The death of aerobatic wunderkind Rob Holland while on a seemingly normal approach to landing hit me—and I’m sure many in aviation—hard, coming after a string of accidents that are stretching our willingness to keep going in the face of ongoing carnage. Obviously, many of us know people who have died in aircraft accidents, and we all have to figure out how to put those aside and do our best to fly safely and be prepared for the unexpected—which is, after all, part of the definition of accident.
But I feel like the mental burden is getting worse, and it doesn’t surprise me anymore when someone I know decides to give up flying well before their medical sell-by date. The burden isn’t that accidents happen; we’ve all come to accept that. It’s that so many of these recent accidents are an utter mystery, and not even the nattering nabobs on social media have any—even outlandish—clues about what might have happened.
At this moment, I’m wondering whether a year or two from now, which is how long it takes for the NTSB to come up with a final report, we will nod our heads and say to ourselves, “Ah, that’s what happened.” Not just to Rob Holland but to the MU-2 crash on April 12 near Copake, New York, or the HondaJet that ran off the runway at high speed in Scottsdale in November, or the Bell 206L4 that crashed into the Hudson last month after the gearbox and main rotor separated from the airframe.
The scary part of this is that for some accidents, even the pros at the NTSB will not be able to give us a definitive answer. While their investigative capabilities are incredible, they do sometimes come up short, for an important reason: lack of data. There is only so much data available, especially on older or smaller aircraft without cockpit voice or flight data recorders.
Sometimes, the NTSB gets lucky and a passenger’s smart device contains valuable information, such as what one passenger was seeing when two tourist aircraft collided in Alaska on May 13, 2019.
By now, you might have figured out where I’m going with this screed. Yes, I am advocating for the mandatory installation of recording devices, especially cockpit video recorders. I know that lots of pilots are adamantly against this, but I’m sorry—it’s beyond time to put those fears to rest. We can make laws to prevent any use of these devices for anything other than post-accident investigation. We don’t need them for flight data monitoring purposes anyway.
We have done so well on safety that many accidents happening now are not of the easily explainable variety. And we can’t prevent accidents if we don’t know what happened. The sooner we know, the faster we can improve.
Do you think SpaceX would be as successful if it waited two years for a final report every time one of its rockets blew up? Of course not. SpaceX investigates based on data captured from many onboard sensors and cameras, finds the problem, and fixes it before the next launch.
We owe it to ourselves to do the best job we can to fix whatever problems are causing these accidents, but we can’t do that unless we know exactly what happened.