Joe Sharkey At Large

The NTSB says the turboprop plane that crashed in Butte, Montana, and killed 14 (seven children and seven adults), had 13 passengers and 10 seats.

“We are going to have to try and understand how, and why, there were three additional people on board the aircraft.” Mark Rosenker, the acting NTSB chairman, said at a press conference on the scene.

The plane was fractionally owned by eight people, most of them related and several on board with their children when it crashed.

Remaining questions, aside from the obvious one, what caused the accident:

–The plane made several stops to pick up passengers in California en route to Bozeman, Montana, near where the group planned a ski and golf holiday. The pilot had filed a flight plan and, presumably, there was a passenger manifest. Are there no regulations in place to ensure that there are not too many people packed into a private passenger aircraft (and this one was a top-line Pilatus PC-12 turboprop, a model that is used as regional airliners in commercial service)?

–Why did the pilot divert from Bozeman to Butte?

–Where, oh where, was/is the FAA and the air-traffic control evidence-trail? Presumably, air-traffic control was involved in some part of that aircraft’s final journey. The FAA has been veeeery quiet. The highly regarded NTSB, which is frequently at odds with the not-so-highly-regarded FAA, is pressing on this, I hear.

–And this may be a dumb question (comments, advice would be appreciated), but why is there no radar or air traffic control at the Butte airport — an airport that has commercial airline service via Delta Connection/SkyWest?

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Meanwhile, another Montana crash story, without comment out of respect for the above:

In Billings, Montana, says the AP, friends of a Sparky Imeson, a pilot killed last week in a crash in southern Montana, say he had set out to photograph the site where he had crashed two years ago.

Says the AP:

“The 64-year-old Imeson took off alone from the Bozeman airport. Two friends say he had intended to document the site of a 2007 crash in the Elkhorn Mountains that left him with a compression fracture to his back, broken ribs, a broken toe and cuts on his head.” The wreckage of his Cessna 180 was found last Thursday.

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A Pilatus PC12 single-engine turboprop like the the one that crashed yesterday with 14 dead in Butte, Montana, crashed near Hayden, Colorado, on Jan. 11, killing the pilot and a sole passenger.

The preliminary NTSB report on the January crash said the aircraft suffered a “loss of control while on initial takeoff climb.”

Meanwhile, the New York Times is reporting today that the FAA issued an airworthiness directive that required safety inspections and repairs on all Pilatus airplanes for a problem that could threaten a loss of control of the plane. The directive called for the inspection and adjustment of a cable that helps the pilot control the up-and-down movement of the nose, the Times said, adding that is was unclear whether the owner of the plane had complied with the directive, “or if that problem was a factor in the crash.”

In Butte, meanwhile, major questions remain unanswered, although the NTSB has now said the number of dead was 14, seven adults and seven children. The NTSB is continuing its investigation, hampered by the lack of a cockpit voice recorder or flight-data recorder on the aircraft.

Among the unanswered questions:

–Who was the operator of the flight, and was it a charter?

–Did the passenger load exceed the limit?

–Why did the pilot divert from Bozeman, the destination?

[UPDATE: The Associated Press today may have part of an answer to the question about who operated the plane, which was registered to Eagle Cap Leasing, an Oregon company, and under what classification. According to the Wall Street Journal, quoting AP, the president of Eagle Cap Leasing is Irving Moore Feldkamp III, a dentist from Redlands, Calif.

Feldkamp told the AP that two of his daughters, their families and another family were on board the plane, heading to a private ski and golf club near Bozeman.]

It’s still not clear under what classification the plane was operating, though.

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United and Continental recently began offering double elite qualifying miles, and now Delta has upped the ante: Triple elite qualifying miles.

(On some fares, that is).

The reason: business travel (which accounts for most elite-mile-status activity) is really, really down. Not that leisure travel is doing much better, but the airlines get most of their dough from business travel.

PASSENGER (on phone to airline reservations clerk): “What time does the flight to Los Angeles leave?”

AIRLINE CLERK: “What time can you get here?”

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A FedEx MD-11 jet crashed on landing at Narita Airport near Tokyo this morning, killing the captain and the first officer, who were the only ones on board the cargo flight from Guangzhou, China.

Investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board are en route to the scene.

FedEx identified the victims as Capt. Kevin Kyle Mosley, 54, of Hillsboro, Ore., and First Officer Anthony Stephen Pino, 49, of San Antonio.

There was no immediate indication of the cause of the crash. But the safety record of the aged MD-11 model jets has been called into question in the past. See here. And also here.

Meanwhile, NTSB investigators in Butte, Montana, today are trying to sort out the crash that killed at least 14 yesterday when a turboprop Pilatus PC-12 regional airliner crashed on landing, after diverting from its destination in Bozeman.

As I noted in the previous post today, there are several crucial questions that must be answered.

The NTSB said today that is was looking into whether that plane was carrying more people than it was certified to carry.

The number of dead in that crash has not yet been officially announced. Initial reports said 17 had been killed, including the pilot. Current reports say at least 14 died.

Nor has it been disclosed who the operator of that flight was, and whether it was a charter flight — and if so, whether the operator was in compliance with all of the rules. The flight originated in California. On board were children and adults bound for a ski holiday near Bozeman.

Nor has it been disclosed why the pilot diverted to Butte. The role of air traffic control is still unclear, as well. Nor is it clear why the plane did not have a cockpit voice recorder.

[UPDATE: A reader, Randal L. Schwartz points out that Part 135 charters aren’t required to have cockpit voice recorders, which I did not know. The NTSB wants them to, as on-demand charters have the highest accident rate. Here’s some background if you’re really, really interested in the detail.}

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Time to stop interviewing otherwise uninformed witnesses describing a fireball when a plane crashed on approach to the airport in Butte, Montana, yesterday and get to the serious business of trying to understand why this happened. Because I’m worried that it represents a growing problem with air-travel safety.

Reports from the scene are sketchy (the local paper, the Montana Standard, evidently had its reporter on other business yesterday, as it used AP wire copy throughout the day). But the plane, a Swiss-made Pilatus PC-12 turboprop, crashed in a cemetery just short of the runway. Initial reports had it that 17 were killed — most of them children from California, bound, with some adults, for a ski trip to the Bridger Bowl ski resort area near Bozeman, which was the plane’s destination. For some reason, the pilot (and there was only one) needed to divert to Butte instead. Some reports today say that 14 were killed, not 17. This is what happens when local newspapers slash staff, by the way.

Here are the questions I’m asking:

–This plane was registered to Eagle Cap Aviation, an Oregon charter and leasing company. Who was actually operating it?

–Was it a charter flight? Meaning, did the operators sell seats to people who signed up?

–The Times reports today that county officials in Butte said the plane had “no black box because it was not a commercial flight.” But a charter flight is “commercial,” it just isn’t “scheduled.” Why was there no requirement for a cockpit voice recorder on this airplane?

–It it was, as appears, a charter flight, who sold it or arranged it? With cutbacks in small-city scheduled air service, some ski areas have been putting together holiday packages using subsidized charter air travel. Was this the case in this incident? The destination airport, Bozeman Gallatin Field, has been growing rapidly in scheduled service, charter service and private aviation flights in recent years, but last year one of its smaller carriers, Big Sky Airlines, went out of business.

–Was there a control tower at Bert Mooney Airport in Butte manned yesterday when the plane crashed? Was it supposed to be manned? (I read a report today that aircraft landing there are on visual flight rules, meaning, heads-up, you’re on your own. But how can that be? The Butte airport still has scheduled Delta Connection service, although Horizon Air recently discontinued service there.)

–If the tower was supposed to be staffed, was it staffed to the correct number? One of the great simmering scandals in our sagging air-transportation system is the staffing crisis among FAA air traffic controllers. Across the nation, because the FAA has been unable to keep up with hiring and training to replace a large number of recent retiring controllers, about 25 percent of the controllers pushing tin in our towers are not yet certified and are classified as trainees.

–From what I can see, the Pilatus PC-12 single-engine turboprop, a plane that is used as a regional airliner as well as for charter and corporate flying, is designed to carry from nine to 12 passengers. If initial reports are correct and there were 16 passengers on board (and one pilot), was this particular aircraft certified to carry that many people? If there were 13 passengers, the question is the same.

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Seventeen people, including children reportedly on a ski trip, were killed today when a single-engine turboprop plane crashed on approach to the airport in Butte, Montana. Here is a report from Butte.

The passengers were onboard a Pilatus PC-12 single-engine aircraft registered to Eagle Cap Leasing, an Oregon charter-flight operator. Here’s the background on the Pilatus PC-12, an aircraft that is often used as a regional airliner and a corporate plane.

And here’s the Wikipedia entry on the Pilatus PC-12.
And here is background on the plane from the Airliners.net Web site.

This is the second recent fatal crash of a regional-airliner-type turboprop passenger plane. On Feb. 13, a Bombardier Dash8 Q400 turboprop flown by Colgan Air, a regional carrier for Continental Airlines, crashed on approach to the Buffalo, N.Y. airport, killing 55.

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[Left: 1939 World War II poster that was famous throughout Britain; Right: Tee-shirt for sale in London now.]

What a mess.

Passenger revenue for domestic airlines fell 19 percent in February (compared with February 2008), the Air Transport Association said today. It was the fourth consecutive month in which revenue has fallen from the prior year.

The number of passengers was off 12 percent “with declines extending beyond the mainland United States to transatlantic, transpacific and Latin markets,” the airline trade group said.

“The sharp decline in spending by passengers and shippers demonstrates how the global recession is taking an increasing toll on the traveling public, as well as on time-sensitive cargo shipments,” said ATA Chief Economist John Heimlich. “The worldwide slowdown is forcing further capacity reductions, despite the meaningful drop in fuel prices.”

From the ATA statement: “Annually, commercial aviation helps drive $1.1 trillion in U.S. economic activity and more than 10 million U.S. jobs. On a daily basis, U.S. airlines operate nearly 30,000 flights in 77 countries using more than 6,000 aircraft to carry an average of two million passengers and 50,000 tons of cargo.”

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The hotel business keeps getting worse.

The latest hotel data from Smith Travel Research have everybody asking, when does this bottom out? No one knows.

For the week ending March 14, the U.S. hotel industry continued posting worsening declines in all three key measures (compared with the similar week in 2008): Average occupancy was down 15.7 percent. Room rates were down 11.2 percent. And revenue per available room (RevPAR) — the number every hotel is most interested in — was down 25.1 percent. That is a shocking drop, and major layoffs are going to hit the hotel industry, where jobs are already been cut, if these trends don’t start turning upward.

As has been the case for months, luxury hotels have been the worst clobbered. In the luxury niche, occupancy was down 20.3 percent; room rates were down 15.5 percent and RevPAR (gulp) was down 32.7 percent.

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Oh sweet Jayzus, are we headed back to the old days at the TSA — after Kip Hawley, now departed, spent three years drilling sense into the asinine mess that was airport security before he arrived? Or it just that this report in USA Today today is a breathless reaction to obtaining a secret memo from some bureaucrat that nobody knows what the hell really means until somebody actually takes charge of the rudderless TSA?

It says that there will be more random searching of passengers at the departure gates, after same passengers have already cleared security. (Actually, I have noticed that screeners have been setting up their church-basement bingo tables at departure gates here and there, and dragging people out of line to search for … well, what? Butter knives that were somehow missed during the actual checkpoint screening and might be used by some deranged soul to attack the fortified cockpit door? Two ounces of toothpaste remaining in a 6-ounce tube?)

It also quotes the worst of the former TSA chiefs, “Adm. James Loy,” as USA Today deferentially refers to him, who said back around 2003 that the second round of random checks and patdowns at the gate (which pretty much stopped after he went away) were a visible sign of security that helped passengers “regain confidence” after 9/11.

They did nothing of the sort, nor did they add an iota of extra strength to security, as security experts kept saying. They just made people ridicule and despise the TSA more.

This was the apex of the festering contempt for, and public opposition to, the security process. When he came on the job, Kip Hawley went a very long way to tackle that problem by professionalizing and beating sense into the screening procedures, with the underlying assumption that a security process that is ridiculed, confused, haphazard, arbitrary and capricious and despised by the citizens is in and of itself a security hazard. That’s where a smart terrorist finds a hole.

By the way, as I kept pointing out at the time (and as one actual retired Navy admiral insisted to me) Adm. Loy was actually “Coast Guard Admiral” Loy, which is a whole different kettle of stars.

And during his tenure TSA got so out of control that many women stopped traveling because they were unhappy about being felt-up by out-of-control screeners during those patdowns.

Do remember that the Homeland Security chief Janet Napolitano hasn’t yet announced a replacement for Hawley, who will, one would hope, pick up where Hawley left off and not go back to the bad old days of ever-more “security theater.”

The TSA’s main tasks now — aside from guarding against terrorist attacks — are to improve technology, get that ridiculous $8 billion budget under control, and get on with putting Secure Flight into effect so seven-year-old kids named Jack Anderson aren’t routinely detained because someone named Jack Anderson, deceased, is on the terrorist watch list, which is supposed to contain only the names of terrorist suspects,  and not those of muckraking columnists who pissed off dainty J. Edgar Hoover and foul Richard Nixon lo these many years ago.

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Check out the new JetBlue ad campaign that hangs on the backlash against corporate jets. It’s wicked and hilarious.

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