garf12
Well-known member
- Joined
- May 11, 2004
- Posts
- 288
Anyone see the "FLIGHT OF FEAR" article in the most recent forbes? They go off on how dangerous charters are. Thoughts?
http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2005/0509/042.html
http://www.forbes.com/home/free_forbes/2005/0509/042.html
Compared with crowded commercial flights, cushy charters are an $8,000-an-hour trip into airborne luxury--with a startlingly higher chance of dying in a fiery crash.
Louise Babb never knew what killed her. The private jet her family had chartered took the 77-year-old retiree from her home in Marco Island, Fla. to Lexington, Ky. for cancer treatment, but on landing something went horribly wrong.
With just one-third of the runway remaining at touchdown at Lexington's Blue Grass Airport, the Learjet was still barreling forward at 115 miles an hour. After the reverse thrusters failed to deploy, the pilot ordered his co-pilot to engage the emergency brake, sending the plane into a skid. The jet clipped an airport navigational tower with its right wing, then hurtled off the runway onto a local highway in a blaze of smoke and fire. Babb's chest was crushed. Her husband, the two pilots and a flight nurse suffered severe injuries but survived.
Only now, almost three years after the crash on Aug. 30, 2002, has Babb's family claimed they've discovered a startling secret: The co-pilot's records had been "pencil whipped," or falsified, to indicate he had fulfilled Federal Aviation Administration requirements for annual proficiency flights with a certified inspector, the equivalent of a driving test for pilots. In a lawsuit filed in Florida state court, the family alleges the co-pilot was inexperienced and misused the emergency brake, causing the deadly skid. "A thing like this doesn't happen unless someone screwed up," says the Babbs' lawyer, David Rapoport of Chicago. The FAA is investigating the allegation, he says.
For the FAA and its sibling, the National Transportation Safety Board, the ill-fated flight is one more statistic in an alarming increase in accidents and deaths involving charter planes. Although the total flight hours reported by charter operators rose only 5%to 3 million last year, fatalities on charter planes jumped 55%, to 65 deaths out of 68 separate accidents. To be sure, there is a great deal of randomness in the annual death count, which was only 35 in 2002. But there is no denying the huge gulf between charter and scheduled airlines in safety. Commercial airlines flew almost six times as many hours as charter planes but logged only 21 accidents last year, with 13 fatalities (all in a single accident).
So for the privilege of spending $59,000 (on a cross-country round-trip on a Gulfstream II), charter passengers were 18 times as likely to end up in an accident, fatal or otherwise, per 100,000 hours, according to the NTSB, as those who suffer screaming babies, security goons and the other indignities of commercial travel.
It isn't clear whether the surge in accidents is merely an anomaly or a sign of deep problems. But the FAA is so concerned that it organized a roundtable of experts in February to discuss what officials characterize as a "rash of accidents" in the past several months, including the crash of a Challenger CL-600 jet in Montrose, Colo. that killed one pilot, a flight attendant and the 14-year-old son of NBCSports President Dick Ebersol, who has since recovered from his injuries.
"We're in trouble here," Steven Wallace, director of the FAA's Office of Accident Investigation, told an audience of charter owners at an industry conference in Las Vegas in March. "We don't see a silver bullet,"he added. "There's no question the perception in Washington, aided by the press, is we really have to do something." The FAA is undergoing its biggest overhaul of the charter rules in 27 years, but improvements aren't expected for another two years.
Meantime the charter industry struggles with rising fuel costs and cutthroat competition among some 3,000 charter outfits, with new inroads being made by the rival business of fractionally owned jets from such players as Warren Buffett's NetJets. Some pilots and others argue that the crunch forces charters to cut corners on maintenance and pilot training and give in to fat-cat clients who demand that flights proceed even in unsafe weather.
Yet the FAA is ill equipped to ride herd over charters. The big commercial airlines get the closest scrutiny because they fly the most passengers, but for charters the FAA depends on an honor system of spot checks, audits and certified agents to oversee operators and their aircraft.
The FAA has a hard time simply measuring the scope of the industry. It pegs total charter revenue at as much as $13 billion a year (or maybe as low as $4 billion), split among not quite 3,000 carriers. Even that vague take, in a 151-page report released last fall, took almost five years to produce. The NTSB says the FAA's method of surveying charter companies to estimate flight hours is so "imprecise"--and charter services so unresponsive--that "accident-rate calculations are not accurate enough"to analyze properly. The hard part is knowing whether that means the picture is better than the data show--or even worse.