2016 non-fiction, aviation history. Wrigley looks into a number of
aircraft incidents.
While Without a Trace concentrates on disappearances, these
incidents are a deliberately wide-ranging selection. There's a Cessna
floatplane that stalled and crashed without mechanical failure, and it
transpired that the pilot believed it was unstallable and didn't try
to practice the procedures for recognising and recovering from the
state. There's an actual documented case of a cell phone interfering
with flight (the pilot decided to leave a message while flying a
tricky approach in bad weather and essentially died of distraction;
I've heard of a similar incident near Vienna). There are bird, missile
and lightning strikes, and flying into weather that was too much for
the airframe.
The one that struck me most, though, was the small Irish carrier's
ATR-42 that made an emergency diversion after one engine shut down
from fuel starvation. Their rigorous equipment failure reporting
requirements (the plane was marked as unflyable until a tech had seen
the problem and signed off on it as non-critical, and getting a tech
could get several hours if it wasn't at their home field) led to a
culture of simply not reporting failures at all if they didn't seem of
vital importance. Combine that with crew incompetence in rarely-used
procedures, and the ever-fatal "get it done" mentality (passengers
were already delayed and annoyed), and you get assumptions and errors.
This resonates with me particularly because, although I'm not working
with safety-critical machinery, and although my present employers are
very reasonable in their demands of me, I have often met this attitude
in co-workers and superiors. Never mind what went wrong, just reset it
and get it up and running again. (Thus destroying much of the evidence
of what went wrong, making it harder to work out an actual fix.) I
view with admiration the aviation safety organisations that set up
another aircraft to match the configuration of the one that crashed,
then instrument it to work out just what's happening in each phase of
manoeuvre. And I have certainly met the people who view safety rules
as an external imposition to be worked round, getting in the way of
the important business of computering.