I almost sobbed; my seatmate was ghostly pale.
The Six was a bit nose-high and the engine sounded like it was running at full throttle. I did not see the sweat on Dad’s face. I did not see the rime ice on the wings’ leading edges or hear the clatter as bits of melting ice flew off the propeller and rattled on the fuselage, but my father did.
Twenty years passed before he told me that when the Six finally staggered out of the murk, the plane was so laden with ice that he was holding the control yoke with just the thumb and forefinger of one hand, afraid that even the slightest extra pressure would upset the fragile airflow over the wings and topple us out of the sky.
“The plane was hanging in the air on her prop alone,” he said. “That was all we had.”
Just a few minutes more in the cloud and I would not be writing this.
For the rest of his flying career, he watched for those things, those decisions that would lead, one after the other, to a crash. He called it “climbing the pyramid”.
Take the accident at Tenerife in the Canary Islands, still the world’s deadliest air crash. As if to spite those who are afraid of flying, it happened on the ground, on March 27 1977, when a KLM Boeing 747 took off into the fog and slammed into a Pan Am 747 taxiing on the same runway. It was a textbook case of climbing the pyramid.
Many flights had been diverted to the Los Rodeos airport after a terrorist incident closed Las Palmas, the airport they usually used. The smaller Los Rodeos airport was so jammed with aircraft that the two 747s would have to taxi up the active runway before turning around to take off.
During a further delay while the KLM 747 took on extra fuel, the fog rolled in.
Instructions from air traffic control were lost when the Pan Am crew made a radio call at the same time.
At the top of the runway, the KLM jumbo’s impatient commander — one of the line’s most senior pilots — swung his aircraft around. Thinking he had been cleared for takeoff, he opened the throttles, sending the laden 747 hurtling into the fog. As the plane gathered speed, the KLM first officer — clearly worried that the Pan Am jumbo was still on the runway — leaned forward and asked twice and too softly: “Is he not clear, that Pan American?”
“Oh yes,” said the captain.
The Pan Am crew saw the lights of the approaching KLM aircraft and frantically tried to steer off the runway.
It was too late — the KLM skipper tried to wrench his plane over the American aircraft but slammed into its upper fuselage before crashing back to the ground.
The rules of aviation safety are written in blood. At Tenerife, they were soaked in Jet A1 aviation fuel and set alight and 583 people died.
The investigation into Sunday’s tragedy will take time, but the way the world is now, we will have a pretty good idea quite soon of what happened. Then we will slowly forget. Until the next plane goes down.