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Against a backdrop of inadequate funding, misplaced priorities and a lack of manpower, American commercial aviation in the 1960s was in a perilous state. In July 1967, when a Piedmont Airlines Boeing 727 collided with a Cessna 310 over Hendersonville, North Carolina, killing 82 people, the industry was in crisis. Congress called hearings on aviation safety and government and union officials pressured President Lyndon Johnson to request increased funding for aviation safety. But the National Transportation Safety Board's probe into the crash was flawed from the start. The investigative team was made up of individuals whose companies had certain interests in the outcome. The lead investigator was the brother of the vice president of Piedmont Airlines. In an effort to shift blame from the government and Piedmont, critical conversations recorded on tape never made it into the NTSB's report. Maintenance and training records, as well as industry warnings of the 727's operational limitations, were also omitted. This book reveals the true story of the investigation: what was left out and why.
On November 18, 1965, U.S. Navy pilot Willie Sharp ejected from his F-8 fighter after being hit while positioned over a target in North Vietnam. With a cloud layer beneath him, he did not know if he was over land--where he would most certainly be captured or killed by the North Vietnamese--or over the Gulf of Tonkin. As he ejected, both navy and air force aircraft were already heading toward him to help. What followed was a dramatic rescue made by pilots and other airmen with little or no training or experience in combat search-and-rescue. Told by former military flight test engineer Eileen A. Bjorkman, this story includes nail-biting descriptions of air combat, flight, and rescue. Bjorkman places Sharp's story in the larger context of the U.S. military's bedrock credo--No Man Left Behind--and calls attention to the more than eighty thousand Americans still missing from conflicts since World War I. She also explores the devastating aftershocks of the Vietnam War as Sharp struggled with post-traumatic stress disorder. Woven into this gripping tale is the fascinating history of combat search-and-rescue missions that officially began in World War II. Combining the cockiness and camaraderie of Top Gun with the heroics of Sully, Unforgotten in the Gulf of Tonkin is a riveting tale of combat rescue and an unforgettable story about the U.S. military's commitment to leave no man behind.
This work examines the causes of airplane accidents and what private and public policies are needed to improve aviation safety. It begins by examining the safety record of the United States commuter airline industry in the post-deregulation era characterized by increased emphasis by airlines on cost control and growing pressures on the air traffic control and airport system. The authors go beyond the safety of the scheduled airlines to examine the reasons for accidents in the nonscheduled and general aviation segments of the United States industry, where the bulk of fatalities occur and where airline pilots increasingly receive most of their training and experience. They then turn to an examination of aviation safety throughout the world, first with a detailed comparison of Canadian and American aviation safety, and then with a look at air safety in all regions of the world and the safety performances of all the world's major airlines. Three emerging issues are then examined in greater detail: assessing the margin of safety, worldwide aging of all airline fleets, and terrorism.
"Conventional wisdom suggests aircraft midair collisions to be random events, governed by the laws of Brownian Motion, and best analyzed by stochastic methods. An alternative hypothesis, that such accidents are deterministic in nature, and that specific factors leading to midair collisions can be identified and mitigated, forms the basis for this Dissertation. A predictive model using case control theory is developed for assessing Risk Index, a criterion measure of midair collision likelihood, for any General Aviation flight, actual or hypothetical. Generating the model requires statistical validation of two independent near midair collision databases, and identifying within them those aircraft, aircrew and airspace characteristics most closely associated with collision risk. Calibration of the model shows reality to fall somewhere between the stochastic and deterministic assumptions. A statistically significant correlation is found between predicted and observed Risk Index for a sizable random sample of flights, with a resulting Coefficient of Determination of 0.25. This suggests that we have identified 25% of the source of variance in midair collision risk, the remaining 75% being random. Therefore we can realistically hope to reduce midair collisions by roughly 25%. Strategies for mitigating the identified causal factors are proposed. Measures to reduce the random, remaining 75% of collision risk are also explored. However, these appear to require a significant overhaul of Air Traffic Control procedures, which must be approached with caution, to guard against the attendant possibility of curtailing capacity in the Air Transportation System."--Page 1-2