IT SOUNDED like the plot of a B horror movie. On Monday, the pilot of an American Airlines flight from Phoenix to Boston took suddenly ill and died, forcing an emergency landing. The next day, the co-pilot of a United Airlines flight between Houston and San Francisco lost consciousness, prompting a diversion to Albuquerque. The former news prompted consternation; the latter, a sense that something was dangerously wrong. When ABC News tweeted news of the United incident, the first tweet in response was: “pilots dying or passing out, midflight wth???”.
But this is hardly the first time a pilot has died at the controls. As the New York Timesreminds us, a Continental Airlines pilot died of a heart attack in 2009; two months earlier, the pilot of a privately operated plane died after takeoff; and two years before that, another Continental pilot died in the air. In all three cases, the plane landed safely.
That is because no commercial flight is at the mercy of a single pilot capable of landing the plane. Patrick Smith, an aviator who writes the Ask the Pilot blog, took issue with the Times headline, which was initially “Co-Pilot Lands Jet in Syracuse After Pilot Dies”. (The paper appears to have changed the headline on its website; it now reads, “Jet Makes Emergency Landing in Syracuse After Pilot Dies”.)
Mr Smith writes:
There are always at least two qualified pilots on board a commercial flight, a captain and first officer, both of whom are able to operate the aircraft in all regimes of flight, in good weather or bad. The first officer is known colloquially as the copilot, but he or she is not an apprentice or a helping hand. Copilot lands jet in Syracuse? That is hardly anything unusual. First officers perform just as many takeoffs and landings as captains do. I land my jet all the time—and never once has the New York Times been there to cover it.
Mr Smith notes that losing a pilot means considerably more work for his remaining colleague. Flying a plane is a collaborative process, and that is why each plane has a captain and a first officer (or, in the case of some long-haul flights, a captain and two first officers). It is not to prepare for the possibility of the sudden death or incapacitation of the person at the yoke. Such an event is exceedingly rare. Pilots receive two health screenings per year once they reach the age of 40, and they must not have certain ailments that could cause problems in the sky. Indeed, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, since 1994 just seven pilots for commercial airlines in America have died while flying. That’s one death every three years. There about 10m flights every year on domestic and foreign carriers serving America, according to the Department of Transportation.
Or to look at the data another way: a 2005 study found 39 instances of pilot incapacitation between 1993 and 1998, in 85m flight hours. Two resulted in accidents, neither fatal. And neither involved a pilot’s death; one was caused by contact lenses, the other by fatigue. In other words, flyers are, in a sense, doubly protected from a cataclysm caused by a pilot’s death—first because such things rarely happen, and second because there’s always an equally capable pilot sitting one seat over.
