The author, Richard Haines,
is a senior aerospace scientist and a member of the International Society
for Air Safety Investigators, which assists the NTSB in accident investigations.
The study was supported by a grant from the International Space Science
Organization and is the first technical report on the subject of air safety
and unidentified aerial phenomena produced by a newly formed organization
called NARCAP (see sidebar).
Says Haines, "If government
authorities are concerned about low probability events such as winds hear,
bird strikes, and lightning strikes -- which don’t occur very often but
when they do they can be disastrous -- then they should also be concerned
about UAP. The FAA has set up training requirements if pilots encounter
wind shear, even though wind shear might occur once in every one and a
half careers, which means you might go through your whole career and never
encounter wind shear. Nonetheless authorities are taking it very seriously.
"I argue that the kinds of
events I’m talking about occur with at least that level of frequency, or
more, and can produce significant changes in the readout of cockpit instruments
which can effect navigation and guidance and flight control particularly
with glass cockpits and fly-by-wire."
In searching through his
personal database of 3,400 pilot sightings from the past 50 years, Haines
found more than a 100 documented close encounters between an unidentified
object and a US commercial, private or military airplane that raised air
safety issues. Most involved near-miss and other high-speed maneuvers by
the UAP near the aircraft, such as that experienced by the TWA crew in
1977. A handful of these cases have actually involved passenger injury
following abrupt avoidance maneuvers by the pilot.
Instrument failures
In about a quarter of the
cases Haines examined, proximity to the unexplained object affected the
aircraft’s instruments or displays. These involved electromagnetic effects
to the aircraft’s navigation, guidance, or flight control systems.
In a March 12, 1977 case,
for example, a United Airlines flight from San Francisco experienced a
uncommanded heading change to the left. When the puzzled crew looked to
the left they saw an perfectly round, extremely bright white light as big
or bigger than a DC-10 at about their own altitude. Noticing that their
three compasses "were all reading different headings," the flight officer
uncoupled the autopilot as the object kept pace with them for about 4 or
5 minutes before finally picking up speed and disappearing.
The pilot never filed an
official report on the incident. In fact, fear of ridicule or worse prevents
most pilots from reporting such encounters; some have even been told not
to report their sighting publicly. Haines calls this "the law of diminishing
reports," and estimates that "for every pilot who is brave enough to come
forward with a case of something he can't identify, there are probably
30 to 40 who don't."
Strange traffic
Haines notes that those who
are brave enough to report such encounters almost always use terms other
than "UFO," "UAP" or "flying saucer" to describe their encounters, making
it almost impossible to track down these incidents in government databases
of the NTSB and FAA.
Instead, Haines believes
that pilots often use such generic terms as "traffic" to report these unknowns.
"If that's the case," he says, "the numbers of such encounters swells to
the thousands."
Haines’ study raises questions
that should make any frequent flyer sit up and take notice. What if the
pilot makes the wrong control input at the wrong time, or otherwise overreacts,
during an extremely close encounter with a UAP? What if the pilot is relying
on his instruments while anomalous electromagnetic effects are causing
them to malfunction? Could close encounter flight performances create cockpit
distractions that inhibit the crew from flying the airplane in a safe manner?
~
No immediate threat
Despite raising the alarm,
Haines emphasizes that "an immediate physical threat to aviation safety
due to collision does not exist." Why? Not thanks to the
pilots’ evasive maneuvers but because of the reported high degree of maneuverability
shown by the UAP in such encounters.
What do aviation experts
think of this new report on UFOs and air safety?
"If his goal to convince
people that they need to look at it, that's fine," says Andy Turnbull,
co-author of "Aviation Accident Analysis," a 1999 NASA-sponsored analysis
of US aviation accidents. "Our report is based on the NTSB. If he wants
the NTSB to change their accident database, he has to show sufficient proof
that the UAP is a significant factor in aviation safety. And he states
at the beginning of his report that UAP are not a significant threat to
air safety."
"But " says Haines, "they
can pose a hazard to aviation safety and should be dealt with appropriately
and without bias, whatever UAP are. "
Haines recommends several
concrete steps to deal with the situation. Aviation officials should take
the phenomena seriously and issue clear procedures for reporting them without
fearing ridicule, reprimand, or other career impairment and in a manner
that will support scientific research.
He also believes that airlines
should implement instructional courses that teach pilots about optimal
control procedures to carry out when flying near UAP and also what data
to try to collect about them, if possible.
Finally, he recommends that
a central clearinghouse be identified or established to collect, analyze
and report UAP sightings for the continuing benefit of aviation safety
as well as scientific curiosity.
"I believe," says Haines,
"that we should not wait for a midair collision to occur before we take
this subject seriously and do something about it."
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