John J. Nance | |
---|---|
Occupation | Novelist, Lawyer, Airline Captain, US Air Force Lt.Colonel/Pilot, Broadcaster |
Nationality | American |
Genre | Aviation-based thrillers, non-fiction |
Website | |
http://www.johnjnance.com |
John J. Nance (born 5 July, 1946 in Dallas, Texas), is an American pilot, aviation safety expert and author. His books primarily focus on aviation, with a great deal of technical detail.
Biography
Born in Dallas, Texas, Nance joined the United States Air Force and served in both Vietnam, and latterly as a Lt Colonel in the US Air Force Active Reserve in Operation Desert Storm in Iraq. After retirement from the US Air Force, Nance became a commercial aviation pilot, and has logged over 13,000 hours.
After working for ABC affiliate WKAA in Dallas as an aviation expert, he joined ABC News and an aviation editor for Good Morning America form 1995. Nance has also appeared as an expert aviation commentator on over 1300 radio and television shows, including The MacNeil-Lehrer Report, Oprah and Larry King Live.[1]
A New York Times award winning author, Nance books Pandora's Clock and Medusa's Child were both adapted as four-hour television miniseries.[2]
Nance holds both a Bachelor of Arts and juris doctor degrees from Southern Methodist University. A licensed attorney, he lives in University Place, Washington.
Controversial thesis on Airline Safety
One of Nance's pioneering books - originally labeled as "controversial" by some misguided critics because he was the first to point out the "naked emperor" of Airline Deregulation's clearly detrimental influence on airline safety - is BLIND TRUST: How Deregulation Has Jeopardized Airline Safety and What You Can Do About it. The pioneering element of the book, however, was not the revelation that the Airline Deregulation Act of 1978 was a safety disaster, but the first major, public presentation of human factors, human performance, and human error considerations as the pivotal missing elements in the airline safety equation. In other words, air safety in general and airline safety in particular had, to the late seventies, essentially ignored the reality that more than 85% of airline accidents were caused by nothing more than human mistakes (instead of mechanical failures), and has refused to acknowledge the reality that humans - even pilots - can never be perfect in their daily performance. While backup systems of intricate complexity and numbers had been developed to backup mechanical aspects of flying passengers (such as two or three extra hydraulic systems in case one failed), there were essentially no backup systems for a crew making a mistake. Worse, even a three-person crew was often the equivalent of one in that the captain ruled and the subordinate pilots, traditionally, were reluctant to point out worries or mistakes. Instead of incorporating a robust expectation that human errors needed backup systems as much as mechanical errors, the industry had built it's safety system on a fatally flawed expectation that good pilots and mechanics could achieve perfection. this is why the airline industry was perpetually surprised and upset whenever those professionals committed a mistake that metastasized into an accident and killed passengers (such as the worst airline accident in history which occurred through a long chain of human mistakes at Tenerife on March 27, 1977, a disaster that killed 583 people when two Boeing 747's collided on the ground).
An original writer under this heading has sadly attempted to regurgitate a long-discredited argument that Nance failed to completely convince in BLIND TRUST when he linked Deregulation to air safety decline. Here in 2008, the evidence from the past 20 years is clearly overwhelming that instead, Nance was dead right in linking Deregulation to safety decline despite the leaders of the eighties inability to detect or acknowledge it. That original contributor wrote:
"In BLIND TRUST, Nance attempts to persuade the reader that airline safety has been jeopardized by the 1978 Airline Deregulation Act. He devotes 7 chapters to Air Florida Flight 90, which crashed with ice on the wings, on January 13, 1982. In that book, Nance attempts to prove "the crash of Air Florida's Palm 90 was without question a deregulation accident."
Contrary to that clearly discredited critique, Air Florida, by definition, was a deregulatory accident in that the airline could not have and would not have existed has the Dergulation Act of 1978 never been passed. Further, the ability of entrepreneurs with no airline experience and no understanding of the special and delicate nature of airline safety to raise money and start an "airline" was the bedrock of the Air Florida experience, and the disaster in 1982. And by the end of that decade, even Delta - who had derisively dismissed human factors training and any intimation that deregulation was a safety problem - had reversed course after living through two years from hell in which they lost flights (two of them at DFW) and had several more very embarrassing incidents which underlined the deregulatory pressures that led them quickly in 1989 to embrace Crew Resource Management training.
In that previous swipe at BLIND TRUST - obviously, again, long-discredited by what has occurred since the eighties - the previous author writes:
"It is a very controversial statement [that airline dergulation assaulted safety], because it ignores crashes which occurred before deregulation, with much the same factors as the Air Florida crash. In a 1986 newspaper article, Nance insisted that airline flying is less safe than it was before Deregulation. However, Nance did not cite any statistics to back up that assertion. That is because accident statistics show just the opposite. "...accident statistics are virtually useless in measuring the potential for airline crashes," said Nance. In fact, there is no way to objectively measure the potential for airline crashes other than to compile statistics on past accidents and to diligently investigate each new accident, to find the cause so future repetitions can be prevented. When airline safety history is measured with the historical stats, which John Nance rejects, then the only objective conclusion is that airline safety has improved significantly, from what it was before Deregulation."
The reality here is completely opposite the confused attitude of the critic, who grossly misunderstands the useless nature of old accident statistics as they applied to late seventies and eighties realities. Frankly, it's sad that such folks still hold to such myopic and thoroughly dismissed ideas. As Dr. John Lauber famously said in the late eighties (Lauber, the creator of the Air Safety Reporting System run by NASA, and a former Board Member of the NTSB), "The absence of accidents in aviation does not prove the presence of safety." In fact, when there are so few overt occurrences in a statistical dataset against millions of operations, the so-called "statistics" derived may be completely useless since they are only refletcing the statistical noise level. One of the main problems in the eighties and nineties was an absence of a way to effectively measure the Safety Buffer: the "distance" between the point at which a problem occurs in a safety system and the point at which all the systems designed to safely absorb that problem fail and an accident results. In that gray zone of problems, errors, and failures prevented by good systems (or chance) from becoming accidents is the real story of airline safety, and for those on the front lines of the airline business in the eighties, as Nance certainly was, the reality was inescapable that the safety buffer was being thinned catastrophically by financially-mandated cutbacks in maintenance, training, and even FAA support (through ATC as well as overwhelmed Flight Standards). While political leaders with a vested interest in deregulation joined clueless airline executives determined not to acknowledge any of the panicked information being transmitted from their ranks by arrogantly rejecting the idea that the deregulatory bloodletting was putting the nation at risk, more and more near-misses were occurring every year, and, for that matter, more accidents and incidents by the end of the decade. The tawdry histories of the end of both Eastern Airlines and Pan Am show, definitively, how badly those deregulatory-assaulted airlines had performed at their end, and in lawsuits and prosecutions following Eastern's collapse in particular, it was unequivocally revealed that the airline had ceased to function safety in their last year, pressuring pilots to take questionable aircraft, presiding over a hatefest of poor relationships in the ranks that directly impacted safety, and cutting corners wholesale on maintenance staffs and procedures (as well as parts supplies) under the rancid "leadership" of Frank Lorenzo, who later brought Continental Airlines to the brink of extinction. These pressures derived from one and only one source: Deregulation.
There are voluminous sources available today to not only put these old arguments in their graves, but to show, as well, how profoundly the financial pressures of deregulation pushed the safety system to the brink. Nance's statements in the 80's were not only self-evident and correct, they were also endorsed (albeit reluctantly) by most aviation professionals - even those who supported deregulation - when he said that airline safety was not where it should be, and that the industry was not as safe as it had been.
The hidden story in all this, however, is not some essentially silly and archaic debate over a long-ago settled fact (that airline deregulation proved dangerous to air safety in it's first 15 years), but the fact that while all other aspects of airline safety were being shoved toward the abyss, the revolutionary new discipline of Crew Resource Management and the recognition that both morale and human performance must be considered, engineered in, and monitored, improved the safety curve at the same moment deregulation was dragging it down. Many airline professionals still do not fully recognize the degree to which those two curves cancelled out a holocaust of crashes, but by the mid-nineties - and without any mandating of such training by the FAA - CRM and it's derivative disciplines (LOFT, ASAP, etc. etc.)had built the foundation of what would, after 2001, create the most amazing period of air safety in airline history (2001-2008) in the United States.
On conclusion, those who would look back at the eighties and make long-discredited arguments that the number of major airline accidents somehow disproved BLIND TRUST'S thesis missed the two main points: Deregulation was a virtual disaster in its negative influence on airline safety (well proven by history), and the worst effects were cancelled out by the rapid rise of the industry's embrace the simple truth that human-caused accidents could not be diminished or eliminated until the human failure causes of those accidents were addressed in completely different ways. This was, in other words, the dawning of a revolution that has now beneficially spilled over to help another even more important public "utility," American Healthcare, where between 48,000 and 96,000 hospitals patients are killed annual by nothing more than human mistakes (See the Institute of Medicine report of 1999, "To Err is Human.")
Bibliography
- Splash of Colors
- Blind Trust
- On Shaky Ground
- Final Approach
- What Goes Up: The Global Assault on Our Atmosphere
- Scorpion Strike
- Phoenix Rising
- Pandora's Clock
- Medusa's Child
- The Last Hostage
- Blackout
- Headwind
- Turbulence
- Fire Fight
- Skyhook
- Golden Boy: The Harold Simmons Story
- Saving Cascadia
- Orbit
- "Harvey Wang" The life story
References
- ^ "John J Nance Bio at ABC". ABC News. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
- ^ "John J Nance Bio". Random House. Retrieved 2008-08-19.
External links
- Official website
- Please use a more specific IMDb template. See the documentation for available templates.