Author: Jeff Wise

While the cause of the helicopter crash that killed Kobe Bryant, his daughter, and seven others has not yet been determined, the weather and terrain conditions in the Los Angeles area on Sunday were similar to those that have killed many helicopter pilots over the years, with fog and clouds masking rugged, rising terrain.  The reconstruction of his flight that follows is based on information from transponder data, air traffic control audio recordings, and my own experience as a pilot who was trained in the exact area where the incident took place.

Bryant’s helicopter, a Sikorsky S-76B built in 1991, took off shortly after 9 a.m. from John Wayne Airport in Orange County, which is located near the coast approximately 35 miles south of downtown LA. According to the New York Post, Bryant and the eight other passengers were heading to a basketball game at his Mamba Sports Academy in Thousand Oaks, approximately 70 miles to the northwest. Over the course of the next 40 minutes the helicopter would trace a circuitous route around the Los Angeles basin as it negotiated mountains and busy airspace in three main phases: first, cutting across the broad coastal plain of central Los Angeles, then winding around the basin of the San Fernando Valley to its north, before a final ill-fated attempt to cross the rising terrain that led west to Thousand Oaks.

At takeoff a few minutes after 9 a.m., the weather was marginal, with a solid overcast at 1300 feet and visibility of about 5 miles in a thin haze. The pilot was flying according to “Visual Flight Rules,” or VFR, meaning that he was relying on his ability to see the terrain below him, and hence had to stay below the clouds. As an alternative, he could have contacted air traffic controllers and switched to “Instrument Flight Rules,” or IFR, that would have allowed him to climb up through the clouds. Controllers would have given him a series of waypoints to follow that would keep him well clear of terrain, dangerous weather, and other aircraft. Flying IFR, however, is time-consuming and constrains pilots to following the directions of controllers. “Southern California airspace is extremely busy, and they might tell you to wait an hour,” assistant professor of aviation at the City University of New York Paul Cline told me. “You’re just one of many waiting in line, and it doesn’t matter if you’re Kobe Bryant.”

So the helicopter continued under visual flight rules. Continue reading New York: Kobe Bryant’s Helicopter Likely Succumbed to Well-Known Danger

A month after swarms of drones began appearing over Colorado and Nebraska, their provenance remains a mystery. How to even start? Authorities have admonished that it’s illegal to shoot them down, and no one’s managed to intercept a tell-tale electronic signal. No one’s even managed to take a clear picture of one. But there might be another way.

The scope and persistence of the operation implies that some significant entity is behind them — someone, most likely, with too much to lose to risk operating without the necessary paperwork from the Federal Aviation Administration. Could the answer to the riddle lie within an FAA database?

There are two sets of records you’d want to explore because there are two processes under which the FAA permits commercial drone flight. The first is called Part 107. To operate under these guidelines, an operator gets a Remote Pilot Certificate and registers a drone with the FAA. They can then fly pretty much anywhere, so long as they follow certain restrictions: They can’t operate at night, or fly over people, or operate from a moving vehicle, for instance. If they want to do any of these things they need to apply for a waiver.

The second form of permission is called a Certificate of Authorization, or COA. In the past these have tended to be used by public agencies like the Department of the Interior and the branches of the military. These are fairly cumbersome to obtain, but once in hand allow an operator a good deal of freedom within a defined area. They’ve fallen out of favor in recent years, however, and a search of the FAA’s database suggests that the most recent ones expired in 2015. “Many agencies are choosing to operate under Part 107,” FAA spokesperson Ian Gregor explained via email. So we can forget about these.

Back to Part 107. Based on published accounts, the Colorado drones always fly at night, sometimes fly in coordinated swarms, and fly significant distances. To do all of these things, an operator would need waivers 107.29 (flying at night), 107.31 (flying beyond visual range of the operator), and 107.35 (multiple drones flown by one operator). Out of the thousands of waivers issued, only five companies were issued a waiver valid for all three. One of those has since gone out of business.

That leaves four. Continue reading New York: Who’s Behind Those Mystery Drone Swarms? An Investigation

What began Wednesday morning as a wild internet rumor had by lunchtime Thursday become close to a settled—though still scarcely imaginable—fact: that Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752, a Boeing 737 with 176 people aboard, had crashed near Tehran not due to technical issues, as Iranian authorities initially claimed, but as a result of an Iranian antiaircraft missile strike.

While there was no direct evidence of a shoot-down in the first hours after the crash, the incident had seemed suspicious from the get-go. Ukraine International Airlines flight PS752 took off from Tehran’s Imam Khomeini International Airport at 6:12 a.m. local time, just hours after Iran’s military had launched multiple ballistic missiles at U.S. air bases in Iraq. President Trump had threatened that America would attack 52 targets in Iran if the country retaliated for the U.S. assassination of its top general, Qasem Soleimani; it stands to reason that Iranian air defense forces must have been on the highest possible state of alert. What’s more, the plane disappeared from air traffic control screens abruptly, and without the crew issuing a mayday—all suggestive of a sudden, catastrophic event. Trump’s bluster and unpredictability, lauded by some of his allies as a strategic virtue, almost certainly contributed to the conditions that allowed this grievous mistake to be made. This is the sort of thing that happens during a war.

For the first 24 hours, however, the U.S. and its allies said nothing about a shoot-down. Reuters reported that “the initial assessment of Western intelligence agencies was that the plane had suffered a technical malfunction.” Then, on Thursday, Newsweek quoted “one Pentagon and one U.S. senior intelligence official” as saying that the plane had been shot down. Hours later, Canadian prime minister Justin Trudeau confirmed the story at a press conference. Continue reading Vanity Fair: How Trump’s Iran War Bluster Paved The Way for the Ukrainian Airliner Shoot-Down

In the wake of the crash of Ukrainian International Airlines Flight 752 in Tehran this morning, two schools of thought quickly emerged. The first accepted the explanation given by the Iranian authorities: that the three-year-old 737-800, which had taken off minutes before, had suffered engine failure before plunging into the ground at Khalaj Abad, killing all 176 aboard. The second, widespread on the internet, was that the Kyiv-bound plane had been accidentally shot down by an Iranian air defense missile.

Given that the facts are just starting to trickle in, it’s far too early to say with any certainty what actually happened. Based on past experience, much of what has currently been reported as fact will turn out to be wrong. The true cause may very well turn out to be something that no one has considered yet. But given the information we have right now, the second explanation makes more sense than the first.

According to flight data recorded by Flightradar 24, the plane took off at 2:42 universal time, or 6.12 a.m. local time, a little more than three hours after Iran launched more than a dozen ballistic missiles at Iraqi bases hosting US troops. Three minutes later, it had reached an altitude of nearly 8,000 feet and was continuing to climb at a steady ground speed of 276 knots, or 318 mph. Then, abruptly, its dropped. A state-run Iranian media outlet released a video that appeared to show the aircraft descending in flames before impacting the ground. Continue reading New York: It Sure Looks Like the Ukrainian 737 May Have Been Accidentally Shot Down in Iran

The latest mystery to manifest in American skies: swarms of drones that fly by night over the Great Plains. Since the middle of December, residents within a 200-mile swath of eastern Colorado and western Nebraska have reported coordinated groups of unmanned aerial vehicles that fly between dusk and midnight. The craft have wingspans of about six feet and at times fly in synchronized grid patterns, dozens at a time, as if mapping the landscape below.

To state the obvious: It is ominous that so many robot planes can operate for so long, over so huge an area, without anyone — even the authorities — able to figure out who’s operating them or why.

“It’s definitely unusual activity,” James Brueggeman, the sheriff of Perkins County, Nebraska, told the Lincoln Journal-Star. “That’s what we’re investigating and trying to get to bottom of: What is the origin of the flights or the purpose of the flights?”

In response to a query from New York, the Federal Aviation Administration said via email: “Multiple FAA divisions and government agencies are investigating these reports. We do not comment on the details of open investigations.”

The fact that so many drones have been able to operate for so long over such a wide area points to the growing gap between the capabilities of drones and the ability of authorities to track and control them. At present, the FAA has no way to systematically track who’s doing what, where. Continue reading New York: About Those Mystery Drone Swarms Over Colorado…

Monday morning Boeing announced the ouster of CEO Dennis Muilenburg, nine months after the grounding of its best-selling 737 MAX jet threw the company into an ever-worsening crisis. In a press statement, the company announced that its board of directors had passed the CEO title to the currently serving chairman, David Calhoun.

Under Muilenburg’s leadership, Boeing had repeatedly reiterated its confidence in the plane and assured the public that any problems would soon be fixed and that the plane would be back in the air. It kept building the planes at an aggressive clip of 42 per month, crowding parking lots in Arizona and Washington State.

Yet the company repeatedly failed to make good on its promise to fix the flaws that led to a pair of deadly crashes. Regulators became frustrated by the company’s lack of transparency and airlines grew angry at its failure to deliver on its problems. Crash victims’ families felt that they were being lied to. As costs mounted into the billions, a series of leaks revealed a pattern of engineering sloppiness and cover-ups. Patience for Muilenburg’s tenure wore thin. In October, Boeing stripped him of his chairman of the board title, but kept him on as CEO.

Many viewed Muilenburg’s continued tenure as a sign that Boeing hadn’t grappled with the seriousness of the crisis. When he appeared before a hearing of the House Committee on Transportation in October, Democrat Jesús García of Illinois lit into him: “You padded your personal finances by putting profits over safety and now 346 people, including 8 Americans, are dead on your watch … I think it’s time that you submitted your resignation, don’t you?”

Instead, Muilenburg hung on. In an interview with Andrew Ross Sorkin of the New YorkTimes, he insisted that since the two accidents “happened on my watch … I feel responsible to stay on.”

That position might have been tenable had Muilenburg been able to deliver some tangible sign of progress. Instead, things got worse. Matters came to a head last week, when the board of directors decided that the time had come to shutter the 737 MAX production line until a clear path forward could be found.

In its statement to the press today, Boeing signaled that it finally understood the fruitlessness of Muilenburg’s nothing-to-see-here approach and was ready to change tack: “Under the Company’s new leadership, Boeing will operate with a renewed commitment to full transparency, including effective and proactive communication with the FAA, other global regulators and its customers.”

That would certainly be a step in the right direction. An attitude of genuine contrition and transparency will be crucial to rebuilding the century-old reputation for reliability that the last nine months had done so much to squander. The question now is how nimbly a $100 billion–plus behemoth can change its ways.

This article ran on December 23, 2019 in New York magazine.

Yesterday’s news from Boeing was of a now-familiar variety: grim. The company announced that it would temporarily stop building the 737 Max, the troubled jet that has spent most of the year grounded in the wake of two fatal crashes. Even after a nine-month-long string of bad news, the decision registers as particularly dire, tantamount to an admission that the company sees no clear end to the Max’s troubles.

There is a great deal of ruin in a country, Adam Smith observed, and the same is true for a $200 billion globe-straddling conglomerate whose sprawl embraces space launch, satellites, and military aircraft, so at first even the grounding of the company’s best-selling passenger jet didn’t seem like an existential crisis. The company had some 5,000 orders on the books for the 737 Max alone, enough to keep the production line humming for years. It seemed obvious that Boeing would fix whatever was wrong with the planes, get them back in the air, and return to booking exorbitant profits.

But that’s not what happened. As Boeing struggled to fix the Max’s flaws, more turned up. The grounding dragged on, and despite Boeing’s repeated assurances that all would soon be set right, the end never seemed to draw any closer. Stakeholders got increasingly fed up. Customers dropped their orders. Regulators expressed frustration and dissatisfaction. The press piled on, dubbing the Max a “death machine.”

Though it didn’t signal an immediate hit to revenue, the widespread loss of faith represents tremendous long-term damage to Boeing. Air travel requires an exceptional degree of trust. A century of reliable engineering had given Boeing a rock-solid reputation. This not only allowed Boeing to profitably feed the world’s fast-growing demand for passenger jets, it helped them bring out new models swiftly and inexpensively, with minimum oversight from regulators.

That’s gone now. Continue reading New York: Boeing’s 737 Max Was a Disastrous Error. So Why Is the Company’s Stock Still Going Up?

Paul Cline will never forget the day he almost didn’t make it home.

It was winter, and a heavy snowstorm had wrapped itself around the mountains north of Phoenix, Arizona. Cline was working as an aviation nurse aboard an air ambulance — Helicopter Emergency Medical Service (HEMS), in the parlance —based in the town of Safford, on the eastern edge of Arizona. A boy had fallen while skiing in the mountains and had broken his femur. He needed to get to a hospital, stat.

The weather blocked all the Phoenix-based choppers, and it looked pretty iffy to the east, too, but it might be possible to get through from Safford, 165 miles away. Cline and his partner, the helicopter’s pilot, faced the kind of life-or-death-decision that HEMS crews face all the time. Do we launch and put our own lives at risk — or stay safe and leave a patient to his fate? “We were a long way away, and the storm was closing in,” Cline recalls.

They decided to give it a shot. “We said, ‘We’ll just launch and take a look when we get there.’ You can’t do that. That’s how people die.” The danger is that when a pilot who is flying by visual reference to the ground flies into a cloud or fog, it becomes incredibly difficult to tell which way is up. “You turn it upside down and you die,” Cline says.

They launched and headed northwest, up into the mountains, threading between storm clouds. When they touched down at the accident site, “there was snow and zero visibility on three sides of us. There was only one way out, over the top of a mountain. We had 20 minutes, or we were going to be grounded for 2 days. My partner reconfigured the helicopter in NASCAR-pitstop time so we could fit this kid with his splint in. We launched. The ride back was the bumpiest I’d ever taken. We were really getting our butt kicked in turbulence. We looked at other, like, ‘Why are we here? What the hell are we doing?’ This is how things go bad in a heartbeat.”

Cline was lucky that day. The way through the clouds stayed open, and they made it home safe. But not all HEMS crews have been so lucky. Between 1972 and 2018, 339 people have died in 127 fatal crashes in the United States, according to data compiled by Ira J. Blumen, MD, medical director of the University of Chicago Aeromedical Network.

Despite recent efforts by operators and regulators to stem the tide, the risk remains significantly higher than in other forms of commercial aviation. Air ambulances have a fatal accident rate 800 times greater than commercial jets in the last decade.

Some of the danger springs from the nature of the flying itself; patients may need to be picked up at remote sites that are unfamiliar to the pilot, with unknown potential hazards like power lines or steep terrain. But critics say the way the industry is set up makes HEMS even more dangerous and expensive than it needs to be. “It’s the poster child for healthcare market failure,” says Ge Bai, PhD, a professor of accounting at Johns Hopkins Carey Business School in Baltimore, Maryland, who studies health care economics. Congress is taking note.

Read the rest of the article at Medscape, where it first ran on November 20, 2019.

Six months and billions in losses after two of its 737 MAX airliners suffered deadly crashes, Boeing is still working on a fix for the troubled aircraft model. What’s clear by now is that the problem isn’t just, as originally suspected, a faulty sensor. Like a homeowner whose attempt to repair a soft spot in the molding reveals a rotten joist and then a whole rotten wall, the facts behind 737 MAX fiasco reveal a corporate culture that has been quietly deteriorating for decades. While the proximate cause of the accident was a piece of hardware you can fit in your hand, solving the problem might require tearing the company down to its foundation.

Thanks to reporting by many superb journalists, the genesis of the tragedy is now understood in detail. The tale begins in the 2000s, when Boeing decided against investing in a clean-sheet replacement for its hugely popular but aging 737 narrow-body jet. It continued in the 2010s, when the company decided to make massive payouts to investors through dividends and stock buybacks rather than invest in engineers or technology. And it reached its culmination with the decision to hastily update the 737 by slapping together a Frankenplane whose powerful new engines caused it to be dynamically unstable. To paper over the plane’s flaws, Boeing fitted it with an ill-conceived automated system that would spring into action at unexpected times, and farmed out the software that ran it to coders in India. Worst of all, it didn’t even tell pilots that the system existed.

To be sure, the 737 MAX that started to roll off the production line in Renton, Washington in February 2018 was mostly fine. It was sleek, efficient, and solidly constructed. And it worked as intended almost all the time. But in modern aviation, 99.99% reliable is not reliable enough. Tens of thousands of planes take off every day, and in order to preserve public confidence, all of them have to land in one piece. A plane that crashes once every hundred thousand times isn’t good enough. And there’s no reason today for anyone to build a plane that is less than perfect.

Read the rest of the story on Medium, where it originally appeared on September 23, 2019.