Steps to Increase Air Commuter Safety Proposed

The National Transportation Safety Board, citing concerns raised in three fatal airline accidents, called Tuesday for increased pilot training, better government surveillance and more safety equipment for commuter airlines.

The NTSB said all three accidents, which took place between August, 1985, and last March, occurred during attempted landings in poor weather and involved relatively inexperienced flight crews. In all, the accidents claimed 23 lives.

Two of the accidents--the crash of a Bar Harbor Airlines commuter near Auburn, Me., on Aug. 25, 1985, and a Henson Airlines plane in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia on Sept. 23, 1985--were attributed to pilot errors in final reports approved Tuesday.

The Bar Harbor accident gained widespread attention because one of the eight people aboard was Samantha Smith, 13, the Maine schoolgirl who wrote Soviet leaders in 1982 because of concerns about the potential of nuclear war. She later was invited to the Soviet Union and became a symbol of U.S.-Soviet good will.

The most recent accident cited by the NTSB occurred March 13 when a twin-engine Simmons Airlines plane crashed during an attempted landing at Alpena, Mich., killing three people.

Pilot Competency at Issue

In all three accidents, “training and pilot competency were issues,” the safety board said in a letter to the Federal Aviation Administration, urging the agency to take steps to improve commuter pilot training.

The letter, which was made public after being unanimously approved by the board, also urged the FAA to step up agency monitoring of training at commuter airlines, to approve a relatively low-cost flight simulator suited for commuter use and require that commuter planes with six or more seats have ground proximity warning devices.

In the Samantha Smith crash, investigators found that the aircraft’s landing approach was unstable and not properly aligned with the airport’s instrument landing beacon. It also concluded that the plane was descending too rapidly.

“The prudent thing to have done is to have exercised a missed approach when (the plane) was in the condition that it was in,” said Jim Burnett, NTSB chairman.

But Burnett and board member John Lauber said many questions remained unanswered because the Bar Harbor plane had neither a cockpit voice recorder nor a flight data recorder.

In its official probable cause, the board attributed the accident to “the captain’s continuation of an unstabilized approach. . . .”