SAFETY IN THE AIR

THE Jet Age is eight years old, and its high white contrails and graceful, swept-wing planes are familiar sights from the most cosmopolitan cities to the farthest provinces of the globe. Flight has grown into an absolute essential for mobile, modern man. By occasional tourist and veteran traveler, the big aircraft are recognized as the most comfortable, convenient means of long-distance travel. Yet hardly a passenger escapes entirely from an ancient skepticism, a lurking suspicion that manned flight is somehow unnatural and inherently dangerous. The hazards are always magnified. Just as the Sunday driver tends to minimize the difficulties of the crowded highway because he himself is at the wheel, in control of his own destiny, the air traveler often exaggerates his peril. He has put the responsibility for his life into the hands of others--pilot, ground controllers, even weathermen--and his unease is understandable. When word of a crash hits the headlines, he inevitably asks himself the question he has asked so many times before: "Is flying really safe?"

It is. Scheduled-airline flying in the U.S. is 6.4 times safer than personal driving; a person would have to travel 263 million miles in a plane, but only 41 million miles in a car, before he ran an odds-on chance of being killed. More people die by falling off ladders than by crashing in airliners. Life insurance is no more expensive for today's pilots than it is for bookkeepers; in a year, only one commercial pilot out of 1,000 dies in a plane. And the record is steadily improving; one accident occurred in every 85,000 hours of flight in 1959, but the rate in 1965 was one in every 800,000 hours.

Reason for this reassuring ratio is that no other industry spends nearly so much time or money playing it safe. The planes themselves are built to such exacting standards that any big multiengined plane can easily climb away from the ground with one engine out, cruise on even less power, and land safely--as a Pan Am 707 did last year--with half a wing burned away. If private cars were serviced as intensely as commercial planes, each driver would need three full-time mechanics, and his auto would be fully inspected before every trip, however short. As for pilots, the airlines select only one applicant out of 20, spend $1,000 an hour to train him, retest him every six months, send him back to flight school once a year, and pay him up to $40,000 a year. With rare exceptions, the pilots are well worth it. Says Jerome Lederer, director of the Flight Safety Foundation and one of the nation's top air-safety experts: "Unless he is a professional driver, no man is one-tenth as capable of driving as the greenest copilot is capable of flying."

The Price of Pressure For all that, hardly anyone in the aviation industry would deny that, safe as the air is, it can and should be safer. The industry has been aroused by the worst bunching of crashes in history: nine plane disasters, worldwide, since Jan. 1 have killed 597 passengers--almost as many as all last year. The fatality total is likely to grow because planes are becoming more capacious, skyways are getting more crowded, and the number of passengers--150 million this year--is expanding by 15% annually. Figuring that the number of passenger-miles will multiply 20-fold within 35 years, Bo Lundberg, head of Sweden's Aeronautical Foundation, forecasts that fatalities will soar to an intolerable 10,000 a year unless the accident rate is sharply reduced. It almost surely will be. But there will always be accidents. "If we wanted absolute safety," says Douglas Aircraft Executive Vice President Wellwood Beall, "we'd never get the planes to fly."

Even without shooting for perfection, though, the remarkable air-safety record might be better than it is. The obstacles are largely matters of economics. Safety costs time and money, pares the payload and performance of the plane, and ultimately has to be paid for by the passenger. Every modern plane is structurally safe according to rigid Government standards, but airlines have been known to put pressure on planemakers to work closer and closer to the lower levels of acceptability. Mechanics do not knowingly send unsound planes back to the flight line, but they have a limited number of planes to keep flying, and front-office pressure to keep those planes in the air can be subtly intense. Occasionally, the mechanics slip; in 1961, a Northwest Orient plane's aileron cables were improperly installed, causing a crash that killed 37.

Pilots also feel pressure to stick to a timetable. No sensible man will ever take off or land in dangerous weather or in a questionable ship simply to please his passengers or the Civil Aeronautics Board, which issues a critical monthly report on flights that miss schedules. But there are times when the pilot's choice is not so easy, when a reasonable man might stay or go, and pressures may make the ultimate difference in his decision. Whenever possible, most pilots prefer to make landings according to visual (fair weather) flight rules, instead of instrument approaches that take more time and cost more in fuel. Circling in a fog over Tokyo in March, a Canadian Pacific pilot decided to divert his flight to Taipei; he changed his mind when he heard a better weather reading from the Tokyo tower and tried a visual approach. The crash killed 64.

The most cautious and experienced pilots have been known to make just such errors. Example: the St. Louis crash that killed Astronauts Elliott See and Charles Bassett. Pilot See, having missed his first pass at the runway, told the tower that he planned a second instrument-landing approach in his T-38 jet trainer. He inexplicably continued to fly a visual pattern and made a wide turn just below the overcast, ran into a patch of fog, apparently lost orientation, slammed a building--and just barely missed demolishing the room where all the space capsules for the next four Gemini flights were stored.

Catching Errors in Time

In 60% of crashes, the "probable cause" is eventually listed as pilot error--a reflection of the fact that increasingly complex planes have become so unforgiving that they must be flown strictly by the book. Departure from proper procedure, a lapse in cockpit discipline, can be a flirtation with disaster. But U.S. airlines, for all their check flights, are sometimes slow to catch and correct pilot mistakes before they become fatal. Electronic flight recorders keep a continuous "profile" of every flight--course, speed, altitude, rate of descent, etc. When they are recovered from crashes, they are an invaluable help in detecting the cause. But deciphering a recorder's tape is a timeconsuming, expensive procedure --which is why they have not been routinely checked after safe flights to detect dangerous or careless airmanship that has not yet caused trouble. United Air Lines has started to analyze its recorder tapes and re-evaluate its pilot-training records since the November crash of one of its 727s, piloted by a captain whose training record was pocked with such comments as "unsatisfactory," "weak," "below standard," and "inclined to get sloppy."

Other forms of economic pressure prevent the lines from learning as much as they might from mistakes. The companies are reluctant to make public all the information that they glean from a crash lest they lay themselves open to suits for defaming the manufacturer or pilot, or point the way for damage claims from crash victims or their families. San Francisco Lawyer Melvin Belli has recorded a lecture (price: $12.50) on how to sue the airlines. Pilots have been hesitant to report collision near misses since former Federal Aeronautics Administration Chief Elwood Quesada started to fine them for errors in airmanship.

One of the greatest impediments to safety is noise-abatement procedure--a product of political and economic pressure that forces pilots to make some drastic power reductions and steep turns while still flying low and slow after takeoff. Says Pilot Harry Orlady, a 25-year veteran with United: "Noise-abatement procedures force you to fly as close to danger as you dare to. You don't have much margin for error." Adds Continental Air Lines Captain Al O'Neal: "If I were a passenger, I would deeply resent those sharp turns close to the ground." Noise abatement is a problem near most cities, but the pilot's nightmare is Runway 31 Left, the busiest at New York's Kennedy Airport. Its takeoff procedure requires pilots to make a sharp turn at a low altitude at low speed. An aviation cadet trying the same trick might never win his wings. Though no crash has been directly blamed on noise abatement, at least one American 707--which plunged into Jamaica Bay and killed all 95 aboard in 1962--would have had a better chance if the pilot had been allowed to climb away fast and straight.

Surviving a Crash

The same economic factors that can make planes somewhat less "airworthy" than they might otherwise be, also stand to make them somewhat less "crashworthy." To dress up the cabin, the manufacturers have put in nylon and Dacron seat covers, soundproofing and rugs; the stuff may be pleasing to the passengers' eyes and pay off in ticket sales, but it can generate black, toxic fumes in a fire. To save weight, and make easy changes in the cabin configuration, seats are not moored to the floor as firmly as possible. Stewardess training is sometimes more of a brief charm school than a careful safety course. The lines have also handled safety drills and demonstrations in the cabin casually for fear of scaring away passengers. Recently, United pilots began to urge passengers to "pay strict attention" to the drills, but so many people complained that the announcements were quietly discontinued.

Modern jets are so powerful that most of them can fly with just about all the passengers and baggage that can be crowded into them. The current trend is to take advantage of this load-carrying ability with "high density" seating. To cut back on that might cause a rise in fares; it might also mean a rise in safety. Though all the passengers survived the crack-up of a United 727 at Salt Lake City, 42 died in the fire because they could not break through the crowded aisles to the few escape hatches. Criticizing what he calls "sardine seating," United Airlines Chairman William A. Patterson asks: "In all good conscience, just how many passengers can you squeeze aboard a plane?"

Experts figure that they could reduce the number of crash deaths by 50% if they could prevent fires. The airlines, the military, the FAA, CAB and NASA are all hard at work on just that problem. They are developing a "very promising" jellied fuel that burns slowly and does not leak from ruptured tanks. The Pentagon and the FAA are experimenting with "tough wall" tanks made of nylon and polyurethane; when a tough-wall helicopter was slammed against a jagged rock at 100 Gs, the crash left only a one-eighth-inch crack. Airlines are also experimenting with a fire-resistant foam, which would automatically flood the fuselage after a crash and protect the passengers.

The industry's desire is not merely to cut the losses in accidents but to improve an already sound record by cutting the accident rate. What the airlines want most is a modern, fail-safe, all-weather traffic-control system. As a first requirement, they need better airports. Of the 709 commercial-airline fields in the U.S., fewer than one half have instrument-landing systems. Worldwide, in 1963, 80% of landing accidents occurred where only 17% of the landings were made--at airports with marginal landing aids. In the developing countries, safety records are far less impressive than in the U.S.

Traffic-handling techniques on the ground have lagged 20 years behind today's planes, but there is also need for more modern equipment on the jets themselves. That equipment is on the way. Sperry Rand Corp. is developing an inertial-navigation system for Pan Am so that pilots soon will be able to know exactly where they are at all times--without any visual reference to ground or water. Airlines are experimenting with lasers and other devices to spot the dreaded "CAT" (clear-air turbulence), which may have torn the tail off a BOAC jet near Mount Fuji a month ago.

For 20 years, companies have been working toward onboard warning systems to prevent mid-air collisions, which are often the result of visual illusions that lead pilots astray. Last month the Air Transport Association announced that development of a practical, economical device is "now closer to realization than at any time in the past." The promising system is McDonnell Aircraft's "Eros" (for Eliminate Range System), which will beep a warning to pilots when two planes get on a collision course. It will also instruct pilots--by means of arrows on the instrument panel --which way to turn to avoid trouble. Everyone is trying to improve altimeters, which are tough to read and may have figured in the first 727 crash, into Lake Michigan, last year. Boeing is tinkering with a radio altimeter, from which a girl's voice calls out the altitude as the plane descends.

The great goal of the airmen is to devise an automatic landing system that will work 100% of the time, whatever the weather, and eliminate the cause of more than half of all fatal crashes. The British are building a computerized autopilot that brings the plane right down to the deck; theoretically, it would fail only once in 1.25 billion landings, but even that is too much for U.S. airmen. Ultimately, computers will control all flight patterns, analyze the weather, and do much of the work in takeoffs and landings. The computers are not smarter than man; they simply solve the complex problems of flight more rapidly and reliably. As Los Angeles Psychologist Chaytor Mason, a former Marine aviator, explains, complex planes call for complex decisions that the best human pilot may not be able to make in time.

It Pays to Ask

Even before the era of computerized flight arrives, the ordinary passenger can do much to lengthen his own odds on security. He can make sure to find out where his exit door is and how it works, where his life jacket is, and what position to fold into in the unlikely event of a crash landing (head on knees, arms locked around legs). He should keep his safety belt buckled throughout the flight, as most pilots do; it can prevent a bad injury in case the plane hits sudden turbulence. The common belief that seats in the tail are safer than those up front has a little basis in fact, but the passenger can do better by sitting close to an emergency exit. Above all, he should swallow his shyness and ask questions. He should not imitate Comedian Mort Sahl's timid traveler who would "rather die than look foolish." The annals of the air are filled with stories of people who led many other passengers out of a crash simply because they had troubled to find out about emergency doors.

"Nothing hampers the progress of civil aviation more than fear," says Jeremiah Dempsey, general manager of Ireland's Aer Lingus. The other side of the equation is that, as planes become safer, more people will become less fearful and will fly. Since 1962, the proportion of Americans who have been up in a plane has climbed from 33% to 38% . But as more people fly, the casualty toll will climb too--unless the one-in-a-million chance of accident can be cut still lower.

Everyone--airline officials, pilots, Government regulators, airport chiefs--will have to work toward reducing the possibility of error as the planes grow to take on larger loads. Douglas is already test-flying an expanded DC-8 that can carry 250 people; Boeing plans soon to start building a 500-passenger 747; and Lockheed intends to market a 700-seat commercial version of the C-5A in the early 1970s. Saving just one of those planes would easily save $10 million worth of airplane and a priceless amount of humanity--which would make almost any effort to improve an already excellent safety record a worthwhile investment.

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