2Wheeltips

The previous article was written entirely from memory; so I decided to open up Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell and re-read the chapter on airplane accidents and once again I was amazed at how similar the accident-factors of a plane crash are to the accident-factors of a motorcycle crash. So with that in mind, let’s pin few additional tails on this donkey.

Profile of the captain:
The captain of the Flight 801 had been employed by Korean Air for four years. Prior to that, he was a pilot in the Korean Air Force with a combined flight time of 89,000 hours, including thirty-two hundred hours of experience in jumbo jets. A few months earlier, he had been given a flight safety award by his airline for successfully handling a jumbo jet engine failure at low altitude.

In other words, he was an experienced and seasoned operator with years of expertise and thousands of miles under his ass. By all standards, he was a person with a high degree of capabilities. And yet…

Profile of the plane:
They would be flying a Boeing 747, the model known in the aviation world as the "classic." The aircraft was in perfect working order. It had once been the Korean presidential plane. Flight 801 departed the gate at ten-thirty in the evening and was airborne twenty minutes later. Takeoff was without incident. Just before one-thirty in the morning, the plane broke out of the clouds, and the flight crew glimpsed lights off in the distance.

In other words, the machine was in perfect working condition and its capabilities were well within the requirements. And yet…

Terrain experience:
The plane began its descent toward Guam airport. They would make a visual approach, the captain said. He had flown into Guam airport from Kimpo eight times previously, most recently a month ago, and he knew the airport and the surrounding terrain well.

In other words, the operator had traveled this route and knew the terrain well. And yet…

Do you think this is a unique example? Not at all.

Twenty years before the crash of Flight 801, a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down by a Soviet military jet over the Barents Sea. It was an accident, meaning the kind of rare and catastrophic event that, but for the grace of God, could happen to any airline.

Then, two years later, a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul. Two accidents in two years is not a good sign. Three years after that, the airline lost another 747 near Sakhalin Island, in Russia, followed by a Boeing 707 that went down over the Andaman Sea in 1987, two more crashes in 1989 in Tripoli and Seoul, and then another in 1994 in Cheju, South Korea.

To put that record in perspective, the "loss" rate for an airline like the American carrier United Airlines in the period 1988 to 1998 was .27 per million departures, which means that they lost a plane in an accident about once in every four million flights. The loss rate for Korean Air, in the same period, was 4.79 per million departures — more than seventeen times higher.

In April 1999, Delta Air Lines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air. In short order, the US Army, which maintained thousands of troops in South Korea, forbade its personnel from flying with the airline. South Korea's safety rating was downgraded by the US Federal Aviation Authority, and Canadian officials informed Korean Air's management that they were considering revoking the company's overflight and landing privileges in Canadian airspace.

But then a small miracle happened. Korean Air turned itself around. Today, the airline is a member in good standing of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless. In 2006, Korean Air was given the Phoenix Award by Air Transport World in recognition of its transformation. Aviation experts will tell you that Korean Air is now as safe as any airline in the world.

In Part Two, we're going to conduct a crash investigation and see if we can learn anything that can be applied to motorcycle accidents and more importantly avoidance of those accidents.

Moody Out

100 points if you can tell where the "Moody Out" quote is from.