NTSB’s approach to near-disasters at SFO troubling

The National Transportation Safety Board cannot fully investigate two close calls at San Francisco International Airport and a similar incident in Atlanta — and, most disturbing, it doesn’t seem to care.

Well over 1,000 passengers were endangered by the three events. The first SFO incident nearly made the airport the second-worst aviation disaster site in history, behind only New York’s World Trade Center when two hijacked planes plowed into it on Sept. 11, 2001.

Yet the NTSB is unconcerned that critical evidence — the tapes on the cockpit voice recorders — was not preserved. It says it’s not interested in fixing inadequate federal regulations that allow their erasure.

That’s appalling. Jim Hall, former NTSB chairman, calls the recordings “critical” to investigations, especially in such close calls. “It reflects the conversation in the cockpit of how this airplane might have ended up in this position,” he says.

Hall says requirements for saving cockpit conversations must be tightened. Rep. Mark DeSaulnier, D-Concord, agrees and has called for a congressional hearing to address the issue. It cannot come soon enough.

The three near-misses not only expose the gaping hole in federal regulations, they also raise the basic question of why the airline industry is allowed to continue using decades-old technology that quickly records over itself.

In the latest incident, a Delta Air Lines plane on Nov. 29 veered from its assigned runway at HartsfieldJackson Atlanta International Airport and lined up with a taxiway occupied by another full jetliner. The incoming aircraft dropped to 60 feet off the ground before aborting its landing, according to the NTSB.

It was eerily similar to the two San Francisco incidents, revealed by investigative reporter Matthias Gafni. In the first, Air Canada pilots mistook the taxiway for the runway where they were supposed to land. The plane dipped to 59 feet off the ground and came within seconds of slamming into four fully fueled aircraft on the ground, endangering an estimated 1,000 passengers.

In the second, an Air Canada plane landed Oct. 22 at SFO despite repeated orders from an air traffic controller to abort because of concern that another plane had not cleared the runway.

In each case, we’ll never know what the pilots were saying as they made their near-deadly approaches. In such cases, there is no requirement to preserve the conversations on voice recorders, which are on continuous loops that tape over themselves after 30 minutes to two hours of flight time, depending on the specific equipment.

Federal regulations require an airline to preserve the voice and data recorders after serious incidents. But the definition of a serious incident involves a plane landing or departing on a taxiway, incorrect runway or other area not designed as a runway. None of the incidents technically met that definition.

The NTSB is uninterested in fixing that. Fortunately, others, including Hall and DeSaulnier, are taking up the cause.