A good example of the role of chance in any event. An Avianca 707 leaves Colombia for New York City, secondary Boston, with sufficient fuel for the flight plus two hours' extra. There are 149 passengers aboard.
The Air Traffic Controllers at JFK have been ordered to land thirty airplanes an hour although it's a black and windy night with heavy rain. (A credible performance by MacLean, ATC Number Two.) JFK is jammed with planes waiting to take off or trying to land. Avianca is put in one holding pattern after another, first off the coast of Virginia, then New Jersey, the level of fuel dropping steadily. With the passage of time, the passengers are growing anxious, and the flight crew is about to have an attaque nervosa.
I mentioned the role of chance or luck. They're matters of probability. Sooner or later, if something can happen -- good or bad -- it will. In this case, unhappily, the pilots did not emphasize their dire fuel conditions. The Colombians were as polite as the New York ATCs were brusque.
And as the Avianca waited, New York control was passed from one ATC to another to another, and with each transition, a bit more information was lost. The last ATC's shift was just about to end and he hadn't been following the narrative. The mechanics at Medallin had failed to repair the ineffective autopilot, so the pilots of the Avianca had had to wrestle a Boeing 707 manually for more than six hours and they were ridden with fatigue. When they were finally cleared for landing, the engineer failed to tell the pilot that they would have only one chance.
The field is invisible through the dirty weather. The airplane encounters violent wind shear that pushes it downward dangerously below the glide path and the pilot must violently yank his controls back to save the plane. The intention is to go around and try again but the maneuver has unported the fuel lines and the engines are starved of their last remaining few minutes. And at this point, the uninformed ATC in JFK's control tower begins to pass the responsibility over to still another uninformed ATC. The Avianca is vectored out over Long Island, finally turned around, runs out of fuel and crashes less than 17 miles from JFK. The ATCs notice that the airplane no longer appears on their radar and muse about what might have happened to it. There are 85 survivors.
Of course in disasters like this everyone wants to know "who's to blame". It's a clumsy and unsophisticated way of approaching questions of causality. The captain, for instance, is supposed to be ultimately responsible for every act on his airplane and is finally responsible for decisions made on the flight deck. Yet his decisions are built on dozens of decisions made by others before he has a chance to do or say anything. Those dozens of decisions can be ranked in order to their importance if they can be measured but they remain numerous. It's not that an event is "nobody's fault." It's that the responsibility is spread out over so many antecedent sources, sometimes thinly and sometimes not so thinly.
In this case, there were crossed transactions -- misunderstandings or runs of bad luck -- involving the members of the crew on the flight deck, between the crew and the ATCs, between the ATCs and the crew, and among the ATCs themselves. The crew never used the ritual word "emergency" in communicating with the ground. Instead they insisted on being given "priority" because they were "running out of fuel." Did they do wrong? The FAA, which employs the ATCs, thought so and declared the fault lay with the crew of the Avianca. Avianca sued, and the FAA wound up paying roughly one third of the cost of the accident.
As usual, the episode is exceptionally well done. There are naturally reenactors but how many shows would track down the survivors of a ten-year-old airplane crash and give them a chance to tell their stories?
The Air Traffic Controllers at JFK have been ordered to land thirty airplanes an hour although it's a black and windy night with heavy rain. (A credible performance by MacLean, ATC Number Two.) JFK is jammed with planes waiting to take off or trying to land. Avianca is put in one holding pattern after another, first off the coast of Virginia, then New Jersey, the level of fuel dropping steadily. With the passage of time, the passengers are growing anxious, and the flight crew is about to have an attaque nervosa.
I mentioned the role of chance or luck. They're matters of probability. Sooner or later, if something can happen -- good or bad -- it will. In this case, unhappily, the pilots did not emphasize their dire fuel conditions. The Colombians were as polite as the New York ATCs were brusque.
And as the Avianca waited, New York control was passed from one ATC to another to another, and with each transition, a bit more information was lost. The last ATC's shift was just about to end and he hadn't been following the narrative. The mechanics at Medallin had failed to repair the ineffective autopilot, so the pilots of the Avianca had had to wrestle a Boeing 707 manually for more than six hours and they were ridden with fatigue. When they were finally cleared for landing, the engineer failed to tell the pilot that they would have only one chance.
The field is invisible through the dirty weather. The airplane encounters violent wind shear that pushes it downward dangerously below the glide path and the pilot must violently yank his controls back to save the plane. The intention is to go around and try again but the maneuver has unported the fuel lines and the engines are starved of their last remaining few minutes. And at this point, the uninformed ATC in JFK's control tower begins to pass the responsibility over to still another uninformed ATC. The Avianca is vectored out over Long Island, finally turned around, runs out of fuel and crashes less than 17 miles from JFK. The ATCs notice that the airplane no longer appears on their radar and muse about what might have happened to it. There are 85 survivors.
Of course in disasters like this everyone wants to know "who's to blame". It's a clumsy and unsophisticated way of approaching questions of causality. The captain, for instance, is supposed to be ultimately responsible for every act on his airplane and is finally responsible for decisions made on the flight deck. Yet his decisions are built on dozens of decisions made by others before he has a chance to do or say anything. Those dozens of decisions can be ranked in order to their importance if they can be measured but they remain numerous. It's not that an event is "nobody's fault." It's that the responsibility is spread out over so many antecedent sources, sometimes thinly and sometimes not so thinly.
In this case, there were crossed transactions -- misunderstandings or runs of bad luck -- involving the members of the crew on the flight deck, between the crew and the ATCs, between the ATCs and the crew, and among the ATCs themselves. The crew never used the ritual word "emergency" in communicating with the ground. Instead they insisted on being given "priority" because they were "running out of fuel." Did they do wrong? The FAA, which employs the ATCs, thought so and declared the fault lay with the crew of the Avianca. Avianca sued, and the FAA wound up paying roughly one third of the cost of the accident.
As usual, the episode is exceptionally well done. There are naturally reenactors but how many shows would track down the survivors of a ten-year-old airplane crash and give them a chance to tell their stories?
