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The exchange of medical metaphors occurred during the second of two days of NTSB hearings May 9-10 into the fatal Feb. 16, 2000, crash of an Emery DC-8 freighter. A missing bolt, never found in the charred wreckage, left the crew with insufficient elevator control immediately after they took off with a 65,000-lb. load of cargo for a flight from Rancho Cordova, Calif.’s Mather Field to Emery’s main base at Dayton, Ohio. The bolt connected the right-side elevator pushrod to the control arm. Without the vital bolt, the pushrod was useless. The design of the DC-8 is such that the remaining control authority on the left-side elevator was insufficient to counteract the tendency of a disconnected elevator on the opposite side to move to the full nose-up position. The doomed three-man flight crew thought they had a center-of-gravity problem and they were trying to return to the field when the airplane crashed.

The hearings revealed egregious shortcomings in maintenance. Goglia said the Emery witnesses "weren’t forthcoming." Additional public hearings are possible; depositions of key players in the case are certain, Goglia said in an interview.

The case has wide-ranging implications for the state of maintenance in the cargo industry, if not the airline industry in general. It also raises serious questions about compliance and the rigor of Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) oversight. In this respect, Emery agreed to cease operations last August after FAA inspectors found more than 100 "apparent" violations (see ASW, Aug. 20, 2001, p. 8). However, the FAA did not suspend the carrier’s operating certificate. Indeed, the FAA recently agreed not to revoke the carrier’s operating certificate until Dec. 4, 2002, a seven-month extension to the original May 15, 2002, expiration date. The extension will allow the carrier additional time to renegotiate leases for the grounded carrier’s airplanes.

Findings to date have appalled relatives of the dead flightcrew. Fred Chesbro, a military aviator, lobbied hard for the NTSB to hold a public hearing on the crash. As it happened, the hearings chaired by Member Goglia were the first the NTSB has held publicly on the crash of a cargo plane. At our invitation, Chesbro offered his impressions of the proceedings and urged the NTSB to press ahead relentlessly in its investigation (see box, p. 8). Goglia has vowed to "pursue every lead to determine the probable cause of this accident." Well, at this point, the missing bolt seems to be the immediate cause. How it came to be installed backwards, without a cotter pin, leading to it slipping out, was the deadly end point of a litany of mistakes and oversights.

Four times worse. The fatal and/or hull loss accident rate is four times worse for commercial air cargo than for passenger carriers, according to published aviation safety statistics. Other research suggests the cargo sector has five times the number of accidents. Even the Netherlands National Aerospace Laboratory found "there is a much greater variation in safety between air cargo and passenger operations in the U.S. than in Europe." (See ASW, Dec. 18, 2000, p. 5)

Is there anything wrong with this picture?

My good friend and brother-in-law, Kevin Stables, was the captain of Emery’s Feb. 16, 2000, fatal air cargo flight number 17.

Last week, more than two years later, our family sat through every minute of the grueling two-day public hearing convened by the NTSB as part of its ongoing investigation into the crash. As a family member and as a professional pilot, I was pleased to observe the NTSB in action. Clearly, these proceedings will help to eliminate the double standard between commercial air cargo operators and commercial passenger airlines. The NTSB’s efforts in the Emery matter will raise industry and government sensitivity to the inexcusable safety deficiencies in this end of the airline business.

In a 1998 letter to the FAA, Capt. Tom Rachford, speaking for the Emery pilots’ union, wrote, "Our maintenance has dramatically fallen off … I can’t say it any clearer: this airline is going to put a hole in the ground and kill someone."

Nonetheless, it was inspiring to watch as members of the Safety Board’s technical panel delved into vital issues of air safety and public interest. They probed deeply and relentlessly. Despite the investigators’ best fact-finding efforts, the ‘correct witnesses,’ according to the Safety Board, were not provided by the airline and, therefore, the Emery Flight 17 hearing will be reconvened with a new cast of characters at a later date.

The Safety Board should provide thorough follow-through on the Emery Flight 17 investigation and should remain focused on the cargo industry while aggressively pursuing much needed reform for effective regulation and oversight. Otherwise, predictions of future air cargo disasters will tragically come true again.