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Aviation History
1967
1967 - 2155.PDF
750 FLIGHT International, 9 November 1967 Fundamentals of Safety THE PERIOD from 1890 to 1907 represented the great con-solidation of power within American business and becameknown as Morganisation. In a sense it was the natural flower of a prosperous society; it claimed the advantages of big units and stability, and for a time it had seemed to prove its point. But in 1907 the crash came and the small and not-so- small man was ruined; investigations took place only to find that the erstwhile great public benefactors, the Morgans and the Rockefellers, had feet of clay and their their businesses had really served only a small clique. Reform was difficult: most of the congressmen and senators, the public servants and the professional men had one way or another worked the "system" so long that there was practically nobody who had the training, the drive and the independence to initiate reform. To a public looking for a vehicle of expression, the Wall Street Journal hardly qualified in these attributes and in the end it was left to an entirely new grouping under S. S. MaClure to show what needed to be done. His band of writers became known as "the muck-rakers" but they studied the muck fairly closely before they put pen to paper and they soon turned this appellation to a badge of honour. Incidentally, their leader was a woman, Ida Tarbell. Air safety seems to have gone through a somewhat similar period of false success, and public confidence in both the US and UK is sufficiently shaken for governmental inquiries to be set up. Yet one wonders to what extent it is possible to find anyone with the training, the drive and the independence to initiate any fundamental reforms. More important, who could wield the power to implement reform even if the investigations led to positive and irrefutable recommendations? For example, most of the industry must know that the only basis for performance and good handling characteristics of a fixed-wing aircraft is the lg stall, or the zero-rate-of-climb speed. Yet even if any inquiry brought this out with abundant clarity, it would be next to impossible for a government to impose this criterion since the manufacturer would, not without reason, say: "But, on the performance side, we will lose pay- load to our foreign competitor; and, on the handling side, good handling qualities never sold an aeroplane yet." Reforms such as these can really be tackled only at the international level where, however, our machinery is no more than advisory. Suppose, on the operational side, that the inquiry resulted in the conclusion that, so long as mixed VFR/IFR traffic was per- mitted (which, on a worldwide basis, seems to be for the in- definite future), one man in the cockpit had to be free to look out, and at the same time it was proved that cockpit workload, in the very areas where collision was most likely, kept two men fully occupied in handling and navigating the aircraft. Would the inquiry then have the courage to recommend a minimum crew of three for all modern aircraft operating into dense terminal areas? Alternatively, would it have the courage to recommend the exclusion of VFR traffic from such areas? At the moment everything points to the contrary and Mr Oscar Bakke in the USA seems, and Mr Peter Masefield in the UK seemed, to be thinking in terms of little landing strips among the big ones so that, even in the densest terminal areas, little aeroplanes could operate among the big ones. But if the inquiry showed that this mixture was inimical to safety and if the public interest is measured by passenger-miles and not by miles alone* (as is so often quoted in this context), who would have the power to follow this to its logical conclusion and separate the traffic? At the moment, not even the Government of the United States (which, incidentally, has recently announced its own *On this basis the weight of public interest is about 15 to 1 in favourof public transport. fNo RD-64-157. "solution," namely slowing down all jet traffic below 10,000ft!) has this power. It would need a new Congress, a new Senate and probably the 26th amendment to the Constitution to get it. Then there is the minimum equipment area, as particularly related to older aircraft. In these days of grace it should not be possible for an operator to fly in an area such as Europe with- out basing his procedures on the ICAO-prescribed navigational aid—which happens to be VOR. Such a requirement would, for example, preclude NDB descents into Perpignan. Yet any regu- lation to this effect would almost certainly be resisted by the operators on the grounds that, at any rate with the older air- craft, such an installation was entirely uneconomic. Or they would say: give us a better chance to compete for the off- season profitable routes and we would be delighted to provide such refinements. So again one meets the political impasse. There are many more such areas where opposition would be strong and conclusive data hard to come by. But there have been attempts to get the data. A year or two ago ICAO tried to collect data on possible accident trends; there were, however, no volunteers to supply it and the item had to be struck from the agenda of the Air Navigation Commission. Trends exist, of course; but it takes a lot of homework to substantiate them to the point at which one could hold one's own against the special pleaders and special procrastinators. It is illuminating to look at this process. In 1960 the FAA tackled fatigue among jet flight engineers but never published the results since, after more than a year's work, it found that fatigue might also affect jet pilots and so it was desirable to start all over again. But after a further two years on this tack it decided that the results were "medically and statistically unreliable" and again did not publish them. Similarly, in 1964, after starting an experiment on altimeter position error by checking civil transports against a pacer air- craft, the FAA found that fewer than half of the transports turned up at the rendezvous and concluded its reportf with the words: "Due to the limited nature of the data, therefore, no technical conclusion can be drawn and, accordingly, no recom- mendations based on present data can be made." It has never tried this direct method again. On the jet-upset problem, I have been waiting now for two years to see the announcement that "Project Taper" has discovered that there is virtually no margin for gust or manoeuvre above 35,000ft; so far as I know, nothing at all has emerged. But strategic shelving or procrastination is not the prerogative of the USA. The recent UK Board of Trade recantation on definitive duty time limitations is a case in point—not to mention earlier cases, such as the successive postponement of regulations favouring airborne radar and flight recorders—both of which collected years of slippage at the expense of flight safety. Undoubtedly, there is an air-safety problem of considerable dimensions; and this is now recognised by most of the aviation- minded countries of the world—so much so that the two leading States have set up special investigating machinery. In the general context of current inquiries, however, the words of Max Beloff Gladstone Professor of Public Administration at Oxford, writing in The Times of September 11, 1967, are relevant: — "There is much to inquire into and much to do; but the dangerwith our close-knit political-administrative network is that most inquiries are so manned that they turn out to be nothing butthe system looking at itself and finding more to admire than to blame." To defeat the dominance of the great establishments any safety inquiry must, I believe, demand a very exceptional per- sonality if it is to get at the core of the problem. In fact, a single personality would hardly be able to cover the ground and what is needed is a whole group of exceptional contributors. I
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