Two items in the news caught my eye this week. And while both are getting relatively little attention while Americans focus on Newt Gingrich's "open marriage" scandal and the rest of the world wonders what really happened when that cruise ship ran aground in Italy, these other stories are significant.


In today's International Herald Tribune, Nicola  Clark reports on the new European airworthiness directive aimed at getting to the bottom of wing cracks discovered on two of nine super jumbo Airbus A380s. Eee gads! Think Airbus customers at Singapore, Emirates and Air France/KLM are biting their nails? Uh, yeah, because those are the airlines who've been told wing installation techniques on the airplanes in their fleet could be susceptible to this problem.

Airbus dismissals that the fractures are harmless, seem not to be carrying much weight with the safety authorities in Cologne, who wrote in the directive, "This condition, if not detected and corrected, could potentially affect the structural integrity of the aeroplane."

Other operators of the A380, Lufthansa and Qantas may feel they've dodged a bullet, and that's a term I've used more than once in writing about this particular model airplane. Need I even say, uncontained engine failure? Near disaster over Indonesia? Nope, these airlines can't be too comfy right now, especially as the directive concludes with the caveat that these visual inspections of wing rib feet are "an interim action." The investigation, as they say, is ongoing, "further mandatory actions might be considered."

Would that the investigation was still ongoing into the cause of unintended acceleration on Toyota cars in 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has turned off the ignition, locked the car and walked away from further study.  But in a report by Bill Vlasic of The New York Times, we learn that the federal agency charged with insuring auto safety isn't up to the task of supervising or even understanding the risks associated with digitization. Hello?

In autos and in aviation, engineers are boldly going where we have not been before. And for years I've been fielding emails from electronics engineers convinced that electromagnetic interference, (yep, that would be Alec Baldwin's EMI) played a role in all those out-of-control Prius, RAV4s, Corollas that had drivers feeling like Keanu Reeves in a real-life version of the movie Speed.

Don't get off the exit ramp yet, I'm gonna bring this back to airplanes in a minute. 

Toyota was under pressure to address concerns that all those cases of unintended acceleration might have EMI interference as a factor. So credible were the people raising the issue that Toyota felt the need to have its engineer,  Kristin Tabar answer the charge in a video on the company website, and it hired the scientific consulting firm Exponent to do its own study.

What Vlasic's story points out, however, is that an independent review found the federal agency not competent to regulate automative electronics. Part of the problem could be the speed with which the auto industry is developing in terms of digitization. A number of recent events with flight software and cockpit systems interference leads me to believe these two industries are not too dissimilar when it comes to keeping up with and managing the risks of complicated fly-by or drive-by-wire technologies.

The argument often put forth by those who say EMI is a fantasy rather than a ghost, is that there is no evidence of problems with interference as the source. It its report, the National Academy of Sciences replies, "Some failures of software and other faults in electronics systems do not leave physical evidence of their occurrence, which can complicate assessment of the causes of unusual behaviors in the modern, electronics-intensive automobile."

Everyone who did not go on a wild ride in a Toyota may be sick to death of the subject just as many people are tired of the debate over whether portable electronic devices should be allowed on flights below ten-thousand feet. But Negroni predicts, this is not the last we are going to hear about wing cracks or crackling electrons. Nor should it be.

Yep, I'm a blogger and I'm a reporter. And sometimes I'm an advocate. When I'm all objective and such, you'll find my byline in The New York Times and the Dallas Morning News, et cetera, et cetera. But when a blog is actually in The New York Times, that line between reporter and opinionator gets blurry pretty darn fast. And to the question, "Is a blog post in the Times subject to the same editorial review as print version?" the answer appears to be not so much. But if you ask me, it oughta' be.

My problem is with the series of posts written by Nick Bilton, lead technology reporter/writer for The New York Times Bits blog.  These tweet-sized bits of so-called reporting are delivered to the reader with all the impact of the Gray Lady herself. Even though nothing he's written on the subject of the use of personal electronic devices on airplanes rises to what the discerning reader would consider a basic journalistic standard.

By way of background, and in truth, full disclosure, I'm a little prickly on the subject. In January 2011, after more than two months research and 30 interviews I reported for The New York Times that pilots, aeronautical and electrical engineers and air safety investigators were concerned about the increased use of hand held gadgets on airplanes and the potential for  electromagnetic interference with flight deck instruments. We air travelers aren't the only ones who have gone digital. The formerly mechanical airplane has too and this has created a potential conflict. The navigation, communication and operational systems can be affected by extraneous signals from all the gizmos we bring on board.

The authorities looking into the issue found 10 reports filed by commercial airline pilots who suspected electronic devices had interfered with flights under their command. 

Following the publication of that story, a confidential source provided me with a study from the International Air Transport Association showing that the problem was global in scope. I wrote a follow up here in my blog, and provided the study to ABC News which produced its own investigative report this summer.

Nevertheless, just in time for the holiday travel season, Bilton has dipped his toe into the water of aviation safety and with the imprimatur of the same New York Times suggests all those worries are for babies. There's no real safety risk in using personal electronic devices during critical phases of flight. Bilton bases his conclusion on the fact that, and I'm gonna quote him here,

"no crashes were attributed to people using technology on a plane."

Well, first of all, that's wrong, which he would have known if he'd even read the previous Times story on the subject. Electromagnetic interference could not be ruled out as a factor in the 2003 crash of an commuter crash in New Zealand. And it was a mid-air collision over New York City in 1960 that first got the Radio Technical Commission for Aeronautics looking into the issue. 

Even so, anyone with more than a "I've heard the safety briefing" background in aviation, knows an absence of accidents is not evidence of safety, any more than arriving home alive after driving  intoxicated is evidence that there's no risk in driving drunk.

By the time Bilton opines next on the subject, he's gobsmacked that the transition to electronic flight bags means pilots will soon be using iPads in the cockpit. More proof, he concludes that EMI presents no flight threat.

"pilots with iPads will be enclosed in the cockpit just a few inches from critical aviation equipment."

There are a number of significant differences between the use of a well-tested and controlled device in the cockpit by the people actually flying the airplane and the use in the back of hundreds of electronic devices in Lord-knows-what state. Just ask yourself, how long would it take a pilot to switch off a questionable piece of electronic machinery in the cockpit versus how long would it take a flight attendant to track down a surreptitiously-used device if the pilots even had the time and presence of mind to investigate that possibility during an anomalous event?

So, you can see why I'm frustrated when a guy writing under the masthead of prestigious newspaper says there is no "evidence to support the idea that someone reading an e-book or playing a video game during takeoff or landing is jeopardizing safety."

Well there is evidence, Bilton just zooms right by it.  In the global study, seventy-five pilots reported episodes that concerned them, and folks familiar with the data suggested the 75 is probably about one quarter of the actual number of events, since about one quarter of the world's airlines contribute reports to the database. 

For those who prefer their pilots not to be wetting their pants over suspected EMI flight control issues I'll point out that it is a basic tenet of aviation safety that events are more predictive than accidents. These pilots were reporting on the precursors to crashes.

But Bilton, having spoken to at last count about half a dozen people over the course of four posts tells Times readers its  "time to change the rules."

He's wrong. Aviation's remarkable record is the result of eliminating anticipated risks and creating redundant systems for the risks and errors that are unpredictable. The use of portable electronic devices falls squarely in the former.

Bilton would know that if he felt the need to take his reporting even slightly off the path between his hunches and his biases. As a blogger he may not need to do that, but as someone who's opinions fall under the banner of The New York Times, he and his editors certainly ought to.

I recognize that as an aviation journalist I am part of the problem. And the problem as I see it is this. We generate so many words about safety but the attention is disproportionately paid to airlines. Don't get me wrong, as a frequent flyer, I'm all for safe airline operations. It's just that other forms of transportation - riskier forms of transportation without the sex appeal of the big airlines, sometimes seem to get a pass.

Just last week, for example, I wrote a story for The New York Times, reporting that a motor coach operator responsible for a horrific crash that killed 15 people earlier this year, had essentially evaded a Department of Transportation cease operation order by simply transfering buses from the sanctioned company to another bus company also under his control.

Photo courtesy NTSB

When the complex ownership of Platinum Jet Management came to light after a runway excursion in Teterboro Airport in 2004, the FAA and the NTSB were all over the issue like white on rice.  Criminal charges were filed and rules dealing with operational control in business aviation were tightened.

I'm ruminating about all this today because I watched with a horrified fascination this video taken by the U.S. Coast Guard on October 7th.  This was a ditching off the coast of Hawaii when the pilot of a twin engine Cessna 310 realized he did not have enough fuel to make it to the mainland.




Bless those Coasties from the 14th District in Honolulu, they  not only saved the day, they had the presence of mind to video tape the plane's final seconds aloft and the pilot's miraculous emergence from the cockpit out onto the wing.

Charles Brian Mellor, 65, was ferrying the plane from Monterey, California to Hilo International Airport. And though he was flying with auxiliary fuel tanks, about 500 miles from his destination he realized he would run short of gas and radioed the Federal Aviation Administration.

Angela Henderson, a press officer with the Coast Guard says when the rescue center got the call at 12:30 on Friday they immediately dispatched a C-130 and a Coast Guard cutter along a track line looking to intercept the airplane.

U.S. Coast Guard photo by Ensign Richard Russell)

"There was a fifty-fifty chance that he could have made it", Angela told me in a phone call this afternoon. "We were there in case he didn't." Thirteen miles offshore Mellor ditched the plane. A rescue helicopter hoisted him from the sea and delivered him to the Hilo Medical Center emergency room.

There were 11 airplane accidents in the United States last Friday. Nine on Thursday and 10 the day before that. You get my drift here, right? More than two dozen airplane crashes in less than a week but the one bouncing 'round the world is this one, courtesy of Coast Guard heroics, the internet and the extremely rare situation in which a pilot has advance notice that he is going down. Which is why poor Angela has been fielding calls right and left.

Who knows as this point why Mellor ran shy of fuel on a trans-Pacific ferry flight?  His narrow escape is a reminder that beyond airliners there are other safety issues that also deserve attention. If this video helps accomplish that, the Coast Guard can claim another success.

Scott McCartney’s story in today’s Wall Street Journal makes some excellent points about the special challenges of saving lives in aviation catastrophes.

First of all, let’s set aside the myth that an aviation accident  =  everybody dead. It’s not the case though it leads some people adopt the fatalistic and passive view that if anything goes wrong there’s little they can do about it.

But at a hangar at London’s Heathrow Airport, British Airways is giving select passengers a dare-I-say crash course in accident survivability. It’s a one-day class offered for the frequent-flying employees of companies who are customers of BA. Scott writes that the airline is considering whether to offer the training to the public for a fee or in exchange for frequent flier miles.

I’ll admit on first reading I was perturbed by Andy Clubb, the flight attendant who runs the class, who told Scott, "We teach people to react faster than anyone else so they are in the aisle first and down the slide first," but Clubb goes on to explain that when a confident passenger demonstrates the correct way to respond, others will follow.

Passengers as exemplars is a fabulous idea, a safety spin on the lesson of United Airlines flight 93 that once the door to the plane is closed the folks inside are a self-contained and necessarily self-sufficient community. In a crisis, survival depends on how well the community works as a whole.  

Evacuating a 777 is a little frightening

The last time I traveled by air, I sat at the over wing exit row and when the flight attendant asked me if I was willing to handle the door in an emergency, I answered confidently that I was. After all, I’d just spent a week in flight attendant training at Emirates reporting a story for The New York Times. Can I remove the door if required? Yes, indeed. (I could even sell duty free perfume if push came to shove.)

What’s a tad bit troubling is that British Airways is considering charging tuition of $220 for the school. If better safety on the plane becomes another source of ancillary revenue like better service at the airport  well, that would be wrong.

A crazed rugby fan in Air New Zealand's safety briefing

Passengers deserve some of the blame for being blasé about safety, but with a few exceptions such as Air New Zealand, Southwest and Cebu Pacific  (see their videos below) the airlines have done little to make the safety briefing relevant or interesting to passengers. For the most part, their flight attendants are up there droning on and on - boring us to death with information that could save our lives. 

So my proposal is this; how about all the airlines join BA in this innovative new program and invite their most frequent travelers to take a safety course for free? Then, in return, and "in the unlikely event of an emergency" these trained passengers would follow instructions text-book style and show the rest of us how its done.

The proliferation of cameras isn't just food for the bottomless pit that is You Tube. Very, very soon, air accident investigators will be saying a big "Thank You" to the army of people armed with iPods, smart phones, and digital cameras who are recording aviation accidents. They are already a source of valuable investigative data.

Need I remind you of the close encounter of the behemoth kind at JFK Airport this past April? The Air France A380 whacked a Delta Connection commuter plane, while inside the terminal someone recorded the whole thing.

It was the bump heard - correction - seen 'round the world. But it was far from the first, or even the most dramatic video caught by a bystander that turns out to be beneficial to the folks who try to understand why accidents happen.

Major Adam Cybanski

At the conference of air safety investigators meeting in Salt Lake City this week, Major Adam Cybanski of Canada's National Defense Forces, held this morning's audience spellbound as he showed how videos taken by news photographers and spectators at a Canadian air show practice session, captured the crash of an F-18 Hornet in the summer of 2010.

The videos - there were three - recorded the horrific and irreversible bank and plunge of the jet at low altitude, the pilot's quick decision to eject from the plane and the fiery explosion a split second later as the plane impacts the ground. 

Sure, this makes for compelling viewing. But its greater significance is in showing how, by using tools both old and new, Major Cybanski was able to understand the plane's flight path and even how some critical control surfaces were moving in the seconds prior to the accident. This was critical information as there was no flight data recorder on the airplane.

"We're in the age of the You Tube generation," Major Cybanski told the audience. "There is video everywhere, iPods, iPhones. I see the investigative capabilities expanding."

In a report for The New York Times in February 2010, I wrote about the crash of a Cessna 310 from an airport in Palo Alto, California. The NTSB investigator was assisted by a municipal audio tape system that recorded the sounds of the accident.

A test flight gone awry at Edwards Air Force base in California, a mid air collision in New York, an air show crash in Poland, a hot air balloon fire in Canada these were among the first of what is already becoming an exponentially expanding library of disasters caught on tape.

Major Cybanski isn't the only one talking about pushing the envelope of our digital age.

Image from presentation of Michiel Schurrman Dutch Safety Board

Michiel Schuurman of the Dutch Safety Board and Paul Farrell of Ireland's AAIU are turning airport radar data into a visual simulation of actual airport conditions in order to examine runway incursions, weather over the airfield and other events. Watching their presentation was like viewing a real-life episode of CSI where keyboards and digit-filled spreadsheets are manipulated by eggheads until voila, the mystery is unraveled. 

Twitter, You Tube and all the rest? Don't scoff. The digital age is pushing tin kicking in a new and promising direction.  It's exciting to see.

Sometimes being a mom helps me make sense of the world, because even when the world isn’t sensible, it at least is familiar. Take, for example, spoiled children. We’ve all seen these children, pitching a fit at the grocery store because mommy and daddy won’t purchase that tempting something on display in the check out line. (Not, my kids of course.) 

This is the image that comes to mind when I read about America’s budget impasse between Democrats and Republicans.

Only in this case, something more significant than supermarket embarrassment is at stake. When the Republicans inserted into the Federal Aviation Administration’s operational re-authorization bill, a provision to eliminate subsidies to rural airports, the Democrats said “hold on” and refused to pass the legislation. Without a house and senate agreement, the FAA lost a chunk of its authority to operate. 

It immediately furloughed 4,000 workers and suspended action on a number of projects including the extremely important work moving US airspace to next gen capability. 

Just to be clear, it is a $16 million difference of opinion that is costing the federal government $30 million a day in uncollectable aviation taxes alone. 

Yes, this is a costly game and I’m not only talking about money, I’m talking about a loss of international prestige and leadership.  Let’s just look at the next gen aspects for a minute. Australia and Tibet have more advanced air navigation systems than the USA. The FAA has been plugging along at a pace that is frustrating US carriers and now this forced suspension of FAA spending will further slow progress.

As I travel around the world, the near unanimous impression of the FAA that I hear is that it is a premier aviation organization; Slow-to-act sometimes, sure. Not distant enough from political considerations in its decision-making, undoubtedly. But as an agency effective in achieving and maintaining high levels of safety, it has been and still is a global leader. That’s what I hear anyway.

Until recently the same might be said of American government as a whole. But these days it is looks like the spoiled children have grown up and taken their tantrums to Washington where they are embarrassing themselves, eroding progress in aviation and discrediting the nation.

Sometimes romance shouldn't be discussed in the cockpit, and sometimes its vital that it is. That was the case on Wednesday when diamondback terrapins looking for romance began crossing an active runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

A couple of eagle-eyed American Eagle pilots blew the whistle on the amorous reptiles. Their call to the airport tower caused the temporary closing of the runway to relocate the critters on a mission to procreate. One of the pilots delayed by the closing can be heard on the radio frequency muttering, "Sufferin' succotash!" (So, so, mild, compared to what we've heard recently.)

John P.L. Kelly, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told The New York Times, the turtles were crossing the runway to get to the other side because that's where they'd find an ideal place to "lay their eggs in the sand."

Photo courtesy Port Authority of NY and NJ

The turtle story is cute and has a happy ending. When it comes to wildlife interfering with flight operations, its not turtles but birds that are most likely to cause disaster.

Unlike bouts involving land critters, airplane versus bird encounters are usually at low-altitude. And the most dangerous time for this match is during takeoff, according to Richard Dolbeer, an ornithologist and aviation consultant who spoke to me after the successful Miracle on the Hudson landing of USAirways Flight 1549.

"On takeoff you’re trying to gain altitude and you’ve got critical decisions to make in terms of turning around and lining up on the runway. This is why bird strikes on takeoff are more likely to cause significant failures on the aircraft but also they’re more difficult for a pilot to manage,"  Richard said.

Try and imagine for example what it was like to be Roger Wutkl who was flying solo over Arizona when a bird crashed through the windscreen of his airplane, knocking his headset and glasses off and making a disgusting mess of the cockpit in November of 2009.

That was a busy month for bird strikes. From India to Brazil, Venezuela to Kenya airplanes were returning to airports in a hurry after flying into birds. (International Birdstrike Committee keeps a comprehensive list of events and a covey of related information on its website.)

Earlier this week Jim Hall, former chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board wrote an opinion piece for the Times expressing alarm over the location of garbage transfer station very near New York's LaGuardia Airport. One does not need to be an expert in aviation or wildlife to know that some very big birds are attracted to garbage and this is going to cause problems at the airport.

I mentioned Jim's article while having dinner with Andy Lester, manager of New Zealand's Christchurch International Airport on Wednesday night which prompted Andy to invite me to see how his airport is minimizing bird hazards by planting bird and bug repellant grass in some of the fields adjacent to the runway.

Ford Robertson and endophyte grass at Christchurch airport

As I understand it, in a process developed by a Kiwi agricultural scientist working in cooperation with the airport, an endophyte fungus is introduced to a certain kind of grass called fescue and the end product is given the catchy name Grasslanz Technology.

It may look like grass but birds don't like it and neither, apparently do bugs, making fields of the stuff unlikely to attract bug eaters. This is the first full year of a large field test and Andy and Ford Robertson, manager of quality and security are monitoring it closely.

This afternoon, while Ford drove me around the perimeter of the airfield and I snapped photos, we saw several large magpies and some smaller birds on or near the airport but the Grasslanz test field was bird-free.  

Magpies hangin' at the airport

Christchurch airport officials are encouraged by their biological fix and consider themselves leaders in the development of an agricultural solution to an aviation issue.

Its not a silver bullet its not even romantic but it is a creative approach and one worth keeping an eye on, even an eagle-eye, for how it might be more widely applied in the future.

The Airbus A380 that sported tail number VH-OQA will return to the sky. Someday. That's the word from Qantas CEO Alan Joyce as reported in Air Transport Intelligence News today by Will Horton. "We'll be in the air by the end of the year with that aircraft," Horton quotes the Qantas boss saying.


Well, the flight crew gossip networks have been abuzz with speculation as to whether an airplane as damaged at this one could in fact be repaired at less than the cost of buying new. And while the answer so far appears to be yes, ($99 million US for repair, upwards of $250 million to replace) there's another factor to consider; the desire by Airbus to avoid having two dreaded four-letter words attached to its newest, biggest, most sensational airplane ever. Those four letter words would be HULL. LOSS.

By virtue of its record-breaking passenger capacity and lengthy development time, the fact that it has far more orders to deliver than it has so far shipped, losing an A380 in its 4th year in commercial operation, even in a casualty-free crash, is just too devastating to contemplate. That's why patching this big baby up and sending it back into revenue service is worth whatever it costs - to the manufacturer of the plane and the maker of its engines and to the airlines around the world that have purchased both.

I can only presume that this is what is motivating Qantas which has ordered twenty A380s to begin talking publicly about that fateful day in November when the Rolls Royce Trent 900 engine exploded, spewing shrapnel into the wing and fuselage and leaving the five men on the flight deck with a mess o' error messages to sort through.

Last weekend, Australia's 60 Minutes program featured a 14 minute spot on the event, putting forth the handsome face of the happy ending captain, Richard de Crespigny. The story - titled Captain Fantastic, don't ya love it? - was on You Tube earlier this week, but is no longer there, so let me quickly recap:

Capt. de Crespigny and company had their hands full as system after system went in-op. "A Rolls-Royce engine has never failed so spectacularly," Capt. de Crespigny told the interviewer. The captain, aided by the four other experienced airmen on this flight, concludes in a glass-is-half-full spirit that having safely brought the airplane back down in Singapore, "it performed brilliantly. It is indestructible."

This is, unfortunately, an example of judging the success of a process by the result, when clearly any one thing could have caused a very different outcome. Did the crew perform brilliantly? Undoubtedly. The engines did not. The airplane? That remains to be seen.

All's well that end's well worked well for Shakespeare but experienced investigators know better than to allow that kind of thinking to distract them from a thorough examination of the way things deteriorated on the aircraft that day.

There are important lessons to be learned from Qantas Flight 32. All of which are entirely unrelated to whether and when VH-OQA goes back in the sky.

See the update on this post here

December 22, 2009

“The airport ramp is most dangerous workplace in the world.”
International Air Transport Association

Because they die one by one, the deaths of airport workers are little noticed events. While families grieve, news accounts focus on the question of whether airline operations were disrupted or air travelers inconvenienced.




If you think I’m overstating the case, view the coverage of the death of an unnamed Calgary airport worker on Monday. He died while de-icing a airliner, apparently falling to his death from the bucket of the de-icing equipment. The man worked for Servisair Canada, which provides an array of ground handling services to airports around the world.

Calgary International Airport spokeswoman Jody Moseley told The Canadian Press “It's a very unusual occurrence and a very tragic one." In fact, while it is indeed tragic, ground-based airport accidents are not unusual. They occur with startling frequency.

In November 2007, the U.S. General Accountability Office issued a report on ramp safety that showed in the five years previous, fatal airport ramp accidents were happening in the U.S. at a rate of six per year.

I’ve found no consolidated database tracking either worker injuries or damage to aircraft. The best I can come up with is a detailed spreadsheet, created by Bob Matthews from the FAA Office of Accident Investigation. Bob's numbers show from 1981 until May of this year there were 247 serious ramp safety events.

"My guess is that we've captured maybe 3 percent of the total events and probably 90 percent of serious events," he told me this afternoon.

I remember when I first heard about the problem, at a conference of the International Society of Air Safety Investigators in 2005. A member of the safety staff of Norway's Wideroe Airlines told me his airline was hard at work trying to reduce the number of accidents. After that I started paying more attention and saving and filing away the reports I heard about these kinds of accidents. Some of the thumbnail stories here, which are not inclusive, beg the question “Is enough being done to address this problem?”

• May 2009 - Miami International Airport - A worker loading baggage on an American Airlines B777 falls to his death.

• October 2008 - O’Hare International Airport - Three people are injured when a United Express SkyWest Airlines airplane collides with a Chicago Department of Aviation truck operating on the runway. The airport employee had to be cut from the truck.

• January 2008 - Hartsfield-Jackson International Airport - An airport lavatory service vehicle collides with a catering truck on the tarmac, killing the 19 year old driver of the lav truck.

• August 2007 - Raleigh Durham International Airport - The driver of an airport vehicle is killed in a collision with an American Eagle airplane.

• May 2007 - Newark Liberty International Airport – A worker is killed after being struck by a tail stand for an Eva Airlines Boeing 747.

• April 2007 - Detroit Metropolitan Airport - Two events in two days, one of them deadly. A ramp worker is struck by an airplane tug and killed. The driver of a de-icing truck flips the vehicle over. He is suspected of working while intoxicated.

• February 2006 - El Paso International Airport - Passengers on a Continental Airlines B737 are horrified to see a contract mechanic sucked into a jet engine while troubleshooting an oil leak.

• June 2005 — Reagan National Airport – The operator of a baggage loader gets lodged beneath a USAirways airplane and is killed.

• September 2003 — Norfolk International Airport - A tug operator gets pinned between the tug and the nose of a Northwest Airlines plane and is crushed to death.

• August 2001 — Reagan National Airport - A ramp agent walks into the propeller of a USAirways commuter plane at in Washington DC and is killed.

If injuries to airport workers and the threat to airline passengers weren’t enough of a concern, the commercial aviation industry ought to, at minimum, be motivated by the financial implications. Ground based airport events are second highest airline cost after fuel for many airlines around the world according to the International Air Transport Association.

IATA, which represents airlines and ground handling companies, estimates $4 billion is lost every year in damage to airplanes by baggage handlers, catering trucks and airport ramp vehicles. IATA warns that this number may vastly under represent number of dollars lost. Smacking a catering truck into a $50 million airplane can cause tremendous damage, putting the aircraft out of service for days or weeks. And the consequences can be even more dramatic.

In December 2005, a hole blew out of an Alaska Airlines flight causing a rapid decompression of the cabin at 26-thousand feet. Prior to the plane's departure from Seattle, an airport worker hit the side of the MD-80 airliner causing undiagnosed structural damage, which caused the rupture of the fuselage as the plane pressurized. Jeremy Hermanns, a passenger on the flight writes extensively about the experience on his blog.

While Hermanns and the rest of the passengers got the scare of their lives on Alaska Airlines Flight 536, it obviously could have been much worse. The danger is in diminishing the seriousness of the problem because the worst didn’t happen.

All of which is to say - as the Calgary airport’s spokeswoman suggests - that the death of an airport worker is a tragedy. But it is more than that. It is a symptom of a larger problem that should concern everyone who flies.