Aviation’s New Ride-Em Cowboy Poster-Child

George’s Point of View

Americans are always looking for new anti-heroes, and Steven Slater has slipped into that role for a number of groups, especially those who have to deal with a surly public, who always have to be polite for the sake of their jobs and bite back their equally surly response.

With the job shortage being what it is, people are feeling the weight of their bills and putting up with their need to take this job and shove it–

But in a more specific sense, he also stands as a symbol of problems in the aviation industry, inside and out. Air travel means discomfort, the bother, the fuss, and a hundred goading needling annoyances: the rude attendant or passenger, hot plane, lost luggage, uncomfortable airline seat, on top of putting up with being too hot, too cold, too miserable. Steven Slater has a whole world of people out there who applaud him for not being “too polite.”

Slater is one cowboy who would have never had his ten seconds of fame if Jet Blue had provided what every cowboy needs: a side kick. Where was the in-house support? While you’re on that plane, what an airline attendant says is law. (Just ask the Feds.) If the machine had been working properly, it would be that unruly passenger who would be behind bars. Whoever should have been backing up Slater, wasn’t. Instead of one lone cowboy taking it on the chin, Jet Blue needs to step forward and take care of their own.

When Steven Slater decided he just wasn’t going to take it any more, and slid off the Jet Blue plane with a couple of beers, he became the poster child for dissatisfied people everywhere, who suddenly put themselves in his rebellious shoes and liked the feeling.

What is more American than the pursuit of happiness?

After all, we’re all cowboys.

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    ATR De-Icing


    Ice is the friend of no plane.

    But there was no excuse for the icing problem on the UTAir flight that we are calling the Tyumen crash.

    On that flight, both Pratt & Whitney Canada PW124 engines were operating till impact. The plane reached 690 feet and banked 35 degrees to the right, then rolled left banking at 50 degrees, demonstrating instability in the roll axis. Why? Ice.

    The ATR 72 had a decent safety record until the 1993 icing incident that caused a fatal crash. This problem was handled by Avions de Transport Regional, the planes designers, by adapting the icing characteristics of the aircraft. They added icing boot extensions to the wing leading edges. (A deicing boot is a ice protection system installed on aircraft surfaces to permit a mechanical deicing in flight.)

    The UTAIr 72 was not de-iced at Tyumen before the fatal flight. There’s not much benefit to adding a safety feature if it is ignored.

    The ATR 72-210 is equipped with PW 127 engines with a maximum certified takeoff rating of 2750 SHP, and a normal power rating of 2475 SHP. The ATR 72 employs a four bladed propeller. The engine has a reduction gearbox assembly . Because the ATR 72-210 is “stretched” ( much longer than the 42s) ATR 42 pilots are warned about taking off an ATR 72 with too excessive a takeoff pitch angle, which would cause the tail would strike the runway. The ATR 72 has a maximum takeoff weight of 47,465 lbs., and carries 11,020 lbs. of fuel. The engine noise and vibration from the props can get uncomfortable.

    Most pilots would not need to be reminded that de-icing is essential when the conditions for ice are likely.

    The NTSB has investigated fifty icing accidents and 202 fatalities from 1998 to 2007. We might be able to conjecture that at least some of these incidents would not have happened if the planes had been properly de-iced to begin with, though for some this is too simplistic an assumption.

    There were fatal consequences to ATRs which ignored de-icing as demonstrated by the UTair ATR 72 that crashed after taking off from Tyumen in Siberia, killing 31 and mangling 12.

    After the disaster, UTAir said that all UTAir planes would henceforth have mandatory de-icing, a change from allowing the pilot to decide whether or not to deice.

    Icing has also been determined as the as cause of two earlier fatal ATR 72 crashes:

    • -Aerocaribbean Flight 883 crashed near Sancti Spiritus November 2010 killing 68 when the plane encountered extreme meteorological conditions that caused it to ice up at 6,100 meters.
    • -American Eagle Flight 4184 crashed killing 68 when in a holding pattern over Chicago encountering a supercooled cloud and rain causing ice which had built up on the wings.

    Icing can take place in a temperature band from minus 12 to plus 4 Celsius.

    We have seen a dozen ATR 72 accidents caused by other events:

    • July 2011-The Eurolot ATR 72 collided with a baggage truck in Warszawa-Frédéric Chopin Airport in Poland.
    • Nov 2009-The Kingfisher ATR 72 skidded off the runway on landing at Mumbai-Chhatrapati Shivaji International Airport in India.
    • August 2009-The Bangkok Airways ATR 72 that skidded off the runway and struck the Koh Samui Airport ATC tower in Thailand.
    • Feb 2008-The Air Bagan ATR 72 that skidded off the runway on takeoff from Putao Airport in Myanmar.
    • July 2007-The Jet Airways ATR 72 made a heavy landing before the mid-point of the runway and bounced a couple of times before going off the runway at Indore Airport, India.
    • March 2006-The Air Deccan ATR 72 that made a landing at Bangalore Airport that was so hard, the new plane had to be sold as spare parts.
    • Aug 2005-The Tuninter ATR 72 ran out of fuel, both engines quit and the plane ditched in the sea killing 16.
    • March 2004-The American Eagle ATR 72 that made a bounced landing before skidded off the runway injuring 13 while landing at Luis Munoz International Airport, Puerto Rico.
    • Dec 2002-The Transasia Airways cargo flight that crashed into the ocean killing 2 crew.
    • Jan 1995-The cargo ATR 72 that crashed in Taiwan killing 4 crew.
    • Dec 1994-The Air Gabon ATR 72 skidded off the runway and struck trees while landing at Oyem Airport.
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    Pinnacle Raises Security Bar. Maybe

    The passenger’s luggage tripped security in Tulsa, and so Pinnacle security detained it. However, the passenger who owned the luggage was free to travel to his destination.

    However, this is what is unclear to me:

    The bag flunked, and stayed in Tulsa. The passenger, however flew to Memphis, although his luggage was arrested (explosives detection.) Shouldn’t they have taken him off the flight with his luggage?

    So after he arrived in Memphis, law enforcement interviewed him, and he passed. But they’ll be shipping his luggage to him later. Does something seem strange here?

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    Afriqiyah Airways A330 crash investigation

    The insurers have had months to move this case along.
    They had months to compensate the families of victims. Have they done so?
    Word is that they have not.

    The one year anniversary of the crash is on May 12.
    Look at what we have. No compensation.
    Look at the debris field. Do we have spoliation of evidence? Common elements like weather wreak havoc on evidence. Just look at what rust does and you have a pretty good idea of the kind of details can be erased by weather. So if the evidence has been defaced by exposure to the elements, how might spoilation of evidence affect the case? No doubt it will result in a series of failed attempts. Failure to secure evidence. Inability to analyze degraded evidence. Obfuscated results.

    For crash investigators, fresh evidence can be as easy to read as a book. Waiting until the evidence is unintelligible leaves us with no Rosetta Stone to help us get to the cause. Another missed opportunity to make aviation a little safer. Another missed opportunity to bring closure to the families who were immeasurably damaged by this crash.

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    Dana Air: Pursuit of the Public Good

    Look in a courtroom and you will see that the trajectory of a case is not a straight line, but rather, one that bounces back and forth between the actions of the interested parties. It is not unlike a game of tennis, except that the ball of justice does not bounce back and forth but rather is angled inexorably toward justice (or injustice) rather than gravity.

    Nowhere is this more true than in the Dana Air case. Some people question why the suspension of Dana Air’s operating license has been lifted. The airline has begun the re-certification process.

    The court may well be in pursuit of justice; but the specifics of the accident and the disposition of the interests of the victims and the offended families should not be waylaid by a false move, a wrong move, a defensive move by interested (or disinterested parties.) This is not a chess match. A case with so many powerful parties involved may play deep in strategies, but we should never forget, it is not a game. The lawsuit is all too real—as real as the thoughtless and preventable annihilation of one hundred and fifty-nine souls. These people need not have died. But they did.

    The court may well be in pursuit of justice; but the Dana Air case is more than an opportunity to escape through, manipulate, reveal or sew up loopholes. Laws exist for the purpose of establishing justice. We should not sit quietly as law is manipulated in the court or government’s own interest. The failure of law is a dam that blocks the flow of social progress. It is a double tragedy when the legal minds involved in a case pursue the escape route of loopholes in the name of self-interest rather than keeping the high purpose of seeking justice for the victims.

    These truths are evident:

    Dana Airline must operate professionally and within the highest safety parameters or it should not fly at all.

    The victims and the families need full disclosure.

    The growth and development of the workings of Nigerian investigation, legal proceedings, allocations of rights and responsibilities must continue, must improve, must be refined; but in the course of that development, the court must not ever lose sight of its responsibility to find justice for people who died simply because they bought airline tickets, or were in exactly the wrong place when a plane fell fro the sky.

    I have not sat in the courtroom and heard every day the words of Captain Dele Ore. I do not know how valid is the coroner’s inquest. I only know that it is a judicial miscarriage for the court to permit the victim’s justice to be hijacked by mistakes in law, governmental evasion of responsibility, flawed forensics, loopholes, legal trickery or even those with a higher purpose of closing the loopholes for future cases. It can never be forgotten that lives were lost that should not have been. Irreparable damage has been done to individuals and families. The intent of the case is not to try the system (though indeed every case does try the system) but rather to find justice for the injured parties.

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    Aviation Industry: Time for a Black Box Upgrade

    Woodland Hills, CA — (ReleaseWire) — 07/07/2016 –No one is saying that aircraft tracking doesn’t need an overhaul. It does. Examination of plane crash events demands it.

    Aviation experts have been asking for pinger battery improvements since a month after the crash of Air France 447 on 1 June 2009, when the pinger battery ran down in July. Air France 447 was not recovered from the ocean floor until May 2011, nearly two years after it was lost. Debris from the accident was recovered in the interim, but if the pinger had been louder, or the battery designed to last longer, then there’s a good chance that the plane would have been discovered sooner. One of the outcomes of this terrible event was a determination to design a pinger system with longer lasting batteries. EASA amended requirements for flight recorders and underwater locating devices in its 2013-26 amendment(RMT.0400 & RMT.0401 (OPS.090(A) & OPS.090(B)) — 20.12.2013) but implementing these requirements takes a prohibitively long time.

    Aviation experts have been asking for better tracking technology since Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 disappeared on 8 March 2014 while flying from Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysia, to Beijing Capital International Airport in China. Because this plane departed from its planned route, finding where it came down has been a unique challenge. Inmarsat’s satellite communications network concluded that the flight continued until at least 08:19 and flew south into the southern Indian Ocean. Triangulation of Inmarsat’s satellite communications has been the only credible source searchers depend on to develop the search area.

    Aviation experts have been suggesting the blackbox be water-activated (or have water-activated duplicates) with flotation of some kind so the blackbox can be found faster. More recently, aviation experts have wondered about EgyptAir Flight 804 which crashed into the Mediterranean Sea on 19 May 2016. It was known fairly precisely where it came down, and yet salvage and rescue units were unable to be on the scene in time to help any survivors—if survivors there had been. We will never know because no one was there. And while tracking the location of the blackbox fell within the thirty day battery limit, if the technology had more power, it could have been located sooner. Finding the wreckage sooner means less money spent on the search, and a shorter time for the families agonizing over their losses.

    So here is what is new: Inmarsat provides SwiftBroadband service for plane’s inflight Wi-Fi on many aircraft. Immarsat is developing a streaming system described as a “blackbox in the cloud.” This streaming system they are working on will allow crucial data to be streamed off a plane on the occasion of specified trigger events like a course deviation or disappearance from radar.

    One only need consider a few factors to realize that a cloud-based system is a crucial development that current technology can easily handle. We need only to look at the cost of the search for a missing plane. According to France and Brazil, those two countries spent more than $40 million over two years to recover the black boxes from Air France Flight 447. Bloomberg reported the recovery cost of Air France 447 was $100 million. According to the South China Post, the cost of the (as yet unfound) MH370 will be as much as ten times more than AF447. Like the expense of MH370’s search, the cost of finding EgyptAir Flight 804 is still ongoing.

    Even when Inmarsat’s streaming system will be available, the aviation industry is going to be resistant, mostly because it is going to be costly. Is this a cost that we must afford? I think it is.

    Let me know your thoughts on this crucial topic at https://twitter.com/GeorgeHatcher

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    Qantas A380 Engine Disintegration Far More Serious

    Rolls said in a statement that the failure was confined to a specific component in the turbine area of the engine. This caused an oil fire. The British company added that it would replace the faulty part. Safety continues to be Rolls-Royce’s highest priority. See their statement

    Qantas is grounding its Airbus A380 superjumbos until further notice, and Singapore Airlines is grounding 3 of its A380s. EASA is calling for inspections. See the directive.

    What Happened
    The cause of the Rolls Royce engine failure has been pinned down to a faulty bearing box, the underlying cause of the oil leak. The bearings allow the drive shaft to move. The leaking bearing box dripped oil into the QANTAS A380 whose engine exploded (uncontained) into the wing, and dropping its turbine onto a house in Batam. The wing damage included electrical cables and hydraulic lines inside the wing, so that pilots were dealing with hydraulic damage (inability to close the landing gear doors), and electrical damage (trouble shutting down the engine beside the damaged one.)

    The Qantas meltdown is one of at least five documented A380 engine malfunctions.

    • Qantas A388 near Singapore on Nov 4th 2010
    • Lufthansa A388 near Frankfurt on Aug 6th 2010, engine shut down in flight
    • Emirates A388 near Zurich on Jul 13th 2010, engine shut down in flight
    • Singapore A388 near Krakow on Sep 27th 2009, engine shut down in flight
    • Singapore A388 near London on May 25th 2009, engine failure

    Newer Trent 900 engines have a different bearing box. Although the new box promises to eliminate the problem, newer models also have system software to shut down the engine before the leak causes a meltdown similar to the QANTAS A380 event over Singapore.

    George’s Point of View

    Although one might say that regulators did not adequately check the engine before approving it for commercial use, I think of Boeing’s response to its recent 787 test flight, and I point out that no one made Boeing step back and pull the 787 back on to the drawing board for more tests and adjustments. Boeing did that, because such remediation is what testing is all about. It is part and parcel of the paradigm of safety in design. It is up to each manufacturer that every item off of their assembly lines be as well designed and as safe as humanly possible. This includes fixing design flaws as soon as they are known. So I wonder, if newer Trent 900 engines have an improved bearing box, this of course begs the question why the older ones were not replaced.

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