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Did relief pilot seize control from captain?
As Egyptians protest the move toward a criminal probe, reports emerge that a crew member said a prayer and plunged the plane into the ocean.
By Alicia Montgomery, Fiona Morgan and Daryl Lindsey
[11/16/99]

Invasion of the body snatchers
When Pat Buchanan made his unholy alliance with Lenora Fulani, it wasn't the "left" he embraced but a strange, secretive group of disrupters known as the "Newmanites."
By Joe Conason
[11/16/99]

Decoding EgyptAir
The National Transportation Safety Board is waiting on a final analysis of the cockpit voice recorder of Flight 990 before turning over the investigation to the FBI.
By Fiona Morgan
[11/15/99]

Team Bradley's all-star lineup
A look at the players behind Bill Bradley's Madison Square Garden fund-raising extravaganza.
By Jake Tapper
[11/15/99]

Madison Square Bradley
Basketball Hall of Famers and former Knicks turn out in droves for the political fund-raiser of the year.
By Jake Tapper
[11/15/99]

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Imagine instead that you're teaching a grammar school class. Terrorists enter the room and threaten to shoot the children unless you remember -- quick -- what's the capital of Paraguay? Hah, I thought so. Boom, they're all dead.

So what do teachers learn from this scenario? To bone up on world capitals, obviously. The problem is, the next group of terrorists to storm a school will demand the square root of 79, and then what good is your geography?

The annoying thing about pilot error is that the term gets applied after the fact, with hindsight being 20/20. In May 1997, a Boeing 767 banged into Newark, N.J., damaging the landing gear (no injuries). The plane encountered wind shear on final approach, and the co-pilot battled to keep the plane on the ground once it slammed in. The NTSB conclusion was pilot error -- specifically an "improper landing flare."

In my mind, the guy was probably lucky to get it down without hurting anyone. Wind shear can flip large planes over or slow them down so suddenly that they stop flying and fall out of the sky. But the fact that he didn't react perfectly -- foreseeing the shear and in which direction it would send his plane -- lays the blame on the co-pilot.

Flying is so complicated and technical that no pilot, no human, could be proficient enough to recover from every single possible failure. That's why it isn't 100 percent safe, why even the most proficient test pilots die. There are parallels to surgery. The doctor has your beating heart in his hand and discovers something unexpectedly wrong with it. He can't put it down and go look up some info in his reference manuals. He has to decide, within seconds, how to solve the problem correctly.

Likewise, a pilot landing on a runway onto which a deer suddenly bolts has only seconds to make the decision: Hit the deer? Swerve to avoid? Attempt to take off again? Each option will almost certainly crash the plane. The cause will be pilot error, or, more specifically, "inability to maintain directional control."

A pilot who swerves to avoid the deer will probably ground loop and smash a wing. Is he a bad pilot? Frankly, I think he's a hero for saving the passengers and the deer. Is there something to be learned from that crash report? Sure, if the pilot and passengers walked away, that's the kind of "error" I'll plan to perform when faced with the same problem.

Which brings me back to the EgyptAir flight. As investigators pore over the black boxes, analyzing every nuance of sound and data, the anxious public waits. Was it a partial electrical failure, rendering the airplane almost uncontrollable? An autopilot problem? Clever sabotage? Was it a bungled recovery from cabin decompression? Not knowing what caused the crash is frustrating for everyone. But for pilots, eager to prevent their own machines from inexorably pointing their noses down into the ocean, the difference between knowing and not knowing can be the difference between life and death.

What all pilots dread is that there won't be a finding, and we'll have nowhere to point our fingers, even though the NTSB is valiantly trying to explain what happened. Charged with investigating every civil aircraft accident, the NTSB maintains a database of crash investigations and results. It makes recommendations based on the findings; for example, disabling the problematic thrust reversers on Boeing 767 aircraft. Pilots also read the reports to learn how to prevent their own potential accidents.

It's these kinds of accidents, and without known causes, which EgyptAir 990 may still turn out to be, that are the scariest. How does any pilot avoid those?
salon.com | Nov. 16, 1999

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