Rather than looking for the ten worst accidents/incidents, the
Hognose digs up the ten worst events or issues
By ANN Senior Correspondent Kevin O’Brien
10. The 2004/05 Christmas/New Years Holiday Travel Season
The year ended with
misery for travelers, and a black eye for several airlines that
didn't need it -- like US Airways, which is publicly and messily
circling the drain, and Delta, which is caught up in that same
vortex. US Air had a sick-out by baggage handlers; Delta had a
complete collapse of the creaking reservation and scheduling
systems used by its major feeder, Comair. Passengers are fickle
beasts who will always buy the lowest-cost ticket that they can,
and then squawk about the service and vow never to fly the line
again. Until, of course, it's the lowest-cost ticket again.
If you keep bottom-feeding, you turn into a catfish, and you
lose the right to complain about the taste of what you ate.
US Air has reportedly asked employees to work without pay over
the New Year's holiday. What Delta's doing is anybody's guess.
Across the industry, the announcement seems to have gone out that
beatings will continue until morale improves. Bum- "whack!" --
bummer.
9. Polluted Pilots
Every year there are a
couple of NTSB reports that tell the sad story of some boozehound
that gets in the plane and kills himself -- sometimes along with
the whole crowd that was at the bar with him when he got an
alcohol-fueled flying jones. This year, we had numerous idjits
fly and arrive despite their best attempts to medal in this Darwin
Award category:
- It was nearly the first and last story of the year. John
Salamone of Pottstown (PA), who buzzed structures -- like the tower
at Philadelphia International -- in a Cherokee for hours on January
15, and has a really bad drunk-driving record, went to prison in
December.
- Louis Kadlecek celebrated his 21st birthday last March by
getting and staying drunk. Midway through this multi-day bender, he
tried to steal an airplane from the Brazoria County (TX) airport,
but the Bonanza outsmarted him and he couldn't get it started. He
had better luck with a simpler 172 and he and his case of stolen
went for an exciting, if brief, ride. He went sailing off into IMC,
and as the NTSB drily puts it, had an "inflight collision with
power lines and terrain." The terrain, ironically enough, was owned
by a prison. He thought he might have gone to Mexico; instead he
remembers seeing a flash as his prop cut through a 100,000 volt
powerline. Acting on a tip, cops asked Kadlecek to be in a lineup;
when they picked him up, he had his toothbrush with him and a
confession on his lips.
- Mark South of Eloy (AZ) made an emergency landing on a freeway
in Santa Clarita (CA) on July 12th. If the test is "any
landing you can walk away from is a good one, and if you can use
the airplane again it's a great one," then this was a *bad* one, as
South left his Ercoupe inverted in the runway as he rode away in
the back of an LA County Sheriff's deputy's cruiser.
- Europeans are having these worries too. Finnair captain Heikke
Tallila was sentenced to six months in prison in England for
attempted drunk flying. A shuttle bus driver was alarmed at the
odor of Capt. Tallila's breath; he turned out to be double the
legal limit -- remember, that is BAC of 0.04 under FAR 91.17;
European JAR rules are similar. Tallila apparently was still under
the influence from the night before: 12 hours is not enough when
you slam eight or more drinks.
- In the Pacific Rim, John David Charlesworth of Australia was
sentenced to two years in jail in February for a March 2003
incident involving a Piper Seneca, five passengers, and an entire
bottle of vodka. Charlesworth had a BAC or .25 -- six times the
legal limit for pilots -- and fortunately taxied into a fence
before he could take off.
The good news is that most of these guys were in the
can, so they didn't have hangovers on New Year's Day. Further good
news -- none of these incidents resulted in loss of life or
serious injury. Prison is a serious bummer, but it's not as bad as
what nearly happened in every one of these cases.
8. TFRs For Crass Commercial Reasons
There are two public figures so important you can't fly anywhere
near 'em -- the President, and Mickey Freaking Mouse. Now, while
Disney cast members have been known to be bitten and kicked by
naughty kids while playing the dopey-looking cartoon rodent, there
is no known threat against him. That didn't stop Disney from
deploying its lawyers, lobbyists and money in depth to get its
theme parks declared Perma-TFRs. This inspired major sports
promoters to follow suit. Despite the noise the lawyer/lobbyists
make, the "threat" here was not to the public, but to corporate
profits posed by aerial advertisers. Folks have died in rides at
Disney, but nobody's died from a falling banner-tug there.
Now, the US military is backing off on the TFRs it demanded over
many of its sensitive installations, but Disney, the NFL, and
other assorted organizations are not backing off their demand
for advertisement-free... excuse me... a cut of the advertising, in
"their" airspace.
Unfortunately, the powerful entertainment empires rammed this
through Congress, that colossal human eBay where everybody's for
sale, and a small thing like the public interest can't outbid what
Disney, the NFL, and the whole soulless gang of Washington insiders
can do to a Congressman's all-important bottom line.
As Winston Churchill said in Commons in November, 1947, "It has
been said that democracy is the worst form of government -- except
all those other forms that have been tried from time to time." But
when huge corporations can buy Congress, is it still democracy?
Wasn't there some dude who called his movement National
Corporatism? Not Churchill, but one of his contemporaries?
Corporatist states, greedy corporations and corrupt Congressmen are
a triple-barreled bummer.
7. BASE Bouncers
BASE stands for
Building, Aerial, Span, and Earth, and that describes the things
that skydivers jump off of when they find that the ground-rush of
ordinary freefall can no longer cut through their ennui. They are
called, then, BASE Jumpers; which sport at one time would get your
USPA license yanked. Until the USPA realized it was a waste of
effort, yanking licenses from dead guys walking. It was a bad fall
in both senses for BASE Jumpers worldwide: of the six or seven BASE
jumpers thought to have died in 2004, three died in a short
span between October and November. One hit a building in China
on a legal jump, a friend of his made an illegal memorial jump in
an Australian national park and struck the cliff he jumped from,
and an American jumped from an antenna into fog, proving the hard
way that BASE jumping ought to be conducted under visual flight
rules.
Several of the fatals over the years, including the Shanghai
victim in October, had previously had near-fatal accidents. And you
hear about the fatals, you don't hear about the brain-damaged
victims in nursing homes. Some of these guys left families. BASE
Jumping might be a hell of a rush, but bouncing is as solid a
bummer as there is.
6. Dope Smugglers
Geez, I thought those guys went out with Don Johnson and
whatshisname from Miami Vice. Apparently not. We never heard if the
feds caught fugitive Eugene Cobb from LA, but if the DEA gets him
for his plane full of wacky weed, the FAA is winding up to throw a
book at him -- he not only was not licensed to operate the
twin, his medical was expired. He's really in trouble now. Or as
they say in Cheech and Chong movies, "Bummer, dude."
5. Election TFRs
President Bush catches the rocket for this one -- his opponent,
Sen. John Kerry, did the stand-up thing and let Aeronca C3s,
Pterodactyl Ascenders and other threatening general aviation
aircraft fly within hailing distance of his auguste presence. But
while Mr. Bush criss-crossed the country, TFRs were springing up on
the chart like pox on a... hmmm... let's change images.
How in all the Gods in Niffelheim are we supposed to track a
30-nm TFR with a 10-nm shoot-to-kill-by-Gadfrey exclusion zone --
that motors down the highway centered on the Presidential
motorcade!!??
Look, do we have to crash a 172 on the Prez's armored limo to
prove this is a bogus "threat?" Heck, I volunteer to sit in the
limo... and I promise not to touch any of the buttons! But the
President's bodyguard, which prefers not to be referred to by its
initials which resemble those of a certain historical leader's
bodyguard, insists that he needs this bubble of empty airspace.
What's next? Shall we all have to avert our eyes or be beheaded,
like commoners in the Meiji Empire? Unfortunately, it's possible
that even the President himself couldn't get this overreaction
turned off. Bummer.
4. TSA Roguery
You have to be done
reading this article in time for "Ten Bummers of 2005" so I won't
go into depth. Lost guns, bungled screening, stolen property,
ridiculous rules and continued fiscal irresponsibility, culminating
in a lavish self-congratulatory bash, where the people who have
made the organization the laughingstock it is, during its short and
unhelpful life, gave each other "lifetime achievement" awards. I
mean, where to begin with this laughingstock? I am sure 2005 will
have lots of stories of the TSA's unintentional comic relief, but
the joke is on us -- when you realize that we pay double for
TSA, once to fund it, and once to pay for all the costs it imposes
on aviation businesses, you have to call it a bummer.
3. Accidents in 135 Operations
If the morning news keeps showing bits and pieces of incinerated
Lears and Gulfstreams, the public is going to get entirely wrong
ideas about the safety of charter operations. While the NTSB will
take its time to make its decisions, I'll take a real flier and say
that ultra-experienced pilots who smack a xenon lamp post trying to
land in zero and 1/4 weather are going to have their actions
dissected by the Board.
Too many charter operators seem to let their
ingrained sense of safety go to pudding when they're on a part
91 positioning flight. Knock it off out there -- losing good people
and good planes for a silly mistake is a bummer. The only thing
that's worse than that is some clown holding himself out as a
135 when he isn't -- and there were a couple of those rogues
who bent metal in 2004 as well. You would think that they would be
weeded out by relentless Darwinian selection, but apparently not.
Bummer.
2. Airlines Cratering In
The Airline Deadpool
deserves an entire story of its own, but the bad developments come
in faster than we can write them down. The way it looks right now,
it's going to be easier to get a landing slot at O'Hare or Reagan
National than getting a slot in bankruptcy court in the coming
year. The judges will be issuing ground holds to airlines seeking
protection from their creditors.
The managers blame the unions, who blame the managers, and
everybody blames the cost of fuel and the pressures from new
startups, who don't have any deal on fuel, but they don't do dumb
stuff in good years, yet, like give $1 million to AIDS charities. I
see lots of good people from pilots to gate agents crisis-managing
their jobs as the companies crash around them and the self-serving
bosses pilfer the silverware.
Eddie Rickenbacker used to say airline profitability was all
about load factors, or has he bluntly put it, putting "bums in
seats." It's hard to look at the results of some of the major
airlines over the last few years without concluding that their
problem has been one of bums in suites -- executive suites. When
your senior management are worrying about wangling bankruptcy
protection for their pensions -- and
only their pensions -- who's running the
company? Who is John Galt? This is going to be a long, drawn-out,
painful-to-watch bummer.
1. Sport Pilot Aeromedical
At the last minute,
without a word to any of the stakeholders, the FAA yanked the
drivers' licence medical away from anyone who had previously had a
medical revoked or denied, without even thinking what they would do
with these people. And most "denials," Federal Air Surgeon Jon
Jordan admitted to me, were guys who didn't follow up with
documentation the FAA demanded, and just gave up. Often
the FAA asks for expensive tests at frequent intervals, which
tends to frustrate people, particularly when you consider that
the requests come from doctors who probably haven't done
clinical work in years, and the tests are rarely covered by
insurance.
I've written on the FAA's position before, and while the
position is defensible, the underhanded way the FAA sneaked it in
at the last minute is not. This was the Number One Bummer of the
Year for 2005, and it's a reminder that there are still people in
the FAA that see pilots as the enemy. If they could just ground us
all, think how safe that would be!
In the immortal words of that great humanitarian, motorist
Rodney King, "Can't we all just get along?" Not if the FAA lawyers
don't try. What a bummer.
ANN's Daily Aero-Linx (04.15.24)
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