Should You Rethink Vacation Plans?
“Dog bites man” may be less newsworthy than “Man bites dog,” but “Dog licks man” or “Man pets dog” is not newsworthy at all. But If most news is bad news, there has been quite a bit of that lately.
And if it seems that much of that bad news bears directly or indirectly on air travel, that’s because it does. This year has been marked by airport disruptions, airplane crashes and air wars to the extent that you may be hesitant to fly for the first time in decades.
So why fly? Most destinations in the world are reachable by other means and those that are not tend not to be those that summer vacationers are likely to visit. But particularly if time is limited, flying is the most convenient and efficient way to get where you’re going.
Newark Airport: So Close and Yet So Far
For residents of Monmouth and Middlesex Counties, Newark, less than 50 miles from any point along the Monmouth-Middlesex County line, is undoubtedly the most convenient airport to reach. It is accessible by car via the New Jersey Turnpike and by New Jersey Transit’s North Jersey Coast and Northeast Corridor lines and by Amtrak.
Unfortunately, the convenience stops at the entrance.
One of the three runways at Newark has been under construction since April 15. Massive delays and cancellations have been the inevitable result, but so far beyond what was anticipated extra construction crews were hired to expedite the project. Coupled with inadequate air traffic control staffing, capacity had been reduced to the point that other airports have been advised on occasion not to allow planes to depart for Newark, as they would not be able to land.
Because the runway was reopened for some uses on June 2, some of the capacity is being restored, although, since the entire project won’t be completed until the end of the year, there will still be closures on weekday nights and weekends. The current solution to the bottleneck is a limit of 68 flights per hour, reduced from between 70 and 90 on a typical summer afternoon, through late October.
During 2024, the percentage of on-time departures and arrivals in Newark was roughly comparable to those at LaGuardia and Kennedy airports. For now, those days are a distant memory. Unfortunately, the other factor occasioning delays and cancellations will not be so easy to ameliorate.
Full staffing at Newark requires 38 certified controllers. Currently, there are 22 controllers, with no immediate prospect of significantly supplementing that number. Air traffic control is so highly specialized that training is customized for each airport, and it can take more than a year to train an already certified controller to work at Newark.
In fact, the New York area as a whole has three of the busiest airports in the country plus numerous private airfields and needs more than 100 more controllers. There are now fewer than 40 in the pipeline. While classes are filled, there are still not enough prospective controllers to meet current needs.
The shortage of air traffic controllers at Newark is not only a matter of inconvenience but may be a matter of safety as well. Yes, it means fewer airplanes can take off or land and when airlines continue their booking business as usual, the disconnect between aspirational scheduling and reality results in frustration and frayed nerves.
Controllers are working a lot of overtime and are tired. But if you see that as a reason to avoid Newark, you should realize the situation is as bad in almost all other United States airports. Unless you want to travel between Akron, Ohio, and Fort Lauderdale, Florida, the airport you use will be short of controllers.
Despite a number of near misses, the number of crashes attributable to a shortage of controllers can be counted at best on one hand. Why has air travel been able to manage with such a thin margin? Unlike in other industries, in air travel the pilot goes down with the plane. Redundancies are built into the system because pilots won’t fly without them.
Those redundancies are not perfect. On April 28 and again on May 9, the air traffic control system lost radar in Newark for 90 seconds, while the air traffic control facility in Colorado, which monitors planes in flight over a large portion of the West, lost communications.
In Colorado, the controllers were able to switch to another frequency. In Newark, the outage was caused by a failure of a telecommunications line and a software failure of the backup line. The FAA has installed a software upgrade and is planning to overhaul the system completely by 2028. When a fiberoptic cable was cut by accident in Fort Lauderdale, the backup system worked as intended.
And yet in light of the drumbeat of catastrophes this year, it is hard not to wonder whether flying is really as safe as we have been told for decades. Some answers may be found in a closer look at some of the latest instances of bad news.
Thinking of Aliyah? Think Again
At press time, a shaky ceasefire between Iran and Israel seems to be holding. The U.S. State Department is urging Americans to leave most Middle East countries, including Israel, Yehuda and Shomron, and to exercise increased caution worldwide. Because the situation is so volatile, keep checking the State Department’s website at travel.state.gov for country-specific advisories and sign up for STEP, which will send emails with alerts and updates from the United States embassy or consulate in the country you wish to visit.
Any trips you take may involve rerouting the flight path to avoid war zones, even if it seems unlikely that the original flight would have been risky.
When countries are at war, accidents can happen. Last Dec. 25, Azerbaijan Airlines Flight 8243 was shot down by a Russian Pantsir-S1 air-defense system that mistook it for a Ukrainian drone. Expect delays, cancellations, longer travel times and higher costs as well as a rapidly evolving situation.
Remember Your Old Rattletrap?
Before the ayatollahs knocked it off the front page, the June 12 loss of Air India Flight AI171 in a horrific fireball less than one minute after takeoff was the latest air disaster to capture the public’s attention. What we know as a certainty is that the cockpit voice and flight data recorders have been recovered and could shed a great deal of light months or perhaps years from now, almost certainly long after this article has been forgotten. But, if we want to know what that crash says about the safety of air travel in the here and now, we can engage in some cautious speculation, thanks to a video recorded by a young man on the roof of his house.
The video shows the plane’s lifting off and beginning to sink moments later. A close examination of the video shows that the Ram Air Turbine (“RAT”) was deployed. This is a small wind-powered motor that automatically drops down from a compartment in the wing or fuselage when the plane loses all electrical and hydraulic power in order to provide enough emergency power to allow the plane to cruise to a safe landing if there is enough time and room to do so.
In this case, that time and room were not available. But what would cause such a devastating event? Almost certainly, it was the loss of both engines, as planes are designed to fly on just one. Significantly there is no engine noise in the video, just the high whine of the RAT. A dual engine failure is extremely rare. So what could have caused it?
One possibility is a bird strike. That was the cause of the crash of Jeju Air Flight 2216 on Dec. 29, 2024, when it belly-landed at Muan International Airport in South Korea, overshot the runway, crashed into a barrier and burst into flames. The airport at Muan is near a bird habitat, and climate change has increased the number of bird species that remain year round. Muan has the highest number of bird strikes of any airport in South Korea by a significant percentage.
It takes more than an isolated sparrow, however, to knock out two engines, but there is no evidence of a flock large enough to do the kind of damage that was done to AI171—no birds in the video, no carcasses on the ground, no feathers or blood in the engines. Another suggestion is contaminated fuel, but fuel comes from pipes underground and is run through numerous filters with automatic shut-off mechanisms in the event that contamination is detected.
The most likely—or perhaps the least unlikely—cause appears to be a vapor lock, something with which owners of vintage cars may be familiar.
Airplane fuel, like gasoline, is a liquid. When it gets hot enough, it vaporizes, and if it does so within a fuel line, it blocks any other fluid from passing through. The temperature at Ahmenabad on June 12 was over 100 degrees, perhaps as high as 120 degrees on the tarmac. Warm air is thinner than cool air, so engines need more power, thus generating more heat than they would in cooler air.
The plane itself was a Boeing 787 Dreamliner owned by India since 2014. Dreamliners were introduced in 2011, and this is the first time a Dreamliner has crashed. Although concern had been expressed about Boeing’s decision to move operations to South Carolina, cheaper than Seattle but with a less experienced aviation labor force, this particular plane had been assembled in Seattle.
If the heat caused a vapor lock—and it is still very much an “if”—it is hard to say that this constitutes a design flaw in a plane that has been in service for 14 years. On the other hand, the planet is not getting any cooler. It may be best, all things considered, not to vacation in a place where the ground temperature can reach 120 degrees, or, at least not until the fuel system is redesigned to avoid the problem. Newer cars don’t tend to get vapor lock.
The Dismal Science
Moral hazard: it sounds like advanced philosophy, but it is actually an economics term for what happens when a third party bears responsibility for the actions of another. Insurance is the classic example—the hazard arises from the behavior of the insured. You may be more likely to skimp on safety measures when you know someone else will run through the checklist a second time or less likely to pay attention when you are aware of a second set of eyes.
That appears to have been the last of a cascade of missteps that resulted in the collision between American Airlines Flight 5342 and a United States Army helicopter on Jan. 29 above Reagan National Airport, one of five designated “complex” by the FAA because of the high traffic volume. The helicopter was piloted by a captain as part of an annual evaluation of her piloting skills. She outranked her copilot, a flight instructor with considerably more experience.
As usual, air traffic control staffing was shorthanded and the controller for the helicopter was also controlling airplanes, a combination that, when approved as it was in this case, usually did not happen until later in the evening when traffic would slow.
Beginning at about 8:45 p.m., both aircraft were in contact with the controller, who could not follow the helicopter in real time because the technology was turned off as part of the secrecy of the simulation. The controller could see the position of the helicopter only after a delay of up to twelve seconds. At that time, mistakes began piling up: the copilot reported an altitude of 400 feet, beyond the maximum of 300 allowed; the controller’s warning of the jet “circling” to the runway was probably not heard because the use of the microphone would have blocked the incoming transmission; the copilot reported that the crew could see other aircraft and requested “visual separation,” which places primary responsibility for avoiding other aircraft on the pilot rather than the controller, although if the controller notices traffic converging, he must call out its existence and ask the helicopter to confirm that the aircraft is in sight. Visual separation was granted.
While the copilot had acknowledged seeing another aircraft, there is no certainty that the American Airlines plane was the one spotted. The controller’s instructions to “pass behind” the plane was not clearly understood by the helicopter crew. As a result, the helicopter continued heading straight for the jet. When two aircraft appear “likely to merge,” the FAA regulations require the controller to advise both pilots. He did not.
Was that last failure due to the moral hazard of relying on the pilot? Did the controller therefore become less careful? The FAA seems to think so.
The agency has stated that, in addition to greatly reducing helicopter traffic around Reagan Airport and permanent closure of the route used by the Army helicopter, the use of visual separation will be limited to certain Coast Guard, Marine and Park Police helicopter operations outside the restricted airspace. The FAA is also conducting analyses at airports in high mixed traffic areas, including the New York region.
So, Should You?
If you are still reading this (and have not taken to bed and pulled the covers over your head), the question remains: Is air travel as safe as we have been led to believe? Yes, there have been disasters—very few, but shockingly newsworthy—and many more near misses.
But near misses are accidents that did not happen. Moreover, they represent circumstances that were anticipated, planned for and turned out as expected. We’ve been told for the last several decades that traveling by air is safest. The numbers speak for themselves.
In 2022, the most recent year for which there is reliable data, there were 1.33 fatalities per 100,000,000 miles traveled in motor vehicles. Compare that to an average of .01 air travel fatalities over the same distance in 2024. Even train travel, with a fatality rate of .04 fatalities over that distance is significantly more dangerous. To put this in perspective, consider that Delta and United alone served about 70,000,000 passengers in the New York area during 2024.
The English speakers across The Pond have an expression, “Safe as houses.” But how safe are they really? Houses burn down. Trees fall on them, they are demolished by tornadoes and flooded by hurricanes.
We just might all be better off on a plane.
Sue Kleinbergis a contributing writer to Jlife Magazine.
