Brace for Impact: Air Crashes and Aviation Safety

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The idea to write about the unthinkable — the reasons for twisted pieces of airplane scattered about a fuel-soaked field and charred flesh being bagged for the morgue, in short, a book on air crashes — was born at a postcard-perfect scene: the view of the Ottawa River from the Britannia Yacht Club.

Every November 11, I join other members at the club to honour those who lost their lives in defence of Canada. Facing Lac Deschênes, we gather at the flagpole and unsuccessfully attempt to shelter against the biting wind while In Flanders Fields is recited. In 2014 at the ceremony’s completion, an elderly lady hearing of my interest in aviation asked if she could speak to me. As a girl, she had seen a plane crash not far from where we stood.

On a July afternoon in 1945, she and a number of local children watched a Canso flying boat do touch and goes on the lake. It circled over Shirleys Bay, then lost altitude to bounce down on the Ottawa River, taxied toward Britannia Beach, and took off again. The yacht club harboured the Royal Canadian Air Force (RCAF) crash boat, which usually performed circles on the lake for pilots to gauge the water, but the old woman couldn’t recall if it had been in use that day.

The Canso was part of the RCAF’s 162 Squadron, which had just returned home to Sydney, Nova Scotia, from Reykjavik, Iceland. Having survived the war, the aircraft and crew were sent to RCAF Station Rockcliffe, Ottawa, to be outfitted for a photographic survey of Baffin Island. That sunny afternoon, as they were practising landings on the lake, Death’s scythe reached out to them. The children watched in horror as the Canso touched down on the river and its wing tipped into the water and tore off. The aircraft then flipped over and began sinking. Holed in the fuselage and so close to the Deschênes Rapids, it went to the lake bottom within minutes, trapping the crew inside.

Wreckage of the Canso flying boat brought ashore, Lac Deschênes, July 1945. Library and Archives Canada.

By the time boats from the yacht club got to the crash, the scene was marked by floating logbooks, oil slicks, and bodies. Killed were five crew members, with two men injured. What was left of the flying boat was dragged up onto the shore, and the wreckage was sent to the RCAF station at Trenton. The squadron was disbanded a month later, and in the euphoria of VJ Day, what happened that summer afternoon on the Ottawa River fell through the cracks, remaining only in the memories of those who, like the old woman, had witnessed it.

Air disasters were much in the news in 2014, as the death toll in commercial aviation multiplied four times over the previous year’s numbers. The tragedies that befell the two Malaysia Airlines aircraft in March and July had resulted in the deaths of all 537 people on board. By year’s end, when 1,183 passengers and crew had died in air crashes, one could be forgiven for assuming 2014 was the worst year in aviation history.

But that wasn’t the case. It is just that people have short memories. In 1998, there had been 1,242 fatalities; in 1996, 1,845; and in 1985, 1,283 were killed. Even worse were the 1970s, when in both 1972 and 1973 aviation deaths topped 2,000. With the Internet and satellite-feed television coverage, there is nothing more telegenic than the shattered, smoking remnants of an airliner with the passengers’ personal effects strewn about the landscape. It is little wonder that aviation is thought of as inherently unsafe. Perhaps humans weren’t meant to rattle around in a metal tube at 33,000 feet, and the fear of flying (especially fear of crashing) affects us all. A high-risk endeavour such as this, we tell ourselves, was never meant to be error-free or entirely safe.

I knew the statistics better than anyone: that the death risk for passengers on commercial airlines is 1 in 45 million flights, that flying is the safest mode of transport, and that you’re more likely to die from falling out of bed than in a plane crash. As sociologist Barry Glassner noted in his book The Culture of Fear, in the entire history of commercial aviation, fewer than 13,000 people have died in airplane crashes. Four times that many Americans lose their lives in automobile accidents in a single year. With the Malaysian Airlines tragedies following each other so quickly, the electronic media discovered what newspaper editors had known since the 1920s: that because air crashes are so infrequent (compared with the daily carnage on the highways), when they do happen, they make for gut-wrenching, fear-inducing headlines and dramatic images. We live in a world of the visually sensational rather than intelligent discourse, and every story of planes crashing due to metal fatigue, turbulence, or just vanishing only serves to confirm our sense of flight as unnatural, uncomfortable, and inevitably catastrophic.

The reality is that, despite the increased speeds of aircraft today and the traffic density on airways, the risk of accident occurrence has lessened dramatically. In the short history of commercial aviation, safety began with the introduction of jet airliners in the late 1950s, which were more reliable and easier to fly than the complex piston-engine aircraft that preceded them. With so many redundant systems, aircraft today are designed to fly themselves, making accidents highly improbable. When they do occur, accidents are the result of a series of interconnecting events — mechanical or human failures that, had they happened alone, wouldn’t have caused the crash.

The game Jenga is a good metaphor for the complex probabilities of an air crash. Every time a block is pulled from the stack, it has subtle interactions with the other blocks, loosening or tightening them. The missing blocks — human, organizational, and mechanical — are the weaknesses in aviation that inexorably bring the plane down. It was this unforeseen sequence of events, what accident investigators call the tight coupling of complex interacting systems, that killed 1,183 people in 2014.

While the present level of safety has come about through radar, the flight data recorder, computers, and crew resource management, less acknowledged is the debt owed to accident investigators worldwide. Every time a plane drops out of the sky, these crash detectives are called on. The metal charnel house that pre-impact had been an airline’s pride and joy yields clues only they can decipher. Picking through the shards and blood smears, they re-create the accident’s flight profile, in effect making time run backward to understand the challenges the pilots encountered. Tragic as they were, the crashes at Tenerife, Kegworth (England), and Long Island (New York), with their Canadian parallels at Dryden, Gander, and Peggys Cove, shaped policy. The lessons from those air crashes played an important role in improving aviation safety.

In a world of politicized compromise, Canada’s Transportation Safety Board (TSB), the United States’ National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), Britain’s Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB), and all other safety organizations serve as the public’s defender. Without regulatory author­ity or stakeholder persuasion, accident investigators play the devil’s advocate, relying on their findings and recommendations to influence events, often attempting to close the stable door after the horse has bolted. And if their national regulatory bodies sometimes consider their advocacy for aviation safety impractical, no one could doubt their dedication. Her greatest wish, an accident investigator once said, is that one day she will be put out of business. Interviewed for this book, another wrote: It’s not often that someone truly gets to help another person when they are in need, and this job affords that opportunity. My heart still races and my gut wrenches every time I walk into someone’s home to discuss an accident in which their loved one did not survive. Every time I do, I take a deep breath and remind myself that I have an opportunity to help someone through a tragic situation and use what we learn to improve transportation safety so that a similar accident does not happen again.

Charles Lindbergh believed that if one took no chances, one wouldn’t fly at all. But, he added, safety lies in the judgment of the chances one takes. Written in 2015, the centenary of air accident investigation, this book demonstrates that the history of aviation is the story of continuous safety improvements.

Researching the birth of Air Canada for a previous book, I came across this poem in a Trans-Canada Air Lines newsletter. Composed in 1944, when the airline was still small enough to be a family, the loss of an aircraft and its crew affected all employees personally. After one such crash, Mary Wright, a flight attendant, wrote this:

From the Pioneers

Why should a bird so gifted be,

With wings to explore infinity,

While man, God’s noblest and most dear,

Must plod the weary earth? O hear

Our daring cry:

We, too, shall fly!

So we dreamed our dream, and we made it real,

With brain and courage, prayer and zeal.

Now the blue, blue heavens our pathways are.

We have brushed the clouds, we have touched a star.

And the rivers flow,

Far, far below.

And if some of us died in the doing — what!

Pity us, you of the common lot?

Life’s sweeter if short to us of the brave.

You stumble your way to a well-planned grave,

But sudden and true,

To ours we flew.

Ottawa, December 2015

1

Flying Too Close to the Sun

Learning the secret of flight from a bird, Orville Wright wrote, was a good deal like learning the secret of magic from a magician. It wasn’t going to be free. The age of powered flight began in 1903 when Orville made the first sustained powered flight on December 17 in an aircraft he designed and built with his brother, Wilbur. This 12-second flight led to the development of the first practical airplane two years later and launched worldwide efforts to build better flying machines. But it took the brothers a few crashes before that secret was partially revealed to them.

The first aircraft accident occurred three days before that historic flight. On December 14, Wilbur tried to coax his Flyer into the air and almost made it. But the sensitivity of the aircraft’s elevator surprised him and the aircraft nosed up, stalled, and then dived into the dunes. It took three days to repair it in preparation for what would become the historic first flight.

The brothers had always been aware that flying meant courting almost certain death. If you want safety, Wilbur once said, you would do well to sit on the fence and watch the birds. It was the price one paid to emulate the gods. Even the mythical Icarus had died flying too close to the sun, which melted the wax that held the feathers on his wings together. When the wings failed, he plummeted into the sea and drowned. Put it down to a young man’s arrogance, complacency, or disobedience in not listening to his instructor father — all errors that continue to kill new pilots today — but Icarus’s death was the first pilot error ever recorded. However, what is never recounted is that his father, Daedalus, using a similar pair of wings, avoided going close to the sun and flew all the way from Crete to Sicily to live there happily ever after. In what must be the earliest ever accident investigation, he had learned from his son’s crash to prevent future such tragedies.

In their pursuit of flight, the Wrights were influenced by the writings of Otto Lilienthal. The German aerial pioneer chose an arc for his glider’s airfoil, mistakenly theorizing that birds flew because they had rigid wings and not the parabolic cambers that evolution had given them. This would cost Lilienthal his life in 1896 when he crashed, his last words said to be, Sacrifices must be made. It was by investigating why he had crashed that the Wrights were able to perfect their own airfoil so that in 1903 they could invent the aircraft.

Such was the exhilaration among the pioneers of conquering gravity that personal safety was second place, if considered at all. Having flown for five years without killing themselves, the Wrights saw their luck run out on July 2, 1908, when Orville was badly injured on the fifth crash, breaking his thigh and several ribs. His passenger, U.S. Signal Corps Lieutenant Tom Selfridge, was less fortunate, having been thrown out of the aircraft and killed on impact. A clean investigation of the wreckage to discover why it happened would have been impossible, since army officers galloped up to the site, outracing the crowd of spectators that followed. An army surgeon conducted the autopsy of history’s first aviation fatality and pronounced that Selfridge had died of a skull fracture. After that, in what became the first protective measure for pilots, Selfridge’s colleagues were encouraged to wear their West Point football helmets while flying.

While an official inquiry cleared the Wrights of any blame, Alexander Graham Bell (who saw what remained of the crashed aircraft on his way to Selfridge’s funeral) surmised that the brothers’ use of twin propellers — one of which had cracked lengthwise and lost all thrust — had caused the aircraft to drop. With the intricate warping controls, Orville didn’t have time to ease the plane into a controlled glide.

Cocooned as we are today from actually experiencing the sensation of flight itself, it is impossible to imagine the exhilaration the early aviators must have felt defying gravity. Poor seat recline, too-small overhead storage bins, harried flight attendants snapping at your request for another drink, a mediocre entertainment system — these are our hardships today. Entitled to departing the airport exactly on time, we expect our aircraft to withstand air resistance without its wings falling off and its pilots to be more than capable of meeting the vagaries of weather and traffic en route.

To the early aeronauts, flying was never just a mode of conveyance. It was subjugation of the laws of gravity, giving one power over the elements. It was, someone wrote, like sex with the gods. Aviation author Leighton Collins, who first soloed in 1929 in an open-cockpit biplane, remembered, Flying releases something almost uncontrollable in the average pilot. Air mail pilot pioneer Elrey Jeppesen recalled in an interview: Those old, open airplanes — you felt like a bird, part of the airplane. You could feel the wind on your face, the wind on the stick and the rudder. You were a part of it. Today you just might as well get on a train.[1] No one captured the exhilaration of flying better than the High Flight poet John Gillespie Magee, Jr., who wrote that with flying one slipped the surly bonds of Earth … and touched the face of God.

But that onrush of joy was sometimes lethal, and most fatal accidents in aviation history have occurred because of it. The greatest danger wasn’t the unreliable engine or fragile fuselage but the pilot himself. Again and again, the young man (or woman) pushed the plane too far and died.

Or he was killed by birds, the original proprietors of the air. Most bird flying occurs between 30 to 300 feet above ground level, the height attained by early aviators. Bird hazards (or feathered bullets, as flocks were called) date back to the initial flights of the Wright brothers. Doing circuits over fields at Dayton, Ohio, on September 7, 1905, the brothers encountered flocks of blackbirds that twice struck their aircraft. The first bird-strike fatality in North America was in 1912 when Cal Rodgers, the first man to fly across the United States, lost his life after a gull became jammed in the controls of his aircraft, causing the plane to crash.

Bird strikes weren’t reported then because they rarely brought an aircraft down. For one thing, the aircraft’s airspeed wasn’t high enough to cause severe damage to the wings and fuselage when a bird struck it, and for another, no pilot had yet made it to the heights of the massive annual migrations of large birds such as Canada geese. Strikes that occurred against the forward-facing parts of the aircraft did expose the pilot to flying glass and bird debris, but the propellers on piston-engine aircraft were too strong to be damaged by birds. The rotating blades protected the engines, if only by reducing bird size and thus the effect of impact.

The late Thomas Selfridge had been a member of the Aerial Experimental Association (AEA) formed at Baddeck, Nova Scotia, by Alexander Graham Bell. In addition to Mrs. Bell, who funded the organization, the other members of the AEA were F.W. Casey Baldwin and J.A.D. McCurdy, two young engineers from the University of Toronto, and Glenn Hammond Curtiss, a motorcycle builder from Hammondsport, New York. As every Canadian knows (or should know), McCurdy’s flight in the Silver Dart on February, 23, 1909, inaugurated aviation in Canada and the rest of the British Empire. Yet although Canadians might have heard of what happened at Baddeck, very few had actually seen flying machines, and there were many who doubted men could fly at all.

That changed in the summer of 1910. The two great aviation meets at Lakeside, Quebec, and Weston, Ontario, that June and July fielded a profusion of biplanes and monoplanes that sometimes took to the air. There were also dirigibles bumping along, balloons ascending, and even parachute jumps from the latter. Remarkably, although there were several crashes at both meets, the Silver Dart among them, and some injuries (and one near-drowning in Valois Bay, Lake Saint-Louis), there were no fatalities (or none recorded) among the pilots or the onlookers.

The first Canadian to be killed flying an aircraft was the Toronto-born St. Croix Johnstone. When his wealthy father refused to buy him an aircraft in 1910, saying he didn’t want his son to die, Johnstone joined the Moisant travelling aero circus then based at the New Orleans stockyards.[2] Soon, with a few firsts behind him such as first flights over cities in the United States, Canada, and Cuba, he achieved fame on the aerial circuit. At the Mineola, New York, fair on August 5, 1911, the young Canadian broke the flight-duration record by remaining in the air for four hours, one minute, and 59 seconds, a difficult feat considering the amount of fuel he had to carry aloft to do so.

Ten days later Johnstone flew his Blériot-type monoplane at the Grant Park air meet held on the Chicago waterfront. Among the onlookers were his parents and young wife, who watched as a mile from shore he executed a perfect corkscrew dive over the water. The aircraft’s wings suddenly crumpled, a local newspaper reported, like paper and the machine hurtled into the lake, its heavy engine and tangled wires dragging its pilot to his death.

Reporters attributed the cause of the crash to a flaw in the airplane’s mechanism. But in what is probably the earliest accident investigation into the death of a Canadian pilot, other aviators at the meet connected the wings’ collapse to the torque of the dive and/or the strain caused by the Mineola exhibition 10 days earlier. The shear centre of a wing wasn’t properly understood until the mid-1920s, and the failure to identify it then meant the industry was unable to ascertain why Blériot-type aircraft, in particular, were prone to shedding their wings in flight.[3]

Before the First World War, the face of aviation in the United States was Orville and Wilbur Wright and Glenn Curtiss, and in Canada, Alexander Graham Bell and J.A.D. McCurdy, all mechanical tinkerers who through trial and error had painstakingly untangled some of the mysteries of powered flight. But more familiar to the public were aerial daredevils such as Archibald Hoxsey, Walter Brookins, Lincoln Beachey, and Cal Rodgers. In the pursuit of cheap thrills, the miracle of flight of which so much had been promised was being strangled at birth. Mass entertainment meant dangerous flying stunts such as inverted loops and spiral dives. Between 1908 and 1913, the New York Times calculated that 308 aeronauts had died in air crashes in the United States, with 85 in the first eight months of 1913 alone. The magazine Scientific American deplored the situation in which aircraft that had promised so much were now providers of sensational amusement, like racing cars and motorcycles, rather than practical means of transport.[4]

The Wrights decried the use of their aircraft for what they termed fancy flights, and in refusing to modify their Wright B Flyer for aerobatics, killed several pilots. Nothing could be gained by stunting, the brothers said, except more deaths. But after 1910, with so much money at stake, even they were willing to trade notoriety for a share of the gate receipts and prize money. Like Curtiss, the brothers set up the earliest flying schools. For $500 down to earn their wings (later reduced to $250), students began with ground-school instructions at the Dayton workshop. They studied how a Wright Flyer was built and repaired, graduating to an ingenious flight simulator (a Flyer with its control levers powered by an electric motor that regulated the wing warping) before actual flight training at Huffman Prairie Field. All aircraft used for instruction were equipped with dual controls, and the student was allowed five hours of flying before being tested for a licence. The test was carried out in front of observers from the Aero Club of America and was run according to Fédération Aéronautique Internationale (FAI) standards.

Without safety measures like helmet and gloves, William Stark gave a flying exhibition with his Curtiss biplane at Minoru Park Racetrack, Richmond, British Columbia, on April 20, 1912. Vancouver Archives.

The odds for the early air man to die violently weren’t in his favour. Planes crashed because no one had put everything together yet. The Wrights, for example, had figured out how the wings on an aircraft worked but were never quite sure where the fuselage fitted in. The little scientific knowledge available then depended on the observation of birds, on intuition, and on limited experience. Aerodynamics was vaguely understood by aircraft engineers and even less by pilots. There had been no experimentation on the structural demand of an aircraft’s wings. Were short, stubby, and strong wings better than long and slender ones or vice versa? Which were more aerodynamic — elliptical or tapered wings? Too many aircraft were falling out of the sky because of thin wings, the planes stalling with no warning to their pilots. Yet no one had figured out that thick wings were safer because they gave the pilot warning and allowed him to reduce pitch. North Americans used pusher engines, but European designers favoured tractors. How did the engine’s position affect the aircraft’s centre of gravity? What was the aspect ratio to be? Were biplanes with their web of bracing wires the future, or were monoplanes such as the birdlike Antoinette with no wires at all the way to go?

Montreal’s Bois Franc Polo Grounds, Toronto’s Trethewey Farm and Long Branch, and Richmond, British Columbia’s Minoru Park Racetrack have long been buried under suburban sprawl. But in the summers of 1910–13, whether in those cities or Saskatoon, Calgary, Fort Erie, or Quebec City, untrained (as all pilots were) birdmen took to the air in numbers for prize money and adulation. Aerial circus promoters attracted the crowds by promising suicidal manoeuvres in flight, luring to their deaths devil-may-care, fatalistic young men possessing little knowledge of aeronautics. And with the public clamouring for thrills and chills, it was a foolish pilot who attempted to satisfy his audience with mundane-level flights.

The daredevils at Canadian aviation meets were almost always American, and it was no surprise that one would die in the first fatal aircraft accident in Canada. Stunt flyers on tour of the Pacific Northwest, the husband-and-wife team John and Alys Bryant had been trained at a Curtiss aviation school and flew only Curtiss aircraft. On July 31, 1913, at Minoru Park Racetrack, Alys Bryant became the first woman to fly in Canada. Not to be outdone, her husband, John, concluded his flying routine by shutting off his engine at 2,500 feet, then diving steeply. Within 100 feet of the ground, he levelled out and landed, still without using his engine. The pair then took their show to Victoria, British Columbia, where on August 6, despite a strong wind, John performed the same routine over the harbour. This time, as he dived, a wing collapsed and the aircraft fell, smashing onto the roof of a building near the waterfront. Bryant died instantly, and his wife never flew again.

In Canada, as in the United States, anyone could build an aircraft and/or fly one. Licences, regulations, and safeguards were unheard of. As with today’s drones or unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), aircraft had evolved so quickly that they outran the bureaucracy seeking to regulate them. There was no organization, government or private, to prevent an aviator from killing himself or others with an airplane. Nor were there procedures in place to earn a licence to fly one or requirements for a permit to build a safer flying machine or restrictions on where it could or couldn’t be flown.

The policy-makers in Ottawa had barely grasped the effects of the increasing use of automobiles in cities — this was, after all, the heyday of the railway — and aircraft were little more than large motorized kites. The first and only Canadian until 1915 to earn an FAI pilot’s licence was J.A.D. McCurdy, awarded to him on August 23, 1910, by the Aero Club of America. By contrast, in France, licences for civilian pilots who met certain requirements were mandatory by 1909, to be followed by military licences in 1911. French pilots were also required to use seat belts and helmets; Germany and other European nations soon followed suit.

Before the First World War, flying wasn’t so much for the brave as for the foolhardy. A culture of safety for the pilot, if it existed at all, was a distant second to actually taking off (instead of hopping) and maintaining a credible altitude. The more death-defying the flight promised to be, the larger the audience promoters could attract — the gate receipts dependent on the absence of any safety measures. If the aviator was fortunate to accomplish a semblance of flight, then there followed cautious turns and dives, sometimes both manoeuvres unplanned. Fighting the engine’s torque and freezing wind, praying that the wings didn’t fold on him, a pilot did all he could just to stay in the air. Since all exhibition flying had to take place as low as possible within sight of spectators and photographers, there was no chance to recover from a stall.[5] However, with so much free publicity from air shows, to paraphrase Curtiss, what better way to show off your aircraft than have it perform such daredevil feats?

It was accepted among the more sensible that flying was a suicidal activity, which dissuaded many amateur pilots such as the young Fiorello La Guardia, Benito Mussolini, and Winston Churchill (fortunately) from killing themselves at an early age. The future British prime minister understood the perils of flying when he famously warned: The air is an extremely dangerous, jealous, and exacting mistress. Once under the spell, most lovers are faithful to the end, which is not always old age.

If the Wrights dressed for flying as they would for church services, the earli­est personal safety equipment for aviators was as much for motorcar drivers of the day. Goggles, gloves, a heavy leather coat, and a cork-and-leather helmet were de rigueur. Seat belts weren’t the easy metal lift-lever ones used in cars and aircraft today and were thus viewed with suspicion because they hindered immediate escape in case of a fiery crash or if the aircraft hit the water. It is incredible