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"Flight of Fear"

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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

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.


 
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In April the NTSB scolded the FAA for lax oversight of aircraft maintenance among charters. That swipe was inspired by the July 2003 crash of an Air Sunshine Cessna 402Cprop plane off Treasure Cay in the Bahamas. Two of the nine passengers died after the pilot ditched the plane in the Atlantic Ocean. NTSB investigators found that the pilot, who survived, had previously failed nine flight checks but was still allowed to fly; in January NTSB criticized the FAA for failing to ground him. Investigators also found an unqualified assistant mechanic had worked on the plane's engines without supervision and cited "numerous discrepancies" in Air Sunshine's maintenance records. Air Sunshine has had six accidents since 1987, and the FAA should have stepped up its scrutiny of the firm, the NTSB said; it advised the FAA to come up with more specific criteria for accidents that would set off red flags about a charter.

Some pilots privately say charters skimp on training at a time when pilots must master myriad different control panels on a wide array of planes; there isn't a single standard design. One pilot says he recently took off in a Learjet and noticed, in midair, that his co-pilot was fumbling unfamiliarly with the controls. "I asked how much training he had. He was clueless," says the pilot, who didn't want to be named. The co-pilot responded that he had only "a couple of hours" training on the jet and couldn't recall who had trained him.

In their eagerness to please well-heeled customers, pilots take risks they might not otherwise. When a chartered Gulfstream IIIcrashed at Aspen, Colo.'s airport in March 2001, killing the 3 crew members and 15 passengers, the accident initially was blamed on the jet-setter airport's notoriously unpredictable weather and proximity to mountains. But in its investigation the NTSBrevealed that the plane departed from Los Angeles 41 minutes late because of some tardy passengers, forcing the pilot to fly into Aspen in the dark and into the teeth of an approaching storm.

The pilot, pressured by the passenger who was paying for the flight, decided to take the risk of continuing into Aspen rather than diverting to a safer airport 44 miles away. En route to Aspen the pilot told a dispatcher at Avjet, the Burbank, Calif. charter outfit running the flight, that it was important to land at Aspen because "the customer spent a substantial amount of money on dinner," the NTSBreport states.

When an accident occurs, it is difficult to assign blame because of the obscure accountability of many charter flights. Unlike commercial planes, which are usually owned and maintained by the airline, charters often use jets borrowed from private owners, who use the charter income to offset operating costs of $3,000 per hour and gas at $5 a gallon.

The Learjet Louise Babb died in was owned by a Louisiana businessman, Michael Henry. (Weird trivia:prior owners included Saudi Arabia's Bin Laden family.) Henry handed the plane to a broker, who in turn set up a management arrangement with American Air Network of St. Louis, owner of an FAAcertificate that allowed it to use this plane and others for charters. The Babbs, however, booked their flight through Air Ambulance Care Flight International, a Clearwater, Fla. charter outfit that was one of 17 subcontractors that paid a fee to fly under American Air's FAA certificate. The pilot and the co-pilot were "leased"to Air Ambulance from DecisionPEO, a St. Petersburg, Fla. temp outfit that handles payroll, personnel and other tasks.

"You do have charters passing through a lot of hands, but this situation is especially screwy," says Babb attorney Rapoport. "You have no idea who's doing what. You can't get a better test case than this." In legal filings the co-pilot's lawyers say it is "highly speculative" to argue that the crash could have been avoided if the pilot's records hadn't been doctored.

The murkiness of charter safety was sufficient to create a business opportunity for Joseph Moeggenberg. Businesses pay his company, Aviation Research Group/U.S., or "Argus" in the trade, as much as $20,000 per month for full access to ratings reports on 848 charters, or $249 for a single report. Argus provides specifics about a flight, the jet's history, the owner, whether the plane is double-booked from another charter, the pilot's record and so on. It assigns a red, yellow or green light on safety (36% receive reds or yellows).

One charter outfit got a prescient "Does Not Qualify" rating from Argus: Aviation Charter of Eden Prairie, Minn., which flew U.S. Senator Paul Wellstone of Minnesota in a Beechcraft King Air A100 as he campaigned for reelectionin October 2002. When a newspaper later reported that Aviation Charter got a bad rating, the company sued Argus for defamation but lost the case on summary judgment; the case is pending on appeal. The flight crashed at the Eveleth, Minn. airport in October 2002, killing all eight people aboard, including the senator, his wife and their adult daughter. Says Argus attorney Eric Heiberg of Minneapolis:"I can't imagine we're going to lose."
 

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