As The Wall Street Journal reports, investigations of nine commercial plane crashes this year — including one that killed an entire professional hockey team — revealed gross violations and errors. Investigators uncovered drunk or sedated flight crews, forged safety documents and panicked pilots.

The Journal cites an assessment by Ascend, a consulting firm in London, that the Russian fatalities and crashes, adjusted for air-traffic volumes, this year exceed those in less developed countries with longstanding safety problems such as Congo and Indonesia.

As recently as 2009, after a safety campaign, Russia had no fatal crashes. Since then, however, accidents have surged at small domestic airlines that were largely overlooked by the safety initiatve.

Internationally, accidents have declined in recent years, as nations have toughened standards for their own carriers and foreign airlines. But experts say in some countries domestic aviation has remained far more hazardous. They blame Russia’s problems largely on ineffective regulation and poorly trained pilots who fail to follow modern safety procedures.

Russian officials, however, reject the criticism. They say recently mandated tighter regulations and stricter inspections will soon resolve the problem, and that officials already have shut down some small airlines and grounded aging aircraft.

In the meantime, however, corporate air-safety specialists say many foreign companies that must transport staff to remote Russian oil fields or mines have forbidden employees from using most Russian airlines or boarding Russian-built airplanes.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

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U.S. Rep. John Mica, chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said he will ask the Transportation Security Administration to revamp the program, which is known by its critics as “chat down.”

Mica told the Boston Herald that, while visiting Boston’s Logan International Airport earlier this month to check the security program,  “What I saw was a mundane, intense bureaucratic exercise.”

The test program requires TSA agents to look for suspicious behavioral clues as they ask passengers routine questions. Mica said what he heard during his visit to Logan this month was “mindless chat with every passenger” that was a far cry from the more probing Israeli-style airport questioning that the program is modeled after and that Mica has praised in the past.

“It’s still not a risk-based system,” he said. “It’s not a thinking system.”

As The Huffington Post reported earlier this week, Mica said that while he was at Logan he watched about a dozen agents quiz passengers. “I put my ear up and listened to some idiotic questions,” he said, citing questions asking where travelers were coming from, why they had been there and where they were going.

The news accounts did not indicate what kinds of questions Mica would want TSA agents to raise. Under the Israeli approach, as one security expert told The New York Times last year, agents “focus on the travelers’ country of origin, their profession, visas that are stamped in their passports, places they have visited, people they know and the color of their skin. If you say you’re a Renaissance art scholar, they’ll ask you if you know who Titian is.”

Mica, however, raised another issue: Even though, under the trial program, passengers selected for further screening are supposed to go through body scanners, on the day he visited, the machines were out of service because there weren’t enough trained personnel to run them.

TSA officials in Boston bridled at the congressman’s remarks. George Naccara, the agency’s security director at Logan, said his behavior detection officers received five days of classroom training and up to 32 hours of on-the-job training.

Since it was launched at Logan late this summer, the program has screened about 165,000 passengers. The TSA has referred a dozen people to law enforcement authorities, mostly for immigration violations or outstanding warrants, Naccara said.

The trial now is being expanded to Detroit, and Mica is seeking changes before it is extended further. Mica is a frequent critic of TSA even though, as The Hill points out, he helped write the law that created the agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

North American air races and air shows attract an estimated 10 to 12 million spectators a year.

Yet the intense competition of the annual Reno event, which draws about 200,000 viewers, fuels enormous risk-taking by pilots. “These guys have always been pushing the edge of the envelope in terms of driving the airplanes hard, driving engines hard,” Massachusetts Institute of Technology aeronautics professor John Hansman told USA Today.

As The New York Times explained, air racing is like aerial NASCAR, with low-flying pilots negotiating a course marked by pylons at up to 500 miles per hour and sometimes flying wingtip to wingtip. Yet the much more widely attended air shows, where thousands gather to watch aerial acrobatics and stunts, have led to the worst tragedies.

One of those tragedies came in 2002, when 77 people were killed and 543 injured after a military jet flew into a crowd of spectators at an air base in Ukraine. In 1988, 70 people were killed, and hundreds were injured, during a show at the U.S. air base in Ramstein, Germany, when three jets from an Italian stunt-flying team collided and crashed into the crowd.

And on Saturday, a day after the Reno tragedy, a stunt pilot was killed in a show in Martinsburg, W.Va., when his plane crashed. No spectators were injured.

In Reno, however, dozens of spectators were hurt, and 15 people remained hospitalized Monday. The dead include nine spectators and the pilot of a World War II era plane, a P-51 Mustang.

As The New York Times said in a separate story, a preliminary report of the accident will be released by the National Transportation Safety Board on Friday, but the complete investigation will not be wrapped up for months. It is expected to examine federal regulations on air races, which are handled by the Federal Aviation Administration.

The FAA, as the Los Angeles Times noted, is responsible for inspecting  the course and the proposed spectator area to prevent crashes from injuring viewers. In August, the FAA canceled a race in Camarillo, Calif., because of concerns about spectator safety.

For the Reno event, race officials, after consulting with federal authorities, barred six of the 21 jets scheduled to compete out of concerns about engine modifications, according to the Reno Gazette-Journal. The newspaper said there have been 17 previous fatalities in the 48-year history of the event, but Friday was the first time spectators were killed.

STUART SILVERSTEIN

An investigation by The Associated Press found that while fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the U.S. during the last decade, reduced opportunities for flying manually could be leaving some pilots less prepared to make critical split-second decisions when they need to take the controls.

The airline industry is suffering from “automation addiction,” said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chairman of a Federal Aviation Administration committee on pilot training. “We’re seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes,” he added.

The AP cited the draft version of an FAA study that says that, in 30 percent of major incidents, pilots had difficulty flying manually or made mistakes with automated controls.

Though the FAA in May proposed requiring that airlines train pilots on how to recover from a stall, other regulations are forcing pilots to cede more control to automation. That includes a rule that pilots need to use their autopilot at altitudes above 24,000 feet.

In the most recent fatal airline accident in the U.S., a crash in 2009 near Buffalo, N.Y. that killed 50 people, the co-pilot of a regional airliner programmed incorrect information into the plane’s computers, causing it to slow to an unsafe speed.

The startled captain responded by repeatedly pulling back on the control yoke, overriding two safety systems, when the correct procedure was to push forward.

An investigation later found there were no mechanical or structural problems that would have prevented the plane from flying if the captain had responded correctly. Instead, his actions caused the aerodynamic stall that sent the plane plummeting.

Errors by pilots, or at least shortcomings in their performance in a crisis, also were cited in the deadly crashes that year of Turkish and French airliners.

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That’s because pilots or flight attendants open the cockpit door to get to the lavatory, enabling any would-be terrorist to leap from his seat and barge into the cockpit in a matter of seconds.

It’s a scenario the Federal Aviation Administration has been aware of for years and one that has prompted many in the airline industry to push for installation of secondary barriers between the cabin and the cockpit.

“We’re in a race against time, frankly, because there is going to be another attack,” Capt. Ed Folsom, a United Airlines pilot who has played an active role in the development of the retractable, fence-like barriers, told The Atlantic. “I’m no rocket scientist, so if I can see the vulnerability, so can everyone else.”

On April 28, 2007, for example, a passenger filed a complaint saying that the cockpit door was open for five minutes mid-flight, according to TSA records. More recently, on May 3, 2010, a passenger said the cockpit door was opened a minimum of five times during the flight.

“Once that door comes open, you’re vulnerable to another attack like 9/11,” Capt. Paul Onorato, a commercial airline pilot and former president of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Associations, told The Atlantic.

According to Onorato, the coalition has drawn up scenarios that show terrorists are able to “blow past” a flight attendant and get into the cockpit within three seconds. Though the secondary barriers can also be breached, supporters say they would give crews a few extra seconds to react to threats.

The FAA, however, has yet to mandate the devices, largely due to the cost  — about $5,000 to $10,000 per barrier. But a committee that includes representatives of the FAA and airlines is preparing a report exploring use of the barriers. It’s due next month, which marks the 10th anniversary of 9/11.

In addition, U.S. Rep. Steve Israel (D-NY), a longtime advocate of secondary barriers, reintroduced a bill in April calling for mandatory installation of the devices on commercial aircraft.

Meanwhile, United Airlines has begun voluntarily installing the barriers, according to The Atlantic. Prior to its merger with Delta, Northwest installed barriers in some planes but negative feedback from crews–the devices made meal and beverage service to the cockpit difficult, for example — killed any plans for widespread installation.

LILLY FOWLER

As ABC News reports, critics say that pilot fatigue frequently endangers airline passengers. More than two dozen accidents and over 250 fatalities have been linked to pilot fatigue over the past two decades, according to the National Transportation Safety Board, including the 2009 crash of Colgan flight 3407 near Buffalo, N.Y., which killed 50 people.

“It’s very disappointing for us and to have these deadlines be missed is a significant setback,” said Scott Maurer, who lost his daughter Lorin in the Colgan crash.

In 2010, Congress passed a bill requiring the FAA to make new rules to prevent pilot fatigue. The FAA proposed lengthening the current eight-hour rest period between shifts for pilots and shortening the maximum workday, which is currently 16 hours.

FAA spokesman Les Dorr did not explain why the agency missed the deadline but in an e-mail to ABC news, he said the FAA is determined to ensure that pilots “are fit and rested when they report for duty.”

“The FAA is working aggressively to complete a new pilot fatigue rule, as well as separate rules that address pilot qualifications and training,” Dorr added.

According to The Wall Street Journal, release of the new rules could be weeks or even months away.

In a statement, the airline industry’s major trade group, the Air Transport Association, reiterated its position that the FAA must consider the potentially high costs, and rely on scientific research, before imposing a rule change.