telescreen.org: Knowing What You're Talking About: Always A Good Thing

Thoughts on the Cory Lidle crash and the reaction thereto:

As is sadly the case with most high-profile plane crashes or other aircraft accidents, it seems that the non-aviation press wastes no time in sensationalizing, exaggerating, and generally trying to scare the shit out of the public. (Memo to most TV journalists: If you don't know anything about a given topic, you might want to keep that in mind while speculating about it.)

Senator Schumer, a usually-smart guy who really should know better, jumped on the bandwagon as well with some more fearmongering:

"A smart terrorist could load up a small, little plane with biological, chemical or even nuclear material and fly up the Hudson or East rivers, no questions asked," said Schumer, D-New York. "I hope this will be a wake-up call to the FAA to re-examine flight patterns, which, amazingly enough, they haven't done since 9/11."

First of all, thinking about the way you do things and analyzing if it's the best way is always a good idea. But I kinda doubt that ATC cleared Flights 11 and 175 into the World Trade Center. This seems to have been a case of too much airplane in too little space, with an inexperienced pilot in suboptimal weather. (More on this below.)

And, a Cirrus is about the size of a Honda Civic. Yes, a terrorist could load up a light aircraft with dangerous stuff and fly around Manhattan with it. But, I'd think a smarter terrorist would load up a truck with dangerous stuff -- but a lot more of it -- and drive it into Times Square. (They inspect some trucks going into Manhattan, but by no means all of them. Or, if you want to go completely undetected, get a couple Crown Vics, paint 'em taxicab yellow, load 'em up with the nasty stuff, and drive those into town.) Just because something's in the air above our heads doesn't make it appreciably more deadly than the dangers on the ground. And one can come up with an infinite number of scary scenarios that don't involve airplanes, so singling out the general aviation community doesn't especially make sense.

However, in the midst of all the hoopla, some informed commentary from people who, well, actually know what they're talking about is most welcome. James Fallows, a very good writer for the Atlantic (and a pilot who owns a Cirrus SR20, the same model that Cory Lidle was flying) drops some science on some of the factors involved. He points out that Lidle was relatively inexperienced (but flying with a certified flight instructor), that the weather was decidedly less than ideal, and that the airspace over the East River is difficult, narrow, and crowded.

Philip Greenspun, a CFI himself, expands on this last point, looking at the sheer complexity of the airspace involved:

My preliminary best guess (and at this point it can only be a guess) is that the two pilots on board the accident SR20 were cruising slowly up the East River. At some point, they decided that they’d reached the end of the little cut-out tongue of uncontrolled airspace over the East River. They attempted a 180-degree turn in an attempt to get southbound down the river toward uncontrolled airspace. An airplane in a sharp turn stalls at a much higher airspeed than when straight and level. Merely by putting the airplane into a steep bank and trying to hold altitude, they could have gone from flying to an aerodynamic stall (wings at too high an angle to the relative wind or, in simpler terms, air not moving fast enough over the wings) in a matter of seconds. At this point, the airplane is not easily controlled and a lot of bad things can happen. Low-speed low-level maneuvering, which typically happens when aircraft are trying to land, is the leading cause of plane crashes.

He adds, in a comment:

One ironic fact that will probably be overlooked is that if they had been in a 30-year-old $18,000 deathtrap of a Cessna 152 instead of their modern super-safe parachute-equipped $200,000 Cirrus, they would be relaxing over a beer right now. The 152 flies a lot slower, so it would naturally turn tighter without a steep bank. The 152 would give more warning in the controls before a stall. The CFI would probably have had a lot more experience with the 152.

Yes, the SR20s are equipped with a parachute system which can lower the entire aircraft gently to the ground in the event of an engine failure. Pretty nifty, no? Many of the press reports I've seen over the past couple days make much of the fact that the parachute didn't deploy. For one thing, the system doesn't engage automatically -- a pilot has to activate it. For another, a parachute isn't much help when you fly into a building. Your aircraft is going to make a sudden stop, and what's left of it is going to plummet straight down. If the engine failed, it'd be a good idea to pop the 'chute, but I'm not sure it would have been of any help at all in this situation.

Also, Patrick Smith addresses some of the hysteria in his always-excellent Salon column "Ask the Pilot":

There's a tendency to equate commercial flying with recreational flying in more ways than are warranted. Seven years ago, when John F. Kennedy Jr. lost control of his Piper Saratoga and crashed into the ocean near Martha's Vineyard, much was made of a dastardly phenomenon called "spatial disorientation." Good god, people wanted to know, what if an airline captain were similarly to lose his bearings? Such thinking neglected to consider that airliners are flown by vastly more experienced crews with vastly more sophisticated equipment.

Although it was merely a single-engine Cirrus -- a high-performance, four-seat model about the size of a car -- that impacted the Upper East Side building, it could have been a 757, right?

Theoretically, except that a plane hitting a building requires one or more of the following circumstances, all of which are far more likely to affect a private craft than a commercial one:

1) An incapacitated pilot.
2) A pilot who is lost, and in weather or darkness that restricts visibility such that a 50-story tower becomes invisible.
3) A catastrophic malfunction that has rendered the machine uncontrollable.
4) A less than catastrophic malfunction or problem that distracts or otherwise leads the pilot to commit a fatal, and entirely avoidable error.
5) It wasn't an accident at all.

There's no reason whatsoever to suggest Cory Lidle was on a suicide mission. Some eyewitness accounts say the plane was flailing, wallowing, banking sharply. Others say it emerged from clouds -- where, if flying under so-called Visual Flight Rules over the city, it never should have been -- and smacked straight into the brick façade of the Belaire condominiums. Eyewitness reports of aviation mishaps are notoriously untrustworthy, and premature speculation can be embarrassingly unprofessional, but I'm hearing things that point to Nos. 2 or 4, above. No. 3 is possible, but highly unlikely. Small planes, even in the throes of total engine failure, are stable, surprisingly nimble, and can glide exceptionally well. . . There's not a whole lot, free of human error, that can send one careening into a skyscraper.

However, combine a mostly surmountable problem with a pilot's inexperience or lack of skill, and suddenly No. 4 is flashing brightly as a likely culprit. . ."Pilot error" can mean lots of things, some more subtle than others, but in the annals of accidents involving light planes, many, many aviators, through incompetence or gross error, have turned perfectly survivable snafus into fatal wrecks.

As I mentioned at the top, it sounds like it was a case of an inexperienced pilot with a fast, high-powered airplane, flying in not-great weather, into a situation that he couldn't correct in time. (And yes, there was a CFI, but he hadn't taken the Cirrus certification. I wonder how much time he'd spent in them.)

By all means, let's investigate what happened. But don't let it color your rational judgment of how to think about the world and its attendant dangers.

UPDATE: Mayor Daley is nuts.