On the night of October 31, 2000, at a little after eleven o'clock, a Singapore Airlines Boeing 747 turned onto a runway at Taiwan's Chiang Kai Shek International Airport and accelerated. As the plane lifted into the air, its undercarriage struck some construction equipment. The aircraft crashed and burst into flames. Eighty-two people died.
Flight SQ006 was on the wrong runway. Runway 5 Right (5R) had been closed for repairs, and the flight should have departed from runway 5 Left instead. There are numerous theories as to why the plane, with three experienced pilots on the flight deck, came to take that fatal wrong turning, but in a sense they are academic, because Singapore Airlines has accepted responsibility for the crash. Does that mean the case is closed? It might have done, but for two developments that may have repercussions going beyond the events of October 31.
The first concerns the reaction to the crash by Taiwan's Civil Aeronautics Administration, the equivalent of the FAA in the United States and the CAA in the United Kingdom. One might think that, given Chiang Kai Shek's questionable safety record--in February 1998 an Airbus crashed there, killing 202 people--coupled with the fact that SQ006 had been able to turn onto a defective runway at all, with no barrier to prevent it, a little humility might have seemed in order. Not a bit of it. Mere hours after the crash, the head of the administration was giving a live interview to the BBC World Service's radio news program, "The World Today." He admitted that he did not know the facts, but he was adamant that there was no way the airport authorities could have been at fault. Before the wreckage was cold enough to allow the first investigators near it, Taiwan was acquitted of all blame.
An experienced spokesperson, well versed in the art of public relations, would have known that the important thing was not to say anything that one might have cause to regret later. "We are awaiting the result of investigations and as soon as the facts are known we will be making a statement." That was all the situation called for; it was all that the situation allowed for. As it was, the CAA came across as bordering on the arrogant.
It mattered, because Taiwan has so few opportunities to tread the international stage that it ought to make the best of those that come its way, even in tragic circumstances. It mattered even more as awkward facts began to emerge. The relevant runway charts had been changed a couple of days before the fatal crash, and nobody seemed sure if the pilots had been briefed about them. A flight attendant maintained that the sidelights of the defective runway had been turned on, giving rise to the impression that it was an active runway. (The airport authorities, on the other hand, have yet to state unequivocally whether the lights were on or off.) There were no barriers at the entrance to the defective runway because "in certain weather conditions" the first few hundred meters of it were authorized for use as a taxiway. Other pilots reported that they had warned of the dangers inherent in leaving runway 5R open, one going so far as to say that "it was an accident waiting to happen."
The timing was particularly unfortunate, because three days later Taipei hosted a major international tourism conference de signed to boost the island's reputation as a leisure destination. One of the things a tourist resort needs is a steady supply of planes delivering customers. But thanks to the second crash-related development, there is a possibility, to put it no higher, that some pilots' associations will call for a boycott of the island's airports.
The three pilots of SQ006 survived the crash and have been forbidden to leave Taiwan until prosecutors decide whether or not to charge them with causing death by negligence. If the international airline community was alarmed before, that really set the cat among the pigeons. Now some of its members are saying that, in practice, commercial pilots are never charged with manslaughter because knowing they might face such charges would inhibit them from cooperating with personnel responsible for flight safety. Flying is exceptionally safe these days, one reason being that pilots are given maximum encouragement to own up to their mistakes. Remove that immunity, and standards will drop. If Taiwan is going to break the unwritten international code and charge the pilots of SQ006 with manslaughter, the safest course is for airmen to bypass the island altogether.
This reasoning is spurious. No one has ever suggested that a drunken driver who kills somebody should be spared prosecution because the police want to know more about drunken driving, and the felon would not cooperate if he knew he faced certain prosecution; yet pilots, who are in a position to kill far more people than the average drunk, want to be treated as a special case.
But for present purposes, that is not the point. The point concerns the shrill manner in which the ROC authorities asserted their authority over the hapless pilots against the unsavory background of a turf dispute. The professionals responsible for investigating the circumstances of the crash wanted to be allowed to get on with their job undisturbed by policemen in muddy boots trampling through the evidence. The prosecutors, learning of this, sent up a wail of protest echoed by the Minister of Justice, who said that no foreign power had the right to interfere with the administration of Taiwan's criminal justice system. Meanwhile, the Singapore-based pilots languish in Taiwan.
By invoking the issue of Taiwan's sovereignty in this way, the prosecutors and the minister did themselves a disservice at a time when the eyes of the world were focused upon them. The fact that they are right in law does not excuse their failure to consider how the script would play abroad.
What can be done about this? In Washington, the ROC retains public relations experts to lobby for it in the corridors of power. It is time that some of that money was diverted home, where it could fund a team of experienced Western advisers employed to fine-tune official statements that are likely to be relayed beyond Taiwan itself. Taiwan prides itself on the way it markets its products. Perhaps it is time it learned how to market itself.