As much as metal on the ground, these intangible elements of realpolitik become part of the story, and the growth of international air travel means that even more than in the past, an accident investigation will involve multiple governments. Their competing interests are thought to provide balance and to ensure an unbiased result. But what I say to Susan Williams, I say to you: these cases caution us to be judicious with our optimism.
1 Now Zambia.
2 Now the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
3 Later Flying Tigers.
4 Now Lubumbashi.
5 Feith retired from the NTSB in 2001.
6 First Officer Lucas did not attend the briefing.
7 Anne Cassin went on to become a flight instructor and commercial airline pilot for Mount Cook Airline, in Christchurch.
PART THREE
Fallibility
It’s slips, lapses, mistakes, and violations. It’s tedious because it is so banal. It’s like every day, it’s like breathing, it’s like dying. There’s nothing remarkable about it.
— PSYCHOLOGY PROFESSOR JAMES REASON
Progress and Unexpected Consequences
In the summer of 2011, I spent a week in Dubai with a hundred enthusiastic twenty-somethings training to be flight attendants for Emirates Airline. I was writing a first-person article about how Emirates is changing the industry by bringing glamour back to air travel.
At the end of my stay, I flew back to New York on an economy ticket, but I didn’t stay in the back of the plane for long. Recognizing a pin I was wearing that indicated I had attended a secret initiation ceremony for Emirates employees, a curious flight attendant moved me to an empty spot in business class. I was digging into a bowl of salted almonds and trying not to get too much grease on the controls of my wide-screen TV when the woman came back with even better news. I was being moved yet again, now into first class, with an even cushier seat and a bigger TV screen. I wasn’t there long before the spa attendant—yep, you read that right—came to schedule my appointment to bathe in what was, at the time, the world’s only commercial airline in-flight showers. Frankly, it didn’t sound especially appealing, but I reasoned that such an opportunity would not likely come my way a second time.
Standing in the altogether in the narrow cylinder watching the timer-activated faucet counting down my five-minute water limit, I marveled at how much had changed in air travel. And you should, too.
The Airbus A380 on which I was flying takes off weighing as much as 1.3 million pounds. It carries 555 people in three classes, or as many as 853 in the all-economy version. It is a far, far cry from the first airliners, like the canvas-covered Avro 10 Fokker with wicker seats for eight passengers that was flown by Australia National Airways in the early ’30s, or the Martin 130 flying boat with sleeping berths for the long transpacific routes flown by Pan Am just a few years later.
The twenty-first-century airliner soars seven miles above the earth, a warm bubble protecting travelers from the dry, frigid, thin troposphere just beyond the cabin walls. The French-built, shower-equipped Airbus A380; the equally revolutionary American-built Boeing 787 Dreamliner, which is so sophisticated it is called a computer network with wings; Canada’s new Bombardier CSeries; and Brazil’s growing menu of Embraer E-Jets, demonstrate what the best engineering minds can produce. Each new model adds to the knowledge base. Even when the engineers err, their mistakes become bricks in the foundation for the new and improved model.
Err is such a tidy word, suggesting manageability. But to err when you are an aeronautical engineer is to unleash mayhem. Planes that do not stop upon landing, that issue alerts that confuse pilots, that explode and catch fire or pitch down unexpectedly—these are the unanticipated products of progress in aviation, and it has been that way since Wilbur Wright told the Western Society of Engineers in Chicago in 1901, “If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial.”
Those tricks beset the Wrights on September 17, 1908. During a demonstration flight of the Wright Flyer for the U.S. Army at Fort Myer, Virginia, Orville Wright lost control of the plane, and it hit the ground. He was injured, and his passenger, Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge, was killed. It didn’t take long to figure out what happened: A propeller blade had split, hitting a bracing wire. That, in turn, tugged on the rudder, nosing the plane down. As planes became more sophisticated, the factors leading to catastrophe became more numerous and more difficult to diagnose.
No example is more cited than the fatal design defects built into the world’s first jetliner, the de Havilland Comet. The British-designed mid-twentieth-century airplane wasn’t just the first passenger jet; it was a spectacularly innovative design with four motors tucked smartly into the wings. Even today it looks futuristic.
The story of the Comet focuses on its propensity to burst apart in flight, its most dramatic and well-publicized flaw, but it had other design issues. Accidents prompted changes, and lessons were learned. What has not changed is how difficult it is for designers to know in advance all the ways an idea on the drawing board will function in reality.
This is not surprising. To create an airplane is complex, involving layers of decisions that become locked into systems that are inextricable parts of the whole. Undoing one feature is like trying to remove eggs after they have been beaten into cake batter.
In the case of the Comet, a number of problems emerged soon after passengers started flying on it. On two occasions the plane failed to take off, careening instead off the end of the runway. Three more events were even more mysterious: the planes simply broke up in the sky.
De Havilland may have been the first jet maker to go back to the drawing board, but it was far from the last. The flap handle on the DC-8, the cargo door on the DC-10, the fuel tanks of nearly all Boeing airliners—these and other components have been reexamined, reconfigured, or redesigned.
In what must be one of the fastest redos in history, Boeing modified the battery system on its 787 Dreamliner after the worldwide grounding of the fleet for nearly four months in 2013. Relentless news coverage about the things Boeing overlooked prompted the chief engineer for the 787 Dreamliner, Mike Sinnett, to admit that revolutionary creations are never fully understood at the outset. “Unknown unknowns,” as he called them, lurk within, and the process of transitioning to the known is a messy and sometimes unpleasant affair.
Nearly every mishap-induced airliner redesign features a Jeremiah, the early detector of the “unknown unknown” who voices concern about the problem, but who may or may not be heeded. For the Comet, the first Jeremiah was Capt. Harry Foote in 1952.
The thirty-six-year-old pilot flew for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC).1 He worked with aviation writer and fellow BOAC captain, the late David Beaty. In his book Strange Encounters: Mysteries of the Air, Beaty concludes that Captain Foote’s suicide at the age of fifty-three was because of his role as the first pilot to crash the world’s first jet-powered airliner.
The crash happened just six months after the Comet’s first flight with fare-paying passengers, on May 2, 1952. That historic event was followed just a few weeks later by the first Comet flight with royalty on board. Queen Elizabeth; her sister, Princess Margaret; and the Queen Mother had a four-hourfly-around as guests of de Havilland.
All this proclaimed that the Comet wasn’t just a new airplane; it was the vehicle that was going to fly England into the future. The postwar nation was getting back on its feet and taking to the air. British products were flying into the global marketplace.
And why not? Jet technology originated in Britain, the invention of a young Royal Air Force cadet named Frank Whittle, who patented the idea for a gas turbine engine while still in his twenties. And though the Germans were the first to create a jet that actually powered an aircraft, Whittle went on to help develop the engine used for the DH-100 Vampire, England’s fi
rst single-engine jet fighter. With this technological advantage, the British could overtake the American plane builders Lockheed, Douglas Aircraft, and Boeing, who were selling their slow and noisy propeller planes to airlines around the world.
In 1947 the British government turned to the Vampire’s creator, Geoffrey de Havilland, to make the first jetliner. It took less than a year for the company to detail the new plane’s attributes, and they were astonishing. The airplane would be light, with a thin aluminum skin. Some sections would be glued rather than riveted, saving the weight of metal connectors. And the plane would fly high. Where the DC-6s and DC-7s and the Lockheed Constellations cruised at twenty-four to twenty-eight thousand feet, the Comet would soar at thirty-six to forty thousand feet. In the thinner air of higher altitude, the plane would encounter less drag and would be more fuel efficient.
The downside of flying seven miles above the earth was that the cabin would require an unprecedented level of pressurization. An interior atmosphere equal to about eight thousand feet above sea level meant putting eight and a half pounds of pressure on every square inch of the walls separating outside from in.
More pressure and a thinner structure were two decisions that would factor in the disasters soon to come, but they were not the only ones. Those new jet engines would subtly alter some basic characteristics of flight and have their own repercussions.
When the war ended, military aviators filled the cockpits of BOAC’s airliners. Among them was Harry Foote, who flew the four-engine Lancaster heavy bomber for the Royal Air Force. He had 5,868 hours in his logbook and was considered one of the airline’s elite pilots, according to Beaty, who wrote that only the best were selected to fly the technological marvel that was the Comet 1. Of course, even the elite would have relatively few hours in the new plane. Foote had just 245 on the Comet on October 26, 1952, the day that would mark the beginning of the end for Harry Foote and for the Comet 1.
Unknown Unknowns
It was just before 6:00 p.m. on October 26, 1952, the sun had already set, and rain was falling when Captain Foote began the Comet’s takeoff roll for the second leg of a journey from London to Johannesburg. Eight crew and thirty-five passengers were on board the plane, registered as G-ALYZ. As the plane accelerated on the runway at Rome’s Ciampino airport, the pilots watched for the needle on the speed gauge to reach eighty knots. When it did, Foote pulled back on the yoke and felt the nose of the airplane rise. The main landing gear was still on the ground, as it should have been, as the plane continued to accelerate. At one hundred twenty knots, Foote pulled the control column back again to lift the jetliner into the air.
So far, it felt like every other takeoff, so he called for the next step. “Undercarriage up,” he said to the first officer. Before the man had time to comply, however, the left wing dropped and the plane turned left. The plane was no longer gaining speed, and the pilots felt a buffeting sensation, the precursor to a stall. The Comet flopped back onto the runway, forward momentum now propelling it into the darkness.
Foote pulled back on the throttle, cutting fuel to the engines as quickly as he could, but what had caused the plane to slow was the braking effect of the main landing gear being torn away by a mound of earth. The plane stopped just ten yards from the perimeter fence. Mercifully, there was no fire, though one wing had ruptured, spilling fuel onto the ground and sending fumes into the night. Passengers were shaken but uninjured.
By November, an accident investigation concluded that Foote’s technique, lifting the nose too high on rotation, was the cause of the crash. The pilot argued that it hadn’t happened that way. The airplane had become airborne after rotation, but had failed to climb and instead sank onto the ground, nose still high.
Many forces were working against Foote. The first crash of the highly touted Comet was the kind of news money can’t bury. Banner headlines and news photos showed the gearless, semi-wingless, entirely hapless G-ALYZ as it lay on the far end of Ciampino airport. Even those at BOAC who sympathized with Foote’s argument would not help him in his effort to reopen the examination, which had acquitted the plane in less than a month by convicting the pilot.
Then, just four months later, Capt. Charles Pentland of Canadian Pacific Airlines had a similar problem getting the plane off the ground. What started out as an uneventful takeoff roll from the airport in Karachi, Pakistan, ended in a deadly inferno. The plane was not carrying passengers, only four crew members who worked for the airline and six technicians employed by de Havilland, all of whom were killed.
Canadian Pacific was taking delivery of the plane it had already named Empress of Hawaii, because it was going to provide the Sydney-to-Honolulu leg of the airline’s transpacific service to Vancouver. The Empress was making a hopscotch journey. Day one was London to Karachi. The second day began at 3:00 a.m. On an already hot and steamy morning, the crew prepared for the flight from Pakistan to Rangoon, Burma.2
More than half a century later and after decades of research into how to enhance pilot performance, it is apparent how many aspects of the Empress flight created additional hazards for the pilots. Most significant, neither of the two men flying the Empress had even the little experience flying jets that BOAC’s Comet pilots had.
Captain Pentland, the airline’s manager of overseas operations, and Capt. North Sawle, thirty-nine, each had thousands of hours of flight time, but the Comet was their first experience in a jetliner.
In his book Bush Pilot with a Briefcase, the biography of Canadian Pacific’s then-president Grant McConachie, author Ronald Keith describes Pentland’s and Sawle’s Comet training as a “crash course.” The terrible pun notwithstanding, even the instructors at the de Havilland pilot school in Hatfield, England, considered the men novices during their time there.
Ironically, part of what made them weak in the Comet was the depth of their experience on other aircraft. Pentland had been a pilot with BOAC and Imperial Airways before joining CPA. Captain Sawle was CPA’s chief pilot for overseas operations. He had been an aircraft mechanic, a plane builder, and a float and ski plane pilot who in his youth had flown mail, supplies, and passengers around some of the least hospitable areas of Canada’s frozen north.
What Pentland and Sawle learned at Hatfield “clashed with flying instincts formed by many thousands of hours at the controls of conventional planes,” according to Keith. On the night of the crash that killed them, Keith wrote that “neither had experienced a night take-off in the jet, nor had they flown it heavily loaded.”
Yet the company not only selected these two to fly an unfamiliar plane on a globe-spanning delivery flight without any relief pilots, but McConachie had ratcheted up the pressure by trying to set a publicity-generating London-to-Sydney speed record. It was a decision Pentland called “bloody rough on us cockpit help.”
Aviation at the time was a swashbuckling, take-no-prisoners business, with airline bosses such as Canadian Pacific’s McConachie, Pan Am’s Juan Trippe, TWA’s Howard Hughes, and American’s C. R. Smith. These men presided over equally driven superpilots who claimed to thrive on the knife’s edge, impervious to the fatigue and fear that affected ordinary men. It was an unrealistic dynamic, ridden with risk. Suffice it to say, Pentland and Sawle were set up to fail even if the plane had not harbored the many design flaws it did.
Loaded with two tons of fuel in the wing tanks, Empress of Hawaii was taxied into position by Captain Pentland and prepared for takeoff. Pentland set the brakes and advanced the throttles, feeding fuel to the four engines. He watched the gauges, waiting for the engines to gain sufficient power so that when he released the brakes, the heavy plane would pop off the mark and begin the takeoff roll.
Moving down the runway, the plane passed eighty-five knots. Pentland pulled back on the yoke, raising the nose of the airplane. He expected the acceleration to continue, but the plane instead lumbered on at one hundred knots, twenty-two knots below what was required to get it into the air.
Whether because of fatigue o
r habit, Pentland seemed to have forgotten that takeoff in the Comet requires a different procedure. At rotation, the nose is elevated slightly, just three to six degrees: anything steeper risks making the airplane stall, even while it is still on the ground.
The plane had already consumed more than a half a mile of runway and was still far from achieving takeoff speed. Concerned, Pentland raised the nose even higher, but the plane went no faster. At that moment something must have clicked. Pentland lowered the nose, and the wheel hit the runway. Only then did the plane start to speed up. He needed just a few seconds of acceleration now, but those were seconds he did not have.
The plane was going too slow to fly and too fast to stop when the Comet reached the end of the runway. The right landing gear hit a culvert, causing the plane to pivot sideways into a dry canal and then slam against the forty-foot embankment on the other side. The brand-new Comet shattered into pieces and erupted into flames as two tons of fuel burst out of the broken tanks in an explosive mist.
This second event, now with fatalities, exposed to a wide audience the first of the Comet’s “unknown unknowns.” Harry Foote was aware that something was wrong from his firsthand experience of four months earlier. The official report may have blamed his piloting skills, but it was notable that de Havilland revised the takeoff procedures for the airplane after his event.
The new procedures required the pilot to rotate at eighty knots and then lower the nose back to the ground while increasing speed. That was the takeoff procedure taught to Pentland and Sawle when they arrived for Comet training early in 1953.
In an article for American Aviation, William Perreault and Anthony Vandyk explained that unlike with piston planes, where the propellers “create a bubble of compressed air close to the ground that nudges the wing up,” the Comet wing with its jet engines did not get the benefit of this cushion. The engineers at de Havilland had discovered “a downward push which can make it stall,” the article said. Pilots were instructed to nurse the plane off the ground by raising, lowering, and then slightly raising the nose again at takeoff speed, a technique called the “Foote takeoff.”
The Crash Detectives Page 12