George’s Point of View
While we are waiting for news of where Air France Flight 447 disappeared to, somewhere in the ocean (and no one can really say with any great specificity anything more specific than somewhere between Rio de Janeiro and Paris France because everywhere they apparently believe it was, they looked, and it wasn’t) Air France is coming out with a report.
An Air France assessment initiated by Chairman Jean-Cyril Spinetta in 2009 and performed by an international panel of eight aviation experts dubbed the Independent Safety Review Team is due to be released Jan 24, 2011.
Its inception was timed, not too surprisingly, six months after the fatal crash, and although officially having nothing to do with the fatal event, its timing alone suggests an optimistic attempt on the part of Air France’s media team to counterbalance the lack of consumer confidence in the airline after they lost a whole plane and 228 lives.
The report will cover training, technical and flight-safety issues, though the not-too-hidden agenda may be to reflect changes made since the crash of Air France Flight 447, (whose wreckage we all know has still not been located.) The report is a beginning of the “New Transparancy” proposed by Air France. There are people who would like to see that transparency extend to some old news, such as what is going on with the search for the wreckage of the worst accident in French aviation history.
The last (02:10) ACARS transmission from Flight 477 contained a set of coordinates indicating the location as 2°59?N 30°35?W officially the last known position, (when the twelve warning messages with the same time code indicated autopilot and auto-thrust system had disengaged, TCAS was in fault mode, and flight mode changed from ‘normal law’ to ‘alternate law’) but one wonders if the instrumentation was already in disagreement at that point, i.e. if that location data could be as faulty as the frozen pitot tubes.
So the report will be out today. The Assessment of Air France training, technical and flight-safety issues is bound to be a big event, but as the media and airline waves these initiatives in the public face, there are a lot of people still staring out to sea, looking for that lost wreckage, who won’t be distracted by any (see-here-look-at-this-news-see-how-much-we-are-improving) sleight of hand.
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Video captured by a passenger shows the liquid first trickling and then streaming down the aisle, soaking the carpeting.
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Middle Tennessee sees no shortage of car break-ins, but plane break-ins are more rare. However, the Metro Nashville Airport Authority told News 2 a suspect was taken into custody in Missouri for st…
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Federal officials say the two people aboard the cargo plane reported the fire moments after takeoff and requested to return to the Fairbanks airport.
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A federal aviation official says one of the two pilots of an airplane that was laden with fuel reported a fire on board shortly before the aircraft crashed and burned
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Nearly four years after a civilian skydiving aircraft collided with a Marine Corps MV-22 Osprey sitting on a San Diego runway, the U.S. government has settled the civil case after suing the businesses involved for damages
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The single-engine plane crashed just after 10am on Wednesday morning on a secondary runway near Terminal 1 at the North Carolina airport.
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An All Nippon Airways aircraft carrying a total of 211 people landed safely at an airport in Hokkaido in northern Japan, despite smoke emitting from one of its wings.
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Two people were feared dead after a rare cargo plane crashed in the far north of the United States on Tuesday, troopers in Alaska said.
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Two people are feared dead after a plane crashed in Fairbanks, Alaska, on Tuesday.
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It is not known yet how many people were on board.
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The plus-size passenger refused to give up an extra seat on a plane to a toddler.
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Report says Russia may be behind GPS interference over Baltic Sea since last August
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Emergency services were called to Sunshine Coast Airport after reports there was smoke coming from the cockpit of a Bonza plane on Tuesday afternoon.
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VH-EBN (pictured) is the first of Qantas’ A330-200LR aircraft to be upgraded with Viasat-capable wi-fi antennae, and is expected to finish its three-week retrofitting this week. The remainder of Qantas’ international widebody fleet will be progressively refitted over the next couple of years.
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MANILA – Two Philippine Navy (PN) aviators were killed after a training aircraft they were flying crashed in Cavite province on Thursday. In a statement, PN spokesperson Commander John Percie Alcos said the Robinson R-22 trainer helicopter with tail number NHT-421 tried to make an emergency…
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Debris and damage left behind more than two months after a plane crashed on Interstate 75 in Collier County.
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Social media does enable those who have had their proverbial 15 minutes of fame to get an extension.
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An alligator caused some trouble after it decided to wander onto the runway at MacDill Air Force Base Monday morning.
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