Russia Faces New Air-Safety Crisis
12-06-2011, 08:00 PM
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Russia Faces New Air-Safety Crisis
By Gergory L. White and Daniel Michaels, Wall Street Journal
MOSCOW—Russia, once a global aviation power, has become the most dangerous country in which to board an airliner. Investigations of nine commercial plane crashes this year, including one that killed an entire professional hockey team, found a raft of gross violations and errors, such as drunk or sedated flight crews, forged safety documents and panicked pilots. In one crash, the navigator used the wrong guidance equipment and aimed his jetliner at a tree, far from the runway.
"I don't know what else has to happen for the recognition of this systemic crisis to reach the entire aviation community," said Deputy Transport Minister Valery Okulov, a former chief executive of national airline Aeroflot, at an emergency industry meeting in October, according to a report in a state-run newspaper. A ministry spokeswoman declined to confirm that account and said Mr. Okulov wasn't available for comment.
Russian fatalities and crashes, adjusted for air-traffic volumes, this year exceed those in less developed countries with longstanding safety problems, including Congo and Indonesia, according to aviation consultants Ascend in London.
Eight of the nine crashes involved Soviet-era planes. But many safety experts say the real problem isn't aging equipment but ineffective regulation, inefficiently small airlines and poorly trained pilots not following modern safety procedures.
Just two years ago, Russia appeared to be an air-safety success story. Following a string of crashes early last decade, the government in 2006 accepted international help to boost safety at its biggest global carriers like Aeroflot and Transaero. By 2009, Russia had no fatal crashes. Since then, accidents have surged amid rising traffic at small, domestic airlines that were largely overlooked by the safety campaign.
The Russian air crashes highlight a nagging problem for the global aviation industry and show the limits of generally successful efforts to cut the danger of air travel. A major reason for the world-wide drop in accidents over recent years is that most big countries cut their tolerance for safety lapses—at their own carriers and on foreign airlines. A critical weakness in this system of nations watching each others' backs, experts concede, is domestic aviation in countries where people tend to overlook risks.
In heartland Russia, for example, many pilots and airplane mechanics show little concern for basic safety rules that have become second nature elsewhere. Domestic carriers operate under national regulations that are much weaker than global rules that Russia's international carriers face. Falsification is common, down to widespread use of counterfeit spare parts, Russian officials say.
"It's the same sort of societal issue you see in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia," says Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a global nonprofit organization that helped implement Russia's safety reforms five years ago.
Russian officials reject comparisons to less-developed countries. They say tighter regulations and stricter inspections, mandated since the wave of crashes, will soon resolve the problem. The Kremlin has ordered small airlines to close and plans to ban most Soviet-built planes that remain prevalent nationwide.
Sergei Masterov, head of safety in the Russian Aviation Agency, said in an interview that the moves will "radically change the situation" and prevent a repeat of this year's surge in crashes. "We're taking an absolutely principled approach to ensuring safety now. We're not allowing anything by."
Russia has the know-how to fly safely because the Soviet Union had a proud history as a leading aerospace power. Yet that experience regularly goes unheeded in Russia's smaller carriers and isolated regions, where Moscow's control and foreign influences remain muted.
"It's not just resistance, it's a kind of sloppiness, carelessness," says Valery Shelkovnikov, a former top aviation regulator who now runs a safety-consulting firm.
In Europe, the market with most links to Russia, European Union air-safety watchdogs see Russia's situation as "a mirror of the society" in which laws and rules are routinely ignored, senior European officials say. The EU is offering Russia assistance, but specialists acknowledge that they lack influence over airlines that don't leave Russia.
Many foreign companies that must transport staff to remote Russian oil fields or mines have forbidden employees from using most Russian airlines or boarding any Russian-built airplane, say corporate air-safety specialists. Some require staff to fly between nearby Russian cities using foreign carriers, on detours through foreign hubs such as Vienna or Helsinki.
Experience from other countries indicates steps Russia must take. Nigeria, one of the deadliest places to fly six years ago, has become much safer thanks to concerted government and international efforts.
China transformed its industry nine years ago after a slew of deadly crashes. To control the country's breakneck aviation growth, Beijing ratcheted up enforcement of existing regulations, adopted stricter international standards and slammed the brakes on industry expansion, even threatening to block jetliner imports. The government invited armies of foreign experts to train Chinese pilots, controllers and inspectors. Within two years, Chinese aviation ranked among the world's safest.
China's nascent aviation industry, though, was simpler to control than the sector in Russia, where hundreds of tiny airlines sprouted from the splintering of Aeroflot at the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991. Scores still survive, but many lack funds to buy new planes or modernize old ones. Moscow now reasons that by closing such carriers and grounding their planes, it can reduce crashes nationwide.
But even some government officials question those moves, noting that nearly all the recent accidents have been blamed on crew error or inadequate supervision, not equipment problems.
After the latest crashes, Moscow ordered inspections of most Soviet-era planes. Inspectors found hundreds of violations that had been previously overlooked and grounded a quarter of the planes, aviation officials say.
Safety officials blame the laxness partly on earlier Kremlin efforts to promote business by reducing inspections.
Crash investigators at the Interstate Aviation Committee, which probes accidents in the former Soviet Union, took the unusual step in November of calling on Moscow to accelerate adoption of international safety rules domestically.
"There should be no double standards for Russian companies operating abroad and inside the country," said committee chief Tatyana Anodina.
Since the mid-2000s, Russia's biggest carriers have voluntarily adopted international standards, often a requirement for flights abroad. But even top players have struggled to impose discipline throughout their operations, industry officials say.
After a Boeing 737 operated by an affiliate of Aeroflot crashed in September 2008 on landing at Perm, in the Ural Mountains, investigators found the pilots had been trained hastily. As a result, they misread vital gauges, which presented information differently from those on Soviet-built planes that they had long flown. Investigators said the captain, who had alcohol in his system, nearly flipped the plane before flying it into the ground on an approach that should have been routine. Aeroflot, which later sold its stake in the affiliate, didn't respond to a request for comment.
Few crashes highlight the breadth of problems plaguing Russian aviation more than one from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport to Petrozavodsk late on June 20.
RusLine, a small Russian carrier, normally flew modern Canadian-built Bombardier jets for its daily hop from Moscow to the regional capital near Finland. But those planes were busy and RusLine lacked the backup fleet that regulations require.
Bending Russian rules to run the flight, investigators said, RusLine chartered a Soviet-era Tupolev-134 and its crew from another small carrier, RusAir. RusLine said it fully complies with regulations. It hasn't been the subject of any special investigations or disciplinary actions by regulators since the crash, which involved a plane from a different carrier. RusAir was shut down by regulators after the crash and no one could be reached for comment.
Alexander Fyodorov, the 44-year-old captain, was new to RusAir. He had quit a larger, more prestigious airline, rather than accept demotion for a hard landing in January, investigators said. RusAir wasn't aware of the violation, which had been improperly omitted from his official record, investigators say. Such falsification of vital records is common, officials concede.
Investigators say preflight medical checks, a world-wide requirement, were perfunctory and possibly falsified. All seven crew members, including flight attendants, recorded identical pulses. The airport says all checks were conducted properly. Still, an autopsy of the navigator found his blood-alcohol level, at 0.081%, was above the legal limit for driving in Russia or the U.S.
A storm over Finland had brought clouds and rain to the Petrozavodsk area, but when Capt. Fyodorov picked up the official forecast on his way to the plane, it indicated weather would be acceptable for landing.
Departure was delayed 20 minutes, but the pilot didn't follow procedure and ask for a weather update. The forecast would have shown deteriorating conditions that would prevent landing, investigators said.
"It's most likely that if the captain had requested the data on the weather at the Petrozavodsk airport…he would have decided not to take off," investigators said.
The 70-minute flight proceeded smoothly, but weather in Petrozavodsk was deteriorating. The airport, known as Besovets for the small village nearby, couldn't warn the crew because it lacked modern equipment to measure visibility. The rudimentary gear it did have barely functioned, since most of its lights were burned out.
Besovets, a primarily military airstrip with few commercial flights each day, had a history of problems. Regulators in 2006 shut civilian operations there for several weeks due to safety violations. The local government took the airport over in 2009 after it nearly went bankrupt, according to reports in the official news agency. Upgrades to outdated equipment got delayed. Airport officials declined to comment on investigators' conclusions, saying only that Besovets is now undergoing renovation.
Mr. Masterov, the safety regulator, said low traffic at the airport probably didn't justify the cost of modern equipment such as an instrument-landing system that could guide flights in low visibility. For Flight 9605, that proved a fatal economy.
The Tu-134 is such an old design that its nose, which in modern jetliners houses radar equipment, is made largely of glass. A navigator squeezes into the bubble for the view.
RusAir navigator Aman Attayev relied on an onboard GPS-based system. "I'll get you in for sure," he assured the captain as they approached. Neither had landed at Besovets before.
Mr. Attayev's confidence was misguided. Russian navigational charts still haven't been fully updated with exact locations and many smaller airports still rely on data from 1942. The old information can differ from modern GPS maps by more than the length of a football field.
Russian regulations forbid using GPS for landing, but Mr. Attayev ignored that, investigators say. As a result, the Tupolev was about 130 meters off course as it descended through clouds.
It was also descending too quickly, but without modern equipment on board or at the airfield, the pilots were unaware. Procedures required the captain to announce at 110 meters altitude whether he would continue the landing or make another pass. But Capt. Fyodorov couldn't see the ground and said nothing as the plane crossed that level. His co-pilot should have aborted the landing at that stage, but sat silent.
Seconds later, a ground-proximity alarm sounded. Capt. Fyodorov searched for the runway. "I don't see it yet," he said. "I'm looking."
"Everything seemed calm," a flight attendant later told a local news website from her hospital bed. "And then I see the wing hit one evergreen, then another."
The captain pulled back hard on the control stick, but too late. The last word on the cockpit recording is the co-pilot cursing.
The plane flipped over, smashing into a ditch along the airport road. It hit the power line to the airport, which immediately went dark. The controller, still unaware of the fiery impact, radioed to the crew to make another pass.
Drivers on the road and local villagers reached the burning wreckage before fire crews. Of 52 people on board, 47 died, including the pilot, co-pilot and navigator.
Three days later, before any investigation results had been released, President Dmitry Medvedev said that although the cause was likely "crew error," he had ordered the accelerated grounding of all remaining Tu-134s. "It's not just because of this crash, it's just time."
MOSCOW—Russia, once a global aviation power, has become the most dangerous country in which to board an airliner. Investigations of nine commercial plane crashes this year, including one that killed an entire professional hockey team, found a raft of gross violations and errors, such as drunk or sedated flight crews, forged safety documents and panicked pilots. In one crash, the navigator used the wrong guidance equipment and aimed his jetliner at a tree, far from the runway.
"I don't know what else has to happen for the recognition of this systemic crisis to reach the entire aviation community," said Deputy Transport Minister Valery Okulov, a former chief executive of national airline Aeroflot, at an emergency industry meeting in October, according to a report in a state-run newspaper. A ministry spokeswoman declined to confirm that account and said Mr. Okulov wasn't available for comment.
Russian fatalities and crashes, adjusted for air-traffic volumes, this year exceed those in less developed countries with longstanding safety problems, including Congo and Indonesia, according to aviation consultants Ascend in London.
Eight of the nine crashes involved Soviet-era planes. But many safety experts say the real problem isn't aging equipment but ineffective regulation, inefficiently small airlines and poorly trained pilots not following modern safety procedures.
Just two years ago, Russia appeared to be an air-safety success story. Following a string of crashes early last decade, the government in 2006 accepted international help to boost safety at its biggest global carriers like Aeroflot and Transaero. By 2009, Russia had no fatal crashes. Since then, accidents have surged amid rising traffic at small, domestic airlines that were largely overlooked by the safety campaign.
The Russian air crashes highlight a nagging problem for the global aviation industry and show the limits of generally successful efforts to cut the danger of air travel. A major reason for the world-wide drop in accidents over recent years is that most big countries cut their tolerance for safety lapses—at their own carriers and on foreign airlines. A critical weakness in this system of nations watching each others' backs, experts concede, is domestic aviation in countries where people tend to overlook risks.
In heartland Russia, for example, many pilots and airplane mechanics show little concern for basic safety rules that have become second nature elsewhere. Domestic carriers operate under national regulations that are much weaker than global rules that Russia's international carriers face. Falsification is common, down to widespread use of counterfeit spare parts, Russian officials say.
"It's the same sort of societal issue you see in parts of Africa and Southeast Asia," says Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation, a global nonprofit organization that helped implement Russia's safety reforms five years ago.
Russian officials reject comparisons to less-developed countries. They say tighter regulations and stricter inspections, mandated since the wave of crashes, will soon resolve the problem. The Kremlin has ordered small airlines to close and plans to ban most Soviet-built planes that remain prevalent nationwide.
Sergei Masterov, head of safety in the Russian Aviation Agency, said in an interview that the moves will "radically change the situation" and prevent a repeat of this year's surge in crashes. "We're taking an absolutely principled approach to ensuring safety now. We're not allowing anything by."
Russia has the know-how to fly safely because the Soviet Union had a proud history as a leading aerospace power. Yet that experience regularly goes unheeded in Russia's smaller carriers and isolated regions, where Moscow's control and foreign influences remain muted.
"It's not just resistance, it's a kind of sloppiness, carelessness," says Valery Shelkovnikov, a former top aviation regulator who now runs a safety-consulting firm.
In Europe, the market with most links to Russia, European Union air-safety watchdogs see Russia's situation as "a mirror of the society" in which laws and rules are routinely ignored, senior European officials say. The EU is offering Russia assistance, but specialists acknowledge that they lack influence over airlines that don't leave Russia.
Many foreign companies that must transport staff to remote Russian oil fields or mines have forbidden employees from using most Russian airlines or boarding any Russian-built airplane, say corporate air-safety specialists. Some require staff to fly between nearby Russian cities using foreign carriers, on detours through foreign hubs such as Vienna or Helsinki.
Experience from other countries indicates steps Russia must take. Nigeria, one of the deadliest places to fly six years ago, has become much safer thanks to concerted government and international efforts.
China transformed its industry nine years ago after a slew of deadly crashes. To control the country's breakneck aviation growth, Beijing ratcheted up enforcement of existing regulations, adopted stricter international standards and slammed the brakes on industry expansion, even threatening to block jetliner imports. The government invited armies of foreign experts to train Chinese pilots, controllers and inspectors. Within two years, Chinese aviation ranked among the world's safest.
China's nascent aviation industry, though, was simpler to control than the sector in Russia, where hundreds of tiny airlines sprouted from the splintering of Aeroflot at the Soviet Union's breakup in 1991. Scores still survive, but many lack funds to buy new planes or modernize old ones. Moscow now reasons that by closing such carriers and grounding their planes, it can reduce crashes nationwide.
But even some government officials question those moves, noting that nearly all the recent accidents have been blamed on crew error or inadequate supervision, not equipment problems.
After the latest crashes, Moscow ordered inspections of most Soviet-era planes. Inspectors found hundreds of violations that had been previously overlooked and grounded a quarter of the planes, aviation officials say.
Safety officials blame the laxness partly on earlier Kremlin efforts to promote business by reducing inspections.
Crash investigators at the Interstate Aviation Committee, which probes accidents in the former Soviet Union, took the unusual step in November of calling on Moscow to accelerate adoption of international safety rules domestically.
"There should be no double standards for Russian companies operating abroad and inside the country," said committee chief Tatyana Anodina.
Since the mid-2000s, Russia's biggest carriers have voluntarily adopted international standards, often a requirement for flights abroad. But even top players have struggled to impose discipline throughout their operations, industry officials say.
After a Boeing 737 operated by an affiliate of Aeroflot crashed in September 2008 on landing at Perm, in the Ural Mountains, investigators found the pilots had been trained hastily. As a result, they misread vital gauges, which presented information differently from those on Soviet-built planes that they had long flown. Investigators said the captain, who had alcohol in his system, nearly flipped the plane before flying it into the ground on an approach that should have been routine. Aeroflot, which later sold its stake in the affiliate, didn't respond to a request for comment.
Few crashes highlight the breadth of problems plaguing Russian aviation more than one from Moscow's Domodedovo Airport to Petrozavodsk late on June 20.
RusLine, a small Russian carrier, normally flew modern Canadian-built Bombardier jets for its daily hop from Moscow to the regional capital near Finland. But those planes were busy and RusLine lacked the backup fleet that regulations require.
Bending Russian rules to run the flight, investigators said, RusLine chartered a Soviet-era Tupolev-134 and its crew from another small carrier, RusAir. RusLine said it fully complies with regulations. It hasn't been the subject of any special investigations or disciplinary actions by regulators since the crash, which involved a plane from a different carrier. RusAir was shut down by regulators after the crash and no one could be reached for comment.
Alexander Fyodorov, the 44-year-old captain, was new to RusAir. He had quit a larger, more prestigious airline, rather than accept demotion for a hard landing in January, investigators said. RusAir wasn't aware of the violation, which had been improperly omitted from his official record, investigators say. Such falsification of vital records is common, officials concede.
Investigators say preflight medical checks, a world-wide requirement, were perfunctory and possibly falsified. All seven crew members, including flight attendants, recorded identical pulses. The airport says all checks were conducted properly. Still, an autopsy of the navigator found his blood-alcohol level, at 0.081%, was above the legal limit for driving in Russia or the U.S.
A storm over Finland had brought clouds and rain to the Petrozavodsk area, but when Capt. Fyodorov picked up the official forecast on his way to the plane, it indicated weather would be acceptable for landing.
Departure was delayed 20 minutes, but the pilot didn't follow procedure and ask for a weather update. The forecast would have shown deteriorating conditions that would prevent landing, investigators said.
"It's most likely that if the captain had requested the data on the weather at the Petrozavodsk airport…he would have decided not to take off," investigators said.
The 70-minute flight proceeded smoothly, but weather in Petrozavodsk was deteriorating. The airport, known as Besovets for the small village nearby, couldn't warn the crew because it lacked modern equipment to measure visibility. The rudimentary gear it did have barely functioned, since most of its lights were burned out.
Besovets, a primarily military airstrip with few commercial flights each day, had a history of problems. Regulators in 2006 shut civilian operations there for several weeks due to safety violations. The local government took the airport over in 2009 after it nearly went bankrupt, according to reports in the official news agency. Upgrades to outdated equipment got delayed. Airport officials declined to comment on investigators' conclusions, saying only that Besovets is now undergoing renovation.
Mr. Masterov, the safety regulator, said low traffic at the airport probably didn't justify the cost of modern equipment such as an instrument-landing system that could guide flights in low visibility. For Flight 9605, that proved a fatal economy.
The Tu-134 is such an old design that its nose, which in modern jetliners houses radar equipment, is made largely of glass. A navigator squeezes into the bubble for the view.
RusAir navigator Aman Attayev relied on an onboard GPS-based system. "I'll get you in for sure," he assured the captain as they approached. Neither had landed at Besovets before.
Mr. Attayev's confidence was misguided. Russian navigational charts still haven't been fully updated with exact locations and many smaller airports still rely on data from 1942. The old information can differ from modern GPS maps by more than the length of a football field.
Russian regulations forbid using GPS for landing, but Mr. Attayev ignored that, investigators say. As a result, the Tupolev was about 130 meters off course as it descended through clouds.
It was also descending too quickly, but without modern equipment on board or at the airfield, the pilots were unaware. Procedures required the captain to announce at 110 meters altitude whether he would continue the landing or make another pass. But Capt. Fyodorov couldn't see the ground and said nothing as the plane crossed that level. His co-pilot should have aborted the landing at that stage, but sat silent.
Seconds later, a ground-proximity alarm sounded. Capt. Fyodorov searched for the runway. "I don't see it yet," he said. "I'm looking."
"Everything seemed calm," a flight attendant later told a local news website from her hospital bed. "And then I see the wing hit one evergreen, then another."
The captain pulled back hard on the control stick, but too late. The last word on the cockpit recording is the co-pilot cursing.
The plane flipped over, smashing into a ditch along the airport road. It hit the power line to the airport, which immediately went dark. The controller, still unaware of the fiery impact, radioed to the crew to make another pass.
Drivers on the road and local villagers reached the burning wreckage before fire crews. Of 52 people on board, 47 died, including the pilot, co-pilot and navigator.
Three days later, before any investigation results had been released, President Dmitry Medvedev said that although the cause was likely "crew error," he had ordered the accelerated grounding of all remaining Tu-134s. "It's not just because of this crash, it's just time."
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