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Where There’s Smoke, There’s Fire. Where There’s Fire, Will There Be Passengers?

George’s Point of View

The biggest consequence in this Trent 900 engine brouhaha may be the Rolls Royce reputation.

While the company’s engineering skills have not suddenly degraded overnight, confidence in Rolls Royce certainly has. If, as the Australian Transport Safety Bureau says, the internal fire in the notorious (Qantas owned) Trent 900 engine is the result of an internal engine oil leak at 1,000°C at high pressure, the endangerment of 440 passengers and 26 crew may have been preventible, given that there seems to have been fore-knowlege (by Rolls Royce) of a 1st generation manufacturing defect in a pipe coupling. As the 3rd generation versions of the engine no longer sport the same problem, the issue was recognized prior to the explosion, and dealt with.

The failure to communicate a potential problem to Qantas before the engine fire, and for that matter, to owners of all affected 1st and 2nd generation products (Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa), goes beyond a communications failure and inches toward negligence. And the practical concern now is that irregardless of whether the specific factor was a manufacturing defect or fatigue, how swift and responsible will Rolls Royce be in corrective action, aggressive inspection schedules and reconfiguring a maintenance paradigm that gets A380s back on track?

Time will tell. Also, only time will tell if this engine explosion will be contained within the auspices of Rolls Royce; Qantas, Singapore Airlines and Lufthansa. In fact, Rolls Royce is not alone in its sub-culture of secrecy and non-reportage and disclosure. Will the teetering public confidence in aviation safety will be irrevocably compromised in the days to come?

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    Always the Last to Know

    In spite of reports to the contrary, Qatar Airways and Ethiopian Airlines deny emergencies that occurred during Sunday’s power outage at the Lagos airport. The rest of the world knew about the power outage even before power was restored. Apparently however, no one told Qatar Airways or Ethiopian Airlines.

    Even the brand-spanking new radar system installed at Murtala Mohammed International Airport will not function without power. And neither can communications.

    Of course, how do you communicate while in denial?

    Pilots coped by flying in a holding pattern or rerouting to other airports when they stopped receiving input from ATC during the power outage.

    Officials of Ethiopian Airlines and Qatar Airways can play all the semantic games of denial that they want. The game is up. Everyone knows. Newspapers got wind of the power outage forcing up to a dozen planes into holding patterns, some of them until they experienced a fuel crisis and had to land without official clearance. There’s nothing like a little journalism to clear the air.

    With enforcement bodies like IATA and EASA empowering the airline passenger and providing oversight, and the aviation industry taking advantage of the (practically) instantaneous communication the world enjoys, legitimate airlines have made it universal policy to be as “transparent” and honest as possible regarding the unavoidable multitude of mini-disasters that constantly creep up in the course of making the world safe for aviation. It is that kind of wide-awake, constant open trouble-shooting and problem-solving which makes flying as safe as it is. No one wants to be “caught with their pants down”– but when it happens, you can be sure most airlines do their best to be wearing shiny clean underwear when it happens.

    Except in countries where denial reigns over truth. Countries that have certain airlines on a banned list.

    Qatar Airways and Ethiopian Airlines say “none of their pilots complained about an enforced landing prompted by depleted fuel.” Maybe their pilots are scared to open their mouths, especially if they’re familiar with that policy of denial.

    One wonders if their pilots–or air traffic control, for that matter–had cell phones. Surely SOMEone in ATC called the main office and said, “Excuse me boss, but we have 12 planes circling, and no electricity. What do we do? What is the policy on that?” Surely SOME pilot used a cell phone, and told somebody somewhere, “Dude, we gotta land, we’re running out of fuel.”

    What did they say at headquarters? Pretend it’s not happening?

    To the folks in charge at Qatar and Ethiopian: Listen, nobody’s perfect. These things happen. Don’t deny it. Take responsibility. You examine what went wrong. You fix it so it doesn’t happen again.

    You don’t pretend it didn’t happen. You’re not a seven year old who broke Mama’s favorite cup or tracked mud on the carpet.

    You don’t fire the poor shmuck who happened to be on the duty that day.

    You admit the problem, own it, examine it in detail, and fix the mechanism, and make helpful policies for what to do if it happens again. And to go the distance, you award that poor shmuck on duty, because while you were sitting there with your head in the sand, denying any problem existed, somebody somewhere on the front lines—pilots and/or ATC—made some right decisions that kept people alive.

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  • Unruly: The Ten Cent Solution

    As far as amenities, like leg room, food, wine and beverage service, seat width, pitch, video access, laptop power, and WIFI are concerned, Economy, Premium, Business or First Class offer varying combinations depending on the airline. But for those “unruly” passengers who seem to be in the news more frequently, the airlines should come up with a new, discounted standing-room-only corner class called Time Out.

    For Time Out class, of course, there would be no leg room, service, or amenities whatsoever. I would vote for a metal bar for them to hang on to for stability, but no doubt the airline would probably have to put in some kind of secure safety harness for insurance purposes. And, the unruly being by nature unruly, this time out area would also have to be sound-proofed, to keep from disturbing the other passengers.

    If pressurization weren’t an issue, I’d even suggest a “rumble” seat on the exterior of the plane, from which in an emergency the objectionable passenger could be ejected (with parachute of course, we’re not heathens) or at least isolated. Certainly ejection of a parachuted passenger is a more democratic solution that the threat of fighter jets shooting down a commercial airliner carrying 131 paying customers and 1 drunken idiot. The experience of riding a “rumble seat” would no doubt present an entirely new perspective on flying to the drunken idiot.

    I did mention that this would be a “discounted” class. I would expect that the aforementioned discount would not apply back to the passenger’s wallet; the difference between the origin ticket and the minimal expense of “Time Out” class would be forwarded to establish ongoing psychiatric therapy which would inevitably result from riding the rumble seat on the exterior of a plane.

    Of course, none of this editorial is true–except for the fighter jet escort threatening to shoot down a commercial plane carrying 132 passengers.

    The San Francisco bound flight that was escorted by two F-16 fighter jets was being escorted because a drunken, disruptive passenger locked himself in the bathroom. I do hope when the U.S. Gov’t lets him out of jail, they send him the bill.

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    Airbus Design Flaws Forced Pilots into Bad Decisions


    In George’s Point of View

    In the operation of the Airbus 330, a percentage of man-made decisions are taken away from humans in the cockpit. When you closely consider the Air France Airbus Flight 447 crash, it is easy to see that bad pilot decisions occurred when the pilots were not getting accurate feedback about what was happening. In old programmer lingo, this is “garbage in-garbage out.” And, unfortunately, when the data comes out of a computer, people tend to believe it, especially pilots in a falling plane, whose lives rely on that particular “garbage.”

    Sure, mistakes were made. The pilot retired, leaving the cockpit to the copilots. If he had stayed in the cockpit, none of this would have happened.

    Of the two remaining co-pilots, one still should have realized the other’s mistaken attitude (flying at a nose-up attitude with falling speeds.) Even something as basic as tandem cockpit control (where the flight controls move in tandem in the left and right cockpit), would have revealed to the second co-pilot what the other pilot was doing. But cockpit controls in the A330 are asymmetrical, and move independently.

    If one co-pilot had caught that the junior co-pilot was flying at the nose-up attitude while the speed was dropping, none of this would have happened.

    Not only did the failure of pitot tubes (the malfunctioning equipment that reads/relays airspeed) occur when they iced up, any failsafes that should have kicked in, didn’t. Thales Pitot tube icing was a known factor prior and considered by Airbus an “optional” fix. Because these tubes were frozen (iced over) airspeed data was incorrect.

    If Airbus had demanded that the flawed Thales pitot tubes be replaced, the airspeed data would have been correct, and none of this would have happened.

    The plane flew for a while with falling speeds, nose up. Then, the idiosyncrasy of the stall warning alarm system kicked in. When airspeed slowed too much, the warning went off, but when it slowed even more, it stopped. The pilots were in a feedback deadzone. Flying at a crawl, the warning quit. Speeding up from a crawl to slow turned set the warning off again. So when they tried to increase to the proper speed, the stall system went off.


    If the stall warning system had been calibrated to go off at dangerously low speeds and keep going off until proper flight speed was attained instead of indicating to the pilots that they were wrong to increase the speed, then none of this would have happened.

    It is a given that correct data and feedback are essential to a pilot. In the Airbus 330, the underlying design failed to provide accurate data and feedback. Could any pilots fly a plane if they did not know what is happening? It all comes down to a whole integration of synchronicity: a coetaneous concurrence of problems and failures converged on the pilots at once. Pilot error alone does not a crash make. Not even on an A-330.

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    The Airbus “No Major Malfunction” Malfunction

    Rumors are multiplying. Now there is an unconfirmed rumor that the captain was absent from the cockpit at the time of the event.

    In NOT a Flight of Imagination , we did not go into depth about the false-rumor buzz initially created by the French publication “Le Figaro” which is owned by Dassault Group. (i.e. vested interest.) It has already been released that an Airbus rep who is in on the AF 447 black box decoding had obtained permission to send out a telex indicating:

    …no immediate action is required as a result of preliminary data from the Air France Airbus A330 accident.

    Of course this is what Airbus is going to say. For all we know, they had that statement ready before they even looked at the tapes. Airbus is laying the groundwork. Don’t forget that this is a criminal case in the French court. One does not need a crystal ball to see that this is going to be very expensive for Thales and Airbus and Air France. And of course, the size of compensation payouts for the victim’s families be determined by the extent of blame of the involved parties.

    From this quote, a thousand rumors sprang, based on every possible interpretation of that one statement. Although the initial Airbus statement was approved by the BEA, the interpretations were disapproved of by the BEA who followed up saying that Sensationalist publication of non-validated information, whilst the analysis of the data from the flight recorders has only just started, is a violation of the respect due to the passengers and the crew members that died and disturbs the families of the victims, who have already suffered as a result of many hyped-up stories.

    The telex does not rule out pitot tube icing, currently a suspected factor in the crash. But Airbus is positioning itself already to blame dead pilots who cannot defend themselves. They want to take the court of public opinion as far as possible away from potential design flaws, manufacturing shortcuts, etc. However, this is not a wise move if they really consider it. The entire bastion of Airbus Fly By Wire theory is that they make “pilot proof” planes.

    So, how in the same breath, can they say their planes are pilot-proof and that they crashed due to pilot error? According to their own hype, If the plane itself is pilot-proof, then it can not crash due to pilot error. It HAD to crash due to “other than pilot” error.

    As I understand it, no matter what happens on this fly-by-wire model, if there is a problem, the pilots are shut out of being able to fix it anyway.

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  • Ethiopia Flight 409: Dubious Claims Circulate the Blognet

    There’s a general consensus among the people who deal with terrorists that terrorists like to take credit for disasters, even when they’re not responsible for them. Ownership of violence is part of the whole extremist “psych-you-out “ ideology. To claim responsibility for an act one did not do to is to “claim” one for the malevolent gipper, to make one appear more powerful, especially when actually helpless, and/or to appease whomever one is confessing to with false collateral by churning out false confessions.

    But consider this: if I say I am Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny, it does not mean I am Santa Claus or the Easter Bunny. Legally, it’s going to take more than tall talking and word of mouth to establish that claim in court. It will take heavy duty concrete proof to make that claim stand up in a court of law. The head of the Engineering Department at the BEA (France’s version of the NTSB, the Investigation and Analysis Bureau) Christophe Ménez said in an interview … that evidence shows that last month’s Ethiopian plane crash was not a result of an explosion. “The fuselage and other heavy parts, such as the engine, all sank together, and the plane’s wreckage was in close proximity, which indicates that the airliner did not explode. ”

    The investigation of Ethiopia Airlines Flight 409 so far does not develop a case for terrorism having anything to do with causing the crash. But even if it were true (and we don’t think it is), the primary liability rests with the operator, Ethiopia Airlines. This is not a legal opinion, just my own opinion.

    Now let’s speculate. If it were a terrorist act, it might derail a law suit against component manufacturers in the United States, but an experienced lawyer would tell us that if an act of terror downed the plane, it would not budge legal claims against Ethiopia Airlines. Under the various treaties that govern air travel, the operator has the primary responsibility for that innocent passenger who paid good money to get on that plane.

    The big news services are not the source of this claim; it looks like it is coming from a blog network, so it appears to be a rumor rather than fact, or a rehash or repost of an earlier theory. There is no plausible evidence of sabotage.

    But we are still hoping for more evidence, and for the families, more remains, to be discovered by the Odyssey Explorer in the ongoing marine search for definitive evidence.

    The terrorism theory has already been postulated and discarded once so I don’t give much credence to it. But more than anything, I regret seeing these things crop up to stress the victims families even more. They’ve already been through too much; and the investigation is going to take a long time. They have a long way to go.

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    Coming together to Counter Airport Insecurity

    airport baggage scanner

    The current state of things requires us to be vigilant anywhere we go these days. I have been thinking of a starting an ongoing conversation regarding safety. I am troubled by Esteban Santiago’s Fort Lauderdale-Hollywood International Airport attack on Friday afternoon. Any traveler who puts as many miles as I do on a plane is bound to be as troubled. We should try to find suggestions, and solutions, and speak out.  

    Here’s what I’m thinking: Federal laws allow you to check-in handguns, rifles and ammunition.  I’ve been thinking there’s a literal bandaid that would help—a red banner or flag or something that sticks on the luggage that states LEGAL FIREARM INSIDE. As a consequence, if we see this banner on the carousel, we are informed. We know to be vigilant, without having to be vigilante.  

    If baggage claim areas have armed guards, that would be another step. They can’t do it all and it will take time to implement.  My banner idea can be implemented immediately.  If individuals are uncomfortable having such a banner, then they should rethink shipping their weapons out ahead of their travel as cargo or something.  

    What possible, realistic solutions do you have?

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