For some reason I'm a little obsessed with airline incidents and crashes. Admiral Cloudberg produces outstanding write-ups, and of course the videos of Mentour Pilot on YT are also excellent.

While this is in no way scientific, it seems that what most catastrophes have in common are bad CRM (crew intra-communication) and lower-than-average airmanship. In most cases, for a catastrophe to occur there must be an initial problem, sometimes very small, that is made worse and worse by bad communication and a series of misunderstandings. And ultimately, in some cases, pilots fail to fly the plane.

For poor airmanship, AF 447 comes to mind (very minor initial incident, plane working perfectly fine, disaster caused by incompetence), as well as a comparable problem on AirAsia 8501 (the captain decided to reboot the computers in flight (!) and the first officer was unable to fly the plane properly without autopilot). Disasters caused by poor CRM include the Tenerife Airport disaster (deadliest accident in aviation history).

But I find incidents that don't result in a catastrophe often more interesting. Incidents and problems are impossible to avoid when using machines as complex as modern airplanes; what's fascinating is how humans, working together and using all of their skill, are able to save the day.

This is the case here. The problem was caused by the maintenance team who didn't use the proper hydraulic tube when replacing an engine, because they didn't have immediate access to the text of the service bulletin that described the procedure, and they thought they could do without. (The wrong hydraulic tube didn't have the proper clearance; when under pressure, it wore away at the fuel line beneath it, until it cracked and leaked.) The actions of the pilots in flight compounded the problem but this was completely excusable given the information and training they had, and the checklists as they were written. Ultimately, disaster was averted by excellent airmanship.

There were other events like that. The most famous one is of course US Airways 1549 ("miracle on the Hudson"), but a less well-known, very similar, and possibly more impressive one, happened in 1988. On TACA Flight 110, the pilot landed the plane on a patch of grass with no engines, with no injuries to the passengers or damage to the plane.

That pilot, Carlos Dardano, had only one eye, having been shot in the face while landing in El Salvador a few years prior and being caught in a cross fire. He had started flying when he was a toddler, on the knees of his father. At the time of the incident, he was 29 but he had already amassed 13,410 flight hours, with almost 11,000 of these as pilot in command.

Another amazing story is the Air Astana flight 1388, in 2018. A heavy maintenance operation had resulted in the inversion of the aileron cables, but not the spoilers, making the plane utterly impossible to control. This problem escaped detection until the plane was in flight. The pilots, after calmly discussing how to ditch the plane in the sea to minimize the number of victims on the ground (it was a test flight with only 6 people on board, all pilots or engineers), managed to regain a semblance of control and landed safely, after 90 minutes of the wildest roller coaster imaginable. It looks like Kazakhs can fly.

It seems the modern world doesn't hold skills in high esteem (what used to be called tradecraft before the word became associated with espionnage); the MBA culture essentially regards workers as interchangeable; and of course we have all these machines!

But the opposite is true. What will save your life is not the machine, it's the experience, professionalism and competence of the people using the machine.