Airline Safety Costs a) Billions or b) Pennies. Answer Below
By David Evans
Sunday, April 4, 2004; Page B05 You hear it all the time at airline industry meetings: "If you think safety is expensive, try an accident."
Still, how one views the relative cost of airline safety -- and whether it becomes a reason to delay making improvements -- depends an awful lot on how that cost is calculated. Too often, the cost is determined through negotiations between the industry and the agency responsible for ordering improvements, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA). The FAA's standard method is to assess the total cost to the industry of a particular safety initiative. The resulting figures typically run into the millions or even billions of dollars -- a sure way to delay action. I have observed air safety deliberations for nearly 10 years, and I think it's time to change the current cost-benefit approach. Discussing the cost of safety improvements in terms of the price per ticket, rather than the overall cost, would make it easier for the FAA to make the necessary fixes. Often, the per-ticket price works out to a few dollars -- or less. Taking this approach would help change the industry reaction from "we can't" to "why can't we?" Besides, all costs ultimately are passed on to passengers, who have no way of knowing that a small increase in the price per ticket would dramatically improve their chances of remaining safe in flight. I'm guessing that if they did know, most would happily pay. Instead, there's a kind of paralysis in the industry. Safety deficiencies recognized by the FAA persist for years, unnecessarily increasing the risk to air crews and the flying public. This is precisely the case regarding three major threats to safe flight: smoke, fire and explosion. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), which investigates all major accidents in the United States, has recommended that action be taken in all three areas. For example, eliminating explosive vapors in fuel tanks has been on the NTSB's "Most Wanted" list of aviation safety improvements since May 1997. That recommendation emerged from the investigation into the fatal July 1996 center fuel tank explosion of TWA Flight 800 over Long Island Sound, which killed all 230 aboard. A joint government-industry task force convened by the FAA said in 1998 that if nothing were done, fuel tank explosions would continue to occur at an average rate of one every 41/2 years. Almost on schedule, a tank exploded on a Thai Airways jet in Bangkok in 2001. Fortunately, the airplane was on the ground, and only one crew member was killed. Unfortunately, the FAA panel had said, in effect, that eliminating explosive vapors in the fuel tanks would be too expensive. Another example: Last month, U.S. carriers reported six flights with smoke in the cabin or cockpit. In each case, pilots were forced to make emergency landings. After the 1996 crash of ValuJet Flight 592 into the Everglades, the NTSB had urged the FAA to evaluate emergency vision equipment that would enable pilots to see their instruments and out the windscreen even in a smoke-filled cockpit. The FAA still has not responded to the recommendation with regulatory action. Now consider the cargo holds in smaller jets, such as the popular Boeing 737 and DC-9. For years, these holds were not required to have an active means of detecting smoke or fire or of spraying a fire-suppressing chemical. Cheaper fire liners were installed instead. The airlines and the manufacturers argued that, at a cost of more than $300 million to equip all the jets in service, fire protection equipment was too expensive. Then the ValuJet DC-9 crashed because of a raging fire in its forward belly hold, killing all 110 people aboard. Using the FAA's standard $2.8 million statistical value of a life, this one accident cost more than $300 million, not including the cost of the plane. As a result of the crash, the FAA ordered fleetwide installation of fire protection equipment. The industry mobilized. The job was done in three years -- at a cost that was less than expected. The ValuJet crash shows the folly of waiting for an accident to justify action. U.S. airlines racked up 52 accidents in 2003, an average of one per week, according to statistics published on March 22 by the NTSB. Twenty-two people were killed in two of those accidents. To be sure, more people were killed on U.S. carriers in 1996 (342). But with an airline industry still hobbling after 9/11, the 2003 accident rate is the highest posted by the NTSB since 1984: about one accident for every 200,000 departures, or one for every 320,000 flying hours, on average. With that in mind, let's consider the cost per ticket of addressing some of the major threats posed by smoke, fire and explosion. "¢ Blinding smoke: In-flight fires have led to the catastrophic crashes of planes whose pilots couldn't maneuver simply because they could not see through the smoke. In a March 15 letter to the FAA, Nick Lacey, former FAA director of flight standards, warned about the danger of fire during a transoceanic flight, which might be hours from the nearest airport. "Current flight deck smoke masks do not provide the ability for the pilots to see their checklists or fundamental flight instruments in the presence of dense and continuous smoke." I've seen too many post-crash accident reports that read, "Cockpit voice recorder indicates crew unable to see instruments due to smoke." The doomed ValuJet pilots reported smoke in the cockpit. The 1970 crash of a Swissair jet is particularly poignant. "We have fire on board," the pilots radioed, asking ground control for landing help. "I can't see anything." Twenty seconds later: "Goodbye, everybody." Investigators concluded that the otherwise flyable aircraft overshot the Zurich airport while attempting to land. In 1993 the crew of another Swissair jet with smoke in the cockpit resorted to flapping an emergency checklist booklet back and forth to see their instruments. Unable to see anything outside the airplane during landing, the captain came to a screeching halt on a Munich runway, averting disaster. German investigators later recommended the use of an "inflatable view channel between the crew, their instruments and the cockpit windows." Indeed, this inflatable channel has been deployed as emergency equipment on hundreds of corporate and military aircraft worldwide. And, most telling of all, the FAA has committed to installing such equipment on its own dozens of aircraft, but it has not ordered that airlines do the same. The equipment would cost 2 or 3 cents per ticket, according to passenger advocacy groups using data supplied by the manufacturer.




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Airline Safety Costs a) Billions or b) Pennies. Answer Below



"¢ Fire: One of the biggest challenges to in-flight safety is fire in concealed spaces. Case in point: an American Airlines DC-9 that was struck by lightning on Nov. 29, 2000, while climbing out of Washington's Reagan National Airport. The energy from the lightning bolt entered the tail cone, traveled up wires located above the overhead bins, arced in the forward area of the cabin and started a small fire between the cabin sidewall panel and the outer aluminum skin of the airplane. A flight attendant borrowed a penknife from a passenger and cut a hole through the plastic wall, into which the flight attendant was able to insert the nozzle of a portable extinguisher and douse the fire while the pilots made an emergency landing at Dulles.


As a result of this and similar incidents, the NTSB has called for improved in-flight firefighting capability in the cabin, the cockpit and inaccessible spaces.

The Fast-Port apertures offered by a small company in New York were designed specifically for aviation applications. Cost per ticket: less than 1 cent to have six of them placed strategically about the cabin. Keep in mind that in this post-9/11 era, the crash axe stored in the cockpit must remain in the cockpit, and passengers no longer have penknives on board.

"¢ Exploding fuel tanks: After the TWA disaster, the NTSB challenged the industry's fuel system design practices. The chief designers of the fuel tanks said repeatedly in meetings that they designed the electrical fuel systems to minimize the number of heat sources that could ignite the vapors. NTSB investigators rejected this reasoning, saying that the hunt for ignition sources clearly had failed and that, instead, the explosive vapors would have to be eliminated.

The FAA convened a government-industry task force to assess technologies that might solve the problem. Its 1998 report concluded that eliminating explosive vapors could cost $5 billion to $35 billion over 10 years -- a lot more than the $2 billion cost of future accidents if the change were not made.

Wrong answer. To its credit, the FAA convened a second task force, which in 2001 reported that eliminating the vapors would cost $10 billion to $20 billion over 16 years. The internal documents of this second look showed that the panel had considered the cost on a per-passenger basis. Its conclusion? About 25 cents per ticket. Late last month, the FAA announced that it would require a partial fix to the center fuel tank. It has yet to act on the wing tanks.

In 1996, Victoria Cummock, a member of the White House Commission on Aviation Safety and Security, proposed a $4 per ticket surcharge to provide a source of funding for all safety and security initiatives then under consideration. Cummock had lost her husband in the 1988 bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland. Her proposed surcharge, which might have plugged some of the gaps in aviation security that were exploited on Sept. 11, 2001, was not endorsed.

A month after the 9/11 attacks she told me, "It breaks my heart to say it, but for a per passenger surcharge about the price of a McDonald's 'Happy Meal' this tragedy might have been prevented."

As the saying goes, one can pay a little now or a whole lot later. At a few dollars per ticket, safety is anything but expensive. And worth every penny.

Author's e-mail:

poecountry@earthlink.net

David Evans is editor of Air Safety Week, a newsletter for the aviation industry.

Here is the link to that Washington Post article.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A46852-2004Apr2.html