She Did Not Turn Left

 

Those are the last words of a New York Times story on the helicopter-airline crash that killed 67 people last Jan. 29 in Washington, DC.  While there is no official word yet from the National Transportation Safety Board on the cause of the crash, the in-depth Times report has material from interviews with numerous experts, and pieces together the final minutes leading up to the crash.  As with so many avertable tragedies, this one combined multiple factors, each one of which might have not been fatal by itself.  But the combination proved deadly, and as is often the case in modern aviation accidents, human error played a large role.

 

The basics of what happened are well known.  American Airlines Flight 5342 from Wichita, Kansas to Washington's National Airport was on its final approach to land when an Army UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter flying a training mission collided with it short of the runway.  All 64 people on the commercial flight died in the crash, as did the helicopter pilot, Capt. Rebecca M. Lobach; the instructor, Chief Warrant Officer 2 Andrew Loyd Eaves, and the third member of the crew, Staff Sgt. Ryan Austin O'Hara. 

 

When I blogged on this crash shortly after it happened, we knew that the helicopter was flying higher than FAA regulations allowed.  At the location of the crash, it was supposed to be lower than 200 feet, but the crash occurred at an altitude of about 300 feet.  Also, the helicopter was equipped with an improved navigational aid called ADS-B, which updates air traffic controllers every second on the aircraft's location, but the device was not turned on at the time.

 

The Times article adds important information about the interaction among the air traffic controller, Capt. Lobach, and Warrant Officer Eaves.  The main purpose of the flight was to practice evacuating important members of the Federal government in time of emergency.  As a part of that practice, it was customary not to operate easily-detected navigational equipment such as the ADS-B.  The helicopter had a standard radar transponder on board which was operational, but it provides updated location information only about every five to twelve seconds, according to the report. 

 

Such a time gap between updates could have been critical.  For one thing, the runway that Flight 5342 landed on that night was seldom used, and it's possible that Capt. Lobach had never been in a situation where she had to avoid a plane landing on that runway.  For another thing, it seems that critical information the controller tried to tell the helicopter crew may have been "stepped on" when the crew pressed their push-to-talk button to transmit words to the controller. 

 

A third factor is that a few minutes before the crash, after being alerted that there was a commercial flight nearby, the helicopter pilots requested "visual separation" from the controller.  This meant basically, "We want to be responsible for avoiding a crash by looking around us and getting out of the way of anything we see in our path." 

 

This relieves the controller from essentially micro-managing the flight's actions, but puts a heavy burden on the pilot to know exactly what is going on and what to do to avoid a collision.  At night, with night-vision goggles on, it is quite possible that Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves had difficulty seeing the approaching Flight 5342, or at least gaining enough information about its path to avoid the collision.

 

At about 40 seconds before the crash, when the two aircraft were about a mile apart, the controller asked the helicopter pilots if they had the CRJ passenger jet in sight.  He received no response, and then transmitted an order to them to pass behind the jet.  Analysis of the recordings indicates that the helicopter crew might have been transmitting at the time and didn't hear this order.  The last exchange between Warrant Officer Eaves and the controller came a few seconds later, and affirmed that the helicopter crew had "the aircraft" in sight and wanted to be okayed for visual separation, which was again approved. 

 

Then, the instructor Eaves told the pilot Lobach to turn left, which would have brought the helicopter farther away from the jet's flight path and might have averted the accident.  But she kept flying straight, and the collision happened a few seconds later.

 

No one knows what was going on in the minds of Capt. Lobach and Warrant Officer Eaves in those last few seconds.  But some aspects of this tragedy remind me of the crash of Korean Air flight 801 in Guam in 1997.  Analysis of the voice recorders in that crash revealed that the  captain of the flight evidently became confused about the plane's location.  But when the junior-ranked copilot tried to correct him, his suggestions were ignored.

 

In a training flight, the protocol should be that the student, even if she is a five-star general, for the moment is under the authority of the instructor, even if he is just a warrant officer.  It's possible that cultural factors prevented Warrant Officer Eaves from being as forceful as he should have been in telling Capt. Lobach to turn left.  And we do not know how deferential Capt. Lobach was feeling at the time, and whether she was alert and cognizant of her surroundings, frozen with fear, or somewhere in between. 

 

But it is already clear that communications broke down in significant ways in the last few critical seconds before the crash.  The technology exists to enable pilots to both hear and talk to the controller at the same time.  I say that, not knowing the details of what would have to change about the old-fashioned AM VHF cockpit radio system still in use, but I suspect there would be some grumbling on the part of those affected and then they would go along with the change. 

 

Beyond technology, there is the vital issue of prompt and relevant communication among those who can do something to avoid a crash.  That didn't happen in this case, and I hope the lessons learned here are applied in every situation where they could help avoid the next accident.

 

Sources:  The New York Times carried the story entitled "Missteps, Equipment Problems and a Common but Risky Practice Led to a Fatal Crash" by Kate Kelly and Mark Walker appeared in the Apr. 27, 2025 edition.  I also referred to Wikipedia articles on the 2025 Potomac River mid-air collision and Korean Air Flight 801. 

Close Call for Flight 4819 to Toronto

 

A saying among pilots reportedly goes, "Any landing you can walk away from is a good landing."  By that criterion, the landing of Delta Air Lines Flight 4819 from Minneapolis-St. Paul to Toronto on Monday afternoon, Feb. 17, was a good landing, at least for most of those on board who did in fact walk away under their own power.  But those who watched the plane land and saw what it looked like afterwards might disagree.

 

Although the Toronto area had recently received as much as 20 inches of snow, airport officials report that the runway was clear when Flight 4819 began its approach to the Toronto airport, which is in the suburb of Mississauga.  The main weather problem was wind, according to a report by CNN, which was gusting from 26 to 38 MPH at a 40-degree angle to the runway.  Landing with even a steady crosswind is a tricky proposition, because the pilot relies on the wind and adjusts his (or her!) controls to keep the plane lined up with the direction of travel.  But if the wind suddenly changes, or drops to nothing, as could conceivably happen, the pilot's carefully calculated orientation and velocity can change just as abruptly.  And something like this evidently happened to the Bombardier CRJ900, which was carrying 76 passengers and four crew members at the time.

 

Normally, just before landing the pilot will "flare" the aircraft, tilting the nose up and slowing the descent until the landing gear contact the runway, ideally without the passengers even noticing they're now on the ground.  That wasn't what happened in this case.  Both reports of passengers on the plane and a video clip taken from a nearby plane show that the jetliner never flared, but hit the ground so hard that the rear (main) landing gear collapsed.  Almost immediately the right wing hit the ground, sheared off, and a fire began where the missing wing exposed fuel. 

 

Then a curious thing happened.  The plane was still going so fast that the remaining left wing was producing plenty of lift.  While sliding along the runway in flames, the plane executed a half barrel roll, turning completely upside-down, until the left wing hit the runway, ending this unique maneuver.  As the fuselage finally slowed down and stopped, the fire did too, leaving 80 passengers and crew members "upside-down hanging like bats," according to one passenger.

 

Not everyone on board was a trained athlete, so getting down off the floor (now the roof) posed problems for several people and resulted in some 21 injuries.  But by week's end, everyone was out of the hospital and in receipt of an offer of $30,000 from Delta for enduring what has to be one of the weirdest landings in aviation history.

 

Most news reports covering this story inevitably mention the previous air accidents that have happened since the New Year, and just to be perverse, I won't (you can find the other two big ones in my previous blogs).  While this one had a happy ending for all concerned, it does make you wonder if something systematic is going on with regard to air safety. 

 

Even with the accidents we've had already, though, flying is per mile one of the safest modes of travel, much safer than driving the same distance in your car.  But psychology is not statistics, and my wife has already asked me with concern in her voice whether I'm going to drive or fly on a business trip I have scheduled later this month.  The logical and more safe thing is to fly, but I understand her concern.

 

Officially, the investigation into this crash has just begun.  I'm sure the pilots will be grilled thoroughly, and the black-box recordings pored over.  We can imagine that there are two extremes of responsibility.  On one extreme, the pilot simply messed up the landing, and the same thing might have happened even if it was a bright sunny day.  On the other extreme, even the best pilot in the world couldn't have dealt successfully with the bizarre and unique wind turbulence that was encountered, and despite all the piloting skills available, the plane failed to flare, hit the runway too hard, and flipped over. 

 

The truth probably lies somewhere in the middle.  Weather remains a not-completely-predictable factor in aviation, despite technical advances such as CAT (clear-air turbulence) detection, wind-shear sensors around airports, and other instrumentation that can help pilots make safe landings, or decide to delay a landing if things are just too dicey. 

 

That may have been the case here, but figuring out that the world's best pilot couldn't have landed in those particular conditions is not something we can presently do.  You can imagine peppering every runway with tiny anemometers that would give some artificial-intelligence system second-by-second updates on the wind conditions, but most of the time it would just be wasted effort, and it might give bad advice anyway, telling the pilot it's okay to land when it wasn't and vice-versa.  And circumstances can change so fast that the warning might come too late for the pilot to do anything about it. 

 

I will keep my eyes on this investigation and when results are announced, I will try to do an update on what has to be one of the closest near-miss crashes on record, in terms of fatalities.  The investigation should go pretty quickly as all the passengers and crew are around to tell us what they saw, the pilots survived, the black boxes survived, and we have a video of almost the whole thing.  What may be missing are fine-grained data on wind conditions, but even that data may be recoverable from video cameras on site if some cleverness is exercised in that direction. 

 

We can all be grateful that every person on that plane survived, even though the landing was more than anyone bargained for.  I'm not sure whether I would take such a ride myself even if I knew there was $30,000 waiting for me on the other side.  The payments to passengers are chicken feed compared to the loss to the airline represented by a functioning airliner that is now turned into scrap metal. But those payments bought the airline more than what they cost in good will. 

 

Sources:  I referred to an AP report carried by WHEC-TV in Rochester, NY at https://www.whec.com/national-world/plane-that-flipped-over-in-canada-highlights-some-of-the-dangers-of-holding-kids-on-your-lap/, a CNN report at https://www.cnn.com/2025/02/18/us/what-we-know-delta-plane-crash-canada/index.html,

and the Wikipedia article "Delta Connection Flight 4819." 

The Door Plug Blowout on a 737 Max 9: Another Headache for Boeing

 

When Alaska Airlines flight 1282 took off around 5 PM Friday, Jan. 5 from Portland, Oregon, few if any of the 171 passengers suspected that anything unusual was going to happen.  But at 5:11 PM, as the Boeing 737 Max 9 was climbing through 16,000 feet, passengers heard a loud bang followed by a roaring wind noise that made conversation impossible.  Where a normal porthole window had once been, a gaping two-by-four-foot hole had appeared next to a row of seats on the left side of the plane.   One passenger, Kelly Bartlett, didn't realize what had happened until a teenage boy moved into an empty seat next to her.  He was sitting in the row next to the hole, two empty seats away from the window, and the blast sucked the shirt off his back.  If he hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, he might have gone with it.

 

Oxygen masks deployed all over the plane, and the passengers remained calm amid the chaotic noise.  The pilot immediately returned to Portland and landed the plane safely.  No one other than the boy next to the hole was injured. 

 

The Boeing 737 Max 9 can be configured for various numbers of seats, and for more than 200, an emergency exit is required in the location where the hole appeared.  But for smaller capacities, the emergency exit is replaced by a panel, basically a plug the shape of the exit door, that blocks the exit opening.  From inside the plane, the window and trim make this plug almost invisible.  But all that was holding it against the differential pressure of over a ton as the plane rose through 16,000 feet were four bolts, at least if the plug had been installed correctly.  This particular Max 9 was delivered to Alaska Airlines only last October, so the problem may have existed since it was built.

 

A Portland high-school teacher found the door intact in his back yard, so investigators are looking at it closely to determine the cause of the failure. 

           

In the meantime, the U. S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has grounded all Boeing 737 Max 9 planes, which affects some 171 aircraft.  It has ordered inspections of the bolts and other structures around the door plugs, and United Airlines has already found that some bolts on its door plugs are loose. 

 

Only last week, we described in this space how all passengers on a commercial flight involved in a runway collision in Japan survived with only minor injuries, and we can fortunately say the same about this accident in Portland.  But things could have been much worse.  In similar incidents involving sudden holes in fuselages, passengers or flight attendants have been sucked out bodily.  If the boy sitting next to the hole hadn't been wearing his seatbelt, that probably would have been his fate.  And if the plug had waited to fail at a higher altitude, the pressure differential would have been greater, possibly tearing a seat off its mounts. 

 

Although we can rejoice that nobody was seriously injured, the big question now is why the plug blew out.  The fact that at least one other plane has been found with loose bolts holding the plug says that this may not have been an isolated incident.  That is why the FAA has wisely grounded the Max 9s until a thorough investigation shows exactly what the problem was.

 

We can only speculate at this point, but already some things are fairly clear.  The fact that the plane suffering the accident was so new points to a possible manufacturing problem.  Nuts on airframes must be torqued to a specific tension, because the proper amount of torque represents a compromise between not enough tension on the bolt, which might leave it subject to vibration loosening or fatigue in some cases, and too much tension, which could lead to bolt failure.  Many bolts on aircraft have locking cables, cotter pins, or other means by which the nut on the bolt is prevented from turning.  It's not clear whether the four bolts that hold the door plug in place had such provisions, but even locking devices can fail, or be improperly installed.

 

Another 737 Max series, the Max 8, was the subject of an extensive and expensive investigation involving defective software that intentionally crashed the plane when it received faulty data from attitude sensors.  This problem cost Boeing billions of dollars and lost prestige, and the last thing the company needs right now is another expensive and embarrassing safety problem.

 

In a statement to employees that was also released to the public, Boeing CEO Dave Calhoun promised "100% and complete transparency every step of the way" during the investigation.  He can hardly promise less, because Boeing's reputation is on the line with every accident that points to a manufacturing cause. 

 

As airlines which own 737 Max 9s wait impatiently to begin using their millions of dollars of investment again, both the FAA and Boeing have big incentives to figure out why the plug blew out and how to make sure it doesn't happen again.  The recovery of the intact door will be very helpful in the investigation, and I expect we will know something definite within 60 to 90 days. 

 

In the meantime, air flight remains a safe mode of travel for the vast majority of passengers.  The incredible number of things that all have to work flawlessly for a typical flight to be completed goes completely unnoticed by most passengers, but it is the product of the efforts of thousands of engineers, technicians, service people, pilots, crew members, air traffic controllers, and others who do their jobs without public recognition. 

 

We are fortunate that the last two attention-grabbing commercial aircraft accidents have resulted in relatively few casualties.  But grounding the Max 9s was the right thing to do, and everyone looks forward to the time when we can know what happened, why it happened, and how to keep it from happening again.

 

Sources:  I referred to the FAA website at https://www.faa.gov/newsroom/updates-grounding-boeing-737-max-9-aircraft and the following news reports:  https://abcnews.go.com/US/alaska-airlines-emergency-fittings-top-door-plug-fractured/story?id=106218951, https://www.npr.org/2024/01/08/1223517098/door-plug-boeing-737-max-portland-ntsb-faa. and https://abc7ny.com/alaska-airlines-flight-emergency-boeing-door-plug/14298712/.

Southwest Airlines Flight 1380: Cracks in Airline Safety?

Over the last twenty years or so, the news about airline safety in the U. S. has been mainly good.  Before last week, the last time a passenger died in a U. S. commercial airliner accident was 2009, and for some time before that it's been true that the most dangerous part of a plane trip is the drive to the airport.  But on Tuesday April 17, the explosive decompression that resulted from an engine fan blade on Southwest Airlines flight 1380 hitting a window sucked passenger Jennifer Riordan partway out of the plane, and she later died of her injuries.  Captain Tammi Jo Shults received praise for her calm and expert handling of the crisis, bringing the plane safely to ground in Philadelphia without any other fatalities.  

Good safety records don't just happen.  They are the product of unceasing vigilance on the part of thousands of pilots, mechanics, traffic controllers, inspectors, and other members of a complex system that has to be continually monitored and managed well to make flying safe.  One of the routine measures that helps maintain safety is regularly scheduled inspections of parts of the aircraft subject to fatigue.  Fatigue can happen to any part that comes under mechanical stress during takeoff, flight, or landing.  And some of the most highly stressed parts are in the engine, of course:  the turbine blades that endure extreme centrifugal forces and thermal stress, as well as the fan blades—the big visible ones in the front of the engine in modern turbofan units. 

A turbine blade that breaks off rockets through the housing like a bullet, usually destroying the engine and often damaging other parts of the aircraft.  This happened back in 1989 to a DC-10, and unfortunately the blade happened to hit the fuselage at a critical point that severed all the hydraulic control lines.  Forced to steer only by manipulating the throttles of the remaining engines, the pilots crash-landed at an airport in Sioux City, Iowa. One hundred and eleven passengers died in that crash and 185 survived.

More recently, in 2016 a fan blade on a Southwest 737 from the same type of engine that failed on flight 1380 came loose and knocked away the entire inlet part of the engine.  One of the flying parts ripped a hole in the fuselage and decompressed the cabin, but the pilots managed to make an emergency landing without serious injuries to anyone.  The missing blade was never recovered, but investigation of the root that remained on the hub showed that fatigue cracking had occurred. 

I wasn't able to determine if the NTSB or the FAA issued any directives for increased scrutiny of these blades after the 2016 incident.  But in light of the more serious consequences of last week's accident, government authorities have ordered inspections of more than 700 Boeing 737s that use the CFM56-7B engine.  That is only about 10% of all such engines in use, but there may be technical reasons why only some of the engines need to be inspected.

While Captain Shults deserves praise for her cool handling of the situation, it's typical of media attention to accidents like this that the pilots get their pictures splashed around for taking a bad situation and making it turn out better than it could have, while the people who spend their lives making sure pilots don't have to be heroes remain unheard-of and unsung.  The media thrive on drama and narrow escapes.  You will never see a news headline that reads, "Flight XYZ lands safely on time with no fatalities or injuries," because that is exactly what we expect to happen.  The people I mentioned above who spend their lives making sure that 99.999... % of the time, the normal thing happens never get any public attention, despite the fact that we owe the amazing reliability of air travel to their dedication and diligence.

In the January 2018 issue of the historical journal Technology and Culture, two historians point out that their own profession is guilty of a similar prejudice or blindness.  Historians of technology typically focus on inventions, discovery, innovation, and disruption, and the people responsible for these things.  But Andrew Russell and Lee Vinsel have issued a call for writing histories of the "maintainers":  the people who fix things when they're broken, do regular preventive maintenance so things don't break in the first place where lives can be endangered, and generally keep existing systems and institutions running smoothly. 

I don't know how far Russell and Vinsel will get in their attempt to encourage historians to look at maintenance, but they have perceived the academic version of a general trend that could lead us into a lot of trouble if we let it continue.  It's the neglect of the people who do routine, ordinary, and even dull activities that are nevertheless vital to the continuance of modern civilization.

This neglect shows up in all sorts of ways:  in the cultural attitudes that tell young people to become a doctor, lawyer, or other highly-paid professional, or else abandon all hope for a decent respectable career and marriage; in the absurdly skewed pay scales that are tending to turn the U. S. into a culture of a small elite reigning over poorly-paid "unwashed masses"; and in the fading of a small-d democratic attitude that recognizes the vital contributions of even the lowliest and lowest-paid workers in an organization or an economy as being just as important as the CEO, but in a different way. 

So while I congratulate Captain Shults for her heroic actions to land Flight 1380, I hope that the nameless technicians, inspectors, bureaucrats, and others whose achievement it has been to make air transport as safe as it is will redouble their efforts to keep anything like the fan-blade accident from happening again.  And if they do their jobs well, maybe I won't have a chance to write about another commercial U. S. airline fatality until I'm too old to care.

Sources:  I referred to a BBC report on the Flight 1380 accident carried on the news organization's website on Apr. 21, 2018 at http://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-43846660.  I also referred to a report of the 2016 fan-blade accident at the NTSB website https://www.ntsb.gov/news/press-releases/Pages/PR20160912.aspx, a New Scientist article that appeared on Nov. 5, 2010 at https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn19685-what-happened-to-that-superjumbo/, and the Wikipedia article "United Airlines Flight 232" about the 1989 turbine-blade accident.  The article "After Innovation, Turn to Maintenance" by Andrew L. Russell and Lee Vinsel appeared in the January 2018 issue of Technology and Culture, pp. 1-25.

Airline Safety: No News Is Good News—Or Is It?

It has been almost four years since the last fatal commercial airline accident in the U. S.:  the crash of Flight 3407 in February 2009, in which pilot and copilot errors combined to send the plane into a house in Clarence Center, N. Y., killing fifty people.  Of course, that could change overnight, but for the moment we can be grateful that the airline safety record looks so good.  However, there’s a fly in this otherwise sweet-smelling ointment:  it turns out that crashes stimulate the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) more than anything else to improve safety measures such as pilot training and work rules.  And the lack of such stimulus has allowed the FAA to drag out some important pilot-training improvements for over a decade.

In the early years of flying, many accidents were due to mechanical failures, and this remained true at least until the 1980s.  Cargo doors, flammable cargo, and of course bombs (before airport security was beefed up) were responsible for many fatalities.  But with the advent of airport security measures and technical improvements in both airframe construction and restrictions on the types of cargo carried, most of the non-human causes of commercial crashes have been adequately dealt with.  What remains, as the story of Flight 3407 tells us, is the human factor.

Because fatigue seemed to play a big role in the Flight 3407 accident, the FAA began to revise rules on pilot work schedules to prevent the kind of overscheduling that pilot Marvin Renslow and 24-year-old copilot Rebecca Shaw experienced before their fatal accident in 2009.  Shaw had joined the flight after an all-night commute from Seattle, and at the time it was a common thing for pilots to snooze in airport waiting rooms at odd moments rather than checking into a hotel with the accompanying delays.

But only in 2011 were the new work-schedule rules implemented, and then only for planes carrying paying passengers.  Cargo flights are still immune from the new rules, which seems to imply that while we want to protect paying customers, pilots and hardware are expendable.

Regulation is a sparring match between an industry that sees restrictions on how they can use their paid staff in dollars-and-cents terms, and a government agency that is beholden to Congress and the people at large to ensure that airline travel is “safe.”  Of course, “safe” can only be approached, not achieved, and therein lies the difficulty.  The practical outcome is that things slide along, with the FAA taking years to solicit industry input and modify the proposed rules, until an accident prods Congress to come down hard on the agency with a mandate for improved rules that will keep the next horse from getting out of the barn after the present one has escaped.

That is perhaps a cynical view of the process, but it appears to cover the facts.  I have not looked at the proposed new rules, but as I recommended in May 2009 when the National Transportation Safety Board issued its conclusions on the causes of the Flight 3407 crash, we can learn a lot from near-accidents without having to go through the agony of a real one.

A recent news report on the issue of new FAA regulations says that voluntary data-gathering has been emphasized over one-size-fits-all obligatory rules.  And perhaps that is one reason that we’ve had such a long spell without commercial-airline fatalities.  The Air Line Pilots’ Association (ALPA) holds an annual Air Safety Forum, and the September 2012 online issue of the Air Line Pilot Magazine describes topics at the four-day forum such as stall recovery, the new pilot training rules proposed by the FAA, and airport safety issues.  Computerized records of voluntary safety-issue reporting make it easier than ever for pilots to learn from the mistakes of their colleagues.  Under the old cop-and-bad-guy model, airlines were reluctant to publicize pilot errors because of fears that they would get in trouble with the FAA, and consequently, knowledge about errors that could have turned into major disasters stayed in the cockpit.  Under the new atmosphere of collaboration, however, the FAA encourages such sharing of experience, with the result that pilots are more prepared than ever to avoid or deal with dangerous situations that other pilots have encountered.

This is one more example of a general principle: that we often learn more from technical mistakes and errors than we do from uneventful success.  This was something Chesley Sullenberger put into practice on January 15, 2009, when some geese killed all the engines of his Airbus A320 on his descent to New York City.  Sullenberger and his co-pilot successfully ditched the plane in the Hudson River and everyone was safely rescued.  It turned out that Sullenberger had served the NTSB as an accident investigator and was active in safety committees for the ALPA.  A good man constantly improving his safety skills got a big chance to put them into action, and he did.

What Sullenberger did that day, we would hope that the entire industry does all the time:  learn from previous errors, communicate them widely, and use that knowledge to prevent future incidents.  So far, it seems to be working.  It doesn’t make headlines, and it doesn’t stir Congress to action, but the pragmatic engineering criterion “does it work?” seems to be met here.  Let’s hope that the new record of time without a fatal commercial crash keeps getting longer each day.

Sources:  The Associated Press carried Joan Lowy’s article on airline pilot rule making, which was titled “No crashes, so new safety rules stall” in the Austin American-Statesman for Oct. 21, 2012.  I consulted the September 2012 online edition of the Air Line Pilot Magazine at http://www.alpa.org/publications/Air_Line_Pilot_September_2012/Air_Line_Pilot_September_2012.html#06 and the Wikipedia article on Chesley Sullenberger.  My blogs on Flight 3407 appeared on Feb. 16 and May 18, 2009.