Long Island Accident: The FAA Has Some Explaining To Do

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The FAA has some serious explaining to do following a tragic accident in Long Island last weekend that killed one person and injured another. As we reported, a Bonanza pilot had engine trouble and the controller vectored him toward a runway at the former Grumman Bethpage airport. Unfortunately, that airport has been closed for some 20 years and the runway hasn’t existed for nearly that long, although pinning down the exact date of its demise has proven difficult. My best guess is 1996. Before forming an opinion on this, I’d recommend you listen to the tape collected by LiveATC.com. You can hear it here. Scroll to the end of the story.

The controller may come in for some withering criticism but I’m going to step out and disagree with that. First of all, his handling of the flight was timely, helpful and professional. As I’ll mention a little later in this blog, the pilot didn’t clearly declare an emergency, but the controller appears to have handled it as just that, as he is supposed to do. In short order, he transitions into anything-you-want mode for the pilot and I suspect someone was about to get on the landlines to LaGuardia, Westchester and Farmingdale to set things in motion.

Now, about those vectors to a non-existent airport. We won’t know this for a while, but it sure sounded to me like he was vectoring using an icon on the radar video map. So what the hell was that doing there? FAA facilities have people assigned to keeping video maps up-to-date and the FAA does this from its own survey information. Did someone miss the fact that Grumman Bethpage had been plowed up and turned into a Home Depot? We’ll see, but someone in the agency ought to be in the hot seat if that turns out to be the case. This is not a trivial oversight, although it’s unknown if it was a factor in the accident. I asked a controller friend if the New York controller might have been pointing the airplane at where he thought Bethpage was, sans the benefit of an icon. He didn’t think so and neither do I. We’ll see what the investigation reveals. I’m sure the question of whether a controller should know the airport was defunct just because he works in the area will come up. Maybe. But I think that’s a reach.

The larger lesson to take away from this right now comes from listening to the tape. Pilots can be notoriously reluctant to declare an emergency and thus they tend toward ambiguous communication. And the accident pilot did exactly that. He first says, “I’m having a little bit of a problem,” then hesitates as though he’s not sure what he wants. Then he says, “I’m going to have to take it down at the closest spot …” To his credit, the controller is already thinking ahead, but listening to the tape, note that the pilot never unambiguously said what he should have said. “I have an engine failure, I am declaring an emergency.” Or, “I need to land immediately.”

Such a declaration with words like that resets the conversation and clears the deck for decisive action aimed at just one thing: saving the people on board. It raises the urgency level with ATC and removes any doubt that the pilot might be just dealing with a minor abnormal, like an alternator light or an open door. Better to declare up front and withdraw it later if you must than blunder through the fog of an uncertain understanding between pilot and controller. And I’m sure I don’t have to write a paragraph explaining why you shouldn’t worry about paperwork and enforcement, so I’ll skip that.

Would having plainly declaring an emergency have changed the outcome here? Who can say? But it certainly wouldn’t have made the situation worse. So that’s the immediate takeaway that I hope all of us will remember from listening to that tape. Never, ever be reluctant to declare an emergency if you’ve really, no kidding got one. Or you think you do. The sooner you get into that mindset, the better your chances of survival.

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