The air crash which killed the Polish president may have been caused by a syndrome called 'get-there-itis', writes GERRY BYRNE
SEVEN-YEAR-OLD Jessica Dubroff skipped across the tarmac to her waiting Cessna. It was 1996 and a blustery April morning in Cheyenne, Wyoming, and reporters and TV crews were watching. She was already famous, not just for her innocent charm in front of the TV cameras, but for her attempt, with her father and a flying instructor, to be the youngest pilot to cross the US coast-to-coast. The weather conditions were dreadful but the Dubroffs were under pressure, not just from the record attempt, but the glare of the media. Within minutes she lay dead in the mangled wreckage of her aircraft after it stalled and crashed.
Fourteen years later, the official jet of Polish president Lech Kaczynski approached Smolensk, in Russia. He was due to attend the first formal commemoration of a wartime Stalinist atrocity which still horrifies Poles. Media from all over the world were waiting. His pilot may have been so awed by the importance of the mission that, against air controllers’ advice, he tried to land in dense fog. All died.
Since Buddy Holly died at the hands of an inexperienced pilot who probably didn’t want to disappoint a famous singer, crash investigators have become aware of a fatal piloting syndrome. Here safety is sacrificed at the altar of fame, where celebrities, the media spotlight or the chance to heroically save life, prod that most cautious of professions to jettison prudence and risk their lives to complete their mission, however foolhardy.
Colloquially called “get-there-itis”, it is nowhere more prevalent than in the world of air ambulance flights, or medevac, as it’s known in the US. In three years to January 2005, 54 pilots, nurses, patients and relatives died and 18 more were injured in what were mostly needless and avoidable helicopter and fixed wing crashes. Another eight died in more crashes in the following months during which the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) tried to make sense of the earlier ones. In the US, medevac flying is now ranked with ariel firefighting for its poor safety record.
So, how does a profession tasked with saving lives end up killing people? The NTSB discovered many factors, including lax standards and poor regulation, but the overriding theme in most cases was “get-there-itis”, although crash investigators prefer the term “pressure to complete the mission”. In many cases, pilots performed the equivalent of wartime scrambling when getting airborne instead of taking time to plan a safe route, get the latest weather forecast, and make sure the aircraft was properly refuelled. They blindly flew into fog, ran into snowstorms, hit power lines, and crashed taking short-cuts over mountains without checking their height.
Some had been awake so long and were so fatigued they weren’t fit to fly, but the call of heroism seems to insist that they alone had the right stuff to get the job done. Like the helicopter ambulance pilot who apparently crashed after falling asleep at the controls near Dodge City, Kansas in the early hours of February 17, 2004. Not only had he been awake for 21 hours, he had been on duty for 14½ hours. The crash happened after 2am, when the body is least resistant to sleep. Or the pilot of a helicopter ambulance which crashed near Salt Lake City, Utah attempting a mission to pick up a patient in fog which another experienced pilot had earlier abandoned because of the deteriorating conditions. The pilot of a 2004 South Carolina medical helicopter died along with his patient and crew after three other pilots had refused to fly the mission because of the danger.
The traditional culture of safety in airlines is so strong that “get-there-itis” accidents are almost unknown, yet they happen. One NTSB accident analysis showed that there is a stronger chance of an airline accident if an aircraft has been delayed and the pilot feels pressurised to make up time. That may have been one of the factors when a Spanair jet crashed in Madrid in 2008 as the pilot attempted to take off after a technical delay without checking his aircraft was properly configured. It wasn’t, and 154 died.
Boasting about his airline’s punctuality record, a Ryanair executive once told a conference that pilots are asked to explain if a flight is more than three minutes late. The ghost of Buddy Holly might have said that was one of the worst ideas he ever heard.
