Ever heard of Sten Molin? He was the pilot whose overaggressive use of the rudder pedals of an American Airlines Airbus brought the airplane down on Long Island late in 2001 with the loss of 265 lives. His name was in all the papers. The National Transportation Safety Board said it was his fault.
Close reading of the NTSB report, released in late December 2004, reveals, however, that Molin was merely a convenient fall guy. The real cause of the accident was a conspiracy of ignorance persistently tolerated by the Federal Aviation Administration, the airlines and the airplane manufacturers. The pilot was the last link in a chain of causes that made him as much the innocent victim as anyone else who died in that airplane.
Molin, whom colleagues described as a smooth, accurate and above-average pilot, was just doing what he had been trained to do, and under circumstances in which he and all other pilots believed that nothing they did could possibly hurt the airplane. That a few not-very-hard kicks on the Airbus' unusually sensitive rudder pedals could actually break the vertical fin off the plane, dooming it to certain loss of control, was a fact that only some aeronautical engineers, and a few oddly reticent bureaucrats at the FAA, understood.
The Federal Aviation Regulations prescribe the strength of every part of an airplane. Some requirements are based on turbulence, others on maneuvers that the pilot can perform. Because the strains that maneuvers impose on an airplane increase as the plane's speed increases, engineers select a certain speed, called the maneuvering speed, as an upper boundary. Before the Airbus accident, nearly all pilots believed that as long as an airplane was flying at or below the maneuvering speed, nothing they could do would break it.
That belief was universal in part because it was so logical. After all, what would be the point of publishing a "maneuvering speed" if it were not a safe speed for maneuvering? Besides, the FAA explicitly supported it. The government's own Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge says "any combination of flight control usage [below the maneuvering speed], including full deflection of the controls ... should not create an excessive air load."
