I was weightless. We all were. Thirty-three thousand feet up in a cloudless sky, our plane had suddenly pitched into a steep dive. I felt my body float upwards and strain against my seatbelt. Passengers around me screamed. There was a loud crash in the back — a coffeepot clattering to the floor and tumbling down the aisle. Our tray tables began rattling in unison as the 757 strained through the kind of maneuver meant more for a fighter jet. Top Gun this was not, though. Our flight that Friday, April 25th, was mostly heavy-set tourists returning to California from Hawaii. More Tommy Bahama than Tom Cruise. Weightless and staring downhill at the thirty-some rows of passengers ahead of me, I had a rare and terrible reminder of the absurd improbability of human flight. We were hairless apes crowded into a thin metal tube hurtling through the sky at a speed and height beyond anything evolution prepared us to comprehend. The violence was over after a few seconds. United 1205 leveled out, having dropped at least 600 feet without warning.

The voice of an audibly flustered flight attendant came over the speaker. “OK. That was obviously unexpected.” An understatement. The fasten-seat-belt sign was still off. A moment later, after we’d laughed and settled back into the friendly fiction of air travel as a mundane commute, her voice returned to notify us that “the pilot took evasive action to avoid an aircraft in our flight path.” Then a few minutes later: “Aloha! United Airlines will be offering today’s DirecTV entertainment free of charge. Anyone who has already purchased in-flight entertainment will receive a reimbursement on their credit card.” In 2014, when checked luggage, snacks, and movies have all become nickel-and-dime profit centers for modern air carriers, this announcement surprised me. Something bad must have occurred. Something truly unusual and unexpected. After we landed safely in LAX, I spoke with members of the flight crew and learned what happened. Air Crashes and Miracl... Bartlett, Christopher Best Price: $6.94 Buy New $46.22 (as of 07:40 EST - Details)

Soon after reaching our cruising altitude of 33,000 feet, the collision alert system sounded an alarm. Our plane was on an imminent path with a US Airways flight over the Pacific, I learned. In these situations, the Traffic Collision Avoidance System (TCAS) communicates between the two planes, alerts the crew, and gives instruction to either dive or climb (ensuring that one plane dives while the other climbs). On United 1205, after the alarm went off, the captain looked out the windshield, exclaimed “Holy s***, there it is!” and immediately took the plane into a sharp dive. The first officer later told me the US Airways flight was “certainly too close for comfort.” Two details in particular are unsettling: Visual Confirmation — At altitude, a pilot can see a long way from the cockpit. Even so, at our speed, long distances can close incredibly quickly. Our plane was cruising at 600 mph. Two planes coming at each other at that speed will close a distance of five miles in fifteen seconds. The Response — Our aircraft was a 757-300, the longest narrow-body twinjet ever made. Violent maneuvers like Friday’s incident are not taken for minor events. According to an Aviation Safety Inspector with the FAA in Hawaii, the severity of the response in United 1205 speaks to the severity of the threat perceived by the pilot. The Deadliest Aviation Accident in History The Tenerife Airport Disaster is the deadliest aviation accident in history. In 1977, on the Spanish island of Tenerife, two 747s collided on the runway. The death toll was 583. On United 1205, I was one of 289 passengers. With the five or six crew members, the total count for our flight was around 295. We were six miles over the middle of the Pacific, so it’s safe to assume two things: 1) The US Airways flight coming at us was a passenger jet of similar size and 2) Everyone on both flights would have died. Had there been a collision, it would have been the new record, with an estimated 590 deaths, one of them mine. The Timeline Cruising Altitude FlightAware data on United 1205 between Kona and Los Angeles (Data corresponds to red line) On April 25th, our flight left Kona a little after our scheduled 12:35pm takeoff. Normally, the above graph of FlightAware data would be a flat line of cruising altitude 33,000 between takeoff and landing. But the data shows a small but unmistakable anomaly around 1:15pm: our speed and altitude quickly drop and recover. Bottom of the Dive FlightAware data on United 1205 between Kona and Los Angeles (Data corresponds to red line) This second version of the same graph shows the lowest altitude reached (the data on the left corresponds to the moveable red line on the graph). The lowest altitude in the data is 32,400 feet — making our dive at least 600 feet. Given the poor granularity of the data here, the drop may well exceed that number.

I’ve spoken to both airlines and FAA representatives in Hawaii and Los Angeles. United Airlines confirmed that an incident occurred and that it was significant enough to merit their own internal investigation. US Airways was unwilling to comment. US Airways 663 and 692 were in that neighborhood of the Pacific Ocean at that time, but without further information, I can’t determine the other side of the near miss. After we landed safely in Los Angeles, thankful to survive the near miss, the passenger next to me laughed and reminded me of George Carlin’s riff on word choice in air travel. “It’s not a near miss, it’s a near hit!”

Not A Problem Until It Is

I spoke with FAA representatives at length this week and my conversations led me to a shocking conclusion: airlines are essentially self-policed. With all its barefoot body scans in the TSA line, air travel doesn’t seem to suffer from a lack of oversight. And that’s true. We devote tremendous resources to ensuring security in air travel. However, the more I learn about the industry, the more it becomes clear that our safety in the air does not have the system of oversight we might imagine. Two airliners colliding six miles over the ocean would be a disaster of such proportion to be unthinkable to us. It was similarly unthinkable only two months ago though, that a passenger jet could simply disappear. Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 ended that fiction. It showed us that, even on a commercial flight with hundreds of other passengers, there is no global blanket of tracking enveloping us and keeping us safe. It’s still the open ocean out there.

The FAA might learn about the April 25th near miss in one of two ways: direct reporting by air-traffic controllers and indirect reporting (through the Aviation Safety Reporting System administered by NASA) by members of the flight crew. An hour east of Hawaii, “there’s no one out there but the pilot — that’s the only one seeing it” according to an FAA investigator in Hawaii. And so, when reporting the incident, the pilot decides if he wants to report the event. If reported, different points in the chain can determine it a “significant” or “non-significant” incident. The event on April 25th, which United Airlines itself considers a significant enough event to internally investigate, was either unreported or “non-significant” in the eyes of the FAA until this week. On Friday, two weeks after the near miss and my initial call with the FAA, I followed up with the agency and learned that the Air Traffic Organization (ATO) was looking into the incident. According to the FAA official I spoke with, the sheer fact that they’re exploring the event implied to him that they saw it as “significant,” even though they’d never passed it on to the FAA with any formal categorization. Two weeks of daily ATO reports to the FAA had gone by without a mention of this likely “significant” event. This official took issue with ATO not sharing the event, but admitted that there is no requirement for sharing, only common practice. I was shocked at the number of links in the reporting chain; not to mention how weak each appeared to be. The FAA even admitted that my initial information, the random phone call from a passenger, was “essential to [their] fact-finding.” Without the basic information I provided to them, they would not, by their own admission, have been able to connect the dots when the ATO began asking questions. Thankful as I am that someone is examining what happened, the system appears broken. The FAA is the only regulatory body with the authority to turn lessons of a near catastrophe into improvements in policy, procedure, or training. Yet, the FAA is in the dark on a near miss that could have taken more lives than any air accident in history. Air travel has a tremendous modern safety record. My experience asking questions about United 1205 however, has painted the picture of a safety system resting on its laurels.

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