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Aviation History
1967
1967 - 0082.PDF
82 FLIGHT International, 19 January (947 •MS*ft* ItttiA CCJ First-hand Evidence IN THE ISSUE of January 5 (page 10) I wrote on the subjectof public inquiries into air accidents; this week I proposeto deal with the reporting of them. By this I mean the reporting of the accident, not the reporting of the inquiry— which is quite a different matter. It is my belief that, within two or three days of an accident, a number of facts of a more or less indisputable character can be assembled, edited and published, and that there are a great many advantages in doing this. I think also that many aspects of an accident may be portrayed in a more meaningful manner than is provided by the usual uninspiring report, and it is these two aspects on which I pro- pose now to comment. The virtue of an early "preliminary report" is best illustra- ted by the effects of not having such a report. For example, in the Elizabethan accident at Munich on February 6, 1958, we have, a day after the accident, a newspaper reporter, who was on board, saying in relation to the evacuation: "Going in and out of the aircraft we were wading ankle deep in slush." The first official report, however, which was not published until about a year later, chose to estimate the depth of slush from the evidence of one airport official and by inter- polation of the meteorological reports of the coverage near the met. screen as converted from snow depth to water equivalent. The figure from these sources and by these methods was said to be ^cm! Now immediately after this accident there were, as shown by photographs, at least a 100 people at the scene and, if the |cm figure had been published within a day or two and it had been considered unrepresentative of the depth on or near the runway (which I believe it was), I would have expected at least two or three of these witnesses to volunteer their evidence. This would have been recorded at the time and the official inquiry would then have had better data. Without publication, such witnesses can become lost. In fact, all the 100 or so of them at Munich seem to have become lost. Similarly, the witnesses on the scene immediately after the crash would have seen the wing and, as they were mainly drawn from airport personnel, at least some of them would have noticed if there was ice on the wing. But if they did notice any, they had no prompting to say so while their memories were fresh—as they would have had by the issue of a preliminary report—and none has come forward to say whether or not there was ice. Again, in relation to the failure of the Boeing 707 at Orly on June 13, 1962, to execute a successful accelerate-stop, we simply do not know for certain whether the runway was wet or dry—which makes a cardinal difference to any per- formance aspects of the inquiry. A preliminary report issued within a day or two of the accident would surely have brought out this vital piece of evidence. One could go on with many other cases where the most elementary link in the chain of evidence is missing—missing just because most inquiry authorities are reluctant to say anything until they think that they are in a position tc say everything. There are, however, a few exceptions—one being the report on the Viscount accident in Queensland on Septem- ber 22, 1966, which was issued by the Australian authorities within six days of the occurrence. So the idea of a preliminary report is not impracticable. My second criticism of inquiry authorities is that, when they do have anything to say, they so often put it across in the most abstruse manner possible. Many accidents, probably the majority of them, invite what I would call a five-dimensional description: the usual three spacial dimensions, plus the time sequence, plus the information sequence. Surely the only way to make a satisfactory correlation of these elements is by means of a diagram. I know that there are plenty of cases of diagrams in accident reports; but most of them are pretty elementary and make little or no attempt at correlation. Not only in the spacial sense (as with the Grand Canyon and the New York mid-air collisions) does one need a visual picture of relative height and bearing; in most cases one needs to know on what meteorological information, radio-aid assistance, or engineer- ing situation the pilot was acting at any one time in the sequence. For example, in relation to the landing or overshoot type of accident, at the time when the RVR deterioration was passed to the pilot (information which is obtainable from the tower tape), had full flap been selected (information which is obtainable from some flight recorders and should be obtain- able from all)? And at that time what was the heading and rate of descent as shown by the flight recorder and as checked against the report of the controller monitoring by precision radar? All this information and much else could be presented in a more meaningful manner by means of an imaginative diagram by a commercial artist than by means of the un- imaginative doggerel and complicated cross-references of the usual official accident report. And if, for instance, there are two possible tracks (because the witnesses differ), the artist puts in the "alternative path of the aircraft" just as, in the famous diagrams of the Kennedy assassination, the artist showed the "alternative path of the bullet." Perhaps it is not too late to make contact with an artist of the old Illustrated London News school; when the next accident comes along, one could feed to him, according to a carefully devised check-list, all the available information and let him get on with setting this down in the graphic rather than the literary medium. I say "carefully devised" because I would not expect the commercial artist to portray, in the preliminary report, the point of origin of a fatigue crack; but I would expect him to show such things as whether the slush came up to the ankles of a man who walked away from the crash or whether the aircraft dropped a wing and dived in just before or just after crossing the noise monitoring post. In fact, there is so much to be gained by a quick preliminary report and by a visual method of presenting it that I feel inclined to go the whole hog and say to hell with the old adage "when in doubt, leave it out" and suggest instead "the lesser sin is to put it in. . . ." After all, it is only a preliminary report; people are going to speculate anyway and the issue can be more prejudiced by the indiscriminate publication of gossip—which is what happens today—than by the discriminate and easily assimilable publication of. data which is available, is relevant and, in the long run, is very likely to turn out to be right. PIA ENDS HELICOPTER OPERATIONS BECAUSE the airline now has only one S-61 available for operations and because of the long (at present 12-month' delivery delay, Pakistan International has decided not to resume its helicopter operations in East Pakistan. The services were started in 1963 and had been doing well until one of the three S-61s was lost in a crash, following a vulture strike and po*' sibly other causes, on February 2 last year. A second S-61 was lost in a training accident on December 10, leaving the carnef with only one helicopter with which to serve the network- The board of the airline also decided, at its meeting on January 10, that PIA "should examine the feasibility of step- ping-up progressively the present air services in East Pakistan- Improved services are necessary in spite of the better surface communications developed during the past four years. .
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