How close calls overshadowed airlines’ safety figures in first half of 2024

Immediately following an exceptionally safe 2023, the first week of this year woke the air transport industry up with two almighty shocks.

On 2 January a Japan Airlines (JAL) A350-900 collided with a Japan Coast Guard De Havilland Canada Dash 8-300 on landing at Tokyo Narita airport. Then, on 5 January, there was a door-plug blowout on a Boeing 737 Max 9 climbing through 16,000ft near Portland, Oregon.

The number that escaped death by a whisker in these incidents was big. Compounding these events, on 8 June, passengers on two Airbus A320neos escaped death by seconds on a runway at Mumbai, India.

Overall, the first six months of 2024 demonstrated continued high levels of safety performance globally in commercial air transport, but only if judged by the small number of fatal accidents and fatalities.

GLOBAL FIGURES

There were four fatal accidents across all commercial air transport categories by mid-year, with 11 deaths resulting from these (see accident listings download at foot of article). Considering that these figures are global, they are impressive, but as always there is the caveat that a six-month period cannot be taken alone as a serious indicator of global safety performance.

If 2024’s first half is judged by the number of passengers and crew who came perilously close to death, however, the year so far looks less impressive. That figure amounts to about 900 in four events – also including a mid-air collision between a Safarilink Dash 8 and a Cessna 172 near Nairobi Wilson aiport in Kenya on 5 March. If these incidents had translated into actual fatalities, the figure would have taken the industry back to the bad old days of the 1980s.

Although India’s Directorate General of Civil Aviation is reported to be investigating the serious breach of air traffic control protocol that led to the near-collision of the two A320neos in Mumbai, it has not issued any details about the event, including the numbers of passengers and crew put at risk by the mishap. Press reports, however, say that a controller on duty at the time has been suspended from duties.

It will be interesting to see how seriously the authorities take this non-fatal event on the grounds that the two aircraft did not come closer to each other than 500m (1,640ft), according to analysis of automatic dependent surveillance – broadcast position data.

Although all on board the JAL A350 and Safarilink Dash 8 survived the collisions they were involved in, the accidents were not victimless. In the first case, five out of the six crew of the coastguard Dash 8 were killed in the collision with the landing widebody when they lined up without air traffic control clearance – at night – on Narita’s active runway 34R.

In the case of the Cessna 172 that collided with the Safarilink Dash 8 at around 6,000ft near Nairobi, the instructor and the student pilot under instruction were both killed.

Meanwhile, the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is investigating yet another runway incursion, having reported several in 2023. The latest involved a Swiss A330 and four other jets at New York John F Kennedy International airport on 17 April.

A preliminary report released on 18 June says a JFK controller cleared the Swiss aircraft to take off from runway 4L at about 16:46 local time. Moments later, a different controller cleared four other jets to cross the same runway, including an American Airlines 737, a Republic Airlines Embraer 175, and two Delta Air Lines jets: a 767 and an A220. The Swiss pilots prevented collision by rejecting their take-off, according to the NTSB.

On 21 May, the first fatality for several years to have taken place on a scheduled passenger jet flight operated by a major international carrier occurred in the cruise, due to severe clear air turbulence. One passenger died on the Singapore Airlines (SIA) 777-300ER.

TURBULENT TIME

In-flight turbulence is the biggest single cause of airborne passenger and cabin crew injury worldwide, and it is not an unfamiliar phenomenon. This year’s accident and incident list reports six significant turbulence incidents, suggesting that either there is a real increase in injury-causing occurrences, or that these events are being taken more seriously by the crew, so more of them are being reported.

Indeed, the second half of this year opened with news of multiple injuries on board an Air Europa 787-9 en route from Madrid, Spain to Montevideo in Urugauy on 1 July with 325 people on board. Its pilots diverted the aircraft to Natal, Brazil to seek medical help for the injured.

The SIA encounter with severe turbulence that took place over southern Myanmar also resulted in the serious injury of some 30 other passengers and cabin crew. The post mortem of the deceased traveller suggests his death resulted from a heart attack at the time of the brief period of severe turbulence, in which some un-secured passengers were thrown at the cabin ceiling and then to the floor, according to an initial report by Singaporean investigators.

IATA director general Willie Walsh, speaking at the association’s annual general meeting in Dubai on 3 June, some two weeks after the SIA incident, remarked that it would review the event to see if anything new could be learned. He added, however, that mitigation measures are already in place. IATA claims that encounters with turbulence are increasing, and as a result it had launched a programme called Turbulence Aware in 2018.

At the recent Dubai meeting, Emirates Airline announced it was joining the 15 international carriers already signed up for Turbulence Aware, explaining that it experiences encounters with turbulence more regularly these days. Emirates says it is automating its real-time turbulence reporting, and integrating the data generated through the Lufthansa Systems Lido mPilot mobile navigation tool it already uses, enabling pilots to see notified areas of turbulence using the navigation function on their electronic flight bag tablets.

Meanwhile, flightcrew mental health continues to be acknowledged as a real and intractable problem in the industry, and two independent reviews of the issue were published in April 2024.

The US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) had commissioned a report on pilot and air traffic controller mental health from an industry-based study group led by the NTSB, the results of which it is currently examining.

On the eastern side of the Atlantic Ocean, the Royal Aeronautical Society’s (RAeS’s) Human Factors Specialist Group has published a paper called Psychosocial Risk Management and Mental Health.

Both study groups acknowledge the well-understood risk that pilots and controllers usually avoid declaring their need for medical help for fear of losing their jobs. Among the US study’s recommendations is that the FAA should no longer require pilots to disclose if they are undergoing psychotherapy, on the grounds that it is good that crew should not be deterred from seeking professional help.

Also recommended by the group is that pilots should be able, without reprisal, to report previously undeclared mental health issues, and that airlines and unions that have not already done so should work to establish peer-support groups.

Chairman of the RAeS Human Factors Wellbeing Specialist Group (WSG) Marc Atherton says it “has been engaged with the issue since 2015” – the year in which the co-pilot of a Germanwings A320 intentionally crashed a scheduled flight over France, killing all on board. It was later discovered that he had a medical record of mental instability that the airline did not know about.

The group reports: “Over this period WSG members have been involved with establishing international conferences, developing Pilot Peer Support initiatives, and conducting research into prevalence rates of common mental health disorders in European civil aviation stakeholder groups including, but not limited to, aircrew.”

“The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the development of a response to the emerging recognition of the safety risk posed by the mental health and wellbeing of all civil aviation personnel,” Atherton says.

MENTAL HEALTH

A unique and shocking event that took place at Amsterdam Schiphol airport on 29 May was clearly the result of a ground crew mental health issue, but what occurred would potentially have had mental repercussions for any witnesses, whether passengers or crew.

KLM reports that a worker on the ramp near a KLM Cityhopper E190 (PH-EZL) that was preparing for pushback deliberately threw himself into the intake of one of the running engines. The aircraft was preparing to depart for Billund, Denmark. The flightcrew shut the aircraft down and disembarked the passengers.

Among new safety developments in the pipeline, the European Union Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) is preparing for a new collision avoidance system, although it has delayed the introduction of a planned runway overrun safety system.

Present aircraft required to be equipped with collision avoidance are fitted with TCAS 7.1 systems, but this standard will be replaced in due course with a system known as ACAS Xa, which is designed to cope with the denser traffic expected in the future which – if TCAS remained the baseline – would result in an unacceptable rate of nuisance alerts.

This will become applicable particularly when the use of unmanned air vehicles becomes more common. ACAS Xa is compatible with TCAS 7.1, but works completely differently. EASA says it has drawn up a formal opinion on ACAS Xa adoption which it will submit to the European Commission for study and approval.

EASA is also working on the introduction of a requirement for flightdeck runway overrun warning systems, but at this point the planned introduction of such technology is likely to be deferred by 18 months to 1 July 2026. This is due to acceptance that airframers face difficulties in meeting the original deadlines for certificating runway overrun awareness and alerting equipment.

STOPPING DISTANCE

These systems have been in development for some time at manufacturers including Airbus, and they use flight management computers that calculate the aircraft’s energy on approach, from which they predict what distance it will need to come to a halt on the runway, and compare this with the real runway length ahead. Different manufacturers are at different stages along the development and certification route.

Since the Alaskan 737 Max 9 door-plug blowout, the FAA has re-invigorated its oversight of Boeing’s production plants, focusing on in-factory observation.

In June, FAA administrator Michael Whitaker told the US Senate Committee on Commerce, Science and Transportation that the agency should have been “more proactive” before the Alaskan event. The FAA requires that Boeing cap 737 output at 38 per month while the oversight programme continues, albeit production is lower than that at present.

An extensive programme to upgrade its in-house safety culture and quality control management was started by the manufacturer in 2019 following two fatal 737 Max crashes in 2018 and 2019, but the Senate committee found that the Alaskan incident provided evidence that the company and the FAA itself had not upped their game sufficiently, and still have much to do.

The door-plug incident and ongoing issues at Boeing seem to have heightened the FAA’s awareness that all might not be ticking along as nicely as it usually does in US aviation.

United Airlines became the subject of additional FAA scrutiny following several relatively minor mishaps within a short period earlier this year. Among those were a 737 Max 8 that ran off a taxiway in Houston on 8 March, an Osaka-bound 777-200 that lost a tyre shortly after take-off at San Francisco International airport, and a 737-800 that landed in Medford, Oregon missing an external panel.

No-one was hurt, and any one of those incidents on its own might not have attracted attention – but the FAA put United on notice, announcing in May that it has effectively suspended any certification of new routes or fleet additions at the carrier. The agency adds: “The certificate holder evaluation programme that the FAA is conducting for United is ongoing, and safety will determine the timeline for completing it.”

It seems that vigilance is back in fashion.

Data comes from FlightGlobal’s research, in association with Ascend by Cirium.