Airways are safest they’ve ever been

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Airways are safest they’ve ever been
By Alan Levin USA TODAY
USA Today
30 Jun 2006

The descent to Tucson was spectacular, the airline pilots recalled later, as the Boeing 737 glided between a canopy of stars and the sparkling lights of the city. The beautiful conditions masked a deadly hazard ahead in the darkness.

Despite charts showing a 4,687-foot mountain peak in their path, the pilots eased the jet to just below 4,000 feet. Only seconds away from a collision, the flight crew noticed the city’s lights slowly disappearing behind a vague dark shape rising above the cockpit.

In an earlier era, this flight in January 2002 would have crashed, killing themore than 100 people aboard. It would have been tallied as yet another case of a pilot accidentally flying a plane into the ground— the leading cause of aviation deaths around the world.

But a new safety device saved their lives, according to an account of the incident obtained by USA TODAY from documents and interviews. As the jet bore down on the mountain, a mechanical voice boomed in the cockpit: “Terrain, terrain! PULL UP! PULL UP!” It was a computer that keeps an eye on every hilltop and mountain in the world, and it warned the crewjust in time. The pilots
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