David Learmount/LONDON
THERE WERE 609 DEATHS in world airline accidents during the first six months of 1996, which compares with only 206 for the same period the previous year. The figures for 1995, however, were particularly low.
The three-year moving average for the January-June period each year since 1987 (see graph ) tells a more measured story: there is an almost imperceptible upward movement of the raw totals. This means that there is a gentle, but definite, downward trend in fatal-accident rates because of buoyant traffic growth.
The number of fatal accidents, at 25, was slightly higher than usual for the decade; but, again, the three-year moving average puts airline safety performance back into perspective (see graph ), with the numbers of incidents hardly changing from year to year. Among those 25 accidents, only four involved large passenger-carrying jet-powered aircraft, although 425 people died in those incidents. Most of the fatal non-scheduled passenger-aircraft accidents involved small turboprop- or piston-powered twin-engined aeroplanes.
Tragic lesson
Perhaps the most shocking accident this year is one for which the scale is not reflected in the graph, because most of the deaths occurred not in the aircraft, but on the ground. Never in the history of aviation, however, have so many people on the ground been killed by a crashing aeroplane. Nearly 300 people in a shantytown market outside Kinshasa, Zaire, were killed when the captain of an Antonov An-32B made a late decision to abort the take-off, and the aircraft overran the runway and ploughed through the crowds on market day.
The exact Kinshasa death toll may never be known. The Russian-registered aircraft was chartered by local cargo carrier Scibe Airlift. Investigators are questioning the validity of the operator's certificate in its country of registration, which was believed to have been withdrawn before the aircraft went to Africa. Meanwhile, if the world needs an example of why development in the vicinity of airports should be strictly controlled, Kinshasa has provided it, at a tragic cost.
The Kinshasa disaster did not occupy much space in the developed world's media. If press interest in airline accidents can be taken as a barometer of the innate public nervousness about flying, however, two recent events in particular have touched raw nerves. A perennial media suspicion that company cost-cutting endangers safety has been detonated by the ValuJet Airlines McDonnell Douglas (MDC) DC-9-30 accident in Florida in May, and also by that of the Birgenair Boeing 757 which crashed into the sea near the Dominican Republic in February. ValuJet, for the media, exemplified the fast-growing, cost-cutting, no-frills, scheduled carrier which started up using low-price older aircraft. Birgenair, as a charter company, exemplified not only the low-cost sector, but, as a sub-chartered Turkish operator carrying German passengers from the Dominican Republic back to their homes, raised the feared spectre of a "flag-of-convenience" culture in air transport.
Flags of convenience
The "flag-of-convenience" angle taken on the Birgenair accident (whether or not this is a strictly accurate description of the sub-chartering arrangement) motivated much more than just the media. The German transport minister raised the issue at the European Union (EU) Council of Ministers within two weeks of the accident, beginning a European programme to establish checks on foreign-airline safety. This EU approach echoes the USA's International Aviation Safety Assessment programme.
The EU, like the USA, says that its reason for acting now is that it cannot wait until the International Civil Aviation Organisation is provided by its more prosperous member states with the necessary resources to police safety-oversight standards effectively throughout the world. The EU's action is the second significant political acknowledgement of the wide disparity in airline-safety standards achieved by different regions and nations.
The disparity clearly remains. In 1996 so far, for example, only two of the 25 fatal accidents listed involved airlines registered in what are traditionally proven to be the safest regions. One took place in North America (ValuJet), the other in Australasia (a Soundsair Cessna Caravan, New Zealand). There have been no fatal accidents involving western-European or Middle Eastern airlines. Given that North American, Western-European, Middle-Eastern and Australasian air-transport activity represents nearly two-thirds of the world's total traffic, the remaining one-third of traffic has suffered 92% of the fatal accidents.
In the USA, however, the ValuJet accident is causing a great deal of establishment heartsearching. Information emerging from accident investigation so far indicates that the cause is likely to have been the unintentional loading, as freight, of a box of oxygen-generator canisters returned to the carrier by SabreTech, ValuJet's maintenance contractor. SabreTech had labelled the canisters as empty when they were not. If this was indeed the cause, the age of the aircraft will have been proven irrelevant, and a direct connection with the low-cost aspect of ValuJet's operation would be difficult to establish, even if it were suspected. The US Federal Aviation Administration's oversight of ValuJet's operations, meanwhile, has come in for intensive politically backed scrutiny, the full results of which are unlikely to be known this year. It is clear from the FAA's communications with ValuJet that the agency was uneasy about the airline's phenomenal growth rate and about several incidents involving its aircraft (see non-fatal accident tables ). Less clear, however, is the reason for the FAA's style: for example, its February instruction to ValuJet to curb its growth rate was made confidentially, even though, technically, the communication was in the public domain.
When the intensive scrutiny of the FAA's dealings with ValuJet is completed, however, regulatory changes affecting the FAA's role could include any or all of three possibilities: a mandate for more oversight, demanding more FAA resources; rules forcing a more open operating style; or, finally, as has been proposed by some Congressmen, a complete separation of the FAA's present dual role of both promoter and regulator of aviation, with the "promoter" role moving elsewhere.
Engine failure
Since the end of June, there has been another fatal accident in the USA, although only two passengers were killed. On 6 July, a Delta Air Lines MDC MD-88 suffered an uncontained engine failure during take-off at Pensacola, Florida, and the debris penetrated the cabin. Because of the phenomenal amount of air-transport activity in the USA, however, this still leaves North America near the top of the world's safety league.
Perhaps there is a message for the international aviation community in that the FAA, the most consistently successful of the world's national aviation authorities at promoting airline safety, should be the one most often subjected to exhaustive analysis and review.
Source: Flight International
