Despite Asiana Crash, Flying Is Getting Safer Except for One Factor

asiana plane crash site

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Right now, looking at the aftermath of the crash of Asiana Flight 214, it may seem a bit of a stretch to see beyond it and assert that, in fact, it demonstrates how much safer flying has become.

This was, after all, the first commercial airliner crash in the U.S. to kill people since the crash of Colgan Air Flight 3407 near Buffalo in February 2009. Set this against the fact that there are more than 30,000 flights every day in the U.S. carrying around two million passengers and it’s clear that statistically flying is a lot safer than driving to grandma’s on thanksgiving.

This achievement has only come about through a relentless process of identifying and then trying to eliminate the causes of air crashes. In the first decades of the jet age these were frequently mechanical. Jet engines were nothing like as reliable as they are now and structural weaknesses in the airplanes themselves had to be discovered and rectified.

Eventually, as the machines themselves became more and more reliable, the focus of crash research shifted to pilots—the human factor. The scientists who make the human factor their specialty are always at pains to say that blame is not part of their vocabulary—they are not out to expose bad pilots but to better understand how pilots behave in relation to the airplane and, particularly, how to design systems to protect pilots from making errors.

The basics of keeping an airplane safely in the air are physical and remain as they were at the dawn of flight. There are precise parameters to be observed for every type of airplane: the speed it must reach in order to take off, the maintenance of its stability as it climbs to a cruise altitude, reaching and remaining at that cruise altitude.

When an airliner begins its descent for landing it is traveling at anything between 400mph and 600mph. For landing it must slow to well below 200mph. That means that as it slows and descends it is, technically, shedding a lot of energy in the form of losing its forward momentum. And there comes the point on final approach when a critical balance has to be struck between maintaining enough energy to remain airborne and stable and losing enough speed to make the touchdown.

This is why landings demand the most of technology and of the pilot. The modern cockpit has an array of technical aids to help. One previously persistent cause of crashes on final approach, called “controlled flight into terrain”, meaning that the pilot hits something like a hill or mountain through flying too low, has been virtually eliminated by automatic terrain avoidance warnings.

In the past few years flight safety experts have become concerned that “loss of control” accidents have been top of what they call “killer events.” Most of these incidents have occurred during approach and landing. The Colgan Air crash involved a needless loss of control on approach to Buffalo. The recent crash of a Lion Air Boeing 737 in Indonesia involved loss of control by an inexperienced copilot—and whatever the final verdict on Asiana Flight 214 all the evidence makes it clear that this, too, involved a loss of control by the pilots that led to an aerodynamic stall warning. (The loss of Air France Flight 447 over the South Atlantic, with 228 people aboard, involved a loss of control in an aerodynamic stall but at cruise altitude of 36,000 feet.)

When a pilot senses that things are not right on a final approach—because he is not confident that airplane is lined up correctly to the runway, because weather conditions have worsened or because there is a warning of other airplanes being too close—he should opt for a “go-around” – abort the approach, power up and return to a holding altitude until ready to make another approach.

Go-arounds are relatively rare, only one or two per 1,000 arrivals. For short-haul pilots that translates one per year, for long-haul pilots as few as once in every five years. Had the crew of Asiana Flight 214 realized in time that they were wrongly configured for a safe landing, they could have made a safe go-around—instead, as it is being reported, the pilots only called for that go-around 1.5 seconds before the tail crashed into the sea wall.

In the end, however formidable the technology in the cockpit, the final resource is human, the proficiency, judgment and experience of the pilot.