Editorial: Accusations mustn't undermine aviation industry's strong record of self-policing

Yahoo

02-03-2025

To Chicago frequent flyers, Tuesday's video was disturbing indeed. A Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 jet roaring in to land at Midway Airport on the short Runway 31C and then, at the very last moment, aborting the landing and climbing in altitude after the pilots spotted a business jet that had meandered out onto the same runway. Right in the 737's path.
Instantly, the Southwest pilots were lauded as heroes and the pilots of the private jet, a Challenger 350 operated by Flexjet, villainized on social media by armchair pundits and, more troublingly, by no less than the newly appointed secretary of transportation.
In a subsequent interview with 'NBC Nightly News,' Sean Duffy was asked if pilots should 'have their licenses yanked' if they failed to respond to a directive from air traffic control. 'Hell, yes,' he said.
We're here to say it's just not that simple.
Let's stipulate a few things. To those of us who fly often, so-called 'go arounds' are far from unknown. We've experienced a few in our time. Professional pilots watch closely for any runway incursions even as they monitor other factors that might make it advisable to abort a landing; the Southwest pilots responded admirably but also were doing what all capable pilots would do in those circumstances.
We'll add that planes are not suddenly falling out of the sky. In all the chaos of this new administration, it's easy to forget that vested political interests have an interest in making it look like everything is falling apart. But two things can be true at once: disaster here, helpful change there. These days, there is video of most every airport takeoff and landing; in the past, far fewer members of the public knew about them and that skews our sense of how many incidents are happening.
Duffy's inadvisable comments after the Midway near-miss notwithstanding, we've been impressed with him so far, not least because the no-nonsense head of the National Transportation Safety Board, Jennifer Homendy, whom we have praised before, clearly has confidence in him. Also, Duffy took quick action to get the helicopters out of the way of Reagan Washington National Airport while the separate incident there was investigated. And he has promised to improve the technology used by the Federal Aviation Administration. He should.
In this case, the issue is not so much that Duffy was premature in blaming the pilots of the Flexjet; the investigation is not complete, but Homendy already has said in public that the evidence points clearly to their not following an ATC command to hold short of the runaway. That's standard NTSB practice. When they are confident enough to say something that affects safety, they say it. Fair enough. Plus these days, those communications are widely available online so Homendy was, you might say, merely stating the obvious.
But that's not the issue: The issue is the complex relationship in the U.S. aviation industry between accountability and self-regulation.
The highly regulated aviation industry is so safe precisely because every single error is reported, often by the very people making the error, diagnosed and (where necessary) changes are made to make the sector even safer.
Think about driving a car. You likely make many errors routinely but they go unreported in the absence of a crash or a ticket. If you're flying a plane, that's not true: Most anything that deviates from optimal gets written up. Most pilots and other aviation professionals consider themselves morally obligated to be part of a system that relies on fessing up to everything, however small. And to do so without undue defensiveness.
The human impulse for self-preservation means that when Duffy talks about 'yanking' a pilot's license, or otherwise injecting a punitive element into this system, he disincentivizes said pilot from self-reporting their next mistake or even that of one of their peers.
There is a need for balance here, we admit. Of course there are pilots flying who don't deserve to retain their licenses. There are areas where no tolerance is appropriate, such as when a pilot reports drunk for duty, as happens from time to time. Such egregious screwups usually get immediately discovered because of the culture we are talking about.
Shaming won't end the inevitability of human mistakes. A draconian reaction to a single incident can actually make it harder to see when multiple incidents mean a serious personnel issue, because more of them will go unreported.
Administrators need to respect U.S. aviation's culture of shared responsibility for safety. This system has worked very well for those of us in the back of the plane.
Submit a letter, of no more than 400 words, to the editor here or email [e-mail].