A third most-human tragedy: Don Bateman, serial inventor of systems to improve situational awareness in the cockpit, passed away last month at 91 years of age... and I prefer this well-timed article by his longtime employer over the sad headline at the NY Times to elaborate further:
Thanks, Jim, for an interesting discussion of what transpired in the skies above your heads in DC and yet another worthwhile deconstruction of a tragedy that is explicable in statistical terms given the complexities of these systems and yet that seems unacceptable even in isolation.
The temptation to cast this in terms of the latest AI environments implementing automated detection and recovery that might have alerted authorities of the conditons more explicitly and might even have taken the plane to a safe landing belies a harsh reality in the form of a question: will there not always be a context or circumstance that requires the vague, spontaneous and even "irrational" response of human intelligence - including sentimentality and liability - to choose a course of action from many alternatives that lead to mediocre or even unpleasant outcomes?
Great summary but small point. The plane did not fly 240 magnetic from MacArthur. The course back to Elizabethton, the flight origin, is 259 magnetic, and this goes just a few miles north of the White House etc. This may be more likely, depending on the autopilot logic (or lack thereof). A course of 240 would go way south of DC.
I wondered about this too. But the flight log (as registered in FlightAware) seems to show an unvarying 240 heading after the plane makes the inbound turn toward Islip, and until it spirals into its crash.
It seems that I can't embed a sample in a "Comment" here, but if you go to this page you'll see what I mean:
Sometimes the heading is 238 degrees, sometimes it's 241, but for nearly an hour the reported track is right on or about 240. Including when it went over DC.
Jim, Sam and I are in the car on a long drive and I just read aloud to him this fascinating and tragically sad story. We are intrigued with your continuing fascination with all things aviation related. Are you still flying these days? Would you ever give it up due to aging? That is an interesting topic, I think. Waving to you and Deb.
Debbie, thank you! Appreciate the attention from you and Sam. (For onlookers: another married-couple writer team.)
Ah, yes, the aviation world pays careful attention to actuarial realities. Its premises are a combination of these three points:
(1) Your "main" certificates — Private Pilot and so on — in theory have lifetime validity. Once a pilot, always a pilot.
(2) But to "exercise the privileges" of those certificates, you have to keep passing a whole long series of competency and proficiency checks. Medical checks; eye exams; regular flight reviews; "night landing" currency; Instrument Proficiency Checks, like the one I described here https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-cirrus-has-landed And many more.
I think more of life should work this way. You can keep doing what you want — for as long as you can demonstrate proficiency in doing it. Some pilots can do that into their 80s or 90s. Some have medical issues in their 30s or 40s.
(3) The main age-related enforcer here is the *insurance industry*, which ramps up premiums steeply the older you get.
Would be happy to talk further with you about this. (For onlookers: Debbie Weil writes and broadcasts on issues of aging, resilience, renewal, and so on. More here: https://debbieweil.com/podcast/ )
And in practical, personal terms, the third factor that I mention above, the insurance realities, will pretty soon be the decider in our household. Deb F and I talk about this all the time. And, as a preview-marker: about five months from now, my insurance comes up for renewal. As does my medical, and instrument-proficiency, etc. Stay tuned.
The oxygen issue is particularly interesting to me because of parallels with mountain climbing. Above 26,000 feet is what they call the death zone. Without canned oxygen, and at those altitudes, sometimes even with canned oxygen, the brain and body begin functioning poorly. At those altitudes, one begins to think less clearly, and can lose will power and cease caring, and the body’s mechanisms for protecting itself from things like frostbite become less effective. (With that in mind, I'm thinking the people in the plane may not have suffered much, if at all.)
I started reading about climbing Everest this past winter. Into Thin Air is about the tragic spring on Everest of 1996, when more than 10 people involved in multiple commercial expeditions including several leaders of those expeditions, died, partly due to bad decisions in no small part due to operating in thin air. It’s a page turner.
I also read my cousin, Tom Hornbein’s 1965 book, Everest: The West Ridge, about his ascent with the US expedition of 1963. I had never been interested in the subject, as you might infer from the fact that his book had been out almost 60 years before I read it. But by all accounts, Tom and his partner on the expedition, Willi Unsoeld, accomplished something rather extraordinary. They are still the only people to have ascended via the West Ridge. There’s now a Hornbein Couloir close to the summit.
Tom was getting old, and I thought I should read up on it, so that I could know enough to ask intelligent questions and learn something from him.
Among other things, Tom describes his own feeling of losing his sense that things mattered, while at high elevations. Due undoubtedly to this experience, in his academic work as an anesthesiologist at the University of Washington Medical School, he studied the effects of thin air on people.
I'd gotten to the point where I could sense I was almost ready to talk to him in early May. On impulse, I googled him--and I got a couple of obituaries (a week later there were many more including in the Post). He'd died a day or two earlier of leukemia. He was 92.
It hadn't occurred to me that he might die any time soon. Between Everest, and my brother's experience hiking with Tom eight years ago while visiting him in Estes Park--my brother fit, and 20 years younger than Tom, having had trouble keeping up with him, 92 seemed young when I thought of Tom. Another Hornbein had passed a driving test with flying colors at 96 and lived to 104.
I have never been interested in mountaineering. But one of my sisters was on an Everest expedition. Many many bad things befell her group (she is fine), and I don't know whether any of them made it to the summit (she did not). But I was chastened by her description of what the thin air even of the Base Camp did to her.
Very interesting. The powerful desire of many customers on commercial trips, some of whom may have previously climbed Everest but failed to summit put a lot of pressure in 1996 on expedition leaders to get them to the top.
My cousin climbed well into his 80s, but he never climbed Everest again, and I got the impression that he did much less climbing after than he had done before. He and Unsoeld actually were extremely lucky, in that they had to bivouac after summiting, no tent, and I can't remember for certain whether they even had sleeping bags. They apparently had the one night in 50 without much wind. Unsoeld lost 9 of his toes because of that night.
Mountain climbing is certainly hazardous. Unsoeld died 16 years after the US expedition, in an avalanche on Rainier.
Thanks for such an exquisite description of what likely happened near Islip and D. C. Despite commonsense procedures, air accidents do happen. Of course it is much safer to fly than to drive, and worse still is to be an electric bike rider in New York City.
Your mention of sonic booms as a kid reminded me of my concern, pre-WW II, when I watched commercial airliners overhead. My fear was that, when they emptied their toilets, that I might be splattered.
Jim. Thanks for this highly explanatory article. As always you do a great service in translating aviation issues to the general public.
I posted this on the Citation Jet Pilots website and thought you might be interested:
“I’ve been thinking about the flight path and the 180 degree turn over Islip. I don’t know anything about the autopilot modes in a Citation V but just going into roll mode or heading doesn’t make sense in correlating with the flight path.
What would explain it is if the pilot programmed in the original airport at the bottom of the flight plan as a standard procedure in case of needing to return to field after takeoff. In case of immediate RTF he has the airport and maybe an approach loaded in, to be removed once in stable cruise. That would mean the FMS had a waypoint after Islip which was the original airport.“
Dan, many thanks. And thanks for your Citation web site post.
Late last night I saw a FlightAware update that made it seem as if the pilot *had* loaded an approach to Runway 24 into the autopilot. As I note in an update to my post, both the GPS and the ILS approach to Rwy 24 begin at Calverton (CCC), which was the last waypoint in their cleared flightplan. So conceivably (a) the plane flew to CCC, then to KISP as the destination — and just kept on going, or (b) the plane flew to CCC and then followed one of the Rwy24 approaches. Presumably we'll learn more.
Jim, I cannot tell you how much I love these deep dives into aviation subjects. And I say that as someone who has never been particularly interested in aviation, will absolutely, positively never fly a small planned, and hopefully never fly *in* a small plane, for that matter. But you just make it so interesting and accessible. Thank you for helping explain this terrible tragedy.
Justin, thank you! Naturally I feel bad weighing in so often on stories of tragedy or near-tragedy. I remember talking with my friend William Langewiesche, who practically grew up in small airplanes, about the awkwardness of writing about aerial distasters. (He has done it memorably in many famous articles. Also, for anyone who doesn't know, his father, Wolfgang L, wrote what is still *the* classic guide to principles-of-flight, 'Stick and Rudder.')
From his position of much greater flying experience and expertise, William said what I feel: everyone involved in flying is obsessed with understanding *why and how* things went wrong, when they go tragically wrong. The aviation magazines are chock full of "Anatomy of a Disaster"-type stories. And because these events are so, ummmm, "imprecisely" rendered in much of the media, there's a compulsion to explain, "Here's what they would have been thinking in the cockpit..."
Yes. I haven't found anything on the usual LiveATC-type sources, but no doubt the NTSB has them already. And, yes, if that WSJ report is correct, and there were *no* communications with the plane after the first 15 minutes of the flight, that will be significant. (Plus recordings of subsequent ATC efforts to establish contact.)
I’m interested in the San Joachin because my dad lived in Hanford when he was a teenager and my uncle lived there most of his life. Went there many times.
Interesting, thanks — because of the haze of travel, I hadn't seen that.
The Central Valley / San Joaquin Valley genuinely is interesting. If it were closer to the East Coast national media might cover it as extensively as they have recently done with Appalachian and Rust Belt communities. And the obvious ethnic difference between working-class communities in the Central Valley vs Appalachia would add a much needed dimension to such coverage.
Most of my intra-California small plane travel has been from a base at "San Bernardino International," the former Norton AFB. From there:
— travel to the south (San Diego etc) mainly involves some of the moderate terrain around SD itself.
-- travel to the west (LA and on to Santa Barbara etc) is through the flatlands of the LA Basin, with the San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Santa Monica, etc mountains off to your right on the trip
— travel to the east is through the Banning Pass, with Mt San Gorgonio on the left side and Mt San Jacinto on the right, and sometimes with ferociously swirling winds. Then on across the Mojave toward Arizona
— and travel to the north — Fresno and beyond — is first over the Cajon Pass, and then crossing the Tehachapi range into the Central Valley.
I've never flown *over* the heart of the Sierra. (I have flown to the Truckee airport, near Lake Tahoe.) More than you wanted to know, but that's the answer!
Last September 4th, a Citation 551 took off Southern France. Shortly after, the pilot notified ATC that there was a problem with cabin pressurization. That was the last contact with ATC. It flew to its destination in Cologne, Germany and when it didn’t land (HDG/HOLD?) it flew on the same track till the right engine flamed out and it crashed into the Baltic. It was followed by each country’s military, but they saw nobody in the cockpit. Maybe a Citation problem?
Google ‘Mystery as private plane crashes in Baltic Sea off the coast of Latvia’
Saw the article in the Post today about the father of the woman lost in the plane crash. So fricken sad.
update from wapo, looks like the pilot had lots of hours in 737s...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/transportation/2023/06/06/virginia-plane-crash-wreckage-ntsb-investigation/
A third most-human tragedy: Don Bateman, serial inventor of systems to improve situational awareness in the cockpit, passed away last month at 91 years of age... and I prefer this well-timed article by his longtime employer over the sad headline at the NY Times to elaborate further:
https://www.honeywell.com/us/en/news/2023/05/remembering-don-bateman-whose-inventions-save-lives
Thanks, Jim, for an interesting discussion of what transpired in the skies above your heads in DC and yet another worthwhile deconstruction of a tragedy that is explicable in statistical terms given the complexities of these systems and yet that seems unacceptable even in isolation.
The temptation to cast this in terms of the latest AI environments implementing automated detection and recovery that might have alerted authorities of the conditons more explicitly and might even have taken the plane to a safe landing belies a harsh reality in the form of a question: will there not always be a context or circumstance that requires the vague, spontaneous and even "irrational" response of human intelligence - including sentimentality and liability - to choose a course of action from many alternatives that lead to mediocre or even unpleasant outcomes?
Ed, thank you — for the reminder of Don Bateman's enormous achievements, and also the connection to the ongoing AI debates.
Great summary but small point. The plane did not fly 240 magnetic from MacArthur. The course back to Elizabethton, the flight origin, is 259 magnetic, and this goes just a few miles north of the White House etc. This may be more likely, depending on the autopilot logic (or lack thereof). A course of 240 would go way south of DC.
Thanks for reading and commenting.
I wondered about this too. But the flight log (as registered in FlightAware) seems to show an unvarying 240 heading after the plane makes the inbound turn toward Islip, and until it spirals into its crash.
It seems that I can't embed a sample in a "Comment" here, but if you go to this page you'll see what I mean:
https://flightaware.com/live/flight/N611VG/history/20230604/1700Z/0A9/KISP/tracklog
Sometimes the heading is 238 degrees, sometimes it's 241, but for nearly an hour the reported track is right on or about 240. Including when it went over DC.
I hope and assume we'll learn more about this.
Riveting story about the Citation jet. So sad, too. Like you, I hope that everyone on board was asleep.
Thank you.
Jim, Sam and I are in the car on a long drive and I just read aloud to him this fascinating and tragically sad story. We are intrigued with your continuing fascination with all things aviation related. Are you still flying these days? Would you ever give it up due to aging? That is an interesting topic, I think. Waving to you and Deb.
Debbie, thank you! Appreciate the attention from you and Sam. (For onlookers: another married-couple writer team.)
Ah, yes, the aviation world pays careful attention to actuarial realities. Its premises are a combination of these three points:
(1) Your "main" certificates — Private Pilot and so on — in theory have lifetime validity. Once a pilot, always a pilot.
(2) But to "exercise the privileges" of those certificates, you have to keep passing a whole long series of competency and proficiency checks. Medical checks; eye exams; regular flight reviews; "night landing" currency; Instrument Proficiency Checks, like the one I described here https://fallows.substack.com/p/the-cirrus-has-landed And many more.
I think more of life should work this way. You can keep doing what you want — for as long as you can demonstrate proficiency in doing it. Some pilots can do that into their 80s or 90s. Some have medical issues in their 30s or 40s.
(3) The main age-related enforcer here is the *insurance industry*, which ramps up premiums steeply the older you get.
Would be happy to talk further with you about this. (For onlookers: Debbie Weil writes and broadcasts on issues of aging, resilience, renewal, and so on. More here: https://debbieweil.com/podcast/ )
And in practical, personal terms, the third factor that I mention above, the insurance realities, will pretty soon be the decider in our household. Deb F and I talk about this all the time. And, as a preview-marker: about five months from now, my insurance comes up for renewal. As does my medical, and instrument-proficiency, etc. Stay tuned.
Thank you Jim! To be continued...
The oxygen issue is particularly interesting to me because of parallels with mountain climbing. Above 26,000 feet is what they call the death zone. Without canned oxygen, and at those altitudes, sometimes even with canned oxygen, the brain and body begin functioning poorly. At those altitudes, one begins to think less clearly, and can lose will power and cease caring, and the body’s mechanisms for protecting itself from things like frostbite become less effective. (With that in mind, I'm thinking the people in the plane may not have suffered much, if at all.)
I started reading about climbing Everest this past winter. Into Thin Air is about the tragic spring on Everest of 1996, when more than 10 people involved in multiple commercial expeditions including several leaders of those expeditions, died, partly due to bad decisions in no small part due to operating in thin air. It’s a page turner.
I also read my cousin, Tom Hornbein’s 1965 book, Everest: The West Ridge, about his ascent with the US expedition of 1963. I had never been interested in the subject, as you might infer from the fact that his book had been out almost 60 years before I read it. But by all accounts, Tom and his partner on the expedition, Willi Unsoeld, accomplished something rather extraordinary. They are still the only people to have ascended via the West Ridge. There’s now a Hornbein Couloir close to the summit.
Tom was getting old, and I thought I should read up on it, so that I could know enough to ask intelligent questions and learn something from him.
Among other things, Tom describes his own feeling of losing his sense that things mattered, while at high elevations. Due undoubtedly to this experience, in his academic work as an anesthesiologist at the University of Washington Medical School, he studied the effects of thin air on people.
I'd gotten to the point where I could sense I was almost ready to talk to him in early May. On impulse, I googled him--and I got a couple of obituaries (a week later there were many more including in the Post). He'd died a day or two earlier of leukemia. He was 92.
It hadn't occurred to me that he might die any time soon. Between Everest, and my brother's experience hiking with Tom eight years ago while visiting him in Estes Park--my brother fit, and 20 years younger than Tom, having had trouble keeping up with him, 92 seemed young when I thought of Tom. Another Hornbein had passed a driving test with flying colors at 96 and lived to 104.
https://www.outsideonline.com/outdoor-adventure/climbing/remembering-tom-hornbein-everest-pioneer/
This is absolutely fascinating. Thank you.
I have never been interested in mountaineering. But one of my sisters was on an Everest expedition. Many many bad things befell her group (she is fine), and I don't know whether any of them made it to the summit (she did not). But I was chastened by her description of what the thin air even of the Base Camp did to her.
Very interesting. The powerful desire of many customers on commercial trips, some of whom may have previously climbed Everest but failed to summit put a lot of pressure in 1996 on expedition leaders to get them to the top.
My cousin climbed well into his 80s, but he never climbed Everest again, and I got the impression that he did much less climbing after than he had done before. He and Unsoeld actually were extremely lucky, in that they had to bivouac after summiting, no tent, and I can't remember for certain whether they even had sleeping bags. They apparently had the one night in 50 without much wind. Unsoeld lost 9 of his toes because of that night.
Mountain climbing is certainly hazardous. Unsoeld died 16 years after the US expedition, in an avalanche on Rainier.
Thanks for such an exquisite description of what likely happened near Islip and D. C. Despite commonsense procedures, air accidents do happen. Of course it is much safer to fly than to drive, and worse still is to be an electric bike rider in New York City.
Your mention of sonic booms as a kid reminded me of my concern, pre-WW II, when I watched commercial airliners overhead. My fear was that, when they emptied their toilets, that I might be splattered.
Thank you.
And I love your airline-peril story!
Jim. Thanks for this highly explanatory article. As always you do a great service in translating aviation issues to the general public.
I posted this on the Citation Jet Pilots website and thought you might be interested:
“I’ve been thinking about the flight path and the 180 degree turn over Islip. I don’t know anything about the autopilot modes in a Citation V but just going into roll mode or heading doesn’t make sense in correlating with the flight path.
What would explain it is if the pilot programmed in the original airport at the bottom of the flight plan as a standard procedure in case of needing to return to field after takeoff. In case of immediate RTF he has the airport and maybe an approach loaded in, to be removed once in stable cruise. That would mean the FMS had a waypoint after Islip which was the original airport.“
Dan
Dan, many thanks. And thanks for your Citation web site post.
Late last night I saw a FlightAware update that made it seem as if the pilot *had* loaded an approach to Runway 24 into the autopilot. As I note in an update to my post, both the GPS and the ILS approach to Rwy 24 begin at Calverton (CCC), which was the last waypoint in their cleared flightplan. So conceivably (a) the plane flew to CCC, then to KISP as the destination — and just kept on going, or (b) the plane flew to CCC and then followed one of the Rwy24 approaches. Presumably we'll learn more.
Jim, I cannot tell you how much I love these deep dives into aviation subjects. And I say that as someone who has never been particularly interested in aviation, will absolutely, positively never fly a small planned, and hopefully never fly *in* a small plane, for that matter. But you just make it so interesting and accessible. Thank you for helping explain this terrible tragedy.
Justin, thank you! Naturally I feel bad weighing in so often on stories of tragedy or near-tragedy. I remember talking with my friend William Langewiesche, who practically grew up in small airplanes, about the awkwardness of writing about aerial distasters. (He has done it memorably in many famous articles. Also, for anyone who doesn't know, his father, Wolfgang L, wrote what is still *the* classic guide to principles-of-flight, 'Stick and Rudder.')
From his position of much greater flying experience and expertise, William said what I feel: everyone involved in flying is obsessed with understanding *why and how* things went wrong, when they go tragically wrong. The aviation magazines are chock full of "Anatomy of a Disaster"-type stories. And because these events are so, ummmm, "imprecisely" rendered in much of the media, there's a compulsion to explain, "Here's what they would have been thinking in the cockpit..."
A long way of saying Thanks.
Whoops, dictation errors but you get the point!
The ATC comm logs ought to shed some light, assuming everything is still recorded.
Yes. I haven't found anything on the usual LiveATC-type sources, but no doubt the NTSB has them already. And, yes, if that WSJ report is correct, and there were *no* communications with the plane after the first 15 minutes of the flight, that will be significant. (Plus recordings of subsequent ATC efforts to establish contact.)
Thanks for this article. Very informative and interesting. A real tragedy for that family!
Tom, thank you!
Saw this in the NYT about Fresno. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/06/01/magazine/fresno-politics-poverty.html
I’m interested in the San Joachin because my dad lived in Hanford when he was a teenager and my uncle lived there most of his life. Went there many times.
Interesting, thanks — because of the haze of travel, I hadn't seen that.
The Central Valley / San Joaquin Valley genuinely is interesting. If it were closer to the East Coast national media might cover it as extensively as they have recently done with Appalachian and Rust Belt communities. And the obvious ethnic difference between working-class communities in the Central Valley vs Appalachia would add a much needed dimension to such coverage.
A good chunk of Country Music came out of Bakersfield, too.
Continuing thanks Jim!
Appreciate your saying so.
So, Jim, how do you handle flying to a California location like Fresno? Going around the Sierra is a nasty detour.
Most of my intra-California small plane travel has been from a base at "San Bernardino International," the former Norton AFB. From there:
— travel to the south (San Diego etc) mainly involves some of the moderate terrain around SD itself.
-- travel to the west (LA and on to Santa Barbara etc) is through the flatlands of the LA Basin, with the San Bernardino, San Gabriel, Santa Monica, etc mountains off to your right on the trip
— travel to the east is through the Banning Pass, with Mt San Gorgonio on the left side and Mt San Jacinto on the right, and sometimes with ferociously swirling winds. Then on across the Mojave toward Arizona
— and travel to the north — Fresno and beyond — is first over the Cajon Pass, and then crossing the Tehachapi range into the Central Valley.
I've never flown *over* the heart of the Sierra. (I have flown to the Truckee airport, near Lake Tahoe.) More than you wanted to know, but that's the answer!
Last September 4th, a Citation 551 took off Southern France. Shortly after, the pilot notified ATC that there was a problem with cabin pressurization. That was the last contact with ATC. It flew to its destination in Cologne, Germany and when it didn’t land (HDG/HOLD?) it flew on the same track till the right engine flamed out and it crashed into the Baltic. It was followed by each country’s military, but they saw nobody in the cockpit. Maybe a Citation problem?
Google ‘Mystery as private plane crashes in Baltic Sea off the coast of Latvia’
Thank you very much for this info. I had *not* heard about this incident. (For other readers: a story is here https://www.euronews.com/2022/09/05/mystery-as-private-plane-crashes-in-baltic-sea-off-the-coast-of-latvia .
I assume that the NTSB is aware of this. Maybe coincidence, maybe more than that. I appreciate your mentioning this.
In case you haven’t seen it yet, here is the Interim report from the the German air investigations bureau.
https://www.bfu-web.de/EN/Publications/InterimReports/IR2022/IR1_22-0915_C551_Ventspils.pdf?__blob=publicationFile&v=4
Thanks. For whatever reason, I couldn’t get the Euronews URL into the comment.
ETA: the plane took off from Southern Spain - not France.