Airline safety record was years in making
Improvements in technology and training behind lack of fatal crashes
WASHINGTON – President Trump took credit Tuesday for commercial aviation’s remarkable safety record last year, but safety experts said the lack of fatal crashes among U.S. passenger airlines resulted from years of effort to improve technology and training.
“Zero deaths in 2017,” Trump tweeted, writing that he had been “very strict” since taking office.
He was describing a safety streak that has continued since the fatal crash of a U.S. passenger airline in February 2009, when Colgan Air Flight 3407 killed 50 people near Buffalo.
The unblemished U.S. safety record was part of the safest year in commercial aviation history worldwide, according to the Aviation Safety Network, a group based in the Netherlands that tracks aircraft accidents.
Ten airline accidents worldwide that had 79 fatalities represented the first year with fewer than 100 deaths among records dating to 1946, according to the group. For comparison, 16 accidents killed 303 people in 2016, according to the group.
“Since 1997, the average number of airliner accidents has shown a steady and persistent decline, for a great deal thanks to the continuing safety-driven efforts by international aviation organizations such as” the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Air Transport Association and the Flight Safety Foundation, said Harro Ranter, president of the Aviation Safety Network.
Terms that Trump used in his tweet could generate quibbles in the industry. Trump cited “commercial airlines” in his tweet, a term that typically refers to both passenger and cargo carriers.
One of the 10 fatal accidents last year was an Air Cargo Carriers crash at Charleston-Yeager Airport in West Virginia, which killed the two pilots on the Shorts 330-200 aircraft on May 5.
Though safety has improved for years, measures adopted in recent years — and a Trump proposal to privatize airtraffic control — remain contentious.
The Federal Aviation Administration adopted three major rules to boost safety after the Colgan crash. One of the rules lengthened mandatory rest periods between shifts for passenger airline pilots but not cargo pilots, a disparity that’s disputed among pilots and some lawmakers.
Another rule required recurrent training for pilots, including on how to avoid stalls in flight, as happened in crashes of the Colgan plane and Air France Flight 447 over the Atlantic later in 2009.
The third rule derived from the Colgan crash required co-pilots to have the same 1,500 hours of flight experience as captains. Fewer hours are required for military pilots and college graduates.
Airlines and lawmakers have criticized the provision, saying that it worsens a shortage of qualified pilots and that classroom education could provide adequate training.
Trump’s nominee to the National Transportation Safety Board, Bruce Landsberg, faced harsh questions at his Senate confirmation hearing for saying he preferred performance-based qualifications rather than an arbitrary requirement for training hours.
Aviation safety experts said the reduction in accidents was a result of years of improvements in training, tech- nology and management, rather than “very strict” action taken by Trump.
“This has been a longtime process,” said Seth Young, director of the Center for Aviation Studies at Ohio State University. “I don’t think we can point to anything that we did in 2017 that resulted in zero fatals in United States airlines. But 2017 was evidence of a solid decade of improvements.”
The FAA is upgrading air-traffic control to track planes with satellitebased GPS that is more precise than ground-based radar. Better weather forecasts allow pilots to avoid storms.
At airports, pavement has been engineered to crumble and halt a plane that veers off a runway. Before becoming vice president, Mike Pence learned the value of this engineering when his campaign plane skidded off a runway at New York’s LaGuardia airport in October 2016, but no one was injured.
Among management efforts, airlines work with the FAA to identify risks and fix them before an accident can occur. A pilot, for example, might report when an aircraft alarm went off unexpectedly or where an airport has confusing signage.
Mark Millam, who manages safety programs as vice president of technical at the Flight Safety Foundation, said a recent effort focused on runway friction testing and data collection to better chart how rain or snow affects different types of planes. This sort of research could prevent even a non-fatal accident like the incident in which a Delta Air Lines flight ran off a slick runway at LaGuardia in March 2015. “You have to focus on a number of risks, fatal and non-fatal,” Millam said.
Sharing information between airlines and regulators is key to identifying risks and fixing them, Millam said.
“We’d like to see the world get that level, where you’re talking about fatal accidents the way you talk about a 50year or 100-year storm,” Millam said.
“We’re never going to be 100% perfect, but we’re so close that all we can do is think about what the next safety issue is,” Young said.