The Daily Background

The irony here is, perhaps literally, killer:

The National Transportation Safety Board warned 15 years ago that Alaska suffers too many air accidents from flying under conditions like those in which a De Havilland floatplane crashed on Monday, killing former Alaska senator Ted Stevens and four other passengers. The 1995 report found that a significant share of Alaska’s aviation accidents, most involving small planes, have resulted when pilots using only visual navigation encountered weather that normally would be considered unsafe for flying without instruments. “All aviation operations in Alaska have experienced a greater rate of accidents involving VFR [visual flight rules] into IMC [instrument meteorological conditions] compared to other parts of the country,” the NTSB stated. The report also cited an earlier NTSB study of Alaskan air-taxi safety, published in 1980, describing a persistent problem commonly known in the industry as the “bush syndrome”: a “mindset of risk-acceptance and a willingness to take risks.”

As we reported yesterday, Sen. Stevens (who was badly injured in the 1978 Anchorage airport crash that killed his first wife) was known among air-safety regulators for being “very protective” of his state’s aviators. Peter Goelz, who served as NTSB’s managing director during much of the 1990s, told Declassified that Stevens repeatedly argued that because of his state’s economic dependence on air transportation and its “unique” weather and terrain, regulators ought to make exceptions for aviation in Alaska.

So, the guy argues hard against air safety regulations that aim to stop pilots from taking off and doing dangerous maneuvers (despite the fact that his own first wife died in a plane crash before his very eyes), and this is what he gets. Okay then.

Filed under: Z-TDB Blog