From the Feb 24 – Mar 1, 2000 issue

News

Flying the Deadly Skies

Air Safety Expert Todd Curtis on Landing in One Piece

by Wm.™ Steven Humphrey

LOOKING FOR THE ULTIMATE trust exercise? Step onto an airplane. For those unfamiliar with physics, the blind faith required to believe a five-ton metal tube with wings can somehow stay aloft at 30,000 feet is a lot to chew on. And with the recent crashes of Alaska Flight 261 and Kenya Flight 431, as well as the highly reported problems with MD-80s, exactly how much trust should the normal traveler be expected to extend?

Todd Curtis may look like weatherman Al Roker and sound like Carl Sagan, but the guy knows his planes. As an MIT grad, pilot, and engineer in Boeing's safety division, Curtis has spent much of his career studying why planes sometimes unexpectedly hit the ground. He has compiled this knowledge into airsafe.com. The site's no-nonsense descriptions of fatal events eschew emotion and conjecture, providing straight-up facts for the media, government, and anyone else who may crave statistical data and skin-crawling examples of airline mishaps.

Mr. Curtis, whose jovial exterior hides a very complicated obsession with stats and unfortunate events, was pleased to answer questions about our highly reasonable fear of flying.

So what's the #1 cause of most airline accidents?

It's not as simple as having one cause. Here's a classic example: 1972, Florida Everglades. The plane's practically brand new; highly advanced for the time. An indicator light burns out in the cockpit. All three pilots are trying to figure out how to fix this light bulb, and by accident, [they] take the airplane off auto-pilot. Then very slowly, in a controlled fashion, the plane goes down -- right into the swamp. Five of the 13 crew members and 94 of the 163 passengers were killed.

See, airplanes are very complex psychological systems. Here you have highly trained individuals working in an environment where there are a lot of procedures and plans, but as this story shows, procedures don't cover every eventuality. Also, people have the desire to do something they think will have a good result, but [it sometimes] ends up being a very bad result, which is what happened in this case.

You've studied a lot of crashes; so where's the safest seat on a plane?

There is no such thing. Believe me, I've looked at the seating patterns of accident aircraft, tried to draw up conclusions, statistical comparisons, and there's nothing that says one seat is safer than the other.

Okay, but let's say you are on the plane, and something horrible happens like cabin decompression. What can you expect?

Well, there was an incident back in '89 where the roof of the plane was ripped off in mid-flight; one flight attendant was ejected, but the rest of the passengers survived. But let's talk about what happens during a rapid decompression. You're flying along at cruise, and for whatever reason -- say a side window pops out -- the air gets sucked from the plane. What happens is that the air pressure is equalized to what's going on outside. Physically you might have some effects: ruptured eardrums and such, but those are not going to be life threatening.

Typically, the emergency system will activate, and you'll have enough oxygen to survive. The [plane] will rapidly descend to a lower altitude, say around 10,000 feet. Then you can breathe the outside air without the supplementary oxygen. So a rapid decompression is not usually going to be life threatening, unless you have a weak heart. But the average healthy person should be able to survive it.

So when a plane is falling from cruising altitude -- say 35,000 feet -- how long does it take you to hit the ground?

Let's say you're going 200 miles an hour straight down. That's about 350 feet per second -- about three seconds per thousand feet, so it would be about 100 seconds. A little over a minute and a half.

Wow. That's pretty ugly.

Well, if you happened to be in the aircraft it would be very ugly.

Seems to me that "using your seat as a floatation device" wouldn't be much help in that situation.

Mmm... probably not. I can think of only three or four times offhand when an accident occurred where the passengers actually lived to use that stuff.

Have you seen Fight Club?

Haven't seen Fight Club.

Well, in Fight Club, Brad Pitt has this theory about oxygen masks. When a plane's about to crash, the masks drop down and pump in 100 percent pure oxygen, so the passengers get high and feel euphoric before they die.

That's a theory not backed up by facts. In most oxygen systems, you have a combination of oxygen and ambient air from the cabin. So it's not pure oxygen coming in. As far as oxygen getting you high, I've been breathing oxygen all my life, and while a lot of people may think differently, I haven't been high since the early Reagan administration.

Okay, so I'm planning a trip. What airlines should I be scared of?

Let's look at pure statistics. Since 1970, U.S. Airways has only experienced eight fatal events in 14.3 million flights. TWA has experienced six in 8.10 million flights. America West, in business since 1983, has had four or five million flights -- with no accidents. Southwest has been flying since '71 -- also [with] no accidents.

Statistically, these are very low numbers. In this country alone, a commercial jetliner takes off and lands like seven or eight million times. Most of those eight million times, nothing remarkable happens at all. I'm sure you've bought a lotto ticket. So how many times have you won a million bucks? You're more likely to win a million-dollar lotto than be killed in an airplane crash.

So if flying is so much safer than, say, getting into my car, why do you imagine we get so freaked out by it?

Airplane crashes are spectacular, and they get a lot of media attention and bad movies made about them. And while you might forget seeing a car accident, a plane crash is the kind of thing that might live in your mind for years. It's also a trust issue: I hate being a passenger, because I'm not at the controls. I'd feel more comfortable if I were flying the plane. Logically, that makes no sense whatsoever, but what can I say? I want to be where the action is.

Wm.™ Steven Humphrey is vacationing in Puerto Vallarta, Mexico and is returning on Alaska Airlines next week.