Small Aircraft as Big Peril Flying in Deregulated Skies

Recently a federal government report noted with alarm that “congestion of the airways” has become a menace to air travel safety. How recently? The year 1957.

It’s not that the skies themselves are crowded. The three-dimensional U.S. sky volume, where a few thousand planes are present at one time, is immense compared to the two-dimensional area of U.S. highways, prowled by many millions of vehicles simultaneously.

Congestion is a problem not so much of the sky as of what we’ll call the “undersky.” The comparatively tiny regions that aircraft pass through at the beginning and end of their journeys--the runways, ground-servicing facilities and the “terminal control areas” (TCAs) proximate to the descent lanes into major airports--can easily become congested relative to traffic volume. So can the air-traffic control system that directs airplanes. From a safety standpoint this is significant because almost all aircraft accidents occur in the undersky, either on the ground (the worst aviation disaster ever was a 1977 collision between two 747s on a runway in the Canary Islands) or near the ground as airplanes are taking off or landing.

Congestion hit in 1957 because the Boeing 707 had just been introduced, commercial jetliner travel was about to grow rapidly and several of today’s major airfields did not yet exist. It has hit again in 1987, because lower air fares brought on by deregulation have dramatically increased public demand. In 1987, U.S. airlines are expected to board nearly 460 million passengers, about twice as many as 1976; total departures of commercial airliners, the main index of strain on the system, will be about 25% higher than before deregulation.

Meanwhile the number of traffic controllers has declined relative to air activity. A variety of statistical somersaults can be performed regarding how many air controllers is the right number, but the compelling figure is this: 287 departures per controller in 1981, 411 per controller in 1986. And there hasn’t been a large new airport added to the U.S. aviation system since Dallas-Fort Worth, 13 years ago.

“One of the things we misjudged was airport growth,” explains Elizabeth E. Bailey who was vice-chairman of the Civil Aviation Board when deregulation took place in 1979. “We assumed that state and regional authorities would have incentives to build airports in order to bring in business, trade and tourism. We never anticipated how effectively local groups would organize to oppose airport construction.” Only one major city, Denver, has plans to build a large new airport. Everybody wants cheap flights to their favorite destination; nobody wants to live near a noisy airport.

Congestion of the undersky has not made air travel more deadly--at least not yet. In fact, statistically it has become safer. During the eight years prior to deregulation, 1,455 people lost their lives in fatal accidents involving scheduled U.S. airlines. During the almost nine years since, 960 have been killed, even as the total number of flights and passengers has grown substantially. But warning signs that this trend may reverse--particularly, new incidence of what ought to be an avoidable problem, aircraft collisions-- now frighten the public and the aviation Establishment.

Amid all the recent concern about reports of near collisions, it seems to have escaped public attention that the majority of such incidents involve not two commercial jetliners but one jetliner and one private plane. Only one midair collision between jetliners occurred worldwide in the past decade, a 1979 incident involving two Aeroflot transports over the Ukraine. But of the seven major commercial crashes in U.S. airspace during the past decade, two, the San Diego crash in 1978, and Los Angeles crash last year, involved airliners hitting private aircraft. No cause was common to the other five crashes; that makes private aircraft the biggest current peril in U.S. commercial aviation.

Here are a few other statistics about private planes to chew on: While no wrecks of major U.S. airliners occurred during 1986 (the Los Angeles crash involved an Aeromexico jet), 958 people were killed in general aviation accidents. During the first six months of 1987, there have been almost 150 reports of near collisions from commercial airline pilots and about 460 reports of near collisions from private pilots. Adjusting for flight lengths and other factors, a private aircraft ride is about 40 times more likely to end in death than a commercial flight. A recent Federal Aviation Administration study of one major airport TCA found 21 unauthorized private aircraft cutting through during a two-hour period, each one a collision waiting to happen.

Responding to such concerns, the FAA recently expanded the TCA around Los Angeles International Airport and imposed restrictions on nine other airports, bringing to 32 the total of restricted U.S. airports. “Restricted” does not mean small aircraft cannot use an airport. It means they can use the airport only under the direction of federal air-traffic controllers (most U.S. airfields do not require this), and in some cases only if equipped with a device called a transponder.

Southern California reaction to the new private aircraft regulations has been heated, because Los Angeles leads the nation in private aircraft registrations--and in 1987 near-collision reports. The reaction boiled down to: “You’ll get me out of my private plane when you pry my dead fingers off the throttle.” Meanwhile, in Washington, John L. Baker, president of the Aircraft Owners and Pilots Assn., the private plane lobby, called the new safety provisions “pitiful.”

A major reason these restrictions drive private aircraft owners crazy is that they take some of the glitz appeal out of flying. There are plenty of small airfields outside major metropolitan areas where private aircraft may come and go as they please. But what corporate executive or wealthy hobbyist wants to land among cornfields?

Small aircraft represent a special threat to commercial aviation for many reasons. One, they arrive at airports randomly rather than on a predictable schedule. Air traffic controllers cannot anticipate how many private aircraft ought to be appearing in a particular area of the sky, as they can with commercial flights. Two, many private pilots are recreational flyers with far less experience than commercial pilots; not only do they make more mistakes, there is no way to enforce restrictions that airline pilots are supposed to abide by, such as adequate sleep and no drinking the day before a flight. But most of all, small planes don’t necessarily show up on radar.

The public thinks of radar as omniscient. In fact, even powerful military radars often have trouble detecting aircraft, and the smaller the plane, the greater the difficulty. Radars are also not adept at determining an aircraft’s altitude. For this reason all airliners carry transponders, machines that essentially broadcast location to ground radar. They carry a similar device called an encoding altimeter that informs ground radar of their altitude. They don’t carry radars that detect other aircraft, another popular misconception. Such radars are installed only on military aircraft. The radars on late-model commercial jetliners are used to avoid bad weather; they can see atmospheric conditions such as thunderheads, formations far larger than planes.

Most private aircraft are not currently required to carry radar transponders. Experts estimate that only about half of the nation’s approximately 200,000 private planes have them. Planes that don’t are generally the smallest ones--hardest for radar to see and hardest for pilots to spot with their own eyes, the last line of collision defense.

Another fact of flying life is that even though aircraft operate in a spherical environment where trouble may come from any direction, most cockpits are designed so that pilots only see what is directly in front of them. If “traffic” is approaching from above, below, behind or the side, a jetliner pilot has no way of knowing--unless ground controllers tell him.

The airborne anti-collision system called TCAS, now being tested on Piedmont Airlines jets, helps pilots “see” in their blind spots, and almost certainly will soon be mandatory for commercial aircraft. But TCAS works by analyzing the information broadcast by transponders. It provides no warning of small planes without such devices--the very category of aircraft most likely to cause collisions.

Yet for all the congressional huffing and puffing about commercial air safety, Congress has been silent on small aircraft safety. Why? First, because wealthy private aircraft owners wield disproportionate influence over Congress. Second, because it happens that few voters have had personal bad experiences with a private aircraft, whereas almost everyone has had a complaint with an airline. That makes the headline-grabbing quotient much higher for bashing airlines.

Private pilots are quick to point out that they help support the undersky infrastructure through aviation taxes. This is true. But that gives them no “right” to use any airport. Although major airports are public facilities built primarily at public expense, private pilots have no more right to use them than I have a “right” to sing opera at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, a theater facility underwritten by the taxpayer.

The idea that taxes confer user rights to public facilities has consistently been rejected by state and federal courts, whether the issue is banning protesters from camping in the publicly financed park opposite the White House or banning solo drivers from the rush-hour lanes of freeways. Nothing in the Constitution or in law provides that the paying of a tax creates an entitlement to use public property any way the taxpayer pleases; if it did, people would be able to picnic at Central Intelligence Agency headquarters. Rather, government is expected to apportion use of public facilities according to public benefit. And in the case of aviation, the public interest in safety at major airports far outweighs individual interest in ease of operating private aircraft.

Starting in 1988, any aircraft operating near the 32 restricted airports will be required to have a transponder with the altitude reporting feature. This is long overdue; it might have prevented both California collisions. The next step should be to require all aircraft in the United States to carry transponders. This would be an unwelcome expense to rural aviators, who represent less threat to commercial aircraft than their big-city counterparts. But universal transponder requirements are inevitable; better to impose them sooner rather than later since lives are in the balance.