An examination by Bloomberg News of US accident records dating back to 2000 shows repeated examples of pilots flying sophisticated small aircraft skipping rudimentary safety checks, working days so long that they test the boundaries of human endurance, or overlooking routine hazards such as ice on the wings
Bloomberg/Washington
Over the hum of rushing air and jet engines, Captain Richard Trammell’s co-pilot warns him that he’s about to break the speed limit as they prepare to land.
“Say, I’m kinda out of the loop,” a fatigued Trammell replies in the dimly lit cockpit of the twin-engine corporate jet as they near the end of an 18-hour day. “I don’t know what happened to me.”
Minutes later Trammell, flying the Vein Guys vascular surgery group home to Georgia after a day’s work in Nashville, Tennessee, tries landing despite an alert that the brakes aren’t working. Within seconds he changes his mind and takes off again but neglects to draw back brake panels jutting out of the wings, making it impossible to climb. The plane strikes a pole and bursts into flames.
Five people on board - a doctor and his staff - were killed in that February 2013 crash. Only the pilots survived, severely injured.
That incident, grimly recounted in a report by US investigators that is being challenged by the pilots, underscores how corporate and private aircraft crews, under pressure to meet the demanding schedules of chief executives, doctors and celebrities crisscrossing American skies, too often flout safety rules, according to pilots, safety advocates and government documents.
An examination by Bloomberg News of US accident records dating back to 2000 shows repeated examples of pilots flying sophisticated small aircraft skipping rudimentary safety checks, working days so long that they test the boundaries of human endurance, or overlooking routine hazards such as ice on the wings.
There have been five times more fatal accidents involving high-end corporate jets and turboprops piloted by professional crews over the past 15 years than of passenger airlines, which have many more flights, the US National Transportation Safety Board records show. In 2007, deaths from crashes of these planes began to surpass those on passenger airlines - a reversal of the trend stretching back to the dawn of the jet age.
“The No 1 thing is getting the job done,” said Melissa Washburn, a pilot who flies business planes. “If they don’t say yes to every flight, they worry about the owners looking for another flight department.”
Investigators cited pilot actions as among the causes of 88% of crashes of business and private planes in the last 15 years. In one case, a pilot got a weather report for the wrong airport. Another neglected to don an oxygen mask in a non-pressurized cabin. Still others failed to make passengers buckle their seatbelts.
While there’s nothing inherently dangerous about such aircraft, government oversight is far less strict than with the commercial airlines. The Federal Aviation Administration doesn’t regularly inspect many corporate-aircraft operators, and pilots are often on their own to decide when it’s safe to land or how many hours they work, according to the people interviewed for this story.
As a result, fatalities on the growing fleet of smaller planes used by wealthy flyers have remained stubbornly high even as deaths on aircraft operated by US airlines have been almost eliminated.
Accidents have involved planes operated by companies such as Quest Diagnostics Inc and Nascar, private aircraft such as the General Dynamics Corp Gulfstream IV owned by billionaire Lewis Katz that crashed last year, and charters hired by celebrities like TV producer Dick Ebersol, who was seriously injured in a 2004 wreck.
Last month, investigators of the Katz crash reported that the sports mogul’s personal pilots almost never performed preflight safety checks when shuttling their boss around the country.
Those simple checks, along with other missed opportunities, could have kept the plane from skidding off the Boston-area runway at 185 miles per hour and bursting into flames on May 31, killing the pilots, a flight attendant, Katz and three other passengers.
It was one of 62 fatal accidents since 2000 involving the most-sophisticated models of corporate-style jets and turboprops operated by professional pilots, flown for business or pleasure. That compares with 13 for US passenger airlines. Since 2007, there have been 106 fatalities on the smaller planes, compared with 50 on airlines, records show.
The accident rate in corporate-style aviation is elusive, and confusion in the way cases are reported tends to understate the problem. The FAA doesn’t collect precise data on usage, and flights with almost identical purposes can be conducted under multiple regulations, making them difficult to track.
As a result, Bloomberg had to examine hundreds of investigative reports and news accounts to tally relevant crashes. The accidents didn’t include hobbyists, people piloting their own planes on business, or crashes in wilderness areas such as the 2010 wreck that killed former Alaska Senator Ted Stevens. It also didn’t include another 29 fatal crashes since 2000 on identical aircraft models used for hauling cargo.
Crashes on passenger airlines have become rare because the carriers take so many steps to protect against pilot mistakes. Strict rules govern how much rest the pilots need, computers continuously monitor their performance, and they’re encouraged to report even minor lapses. Seatbelt use is enforced.
While some have called for increased regulation of business and private aircraft, sweeping new rules are unlikely.
“Nobody’s paying attention,” said Kitty Higgins, a former member of the National Transportation Safety Board. “It’s just ridiculous in this day and age.”
The National Business Aviation Association, among other groups, defended the industry’s record.
The association and the International Business Aviation Council in Montreal said the best fleet operators have accident rates equivalent to commercial carriers and that it’s unfair to indict the entire sector based on crashes by a small number of pilots. Industry groups and the FAA also are trying to set voluntary standards to improve safety.
The FAA has begun programmes to introduce airline-like safety data monitoring to corporate operations. The agency has also set a goal of reducing the fatal accident rate on all types of private aircraft by 10% by 2018.
“The FAA and industry are committed to making aircraft, technologies, training and procedures across all categories as robust as possible to improve safety,” the agency said in a statement.
The two industry groups encourage companies to keep pilots well-rested and to submit to outside safety audits.
“For operators whose flight crews routinely adhere to industry best practices, the likelihood of a fatal accident is greatly diminished,” said Peter Ingleton, a director at the Aviation Council.
It was more than a failure to adhere to best practices that led to the 2007 fatal crash of a twin-prop plane owned by Nascar, which governs stock-car racing events. The company also violated aviation regulations, according to the safety board.
When investigators arrived at Nascar’s Daytona Beach, Florida, flight department after the accident, they asked the aviation director to show them the company’s flight operations manual laying out safety tenets.
At first, he couldn’t find it.
Then investigators discovered that the manual wasn’t always followed. In fact, the fatal flight, which killed the two pilots and three people on the ground - including two young children - - was in violation of the manual’s rules, according to the NTSB.
Even though Nascar’s planes were reserved for business use, Bruce Kennedy, married to Lesa France Kennedy, whose grandfather founded Nascar, had been allowed to fly one if he was with a company pilot.
The problems went deeper, investigators found. Even though some cockpit electronics had emitted a burning smell on a previous flight, no one had ordered maintenance on the Textron Inc twin-engine Cessna 310R, which was required under FAA rules, according to the safety board.
Within 10 minutes of taking off, one of the pilots radioed that there was smoke in the cockpit. As they were trying to make an emergency landing, they hit two homes in Sanford. The NTSB found that actions by Nascar’s flight department were to blame.
Nascar didn’t respond to requests for comment.
Quest Diagnostics had broader issues. The company, which used to operate its fleet of delivery planes as private flights with limited government oversight, had two fatal accidents between 2003 and 2009.
Among the problems: Pilots flew overnight shifts after working day jobs; flight crews were pressured to make perilous low-visibility landings; and workers who raised safety concerns were punished, according to investigation records.
“This was the way they did things and they didn’t have a reference to know better,” Christopher Andreychik, a former Quest pilot, said in an interview. “That’s what bred this cowboy mentality.”
Quest has since voluntarily agreed to greater FAA oversight. Denny Moynihan, a company spokesman, declined to comment.
“In almost every other context in which we do work, there is regulation driving the safety programmes,” said Leigh White, president of Alertness Solutions, which has consulted with industry groups on how to limit pilot fatigue. “In business aviation, where there is no regulation, it’s a completely different universe. It’s largely voluntary.”
Corporate aviation is regulated by multiple tiers of US law. Privately owned aircraft, such as Katz’s plane or Nascar’s fleet, have the least oversight.
Charter carriers, those charging customers per flight, face FAA inspections and regulations. But even those standards can be easily overlooked, according to pilots and NTSB accident reports.
After Senator Paul Wellstone, a Minnesota Democrat, died in a 2002 charter-plane crash, an NTSB investigation found both pilots demonstrated “potentially serious performance deficiencies” on previous flights.
Investigators of a crash in Lake Michigan on June 4, 2007, involving a University of Michigan organ-transplant team, found the charter company had falsified the co-pilot’s training records, according to the NTSB. The safety board blamed the pilots for the crash and found that “operational safety deficiencies” at the charter company along with poor FAA oversight contributed.
In addition to the two pilots, the accident killed two surgeons and two technicians who had obtained lungs to be transplanted to a critically ill patient.
Sometimes the problem starts with the passengers.
Unlike airlines, where pilots are shielded from passenger pressures, flight crews at private and charter operations can be subject to unique demands from powerful people on the plane.
One pilot, who asked not to be named because he feared it would harm his career, said he often worked for more than 24 straight hours while ferrying around his wealthy bosses.
Private pilots are subject to the whims of owners who are used to having their way, said Stuart Matthews, former president of the Flight Safety Foundation, which promotes better practices among corporate and charter operators.
“I was constantly hearing stories of corporate pilots who don’t get enough rest or who are always concerned about being pressured to press on,” Matthews said.
In 2001, a chartered jet crashed in Aspen, Colorado, killing 18 people, after the person who paid for the flight became “irate” upon learning they might not make the airport’s curfew, according to the safety board.
Investigators concluded that pressure from the passenger contributed to the pilot’s decision to try landing without being able to see the runway.
The problems rarely stem from the quality of the aircraft. The newest version of planes made by General Dynamics’s Gulfstream and competitors Bombardier Inc, Textron or Dassault Aviation SA often come with better safety equipment than airliners.
And there’s no mystery about how to operate them safely, either. New cockpit technology, pilot-training techniques and layers of checks and balances have transformed aviation safety in recent decades.
Companies such as Berkshire Hathaway Inc’s NetJets, which sells shares in private jets and operates with airline-like safety standards, haven’t had a single fatal accident since 2000, according to NTSB data.
Though some people like Higgins say there should be greater oversight of corporate aviation, such proposals haven’t gotten much traction even from safety advocates.
“A lot of times we’re talking about people who aren’t following the regulations anyway, so I’m not sure that more regulation is the answer,” NTSB chairman Christopher Hart said in an interview.
While Ingleton of the International Business Aviation Council believes that corporate aviation in general is safe, he said that isn’t true at all operators.
“Regulation won’t fix it. Cajoling doesn’t seem to fix it,” Ingleton said. “There seems to be a bunch of people out there, you just can’t get into their head.”
In the case of the Vein Guys, the fatal journey began at about 2am on February 20, 2013, when Trammell and co-pilot Jeremy Hayden awoke to make their first flight of the day.
After flying to Nashville, Trammell tried to sleep at the airport, he told investigators. His mobile phone records showed the longest break between texts or calls was 1 hour, 5 minutes.
Later that night, as they neared the airport in Georgia, the pilots got a warning light that the anti-lock brakes weren’t working. That meant they needed to divert their twin-engine Beechcraft Premier 1A jet to an airport with a longer runway.
Trammell and Hayden continued their landing.
After seven seconds on the ground, Trammell had second thoughts and lifted off again. But the pilots failed to retract panels on the wings that were designed to help stop the aircraft on the ground, leaving them unable to climb, according to the NTSB report. They lumbered forward before hitting a power pole and crashing.
Trammell told investigators he couldn’t recall the landing attempt. David Katzman, a lawyer representing Trammell, said in an interview that the NTSB should have looked at issues beyond pilot actions. Trammell alleges in a lawsuit that the utility pole the plane struck was improperly placed too close to a runway and that the plane’s design is partially to blame.
Hayden’s attorney, Steven Ashby, said his client also disagrees with the NTSB’s findings and believes the placement of the pole was primarily responsible for the crash.
“Those who depend on pilots to provide safe transportation deserve pilots who are well-rested and otherwise fit for duty,” NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt wrote in a statement attached to the final report. “That did not happen in this case.”
