Attention All Passengers (25 page)

The “Nanny State” Argument

This is a corollary to the “get government off our backs” contention. Legally, politically, morally—this argument is bogus. Requiring that children under two be strapped into seats on a commercial aircraft traveling at .82 Mach is not the intrusion of a nanny state bureaucracy dictating how kids should be raised or fed or disciplined. It's the closing of a loophole that has existed since 1953. In fact, by this reasoning
all
passengers should be free to remain unbuckled or even unseated on commercial airline flights. The FAA has a congressionally mandated responsibility to ensure the safety of all of us. Furthermore, to reduce the risks to their crudest elements, a flying projectile—even a human one—poses a hazard to everyone else in the cabin, so closing the loophole increases the margin of safety for everyone on board.

The Statistics Argument

What we're talking about is a handful of deaths and an unknown number of injuries.
This is what is whispered in Washington, but no government official or airline executive will dare speak it aloud. And yet it's the most persuasive argument for doing nothing and allowing FAA and airline inaction and a gross lack of education to endanger more and more infants every day. But it's best to raise this claim—how else to refute it? As passenger advocate Kevin Mitchell puts it, “To be cornered on this as a statistical analysis is to lose the argument. We're a country that sends out helicopters to save a dog in a swollen river. No one questioned the cost of saving the Balloon Boy in that moment. Do we really want to look at this as only a dollars-and-cents issue?” Ultimately, that's the only question that matters.

Falling Through the Safety Net

Unfortunately, not all lap children have been as lucky as the Sosa and Trejos babies. And no one knows this better than Jan Brown, a flight attendant on board United Flight 232 when it crash-landed in Sioux City, Iowa, in 1989. Over the years she has told and retold the harrowing tale of how she instructed the passengers to brace for impact, and as per standard operating procedures, told a mother to place her lap infant on the floor. As the NTSB accident report noted: “The mothers of the infants in seats 11F and 22E were unable to hold onto their infants and were unable to find them after the airplane impacted the ground.” Minutes later, Brown had the heartbreaking duty of confronting one of those mothers outside the burning wreckage and informing her that her child had died.

That experience transformed Brown into a crusader for banning lap kids, particularly after the NTSB report made that recommendation official. At an NTSB briefing she testified: “When preparing the cabin for an emergency, flight attendants should not have to look a parent in the eye and instruct them to continue to hold the lap child when we know there is a very real possibility that child may not survive without proper restraints. . . . No parent should find out in this way that holding a child on a lap is unsafe.” I asked Brown if she ever imagined this issue would be debated twenty-two years after the crash. “I'm very surprised,” she answered. “God has a funny sense of humor to have someone who is afraid of public speaking talk about this for so many years.”

Her passion came through as she recounted the long battle she has fought: “They're looking at it one way. I'm looking at it as a flight attendant who had to face a mother whose child had died. They want us to tell everyone over two to brace for a crash. But those of you under two—well, tough. Thanks for flying with us . . . The FAA operates on a body count. . . . That's the FAA mentality. It's criminal. Then why do we need an FAA?” Brown said she has found peace by determining such matters are in God's hands. But she thinks of the child killed in Sioux City and says, “I can't let that little boy alone. I'm tenacious. I finish what I start.”

In September 2011 I traveled to Washington to receive an update from the DOT on the FAAC's proposals. I was tremendously disappointed to learn that the FAA has no immediate plans to mandate child restraints and instead will continue to educate parents about the dangers of lap children, a formidable challenge indeed. I asked an FAA official about this, and he responded in two words: “Cost-benefit.”

Part II: It's No Longer All or Nothing at All

Experts point to multiple serious commercial accidents in recent years in which there were no fatalities. This list keeps growing, and includes four rather extraordinary recent cases:

• August 2005: An Air France Airbus A340 with 309 people on board ran off the runway upon landing in Toronto and burst into flames; there were no fatalities for the flight dubbed the “Miracle in Toronto.”

• December 2008: The Continental Boeing 737 carrying 115 people ran off the runway upon takeoff in Denver with the Trejos family on board; although the plane was severely damaged and there was a postcrash fire, thirty-eight passengers and crew were transported to hospitals—but no deaths.

• January 2009: The US Airways Airbus A320 with 155 people on board—including the Sosas—ditched in the Hudson River in New York City after a debilitating bird strike disabled both engines; there were no deaths on the “Miracle on the Hudson” flight.

• December 2009: An American Airlines Boeing 737 carrying 154 people overran the runway while landing in Kingston, Jamaica; although the aircraft fractured, there were injuries but no fatalities.

In all four cases, the aircraft were destroyed; two were burned beyond repair and one was dragged from a river. Yet a combined total of 733 people lived to talk about their experiences—and not one succumbed. “They're not miracles anymore,” says NTSB chairman Hersman. “We see these miracles more frequently than the crowd killers. It's a myth that is perpetrated.” On this issue she is in agreement with former FAA administrator Randy Babbitt: “The Miracle on the Hudson, that was no miracle. It was a symphony.”

It's past time to jettison the tired mantra that no one walks away from a plane crash.

Damn Statistics and Lies

Surviving even the most grisly of crashes is not theoretical. One need only look at United Flight 232, which experienced a “catastrophic failure” of the tail-mounted number-two engine, causing high-speed shrapnel to sever all three hydraulic systems powering the DC-10's flight controls. Through a remarkable display of piloting skills, Captain Al Haynes and crew utilized only engine power to “steer” the plane to a rough and fast descent into Sioux City. The subsequent crash killed 111 of the 296 people on board, though many airline veterans would have said a total loss of flight controls was a nonsurvivable scenario.

A native Texan, Al Haynes naturally sounds like an airline pilot cast by Hollywood. He learned to fly as a Marine Corps aviator, and subsequently accumulated more than twenty-seven thousand hours of flight time on five different aircraft during a thirty-five-year career for United. He's almost eighty now, but he remains sharp—and humble. “I was just in the wrong place at the wrong time,” he says modestly, though aviation experts know better. For more than two decades now, aeronautical types have spoken in awe of the tremendous piloting performance of Haynes and his crew, long before Captain “Sully” Sullenberger justifiably became a coast-to-coast hero for his own tremendous feats on the Hudson River.

Haynes has earned the right to decry the “all-or-nothing” mantra by calling it “a pessimistic attitude.” But he places partial blame on media coverage: “The media push it when there are injuries and deaths, but not when there aren't. People very quickly forget there are survivable accidents.” He praises Sully for the “fantastic thing he did,” but adds that had there been fatalities on US Airways Flight 1549, “it would have been an even bigger story.”

Such criticism of media coverage may sound like sour grapes; after all, what editor or producer would
not
lead with a plane crash that killed one hundred or more people? (NTSB members often say, “If it bleeds, it leads and if it scares, it airs.”) But more than two decades ago, an expert studied the front page of the
New York Times
for two years and found the following: “Page-one coverage of airplane accidents was 60 times greater than reporting on HIV/AIDs; 1,500 times greater than auto hazards; and 6,000 times greater than cancer, the second leading killer in America after heart disease.”

That expert is Professor Arnold Barnett. It may seem odd, but one of the nation's leading authorities on aviation safety statistics struggled with aerophobia himself. In his office at MIT, we discussed the rumor. “Yes!” he said. “It may not be a total coincidence.” He pointed out that when he was growing up in the 1950s, airplane crashes were rather common, and by the time he flew for the first time in 1967, he was more than nervous. He wondered how he could sublimate these fears, and struck on the idea of analyzing airline safety records, noting, “There really had not been a formal statistical analysis.”

Barnett asserted that the death risk in boarding a commercial U.S. airline flight now is about 1 in 20 million, and stated he is “in awe” of the airline industry's safety record: “It's sort of like the Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Fearful Flyers and Fearful Airlines

I've never suffered from aerophobia (I never would have lasted at Overseas National Airways or Tower Air if I had). A few years ago, shortly after I started teaching at Hofstra University, I stumbled upon a leading authority in aerophobia and saw his email address ended in “@hofstra.edu.”

Mitchell Schare teaches psychology and founded the Fear of Flying Treatment Program at Hofstra's Phobia and Trauma Clinic. I'm a Tuesday/Thursday guy and luckily he is, too, so I trekked cross-campus and strapped myself in for a multisensory virtual reality ride. I assumed it would be rather cheesy but found it surprisingly realistic, even though my blood pressure didn't rise at zero hour. The most important thing I learned is that the generic term
fear of flying
—aerophobia—actually is an umbrella term for at least seven separate fears, with subsets of fears to boot. Passenger A may be afraid of heights and Passenger B may be unnerved by loss of control. What's more, one person may be bothered by claustrophobic germy air while another is freaked out by claustrophobic physical closeness to others; the potential combinations are extensive. “Naïve people assume everyone with aerophobia is afraid of dying,” explained Schare. “But not everyone is afraid of dying.”

Because so many fearful flyers need to medicate and/or intoxicate themselves in order to board an airplane, that poses additional risks if that airplane needs to be evacuated—when every additional second literally threatens the lives of others. “In terms of survivability, you need the crew and the passengers to work together,” Schare said. “People have to follow instructions and someone has to take control. Who will survive? Some people will be on the program and some will lose it.” He explained that owing to dissociation—when certain individuals lose direction during a life-threatening situation—some passengers may act as if in slow motion.

Of course, the FAA requires the preflight safety briefings, but the redundancy prompts some of us to tune out. That's why Schare gives credit to Southwest for allowing flight attendants to joke during the briefing; a common bit is, “If you're securing the oxygen masks of two children, decide which one you love more.” He explained that this forces even the most frequent of flyers to suddenly pay attention during a canned speech they may have shut out. Similarly, Virgin America has created a clever in-flight video.

Experts say the airlines don't like publicly addressing this topic, over concerns that skittish passengers will opt not to fly. Schare, who forces his fearful patients to confront their worst terrors, applies the same principle to the aviation business by noting, “You're talking about the big scary thing the airlines don't want to talk about—a crash.” He maintained that more can be done: “I think the airlines need to step up and address this.”

Former NTSB chairman James Hall says fault lies with the industry: “The airlines will not do the basic education that is needed. Because they're concerned about the adverse economic impact on the bottom line.” But he asserts the ultimate responsibility lies with the FAA, and says, “I believe in the American system of government, even though it's not always implemented. Many times safety has to be the responsibility of the government because some corporations view death as just an economic factor rather than as a tragedy.”

Learning from Tragedy: Technological Improvements

“I felt the heat from the fire and I thought, this is the end,” Jan Brown recalls of the Sioux City crash. “It was so peaceful and painless.” Then reality struck that she was alive, and her instincts kicked in: “Thank goodness for that training.” She is echoed by her former captain, Al Haynes: “It was all due to good training.” Brown recalls she wasn't sure if the aircraft was losing pressure and she would be sucked out of the fuselage so she sat down in the aisle and held on to a seat support; although she lost consciousness, she didn't loosen her grip, knowing she had only sixty to ninety seconds to get out.

Nora Marshall, chief of the NTSB's Survival Factors Division, maintains that emergency training for crew members—coupled with good communication—is all-important: “There's really been a lot of evolution in protecting passengers.” That's why Brown has real respect for the performance of the flight attendants on the Hudson River, who executed a near-flawless evacuation: “It was incredible that people got off with their life vests on. I was in awe of that. I know how tough it is to get them on.”

Preventing such occurrences in the first place is even tougher. Kendall Krieg, senior manager of flammability certification for the nation's largest aircraft manufacturer, says, “The number one thing we focus on at Boeing is eliminating the event to start with.” On my visit to the company's massive facility in Renton, Washington, he and his colleague Al Carlo, a safety airworthiness manager, spoke at length about accident prevention and avoidance. The list of technological and human factor advancements in commercial aviation is impressive, and could easily fill another chapter of this book. But I asked them to address the worst-case scenarios, and accident survivability.