How Aircraft Accidents, just like the DC Crash, Are Investigated

How Aircraft Accidents, just like the DC Crash, Are Investigated

By Gary Stix edited by Dean Visser

A video digicam on the Kennedy Middle in Washington, D.C., captures a chiaroscuro picture of the night time panorama within the nation’s capital. A banking airplane approaches above. It strikes towards the digicam after which passes uneventfully out of view. Off within the distance, a shiny blip within the sky strikes slowly ahead. A a lot smaller pinpoint of sunshine approaches from behind at a faster tempo. Inside just a few seconds, the smaller plane overtakes the bigger one and an excellent flash illuminates the night time sky lots of of ft above the Potomac River.

Final night time’s collision of a Sikorsky UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter with American Eagle Flight 5342 is feared to have resulted within the deaths of the industrial airplane’s 64 passengers and crew, in addition to the helicopter’s three U.S. Military service members. Understandably, the incident astonished each consultants and the flying public. Touring in U.S. airspace has typically been a remarkably safe expertise for a few years. The final home accident that concerned a industrial airliner and resulted in main fatalities dates again to 2009.

Ronald Reagan Washington Nationwide Airport stays a problem for pilots, who should cope with each the heavy visitors and the restricted airspace close to areas such because the White Home and the Pentagon. The Potomac is the positioning of 1 earlier main accident: in 1982 an Air Florida flight crashed right into a bridge whereas taking off in a storm after which plummeted into the frozen river, killing 74 of the 79 folks onboard and 4 motorists on the bridge. In recent times, close to misses at Reagan Nationwide have occurred on the bottom, with aircraft paths intersecting dangerously on the runway in a number of incidents recorded by the Federal Aviation Administration.

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How do air security officers proceed with investigating such a serious accident? Scientific American put that query to Kristy Kiernan, affiliate director of the Boeing Middle for Aviation and Aerospace Security at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical College.

[An edited transcript of the interview follows.]

Accidents in industrial aviation are uncommon, and I feel lots of people are questioning how we’ll discover out what actually occurred in yesterday’s incident.

There are very clearly outlined processes for this. The NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] has a “go team” that’s launched instantly, and as soon as the rescue and restoration operations are winding down, the eye turns to perishable proof—issues that could be affected by the surroundings or by the motion and restoration of the wreckage. In order that’s an important factor, to gather the perishable proof. Clearly, as soon as the scene has been secured and it’s attainable to function safely, there are a variety of hazards at an accident scene, so safety of the people who find themselves doing the rescue and restoration and the investigation can also be an essential issue.

iSo what comes after that?

Clearly, the so-called black packing containers, the voice and information recorders, are crucial to get better. These could be current on the regional jets. I don’t know what sort of recording gadgets are on the UH-60 [helicopter]. However generally, the black packing containers are a giant focus. Then there are numerous teams which might be convened—operations, upkeep, air-traffic management, climate—and all of those teams, together with human components consultants examine their explicit space.

So, as an illustration, in air-traffic management, you’ll be securing all of the air-traffic management radar and the tape of all of the communications. Equally, for operations, for each the Military and for PSA Airways [the regional American Airlines subsidiary involved in the crash], there will probably be a group of proof associated to the folks concerned within the operation of the plane, together with their coaching data. If issues usually are not as they need to be, the trouble in a selected space is proportional to the function {that a} explicit truth performs within the investigation. So an increasing number of assets will probably be deployed towards the areas the place the investigation is progressing. All that takes time. We’ve got a quick information cycle, and the general public ought to get data as quickly as they’ll, however it’s higher to attend for good data than to provide in to hypothesis and opinion, which frankly, have completely no place in aviation.

Are you able to describe what has been discovered from pursuing previous investigations?

I’d say is that now we have layers of security that exist. And so, for instance, there are procedures when it comes to the place airplanes are within the sky and what altitudes they’re at. Then now we have applied sciences. We’ve got collision avoidance techniques. We’ve got what’s known as ADS-B, Automated Dependent Surveillance-Broadcast. That’s one other instrument that’s used to assist in situational consciousness of the place different plane are within the airspace. We’ve got extremely educated air-traffic controllers, and in quite a few cases prior to now, they’ve been instrumental in avoiding midair collisions. Then now we have extremely skilled pilots on the flight deck of the regional jet and extremely educated and skilled aviators within the Military helicopter.

However that isn’t all the time sufficient, is it?

So we usually have all of those layers. Nevertheless, we even have to acknowledge that we ask a variety of our techniques. We’ve got that space in Washington, [D.C.], which is high-density, high-volume and has a excessive tempo of operations. And whereas now we have totally different margins of security—in order that whenever you’re driving on a slick and snowy street at midnight, you may keep protected operations—your danger profile and your security margin is totally different than on an attractive Sunday afternoon. So there are areas the place our security margins are thinner, and people are the areas that we actually must be vigilant for.

If folks may see the entire actions that go into protecting the airspace protected, I feel they might be reassured. However the very last thing that I’d say is that we needs to be comfy the place we are actually. We should always all the time, as aviation security professionals, be uncomfortable. For the touring public, I feel they’ll take consolation due to all these actions that go on each single day. However even one accident, when there are 40,000 operations within the U.S. home airspace each day is just too many.

Air accidents with mass fatalities are uncommon. Doesn’t that in some methods make them harder to analyze?

I don’t know that it makes [such accidents] more difficult to analyze. It positively makes [them] more difficult to foretell as a result of there may be a variety of modeling that’s accomplished within the trade to try to perceive the various things that go into an accident. There’s not a smoking gun; there isn’t just one causal issue. Even in the event you discovered one factor, there’s a motive for that one factor, and that motive is extra difficult. And in the event you simply determine the one factor, you’re actually not fixing something. You need to go deeper and take a look at the why behind it. These accidents are very uncommon. So the probability of the identical one recurring, particularly after we take motion, is extraordinarily low. However we are able to’t cease there. We need to use every factor we uncover as a chance to look at all of the components that went into it—in order that we’re not simply being reactive however [are also] in a position to look ahead and determine the dangers and hazards that now we have to mitigate.