Pilots Hope Emery Hearing Underscores Part 121 Loopholes

Aviation expertises, news journal

The pilot community hopes the two-day NTSB hearing on the February 2000 crash of an Emery Worldwide DC-8 freighter will call attention to what one pilot called "absurd" differences in scheduled passenger airline regulations and the rules that most cargo carriers follow.

Part 121 carriers are divided into three categories: flag, domestic and supplemental. The last category is reserved for all-cargo or charter operations, and features regulations that, in some cases, differ significantly from what the big passenger carriers must follow. For instance, an MD-11 captain flying for a scheduled passenger carrier is limited to 60 cockpit hours in any 14-day period. But because of variances in the supplemental regulation, a FedEx MD-11 captain flying the same routes can legally spend up to 96 hours at the controls during the same 14-day period. Similar variances have kept collision-avoidance systems and some fire-suppression equipment required on passenger planes from being mandated on cargo planes.

Like smaller Part 121 cargo haulers, FedEx and UPS — which operate larger and more demanding networks than most passenger carriers — have Part 121 supplemental certificates. UPS elects to meet the more stringent "flag carrier" standards, however.

Air Line Pilots Association is campaigning to have Part 121 supplemental regulations supplanted by more stringent Part 121 flag or domestic standards, similar to the "one level of safety" effort that saw big Part 135 carriers moved under Part 121. FAA, spurred in part by recommendations from NTSB, is addressing cargo safety issues. Working with industry, the agency’s Flight Standards service developed the "Air Cargo System Safety Implementation Plan" (ACIP), which addresses many issues uncovered in accident investigations or through routine surveillance. FAA hopes to finalize the plan this summer.

ALPA Wants Rules

ALPA spokesman David Webb, an MD-11 captain with FedEx, said that efforts like ACIP, the Emery hearing (the first on a cargo crash), and an NTSB-led conference on air cargo safety slated later this year are "encouraging" but fall short of solving the problems. "This needs to be regulated by eliminating the discrepancies in the rules," he said.

Safety officials acknowledged that Emery’s status as a Part 121 supplemental carrier likely played little role in the accident two years ago near Sacramento. Evidence uncovered during the probe suggests that a bolt in the plane’s elevator system may have worked itself loose, rendering the plane unflyable (DAILY, Aug. 27, 2001). The revelations, combined with Emery’s spotty maintenance oversight history and problems found on other planes inspected after the accident, led investigators to focus on maintenance and FAA oversight.

The Emery DC-8 crashed while trying to return to Rancho Cordova, Calif.’s Mather Field soon after a crewmember radioed that the plane had a center-ofgravity problem. All three crewmembers died. Yesterday’s testimony on the first day of a planned two-day hearing, established that the crew performed the necessary preflight checks on the elevator, but that the problem was not detectable. Nor should the pilots have known that a malfunctioning elevator panel, and not a CG problem, was forcing the plane’s nose up despite the crew’s efforts to level off. Boeing’s Nicholas Gentile, a chief pilot and senior flight crew training manager, said the manufacturer is developing maneuvers to combat low-level upsets. He testified that the recommended maneuvers will be close to the same as those attempted by the Emery crew.