One thing I feel is that someone out there in aviation (and I don’t know who it is)-the pilot in general, ATC, or the airline-does not respect Mother Nature. Weather happens. Sometimes very BIG weather happens. And people will just not be dissuaded by a little common sense. No matter what, if we want to go, we’re going to jump on our magical Boeing-Airbus-Embraer-McDonnell Douglas Sleigh like Santa Clause, the Postal Service or Fed Ex, and we will go. People want it, so the airlines are going to provide it, like the inscription on the James Farley post office in New York “Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift completion of their appointed rounds.” Or to more-or-less paraphrase David Farragut, “Damn the lightning, full speed ahead!”

So my first point is that we should respect nature a little more. Sometimes discretion is the better part of valor.

We commonly make assumptions here in all of our posts, because we’re using a who/what/where/when format. The “What” usually ends up as a synopsis of events, with just a little bit of why thrown in. But “why” is not a question we can take lightly. “Why” an incident happens is just too big for us to cover, especially since we try to get our posts up within hours of the event. Between you and me, if it takes a year for the whole NTSB research team made up of a federal building full of highly educated and experienced experts, thousands of pages of recorded documentation, video and concrete evidence, and the nation’s keenest analytical minds juggling all the permutations to figure out “why” a crash happened, then we don’t really think we can come up with the perfect “why” off the top of our heads fifteen minutes after the crash.

That said, there’s an expert in Jamaica–Lt. Col. Oscar Derby, director general of the Jamaica Civil Aviation — who says that the aircraft touched down at 4,100 feet (assuming this is fact, since one can assume the director general of Jamaican aviation has access to all the facts) and that number isn’t referring to altitude, it’s referring to the plane’s wheels contacting mother tarmac halfway down the runway. I’m not going to talk about his decisions, or his inquiry because it is simply too soon.

But if the plane landed halfway down the runway (if it is not internet gossip, but a fact that the plane did land halfway down the runway)…that is significant. It probably wouldn’t matter if the plane hadn’t bounced. Or if it hadn’t been raining. Or if the plane hadn’t hydroplaned. But ALL of those things happened too.

I don’t know why the pilot landed halfway down the runway; but I do know there is always some point of no return where the pilot must commit to either fly by or land. I don’t know the factors that came into play with this pilot, on this day, on this runway, during this storm that affected the decision. Experts will be spending years looking at this pilot’s split second decision.

The fact remains that in a harrowing rainstorm, after a turbulent flight, a bounce on landing, and hydroplaning, the American AIrlines crew still managed to come out of it with everyone aboard alive, and that is a job well done.

George’s Point of View

Humans are amazing inventors, capable of envisioning a “possible” for every “impossible,” creating incredibly complex feats of engineering, in the name of Hughes and Learjet and McDonnell Douglas and Lockheed and a hundred others whose names won’t be forgotten. Even amazing inventors can engineer lemons, or fail to see every possible contingency. But the possibility of error goes beyond human error. Humans are not responsible for the fact that rust exists. Do you blame Einstein for the fact of relativity? It’s the dichotomy of reality: for every up there’s a down. Everything creates its own opposite. “Fixed” allows the possibility of “broken” to exist.

Thinking logically along those lines…we can speculate and plan, study and test, polish and revise, but does that make our planning and scheduling invincible? Even if it were perfect (and I’m not saying it is, because I am speaking of things in general), things fall apart. The nature of reality is change. Change happens. Plan for contingencies 1-3000 and the one that will happen is contingency # 3001.

We have to be careful sometimes when we start talking about human error. Unfortunately the container where the human error begins is life itself, because in theory EVERY thing can be blamed on human error. The patient died, blame the doctor. Nevermind that the patient was 112 and suffered every illness known to man.

In aviation, gunnysacking the humans happens too. Maybe they didn’t cause the lightning but they flew through it. We humans are pretty amazing creatures but we don’t control nature. We can plan and schedule all we want, but if you are going to fly during rain, you’re going to encounter thunderstorms. So let us say that the storm is responsible for the event. Do we blame the pilot for flying through the storm? Do we blame the arrogance of the plane manufacturer who claims the plane is invincible and can fly through anything?

Pilots are human. We have the full range of the spectrum, from the sublime, Sully, to the ridiculous (Colgan Air’s Marvin) Renslow. The problem that a hero like Sully presents to the rest of us is that he creates the philosophy that well trained pilots should be able to solve any emergency.

But take for example Air France 447… could the pilots have been able to cope with flight speed problems caused by the performance of flawed parts?

Is the failure to recover from an unexpected event (wind shear, potential conflicts with other planes, broken planes) pilot error? If we put human beings in an easy chair of an automated job in some point-and-click fly-by-wire captain seat, when the crisis happens, the built-in redundancies in flight systems fail and the pilot can’t snap out of humanness to turn into Superman when the wire breaks, is that pilot error?

Our pilots now have to deal with cost-cutting industry practices causing fatigue and poor training.

Even if the ultimate safety device in the airplane is the well-trained pilot, guess what? Pilots are human. Humans are capable of mistakes. They are capable of mistakes when operating planes.

Let us not forget that pilots fly planes that were crafted by humans, maintained by humans, orchestrated by human ATC, landing on airports designed by humans.

There is no one single answer. I have seen it a hundred times, and each case is unique unto itself, with one generality that can apply.

Human error occurs at all levels, and rarely alone.