The Practiced Art of Airline Safety
By Dick Karl
October 2006
 10:15 a.m., eastern daylight time.
The air is cool and quiet, save for the rustle of the drapes and the ripping noise made by Sabra as she opens some suture packs. Cindy is busy setting up her Mayo stand, upon which she has arranged a collection of shiny surgical clamps, two scalpels, some sutures and some silk ties. She has carefully counted the sutures and the instruments, too.
I watch with absent thought as Janet paints the patient's right chest with Betadine solution. Things are going well, we started on time and the first part of the operation has gone well. Soon I will be looking at this young man's heart and freeing his esophageal tumor from his thoracic aorta. This is my usual world, I am at home here.
Suddenly I am overtaken by a series of other images, ones I saw just a week ago. They are sights I saw in fellow columnist Les Abend's world. Since I love aviation and surgery, and because I've developed an interest, some say an obsession, with the application of aviation safety techniques in the surgical environment, those images are now superimposed onto the draped patient before me.
Les had arranged for me to travel with him on a four-day trip. American Airlines had obtained permission from the Federal Aviation Administration for me to sit in the jumpseat and watch the way the pros practice safety. Those four days will be forever tattooed in my visual, aural and emotional memory. For a lifelong airline pilot aspirant, the adventure was so rich, so succulent, that I am speechless when it comes to thanking Les, the FAA, American Airlines and its chief pilot, Mark Hetterman, and its CEO, Gerard Arpey, the man who gave us the green light. In the post-9/11 world, it took a lot to make it happen.
But happen it did. The differences between Les's environment and mine were many and the experience has sobered me about the safety work we have left to do in surgery. From the airline pilot's sign-in to the final after shutdown checklist, aviation has got plans and backup plans that are far more evolved than those we have in the operating room.
Here's what I saw over those four magical days. We started with a sign-in one hour prior to departure. In the operations area Les called up the flight plan, departure, en route and arrival weather and printed it out. The final document was a strip of paper approximately nine feet in length. Les expertly folded the pages into a coherent set of useful chunks of information, then, in a practiced way, tore along pre-perforated lines to separate the sheets into several packets of data.
I can't tell you that I ever fully comprehended all of the items that he printed out, but I do know that there was a lot of information there. Our first flight was from Fort Lauderdale to San Juan, Puerto Rico, a distance of 908 nautical miles. The flight plan included the route, the latitude and longitude of each waypoint, the expected time of waypoint passage, the fuel remaining at each point, the predicted takeoff weight and total fuel on board. That total fuel was calculated to include the predicted fuel burn en route, taxi allowance, reserve and alternate provisions and fuel to hold. Our alternate was Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic. Les took the total fuel on board, subtracted the reserve and alternate amount and divided the rest by 130 lbs of jet-A per minute of flight. He calculated we had another 50 minutes of gas, which he called his "play around" reserve. He seemed satisfied.
That was just three feet of the printed information and Les carefully reviewed the remaining six. There he found notams, winds aloft, a list of American's minimum equipment list (MEL) revisions, a note about the need to establish communications with Havana ATC 10 minutes prior to entering their airspace, a lengthy text description of the prog chart, runway conditions, frequencies for a variety of services (ATIS, FBOs, etc.), deicing conditions (it was hot everywhere), the names of all crewmembers and their nicknames, and the V speeds for each runway. I'm sure there was more that I couldn't decipher.
There was a note about being sure to turn off the center tank fuel pumps when the tank held less than 1,000 lbs of fuel, a lesson learned from the analysis of the TWA 747 that blew up over the Atlantic Ocean en route from New York to Paris. During our four-day trip the 10th anniversary of that accident occurred, reminding all of us that aviation, though safe, can be dangerous.
 It was time to board American's elegantly shaped and traditionally painted 757. Les introduced me to Robert Wall, our first officer. We had our first of many lengthy conversations with gate agents; they were all very suspicious of a jumpseater not in uniform and without an ID. I produced a very official looking slip sent to me by American entitled "Admission to Flight Deck." It carried the signatures of the chief pilot and of the principal operating inspector (POI). In a way each of these encounters was reassuring: American is very particular about who sits in their cockpits.
Safety emphasis was everywhere. The airplane had just come from our destination, San Juan, and Les made sure to ask the incoming crew about the flight conditions they had just encountered and the airplane they had just flown. It took only a minute, but it spoke volumes.
Discuss this article in our forums
|
