NET Journal; Fasten Your Seat Belts: A Report on the Crisis in the Air

In that journal, fasten your seat belts, January 13, 1969. The following program is from NET, the public television network. We are now on our final approach to Lebanon Airport, New Hampshire.

Please extinguish your cigarettes, the captain advises the weather is overcast and the ground temperature near freezing. He also reminds you that the safest portion of your journey is now over, so drive carefully away home from the airport. Thank you for flying with us. The air was just announced, the landing ritual and the fast and low safety belts brakes were put on and at that moment the plane hit the ground very hard and I thought, oh, must be a clumsy landing. And the next moment everything in front of me was inflamed. It was in the last seat on the aisle and the air hostess was strapped in next to me.

She freed herself, put the flames out on my hair, rushed to the emergency exit and tried to force it open. My left foot was jammed, I freed it after a while and almost forgot to open my safety belt. Then I frantically rushed after the air hostess. A man helped to open her the emergency exit and thank God we were free and we stepped outside. And I suddenly noticed we were at great height and before I could sink out to get down from the tail I just slipped and fell through enormous height and I think I fell through a pine tree which held that each branch held my foot so luckily after a long time I landed very softly.

We were flying from Philadelphia to Boston, changed planes from Boston to Hanover. And you were flying alone? My husband died in the plane. I'm just going to see him. The airplane hit Moose Mountain just under 2,300 feet so he was above the ceiling and obviously in the fog and overcast when he hit. But he was several hundred feet under the altitude he should have been crossing Moose Mountain. This man was very familiar with this thing for the following three years. The pilot's aware, the approaching of a mountain.

I don't know any pilot. He's sitting up front there and he's going to be the man to get caught. And we want to know why he was too low at that spot. We brought with us two doctors from the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology and watched and they go with us on crashes and we have two FBI men doing fingerprint identification. I know I can see it. I really can't see how anybody got on. I think in all honesty, I don't think he could classify this as a survivable accident. The airplanes are just not built. That type of survivability on an action of this type. I think I'll try to go split that way right now because there's too many pilots. Everywhere. He's drooling all over the place. Some were still in the seats.

We had one out here in the middle that was still alive when we got here. We had to find first. She was still strapped in the seat and that was on top of her. She laid face down. When we get down here, once she heard the voices, she started hollering. But she didn't make the...she didn't make it out. There's a role to say that they want to claim the body as fast as they can and get out. Sometimes we have a problem with them because if we have anybody to give them, they get in an uproar. But we usually point out that identification is very important to them for financial reasons. We want the identification to make sure we knew exactly who was at the airplane or if there was any unauthorized person on the airplane. We have to check off that list very carefully. An orthodontic work on the teeth and filling and a very helpful jaw work even when you have to head left or anything. Some torso remains with the different types of sky tissue. The fingerprint, of course, footprints sometimes.

Glowing oftentimes is very helpful. In this case, we had people who were dressed. They didn't have the figures of crushed bodies that you get. Some accidents that don't have any clothes on. They never have shoes on them. Clothes have been torn off or burned off. This instrument is in very good condition. Usually, we don't have such good luck. Of course, I'm not saying it. It could be used again. I have recovered both the CVR and the flame recorder. They were found in the area of their installation. Although they were loose and buried at very high temperature to breathe. We sent them into the lab in Washington, where they were. I would say that the chances of getting anything out of the voice recorder are very poor.

A sense of voice recorder tape is some myelars. There are metal pieces within that thing that are melted. The other, the flame recorder may or may not have an intact tape. We have no report on it yet. We've been working on it now for five days. As you can see, it got pretty badly burned. Our tape suffered pretty bad damage. The tape feeds through here, and these styluses move back and forth to give us our impressions on the tape. This will give us his altitude at impact, also his airspeed. If he was flying like he should have been, according to the approach procedures up here in New Hampshire. We hope to get this information. For present, we're missing one critical portion right at the end, and this is what we're hunting for here.

Possibly we can find this one little flame on the readout machine. The aluminum tape has been just destroyed, and we've actually had to pick up pieces and unfold them, and it's taken quite a bit of time to get them back into place. What the investigators seek to learn is what caused this airplane to hit a mountain. Why did Mrs. Nettle escape while her husband perished in the fire? Can airplanes be built and flown so there will be fewer crashes? And if they crash, can more passengers survive? Your chances of dying in an airline accident are one in a million. On the basis of passenger miles flown, airline travel is the safest way to get from point to point. But calculated on the basis of the time exposed to danger, an hour spent in an airliner is much more dangerous than an hour spent in a bus

or a train or even your own car. It all depends on how you interpret the statistics, and which expert you listen to. The level of safety in scheduled airline travel in the last five years, orders on the unbelievable. We've averaged 250 deaths per year. It's a remarkable safety record. Safety is relative. I think we have a very reasonable level of safety, but it can be higher, and it should be higher. When you know that you can do certain things that would raise this level, it would save lives, and you don't do it, then you're wrong. The accidents are so rare in airline aviation that we're working where it takes a great deal of money to gain a very slight increase in safety. Any airplane could be safer by the addition of safety devices by the expenditure of more money.

Of course, if we reach the point where it gets so heavy, then we're not going to be able to put any passengers on. We've defeated a very utilization that we're after. I think the airlines have generally spoken are happy with the level of safety. Basically, it's a level that they can accept from a business standpoint, an economic standpoint, and a public relation standpoint. People are reluctant to talk about our safety in public. It's sort of a closed subject. You don't discuss it out in the open. People within the industry, it's sort of a sacred thing. I think they've, for many, many years going way back, aviation was difficult thing to sell. And certainly at one time, it was a very, very hazardous thing. Back in the days when the airplanes were tied together with baling wire and fabric. So I think over the years, everybody that grew up in the industry they've been selling aviation, selling safety, and so forth, which is natural and good. But it's got to the point where you just don't unsell it in any way.

You never criticize it. You're supposed to not outside of the end of the circle. Major airline crashes occur on an average of once a month in North America. Pilots say there are many crashes which could have been prevented and many people die needlessly in accidents which should have been survivable. No airline is immune from accidents. No airplane is completely safe. Danger areas are clearly indicated. Landing and takeoff, mid-air collision, inadequate runways. Outdated radar control, hijacking and sabotage, mechanical malfunction, inadequate training and testing. Every time a new airplane design is put into service, there is a probability it will crash a few times before it is mechanically failsafe and pilots learn to fly it. In 1964, the Boeing company rolled out at 727, a fast medium-range jet much in demand by the airlines. Pilots described it as a sweet airplane very easy to fly.

For 18 months there were no mishaps. Then several 727 crashes in quick succession. One was in Cincinnati. American Airlines flight 383 from New York crashed and burned on approach to landing at greater Cincinnati airport. Five seconds before it hit the last radio message from the pilots indicated they did not know they were approaching too low. The safety board stated the probable cause of this accident was the failure of the crew to properly monitor the altimeters during a visual approach into deteriorating visibility conditions. The true cause of the accident really was a more an operating type of procedure that was wrong and training procedure. And also the airplane itself had a peculiarity that ended into it. Sometimes it is hard to distinguish between a design problem in the airplane and the training that goes with the airplane, training to the flight crews. So that in the 727, as an example, pilots in the early days

were flying the airplane very likely with insufficient information about its characteristics. It took time for the airlines and the pilots to become familiar with the sink rate of the airplane and its ability to pull out of a descent and so forth. And that very likely entered into the early 727 cases, 727 accidents. Three of them they blame on pilots. Two of the actions were labeled unknown. And the other one, it was in the foreign country, I don't know what the finally termination was, but they're all similar type of an accident in that it was occurred in a descent to a landing and they just weren't right on in. They couldn't check their descent. They corrected the problem, but they never publicly labeled the problem. They never really pinpointed the problem that is the public standpoint officially. The Boeing company states that only one of the 727 accidents

was associated with a high descent rate or sink rate and that the other accidents may have been caused by other factors. However, pilots were warned to pay strict attention to the landing characteristics of this airplane and this type of accident did not recur. The DC-8 was the Douglas company's entry into the Big Jet sweepstakes. The plane performed splendidly, but after years of service it was involved in crashes where the pilots got into high-speed dives that could not pull out. We've had within the past decade, which is our only decade of experience in civil jet aircraft, some sophisticated designs that have resulted in some rather sophisticated accident causes. For example, the high-dive accidents on these jet aircraft,

they're so large that a man can not physically move the controls himself, so they have hydraulically boosted control surfaces. They found, for example, in the aircraft accident at St. Teresa's and the American domestic Eastern Airlines accident like Pontgetrain, that a part of the cause of contributing factor was the fact that the pilot had the capability to move these powered controls, this powered steering, if you will, to a position that was dangerous in that they could move the entire horizontal stabilizer to a nose-down position at a time when they might not notice it at night in turbulence when their attention was otherwise diverted in an air traffic control situation, for example.

And they found that the pilot could get that heavy control into this angle that pulled for a dive and then the airplane could start into a dive and develop within a matter of split seconds an unrecoverable dive. High-speed dives on DC-8s were involved in the Air Canada crash at St. Teresa's Quebec and the Eastern Airlines crash in Lake Pontgetrain. The fact that that horizontal stabilizer was found in the wreckage of both airplanes in the full nose-down position is indicative of the fact that there was a control problem the Canadian government to felt that in their finding and so did the Civil Air and Alex Boer. The investigations of the DC-8 centered around the flat part of the tail known as the horizontal stabilizer. It was discovered that in the full nose-down position the plane could go into an unrecoverable dive. Douglas Company was very anxious to make the change and they did it voluntarily without any requirement on the part of the government

and all they did was restrict the area of movement. On the DC-8 they restricted it from an ability of the pilot to put the horizontal stabilizer from two degrees nose-down before the accidents to one half a degree nose-down after the accidents and we haven't had an accident since. On a high dive with the DC-8. It is my view that this defect was correctable before the plane was ever-certificated. McDonald Douglas states that since the DC-8 flew more than a million miles before these two accidents there could not have been a defect in the airplane. The adjustment to the controls they say was made to prevent pilot error. The company denies that the nose-down adjustment of the stabilizer caused the accidents. The next generation of airplane is the jumbo jet which will roll up to already overcrowded terminals with 490 passengers in each plane. The first to make its debut is the Boeing 747 and as the christening took place in October 1968

the insurance brokers were calculating the probable crash rate. This is called the learning curve for new airplanes and their projection based on past experience is that two of the 747s will crash in the first 18 months. The airlines are well aware of this history and there are some statistics to support the theory of a learning curve. Right now the airlines and my organization are actively exploring this learning curve phenomenon and attempting to get behind what is really involved here as a matter of fact during the past year we've had several meetings among ourselves to evaluate this and the greatest depth we could. I was part of an airline group that went out and we had a two or three day session with Boeing on this subject

so I could say that for the 747 and as far as that goes for the other big jets that are coming in the users and manufacturers are doing everything they can to make sure that this introduction into service is as safe as possible and that we don't go through this so-called learning curve phenomenon. The Federal Aviation Agency or administration now has been extremely relaxed and certification testing. Basically the airline manufacturer makes the test and they'll make the design and they'll test it and they report to the FAA that everything's all right. I think that we should insist that the FAA do more of their own testing and that they have an adequate staff to evaluate the initial design of particularly a new aircraft and we just don't have that now. Well I think it's too much of a generalization. We would like to have more inspectors.

We do check out every airplane. We do individually certificate every jet pilot but we do delegate to the airlines on a designated basis the piston policy because we don't have enough inspectors to go around. Obviously there will be some flight tests conducted by FAA test pilots but the bulk of the design, the testing of the material, the majority of the flight tests will all be conducted by a company employees who are interested in producing an economical aircraft that can make a profit for another business and airline. We spot check it, we fly it. We keep people in as factories looking at it but we do not take responsibility and could not for the millions of parts and the millions of man hours that goes into making every airplane. This would be like looking at every automobile by some government inspector. We think that we have about the right balance on spot checking,

him certifying, him performing the test and showing us but in the end result we'll fly ourselves. People who fly are mostly very anxious to get to their destination but one in every hundred million wants to blow up the airplane with himself or someone else on board. There have been nine cases of sabotage in North America the motive usually to collect the insurance. Max from 225,000. I think yeah, travel insurance should be less because I think the risk is lower than that. I think the rate is high. You are. I think it's a rather safe means of transportation but still carry insurance. I think we should eliminate the slot machine insurance and bending machines where you throw a quarter in and buy a lot of insurance because we have had situations where some deranged individual buys a bunch of insurance by putting money in a slot machine

type of a gadget and buys all this insurance. I think the deranged person, the person bent on suicide or a person that wants to kill somebody else by putting a bomb on an airplane. I think he would think twice about going before a reputable insurance agent and sitting down and taking out insurance. I think that because one state did take action and outlawed these bending machines. I think insurance bending machines should be taken out of airport terminal. Whether bending machines contribute or not, sabotage continues to be a threat. A device to detect explosives is now being tested in some airports by the FAA. We have developed a laboratory model of an instrument which can detect a variety of explosives which would not require any examination of any individual person all of his baggage just as he walked on board an airplane or through an enclosure.

He would be electronically scanned and by a variety of techniques we could tell either whether there are explosives or weapons carried on boarding. I don't want to get into exactly how this can be done because whenever one poses a technological problem there are enough nuts in the world to take this on as a personal challenge. A more frequent danger in the air comes from people who don't want to destroy an airplane but merely to borrow it at gunpoint. There were 19 cases of hijacking in the US and Canada up to mid-December 1968. To determine which passenger is carrying a weapon is a difficult technical problem. Some progress is being made but there's an urgent need for countries to adopt an extradition treaty for hijackers. Pilots have plenty of problems without having to deal with hijackers or saboteurs. To hoist a hundred tons of airplane into the sky

is a process of considerable complexity. If anything goes wrong, the takeoff must be aborted before the plane reaches critical speed which is known to pilots as V1. Pilots say the V1 speed is not reliable because most runways are too short if they have trouble on takeoff and accident is inevitable. The V1 is our takeoff decision speed. It's a point on the takeoff where it's a go or no-go situation. Below that particular speed on that particular airplane and that runway and that gross weight and so forth before you obtain that speed you theoretically can stop the takeoff and there's sufficient runway left to get the airplane stopped before going off again. It is my view that if a pilot has to abort on a runway-limited airport at V1 at decision speed that he will not be able to stop the aircraft that means it's an inevitable accident. In 1964 a TWA flight taking off from Rome

was approaching V1 when something went wrong at the controls was kept in lowle. Two indications showed up and so I aborted the takeoff. As a result my outboard engine collided with a piece of construction equipment the plane exploded, burned out. Nobody was killed because of impact forces. The people died because of the fire. They couldn't get out of the airplane. I went out the cockpit window and I couldn't get back in the passenger compartment because in this case the forward shoot jammed up and people couldn't get out and I went out the window with the idea of getting it below the shoot and helping people down from a lot of people just simply never get out. There's a great deal of effort on crash survivability and as a matter of fact this is one of the places where the government has put a major effort as far as its R&D is concerned

and also has taken a number of major regulatory actions. Well you may recall about oh I guess it must be about the better part of two years ago. There was a new rule on evacuation which called for required the airlines to conduct drills and demonstrations to prove that an airplane with only half the exits open could be cleared in 90 seconds. And so that's one example. The size of the doors and the matter of clear path to the doors. The present system of emergency escape system from an airline is just an absolute disgrace. It's a Mickey Mouse system and it's a system of opening doors and inflating shoots that you slide down and it's cumbersome. It's difficult to get them in operation half the time they don't work.

The history of these shoots is pretty sad. They changed the evacuation demonstration from two minutes to 90 seconds. It's a rehearse drill, so to speak. It doesn't coincide with the realities of an emergency situation. To determine the effect of fire and impact the FAA crashed this plane and recorded the results on high-speed cameras. They learned that seat mooring should be strengthened and meal trays padded and some of these changes have already been made. Other recommendations call for smoke hoods and improved escape mechanisms.

One promising experiment tested rubber balloons which inflate instantly to cushion bodies from the impact of a crash. Engineers believe the most promising single experiment is the development of a jellied fuel similar to napalm. Ordinary jet fuel explodes and burns violently a few seconds after it catches fire. Jell fuel burns slowly and does not explode. But safety experts say the development will take many years, unless there is public pressure on the airlines and the government to develop it faster. Of all the causes of airplane accidents, landings continue to be the most dangerous. Runways are too short. Approaches are cluttered with factory chimneys and apartment buildings, navigation aids are inadequate or malfunction. Captain Lowell describes what he calls one of the most hazardous places to sit down an airplane with Guardia in New York.

This airport here is one of the problem airports of Guardia. It's been the scene of many accidents. And just recently one airplane hit this pier out here approaching during low ceilings for visibility and his wheels caught the end of that pier, fortunately he was able to pull out and nobody was hurt. This runway is relatively short and this is why they built that pier out there to lengthen it a little bit. Approaching in bad weather when you're approaching strictly on instruments, the airplane will touch down 700 feet from the end of the runway. Of course the pilot is sitting way up and his landing gear is way below him. And you only have I think 26 foot clearance with the landing gear with that steel pier out there. I think too often the pilot is used as a scapegoat. For instance this runway, we're talking about this runway out here. This has been approved. The instrument landing system has been approved by the FAA. It's been approved by the airline operators. The length of the runway. So what else could be wrong?

If a pilot hits that steel pier, he's got to be at fault. It's approved. And the point is that, of course on a day-to-day operation, hundreds of airplanes are landing there and they don't knock their gear off. But then we operate under all kinds of weather conditions. And when the weather is bad, your margin is reduced with this sort of an operation. And eventually something will happen. Combine it with a minor error in the altimeter. And I'm talking about a minor error. You don't need much of an error in your altimeter reading to clip the end of that pier. And you won't even know it. You think everything is fine. And all of a sudden you hit something. And this has happened and does happen. It did happen in November 1968 when Japan Airlines, with 96 persons on board, landed in San Francisco Bay. Three miles short of the runway. The pilot was 900 feet below where he should have been when he broke through the fog. Why he misread his altimeter is a mystery. But pilots believe there should be safer landing systems

to prevent such mishaps. The Japan airliner was equipped with a radio altimeter, but its warning light flashed too late to prevent an accident. A Navy test of this standard altimeter found that experienced pilots misread it 10% of the time. It takes only one miss reading to cause an accident. The only certain way to bring an airliner down in zero weather is to have a computer at the controls. Fully automated landings like this McDonald Douglas system are within the state of the art, as these pilots demonstrate with their hands totally off the controls. But more research and development is needed, and it will cost about $100 million to get an operating system. This is approximately equal to what it would cost in insurance settlements in the crash of one jumbo jet. In aviation, it is often public clamor which leads to improvements. But sometimes public clamor creates new hazards. Jet planes make so much noise that living is unpleasant

within 50 square miles of an airport. The jumbo jets will be quieter than present aircraft, but supersonic transports will be much worse. Yet new houses and apartments continue to be built under the flight path. Most of the really noisy fights out of Canada are conducted off runway 31 left. The state of New York is sponsoring a large apartment complex in an area about a mile and a half off the end of runway 31 left. And so these 10,000 apartment dwellings will be subjected to extremely high noise levels to understand though that they're very strict specifications involving acoustical treatment of the buildings and they should be suitable places to live indoors. But anyone who lives there will be essentially a captive because if he goes outside, the noise levels will be such that he can't do anything productive. He won't be able to sit out on a patio and talk to his friends. There's a wide variation in the threshold of damage in different people

but a single flyover at a level around 140 decibels would or should probably cause some minor hearing loss in a young child who had not had any permanent hearing damage prior to that. When citizens complain enough, they get action. At many airports, microphones are installed off the end of the runways and pilots are required to cut back on their engines to reduce noise. At Kennedy in New York, a special tower observes every takeoff and records how much noise the pilot makes. If he rings the gong, his airline gets a nasty letter. Some pilots know where the ground microphones are located and cut their engines back for a few seconds as they fly over. Most pilots believe the noise abatement procedures involve unnecessary risk to the safety of the airplane. Captain Lowell says it may have contributed to one fatal accident. They had an accident out of Kennedy a few years ago with a jet that took off and went into Jamaica Bay.

It was determined later after the investigation that this airplane had a mechanical malfunction in the retabuse system. But the fact is, if he had been making a normal takeoff, climbed out normally, obtained speed and altitude in a normal way without making a low altitude turn and power reduction, he would have been able to overcome this problem and he would not have crashed. It was quite a bit of controversy on that protective accident because the official accident reported did not blame the noise abatement procedures. Why don't they shift some of this noise over to other runways because we know for a fact that we're getting the brunt of the noise. I've lived here almost all of my life. We were here long before the planes came. We were here long before the runway was built. This runway was built without our knowledge. We had no idea that they were pointed these runways directly over until the first planes came over. This is the smell of the odor of the fuel, the jet fuel. This we get when the winds are from the northwest direction

and sometimes it's intolerable. They tell us that it's non-toxic and that it's non-daisers but it seems to us that it's not so. Sometimes we just gag. We can't breathe it all down. These planes will take off at either worlds or less than one minute apart and they'll keep the sub right up to about 12 o'clock in the morning, 12 o'clock in the morning at times and then they'll start in again around six in the morning, seven in the morning, whereas we're almost impossible for us to sleep. Every city in the world is out growing its airport. Traffic nearly doubles every five years. More runways and more airports are desperately needed but everywhere citizens want them to locate somewhere else. New York has been trying for 10 years to get a fourth jet port but most areas can bring enough political pressure to keep it away. In one New Jersey county where the jet port wants to locate

citizens are already drawing up their battle plan. So my message is take a look at what the Jersey Jet Port Site Association did beginning in December 1959 which resulted in the signing of the wilderness area built by President Johnson only a few weeks ago. You can do the same but my 16 years as your representative in Congress I never saw anything as dramatic as the unity with which the people rose against this proposal to violate the character of their neighborhoods and to destroy values in an effort to put a jet port in an unsuitable location. I think we have a beautiful residential area here and I would hate to see it destroyed by first of all a jet port and second of all all the commercial whatever comes with it. Well, they should go to a less populated area.

They get less complaints, less turn downs when they... I wouldn't live within 50 miles of an airport and anybody that does live in fact do you know that there's a town outside of Los Angeles that is suing that the town of Los Angeles some 80,000 people for emotional problems caused by aircraft noise. We've got Somerset County fairly nicely situated and I would hate to see it destroyed. If these citizens secure their area against a jet port it may have to move to a site near Philadelphia more than 50 miles from New York. It will take seven years to build and long before then air traffic into New York will be hopelessly clogged. On January 15, 1969 the FAA begins to enforce a rationing system for airliners landing at New York's airports. They will require a ticket to land before they are allowed even to take off. Small private airplanes outnumber jet liners 50 to 1.

Some of them are as well equipped as an airliner but many don't even have a radio. Students can buzz around through the landing areas of major airports an hour after their first solo. Forty new planes are built every day and the accident rate for small planes keeps going up. To prevent mid-air collisions the FAA and the Air Transport Association have developed a collision avoidance system which warns pilots of the approach of other planes and tells them what to do to avoid a crash. McDonald Douglas built the system and is using it on its own planes but it won't be installed in airliners until 1972 at the earliest. Even then it won't prevent collisions with small planes. The mid-air collision problem today is the greatest with lighter planes down low and you're operating in the lower altitudes. And they're operating most always on a visual under-visual flight rules on a CNBC basis and this is where your greatest problem today lies.

We don't like getting tangled up with the airliners anymore and airliners like getting tangled up with us. But I thought that you might be wiped out by one is not too realistic and I guess we don't think about that much even though it really happens. It happens that it's very easy for a guy to go up on a paper cup with sort of half a radio, perhaps a receiver only. And if his navigation is not too careful, find himself in the molten zone. He's realizing it himself. He may be tilling along at 2,000 feet. He could fly right through an approach fast. He wouldn't know because his navigation isn't good enough. He might even hear them talking on their radio about a blip on their screen, advising other traffic if there's somebody in the area in a certain position all the two don't know. And not know that's him because he doesn't know where he is. There's some traffic, little wee traffic, low and sand. What do you do? He was going right into that guy. Well, the only thing I can do is just keep a sharp eye out.

He happens to be turning in towards us now. But he's well below. I don't know what the hell he's doing. It's a twin beach craft. He's bigger than we are. And he's done at least 1,000 feet below us. He's not much off the surface. Hey, our UCH. Do you have a target in our vicinity, sir? No, where did you come from heading now, sir? Our compass heading is 0-1-1-1-0. No, I have, you know, just yourself. And, you can't find your target. It's a very, very heavy target. I do have a faint target now off to your left side. I can see a better coming out of your transponder target now. And he'll be off to your left, he's already stopped. Yeah, I was curious that we weren't getting a advisory from you with an aircraft coming as close as that.

I guess it was because of the vertical separation, eh? If it were very far out, we wouldn't take them. But I think the problem there is that your transponder returning. So great, you're sort of blocking the whole little area around you. That goes to me. My safety device, my transponder, which has been on full power, was in fact wiping out the radar signal from that aircraft that was getting pretty close to us. Now, I have to reassure myself that had he been at the same altitude as us, we would have had a warning about him earlier when he was further away and not getting wiped out by our signal. But it still remains true that with that aircraft right under us, he might very well have come for any reason and we wouldn't have been advised. And this could apply to the same kind of separation problem with an airliner as with me. You know, if I were out there without my transponder on, and for some at low, and in the shadow of an aircraft's transponder signal, and that way, I suppose if I decided to pull the nose back and go straight up, we could get into the problem with an airliner.

We're operating on a luck system, more or less. We still have a very large ocean of air, and it would depend on a great deal on this fact alone to keep us from colliding with other airplanes. We're here for it, to part Northwest, noise of any of the stages. Eastern 6-5-1-1-1-3-3. The congestion and the fact that the traffic control system has a system devised some 30 years ago, it hasn't kept up with the sophisticated airplane. It's way behind. Northwest, 85 coming out to talk to you. As of the first of this year, the Federal Aviation Administration granted immunity for the pilots and the traffic controllers if they report near misses. In other words, they're trying to get a reading to see just how bad the situation is. And since that time, unofficially, the figures are running around 200 near misses a month, which is rather frightening. Sometimes it gets pretty hairy in the control tower, but it's even more tense at the radar center

at Islet Long Island, where every airplane converging on New York must be identified, logged, charted, and safely directed through the world's busiest air corridor. We didn't have to do it with a single hero. National 92, the spoke I had before, they've been one 2,000 radar cancer. Unfortunately, I've been present three times when we've had mid-air collisions. The most recent one happened when two aircraft, theoretically, were 1,000 foot apart, but somehow managed to get together. And one was much more fortunate, made it back to Kennedy and the other landed on a border of New York and Connecticut with loss of life. Despite the fact that the controller may not have contributed in any manner, he can't help but feeling this center responsibility. I think all controllers are forever have the specter of a democratically sort hanging over your head that any event

something happened, even if you didn't contribute, you can't help feeling that perhaps there was something you might have done to alleviate this to avoid it. Well, that's the kind of just one out. He hasn't come back yet. He had just departed a little while ago. I mean, he's going to be all over Montaug and... No, he didn't cancel it. He's going to be late, probably. I don't know if he is going to be, so just leave him there like that. Just expect... Put him on top of Carmel Bay. I was working inbound traffic from the north and northwest to the Kennedy Airport. My coordinator accepted a handle from the high altitude sector. In a route, descent to Kennedy by Carmel Riverhead de-apocalyptic. The aircraft came over and reported at the sign altitude that I have marked on my flight progress strips.

Identify the traffic, verify the identification, issued an in route descent appropriate for traffic. His clearance was from a high altitude which would be somewhere above 23,000, to an altitude of 11,000 feet. As he was approaching the Carmel VOR, there was other traffic south-westbound from Boston to Newark Airport. And there was a normal occurrence at two aircraft, vertically separated by 1,000 feet, but crossed over one another. There was nothing different than doesn't happen at least, maybe a hundred times a day. The next thing I know, the trans-world aircraft, and it made reference to the fact that he just had a mid-air collision. I wasn't very sure what I had heard the first time because it was startling. I just wasn't sure I asked him to say it again. And his reply was, I just hit a blue-colored constellation. At that particular time,

it was a penny-trading joke to myself. And again, I wasn't really sure what I had heard, and he verified that he had 30 feet of his left wing torn off. I made everybody around me aware of it because I don't remember exactly what I did, but I know I jumped at my feet. Within seconds after I gave him a direct course to the Kennedy Airport, naturally giving him the most expeditious handling we possibly could. I made also reference to the other controller. He didn't realize the impact of what I had heard. Oh, so maybe two minutes or a couple minutes after I knew what was going on. I said to the man, I said, see if he can contact this aircraft. So he did, and he said, I can't.

I just try again and again and make sure you get him. And when he finally did get in contact with him, there was panic. You handle hundreds and hundreds of aircraft a day or a week. And you never think of him as really people in each aircraft. You'll go crazy trying to separate people. It's this blip. It's not coming next to this blip. And my first impulse, he told me he just hit another aircraft was, oh my gosh, those poor people. And there you are sitting with a microphone in your hand. There's really nothing much you can do. I recall hearing, I don't remember if it was the pilot or the engineer, or one of the people from the aircraft talking with you. And he gave his full name. I don't recall the name of hand. And he said, help us. Like I said before, you sit there with a monk in your hand.

There's not much help you can give him. If you say, fair aircraft flying, you have level flight with all the things being normal, you can help. And aircraft going down, you can't help them much. Well, how could that particular incident be normal? It's purely conjecture on anybody's point who can actually happen right at this particular time. We're giving 1,000 foot vertical separation to any aircraft. We're giving three miles lateral separation within 40 miles of an antenna of the radar facility using and five miles after the facility. And you can extend those safety procedures to infinity. You can give a guy a hundred miles. But that doesn't mean that these pilots and these facilities are equipped and that they're using is up to snuff. Right now, we have two-dimensional radar. We have radar that'll tell you the direction that they're moving.

We have radar that'll tell you the distance we need vertical radar. I don't believe that the equipment was ever more reliable than it is now, with the exception of one of our three radar systems. It's becoming less and less reliable because it's such an antiquated system and it's subject to breakdown. The equipment that we really need is probably still on the drawing board. I could think of times where I could have used a better frequency. I could think of times when I could have used a better radar presentation. Well, frankly, if the equipment were more reliable, if we could depend upon our radar, if we could depend upon the radio from ground to air, it would alleviate much of the anxiety that you'd still would always have this thought on your mind when you're working as many as 2,000 SOBs or souls on board as we call them at one given moment. The pressure mounts at the traffic mounts.

You come in in the morning and there are days that you can sit around and really just man your position and fly through it. I mean, it's just like any other job. But when you have bed weather, thunderstorms in this guy, snow, whatever it may be, the weather predicts the conditions of the radar controller and of the pilot as well. When it's bed weather, the pilots are more intent. They're listening a little more carefully. They're more concerned of what's going on. And on the other hand, when it's VFR and they can have visual reference to anything that they're flying from. They can see from here to Chicago that there's a little more lax in their operation. 526, how long have you got seven? In Washington, a friend of mine was working in the aircraft and he never did return to work and this was over eight years ago. As a matter of fact, he ultimately committed suicide. Now, as far as more recent, the one controller was out on sick leave for over three weeks and he had nothing whatsoever to do with this.

And the other one still bears the scars to this day. It contributed to a very unhappy home life. And, frankly, every time he works in aircraft, he gets the feeling that perhaps something might happen. You never think about coming to work and working to aircraft that are going to hit. At least I don't. At least I try not to think about it. Unfortunately, it seemed that the industry or the agency itself were either unable or unwilling to do anything about the situation. What should the FAA do? It's quite strenuous at this particular time for everybody concerned to be working a six-day week. We need skilled personnel. We need skilled personnel badly. These people are coming in off the street, as you'd say, and they have some basic background, mostly military background, either former pilots, tower operators, and their knowledge of air traffic and control is very limited.

And you've really got to take them by the hand and lead them most of the way. And we need incentives for the more high-density areas, such as New York, Chicago, LA, or most of the big metropolitan cities, that there'd be an incentive for these men to work at these particular airports. The equipment that's the best that's being made, everyone would like to have better car, better TV, better refrigerator. But we are using the most modern that the industry can provide in a way of integrated circuits to solid state equipment. Certainly, you don't replace all the radars every year. We've got about a billion and a half, or close to two billion invested in them. And I think it'd be completely unreasonable to replace them every year, as the airlines do not replace their fleet every year. Unless they very quickly come up with better equipment, both radio and radar,

and come up with more controlists, the situation that you saw last summer won't be one-tenth as bad as it will be in succeeding symbols. It seems that every major improvement has been brought about by our major catastrophe. Hopefully, it won't take another crash to get things going right. Money, just money. It takes money, and we can have probably the best sophisticated air traffic control system. That's available. I hope it doesn't take another mid-air collision because I don't think how anybody could possibly explain not having this equipment at the next mid-air collision when lives are concerned. You can't put a price on someone's life or put a price on safety. Did this bad tree lease? We have it. We haven't taken off data.

Take off data's program. 1.96, 1.96, 1.2, 1.38 out of five. 1.38 out of five checks. They do our warning lights. We've got the forward entry time cargo. And the next day, or at the end of the day. Down to the dust priors, here's your MEL. We're going to get a full-zero idea. We'll go there one more time. We're going to get a full-zero idea. We'll go there one more time. We're going to get a full-zero 1.119. Got the dust in there, both. 6,000 feet. Check it. You're going to have to get a five on the right. We're going to get a full-zero 1.169.

1.6,000. I'm sorry, I got a full-zero 1. It's 1.18, 1.6,000. It went 4.17,000 feet. We're going to get a full-zero 1. Roger, I saw my pilot. Follow me, Roger. He's in the 7.68, I can't take me off now. I want to eat my lunch. This is NET, the public television network.