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