A former airline investigator explains.
First-person essays and interviews with unique perspectives on complicated issues.
A gray-haired pilot straight out of central casting landed a US Airways airliner on the Hudson River on January 15,2009. Geese had badly damaged the plane’s engines, and faced with an airplane that was little more than a glider, the pilot successfully landed the Airbus 320 in the water. All 155 people aboard survived.
You probably know the pilot by name: Celebrity is fleeting to most, but even a decade later, Captain Sully is widely remembered for his heroic landing, now known as the Miracle on the Hudson. The story even inspired a 2016 Clint Eastwood film starring Tom Hanks.
The hero pilot is an enduring character. This may explain why, when planes crash — as two Boeing 737 Maxs have over the past five months — people immediately speculate about the folks in the cockpit.
“Was it pilot error?” I am often asked by those who know my background as a former air accident investigator and the author of The Crash Detectives. Pilots may be the first to arrive at the accident scene, as the saying goes, but the question still troubles me. Accidents are never the result of one thing or one person. They lie at the end of a long chain of events.
So I watched in dismay but not surprise as the pilots of Lion Air Flight 610, which plunged into the sea shortly after takeoff in October 2018, and those in command of Ethiopian Airlines Flight 302, which plowed into a field in March, were the focus of stories and speculation about the quality of their training and performance.
To be sure, when crash investigators start the process of figuring out what went wrong, pilots are scrutinized. Their training, medical history, sleep patterns, and emotional state are relevant, as are the actions of many others workers associated with the flight. Crash investigators also study the airplane, its past maintenance, repairs, service bulletins, its cargo, and of course all the details associated with the final flight itself.
