“In the cockpit, the fault warnings have escalated,” says the narrator. “In the cabin, passengers have no idea their pilots are struggling to maintain control of the plane. The pilots now notice that the plane is rolling sharply left.”
With terrifying attention to detail, this clip from National Geographic’s Air Crash Investigation re-enacts the final airborne moments of Air Asia’s Flight 8501 before the Airbus A320 fatally crashed into the Java Sea.
These days, airplane crashes are considerably rarer than they were a few decades ago. In fact, as recently as 2017, we had an entire year without one. But when they do occur, a passenger airline’s crash brings fear, recriminations, and a search for answers.
The people responsible for finding these answers face a number of hurdles. It could be the complexity of a changing environment, as was the case with Flight 8501. It could also be fevered media speculation, which spreads potentially harmful or inaccurate information about a crash or its causes. Governments, regulators, airlines, aircraft manufacturers, families of the victims; the list of people who want answers is long.
But what drives the people seeking these answers?
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Dr. Todd Curtis was a young Texan enthralled by the promise of the stars and the sky.
“Growing up in Texas in the 60s and 70s, this was a time when two major things were going on in aviation. One was the Vietnam War and the other was the space program.”
Fast forward four decades, and Dr. Curtis is sat in his study, reflecting on a storied career that took him from a flight test engineer in the US Air Force to an airline safety engineer at Boeing. This was before he founded AirSafe.com, which offers everything from detailed reports of crashes to information on baggage issues and even tips on conquering your fear of flight.
With a PhD in aviation risk assessment, Dr. Curtis has also featured heavily as an expert in print, online and broadcast media. This included his recurring appearances on Air Crash Investigation, which re-enacts high-profile air disasters in state-of-the-art CGI, while deep-diving into the truth behind the causes of these crashes through analysis by experts.
“For major investigations, the ones involving airlines with investigators coming in from all over the world to assist, there are three major steps: Collecting information, analyzing it, and sharing the results, which are shared with the general public and go into the details of that specific flight.”
After that, Dr. Curtis and his team will look at things that can be done to prevent similar crashes in the future, sometimes offering specific recommendations on changes that should be made to the system of safety.
“Given that people in every country are dealing with the same issues in aviation, it’s not surprising that you see the same problems come up again and again when it comes to accidents.”
However, while the steps may appear simple, finding solutions can be incredibly complex.
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Greg Feith recalls the day that changed everything. The then-21-year-old was interning with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) in the body’s Los Angeles field office when he accompanied an investigator to the mountainside site of a Cessna crash to document the wreckage and determine whether or not the aircraft was mechanically sound.
Indeed, that accident causes Feith to abandon his ambition of becoming an airline pilot, instead focusing on becoming an aircraft accident investigator.
“I loved the challenge of being an investigator, having to step outside of yourself and take in a different perspective to solve a problem.”
In his decades-long career as a senior air safety investigator at the NTSB, one other mountainous crash stands out in Feith’s memory. “In 1985, I led a team of investigators to the summit of Illimani, one of the highest mountains in Bolivia. Eastern Air Lines Flight 980, a Boeing 727, had crashed up there, at 21,000 feet. It still holds the record for being the highest accident site in commercial aviation history.”
The unique circumstances of the crash presented an unusual set of difficulties. “We didn’t have any particularly high-tech method to get up to the summit. I ended up spending a month in Bolivia. We were climbing up and down that mountain without any oxygen. Several members of my team had to go back down with altitude sickness. The two black boxes were buried under 30 to 40 feet of snow.
“Unfortunately, when planes do crash, they don’t always do it in convenient places.”
The most complex water-based accident Feith has investigated was SilkAir 185, which was supposed to go from Jakarta to Singapore but crashed into Sumatra’s Musi River. “That river was so polluted – it was like searching through liquid chocolate.” Like so many of the crashes Feith has investigated, it was a joint effort between bodies from two governments – in this case the NTSB and Indonesia’s National Transportation Safety Committee.
Due to the global nature of aviation, it’s always an international investigation.
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While air crash investigations can be a complex undertaking, one factor that has helped make the process a lot easier over the decades has been technology. “There’s vastly more information available to the investigators today than when I began looking into this 30-something years ago, starting with what’s commonly known as the black boxes: the cockpit voice recorder and the flight data recorder. Because of the advances in computer technology and memory storage, hundreds of times as much information are inside of these boxes now.”
This is complemented by other technologies developed outside the aviation space, from surveillance cameras to people’s mobile phones, as well as radar information beamed out automatically to receivers all over the world, he adds.
However, every accident – whether involving a large or small aircraft – is unique because the circumstances are not standard, says Feith. “You can’t put a generic situation to a specific type of accident. You have to look at the individual and you have to look at the aircraft and the operation in the situation.”
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Feith and Dr. Curtis – who are both small-engine pilots themselves, know each other well and recently collaborated on Feith’s Flight Safety Detectives podcast – respect the level of depth, detail and accuracy that go into producing Air Crash Investigation.
When asked if we could ever live in an accident-free world both experts concurred that as long as humans were driving the industry, error was always a possibility.
“It’s not necessarily pilot error – humans have designed the aircraft, built the technology, scheduled the maintenance.
“You can standardize a machine,” he adds. “You can’t standardize a human.”
Season 21 of Air Crash Investigation is airing on Friday’s at 9:00pm UAE, only on National Geographic.