George’s Point of View

There’s a lot that is said in the world about gatekeepers. If you haven’t heard about them, you’ve run into them. They’re the low level filter that keeps the riff raff out, in positions that look plebeian but which wield far more authority than their level on the hierarchy would suggest. That’s the guy at the door who won’t let you in. If you’re hitting the trendy night spot, he’s the one whose thumbs up — or thumbs down–decides your fate. It’s the secretary that let’s your call go through. It’s the one at the ticket office who lets you in on the really good seats to the fight. Those are the gatekeepers you see.

The ones to watch out for, though, are higher on the feeding chain. They’re the ones who appoint the gatekeepers. Usually they have some kind of agenda, but you’re not going to see them, or their agendas, because the main thing about them is that they’re the part of the iceberg that you don’t see. They’re very good at staying underground, until something comes along like the Titanic.

So picture this:

Your job is inspecting planes. You’re sort of the gatekeeper for the plane. IF you say yes, it flies, then, well…it flies. If you say no, the plane goes back to the drawing board. Your whole purpose is to be discriminating–to keep out the riff raff. You keep the “plane” bakers from serving the planes before they’re “done.” You catch what problems there be, so there won’t be a disaster down the road. Imagine if you report a problem with a plane, and instead of getting commendations from the powers that be for your superlative discernment, you get shunted off to a desk, and the powers that be rule in favor of the airline. And then a year later, the plane you had issues with causes a disaster which you may have been able to prevent.

This is all under investigation, and it may all be smoke and mirrors and finger pointing.

It may be something more.

I’m talking about inspector Christopher J. Monteleon whose story is in the New York Times.

Monteleon got moved to a desk for doing his job. The situation seems to have been the catalyst for a whole lot of professional trouble for him. What if someone had paid attention to his concerns? Would the Bombardier Dash 8 Q400 been given more refinements? Would changes have been made that could have made it safer?

Then, Monteleon complained that the Office of Runway Safety “was using skewed methodology to understate the severity of safety concerns.” He wasn’t monitoring a flight that was subjected to dangerous icing that was being flown by a poorly trained and exhausted pilot. But maybe his is the kind of eye that would have made someone somewhere insert an extra page in the manual to cover the situation that would have saved 49 lives.

Maybe his contribution would have made no difference at all to the tragic Colgan/Buffalo NY flight.

But I’m looking past Monteleon and this particular incident to the bigger picture. I’m looking at his superiors who for some reason discounted the advice of their own expert. His bosses may not have liked the squeaky wheel, but his JOB was to do the squeaking. Apparently they wanted him to shut up, and stop getting in the way of the airline business. Apparently someone in the FAA forgot that the FAA does not work FOR the airlines. Their directive is to regulate civil aviation to promote safety–NOT commerce.

I am wondering if there is a part of the FAA iceberg that needs to be brought into the light. I suspect that Mr. Monteleon agrees with me.

Lives have value. It doesn’t matter if a man makes $10,000 a day, or 10 cents. If he dies in a plane crash, he’s irreplaceable. Maybe his boss can put a dollar figure on what it would cost him to lose that worker; maybe his banker can come up a specific value to subtract from the family’s credit rating.

But to his wife
to his son
to his daughter
to his parents
to his friends
to all those his life touched daily—
he’s irreplaceable.

His loss leaves a hole in a family that money can never fill.

And then the attorneys for insurance companies will “try” to get by with compensation offers that are equal amounts for each passenger, that in some cases, equal to “peanuts” — I don’t see that too much, but ‘they’ try, especially if the laws in the country have established maximum low-values for the loss of life in aviation accidents. Even with Warsaw and Montreal the compensation I’ve seen is seldom governed by the caps provided for in these treaties.

Instead, the compensation is based on the profile of the decedent. Age, Occupation, Family, etc. With this said, each seat on that plane is occupied by an individual and the family of the victim should be compensated accordingly, and in addition, the family should be paid non-pecuniary damages for pain and suffering, etc. In a perfect case, that’s how it works.

Whether he makes $10,000 a day, or 10 cents will not affect a man’s pain and suffering. In fact, his pain may be worse, knowing his ten cents is all that lies between his family and ruin.

PEANUTS is not acceptable.

IF the European Aviation Safety Agency is going to uphold its own mission “to promote the highest common standards of safety and environmental protection in civil aviation,” it must take strong action when it receives the French Accident Investigators first results.

There’s so much speculation out there regarding what this account will be that it just seems better to wait and see what it says before second-guessing it. Regardless of the details, you know the report is going to talk about 1. lightning and weather 2. pitot tubes; they may also talk about computer issues, composites and the stabilizer/tail fin/rudder also. I doubt they’ll tackle Airbus’s fly-by-wire technology.

The only thing I don’t understand is why Airbus 330’s have not already been grounded pending the results of the investigation. With several recorded incidents of Airbus 330’s suffering near-disasterous incidents and generating data similar to what was received from the AF447 flight, it makes more sense to ground these planes now before another accident occurs. Why are they letting people fly around in a plane that is an accident waiting to happen?

Or are paying passengers the world over just guinea pigs for Airbus to test their craft on until they get it right?

In an aviation disaster, what happened is never a true mystery. A true mystery is something that baffles understanding and cannot be explained. We know there’s an explanation. We know something tangible happened. There is a tangible explanation. We just don’t know what it is. What happened. Or in what sequence. Or if one or two of the events in the sequence didn’t happen, could the disaster have been prevented.

Most aviation disasters live in a realm of tragic mystery. We are always walking around, picking up the pieces of the puzzle. In fact, there are usually few pieces of evidence to pick up–and the ones we do find crumble in our hands, or they’re inexplicable or perplexing. So when we put the puzzle pieces together, they may fit a multiplicity of ways. There may be huge gaps. Or there may be no way at all to fit together the disparate elements. Oh, sure, we come up with a thousand theories–perhaps a different theory for each time we consider, each time we try to take another perspective, each time we speak to another expert. These experts agree; those experts disagree. Perplexing, an enigma, a riddle the answer of which remains forever out of reach. The alleged mystery—the answered question— remains, all the more tantalizing because we know there is an answer.

As troubling as it is for those of us who look for the answer to “how” it happened, families struggle with fathomless questions a thousand times harder to deal with: why my loved one? Of all the thousands of trips, why this particular flight, why this particular plane, why this January, why this Monday?

Families play the questions back in their heads, rewind their lives and replay the events as if somehow in the thinking of it, they could reach back through time, stop their loved one from boarding that plane, or otherwise change a single factor–make the pilot leave his phone behind. Make the mechanic give that lug nut an extra turn. Bless that plane designer—or the parts designer—with something extra so that on that long ago day when he came up that design, it was flawless. The thing that if it had been done just a little differently, would have kept the tragedy from ever happening. That magic something that could undo what has been done with such conclusive finality. As if the moment could be rewound as in a movie, and come out differently. These are the questions which are beyond inscrutable, profound questions heavy with the weight of life, of love wrenched away before its time.

The answer may be elusive.

But there’s always rigid hard reality behind a crash. There’s always an actual sequence of events that instigated the tragic event.

So any time I see an airline being proactive, I think of lives that will be saved.

Alaska Airlines begun inspecting their 14 Boeing 737 jetliners because of the emergency airworthiness directive issued Friday. Severe vibration occurred in some European flights was due to “lug failure on an elevator control mechanism. The elevator controls the plane’s pitch.”

There are mysteries hanging about 737s such as ITEK & PERM and recently Ethiopia. In the first two it was determined that it was human error.

I have always believed that pilot error alone will not bring down a plane.

This vibration opens a whole new window of possibility of answers to our unanswerable questions. In some of these past crashes where we have not found the answers, is it possible these tragic flights encountered turbulence which was exacerbated by this vibration? Could this flaw have been instrumental in the Aeroflot-Nord B735 crash at Perm on Sep 14th 2008? or to Itek Air B732 at Bishkek on Aug 24th 2008? Or more recently, to Ethiopian Airlines B738 in the Mediterranean Sea on Jan 25th 2010?

So I am glad to hear that Alaska Airlines begun inspecting their 14 Boeing 737 jetliners. I am glad to hear that Alaska Airlines is committed to safety. They should be commended for wasting no time in ordering an inspection.

If only all carriers were so diligent, there might be fewer grieving families. And that wouldn’t be a bad thing, would it?