Malaysia Air Mystery Fails to Spur Changes Despite March Disappearance of Flight 370 Experts Still Debating Need to Track Commercial Airlines By ANDY PASZTOR, Wall Street Journal Dec. 30, 2014 11:33 p.m. ET Nearly 10 months after Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared, setting off the biggest mystery of the modern jet era, regulators, safety experts and the global airline industry remain sharply at odds over how to respond to the tragedy. The March disappearance of the Boeing Co. 777 stands out in a year of aviation turmoil, including the shooting down of another Malaysian airliner over Ukraine and the crash of yet another jet near Indonesia. The latest tragedy, in which the remnants of AirAsiaFlight 8501 weren’t located for nearly three days, has added to debate over changes some experts say should have followed Flight 370’s saga, such as universal tracking of airlines and instantaneous streaming of aircraft flight data in an emergency. But consensus about implementing such changes—or whether the money should be spent on other safety enhancements—seems as elusive as the wreckage of Flight 370 itself. In a typical commercial-air accident, manufacturers and regulators start working on potential fixes long before all the answers are pinned down. But Flight 370, which dropped off radar screens on March 8 on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, has broken that pattern. An international hunt has failed to determine why the jetliner, with 239 people on board, veered thousands of miles off course before presumably running out of fuel and crashing in a remote corner of the Indian Ocean. As the underwater search drags on, disagreements continue over what Flight 370 portends for future safety threats and the best way to prevent a recurrence. Tony Tyler , who heads the largest international airline trade association, has said Flight 370 threatens to erode public confidence in the industry even though it was “an extremely rare, if not unique event.” But the industry appears reluctant to make major financial commitments to deal with what some executives refer to as a “one-off event,” and controversy persists about whether it warrants new equipment or significantly enhanced procedures at all. Some say the response to Flight 370 has been slow and disjointed. “I was expecting much more of a reaction,” Jim Hall, former chairman of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board, said in an interview. “Having a wide-body airliner go missing without a trace is totally unprecedented,” he said. But airlines “seem reluctant to address issues everybody else can see over the horizon.” An industry-regulator task force this month proposed voluntary guidelines calling for virtually all airliners to report their positions at least every 15 minutes when they aren’t covered by ground-based radars. More-frequent reports are envisioned in emergencies. Yet more-extensive safety improvements—intended to guard against terrorism or a rogue pilot—haven’t gained traction. Those include making onboard communications systems tamper-proof, or instantly streaming flight data off planes when something goes seriously awry, rather than retrieving the same information from “black box” recorders located in the wreckage. In the AirAsia crash, which is believed to have killed all 162 aboard, real-time data streaming would likely have saved valuable time in searching for any survivors, while immediately providing investigators with crucial data about why the Airbus A320 went down. Investigators suspect thunderstorms played a role, but they won’t have firm answers until underwater searches locate the black boxes. By contrast, so-called deployable recorders, of floating black boxes intended to separate from the fuselage in the event of a crash, could provide clues within hours of an accident. Deployable recorders are widely used on military aircraft but aren’t standard in commercial aviation. Airbus has said it is phasing them in, but they aren’t yet used on the A320 model. Debates over such technology highlight a broader dilemma confronting a global airline system that has been steadily growing safer: It is becoming harder for airlines and regulators to justify expensive new safeguards. Prior to 2014’s spate of disasters, overall global commercial accidents hovered at a record low rate of roughly 2.8 crashes per million flights, according to data gathered by the aviation arm of the United Nations, and it had been declining for several years. Total fatalities dropped by two-thirds from 2009 to 2013. American carriers have transported some four billion passengers over the past 5½ years without a fatal crash. For travelers on U.S. jetliners, statistically the greatest risks occur when planes taxi prior to takeoff and after landing. As a result, it is increasingly difficult to use traditional cost-benefit criteria to justify spending on further safety improvements in the skies. The puzzle of the missing Malaysian jet, which investigators say was likely purposely diverted by an individual or group, magnifies that paradox. “All the safety considerations we have relied on since the 1950s, when jets started flying, haven’t helped an industry that’s conflicted about what to do” in the wake of Flight 370, according to consultant John Cox, a former accident investigator and senior safety leader for North America’s largest pilots union. He and many other experts worry that overreacting to Flight 370 might end up focusing on safety initiatives with significantly less payback potential than targeting hazards such as runway excursions, loss of control, and onboard fires. “As big a mystery and public-relations nightmare as the incident remains,” Mr. Cox said, “it’s also important to remember the flight was just one in tens of millions of safe trips.” Even before Flight 370, a similar challenge vexed Federal Aviation Administration officials. They had long struggled to balance estimated implementation costs of tougher rules against long-term economic benefits in terms of lives saved and crashes prevented. That calculus—based largely on extrapolating future accidents from previous crash rates—helped make this decade so far the safest period in airline history. But in recent years, the FAA also has been forced to re-examine certain cost-benefit principles. The agency abandoned efforts to impose tighter fatigue-prevention rules on cargo pilots after concluding estimated costs far exceeded anticipated safety benefits. Largely for the same reason, White House and Department of Transportation officials scuttled more-restrictive proposals to control shipments of lithium batteries. In extreme cases, FAA officials have gone out of their way to make sure calculations factor in projected benefits of avoiding minor ground collisions between planes and service vehicles. Many of the same economic tensions affect proposals to revamp pilot-training requirements or require carriers to set up formal programs to mentor newly hired aviators. As a fallback, agency officials now hope to switch to a different standard, though one bound to take years to be widely accepted: quantifying the benefits from reducing or eliminating incidents, rather than preventing actual accidents. Peggy Gilligan, the FAA’s top safety official, conceded at a conference in October that applying this new approach “can be quite a challenge” when it comes to “predicting or avoiding potential risks” before they can cause damage or deaths. When the public ponders Flight 370, “it is incomprehensible that a commercial airliner can simply disappear, and expectations are high” that loopholes will be plugged regardless of cost, said Thomas Mickler, the European Aviation Safety Agency’s Washington representative. After Flight 370, many experts worry that unless efforts continue to raise the safety bar, traffic growth could boost the number of accidents world-wide. In fast-growing parts of Asia and Africa, for example, inadequate pilot training and poor cockpit discipline already have caused some egregious and fatal crashes. Matthew Baldwin, the European Commission’s former director of air transportation and now one of its senior financial policymakers, has warned that Flight 370 provides a “stark reminder for all of us of the public’s lack of patience” with safety or security lapses. “We cannot rest on our laurels,” Mr. Baldwin said told a U.S.-European safety conference during the summer, because budget realities mean aviation authorities everywhere “face ever increasing pressures to do more with less.” Ultimately, the biggest hurdle posed by Flight 370 may be trying to fix something that hasn’t been fully explained. “We have a ‘never supposed to happen’ event, yet there is a clear-cut need to prevent a repeat no matter how unlikely that may be,” according to William McCabe, an industry consultant who previously served on a panel studying FAA operations.
Posted on: Sat, 03 Jan 2015 01:17:43 +0000
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