Eu Banned List Warns European Carriers to Fly Safely

The civil aviation authorities of Member States of the European Community regularly puts out a list of banned airlines–airlines which are banned from flying over European airspace because the planes have failed safety inspections, and otherwise proven to be operating with less than prescribed safety standards.

Unexpected additions to this most recent list are airlines from Germany and Spain, highly developed nations in which attention to safety appears to be waning. The expected underdeveloped African nations are included, such as Yemenia Airlines, which is now famous for using approved planes over Eu airspace and for allowing certain unsafe planes to fly outside of EU airspace. One such Yemenia Airbus crashed in 2009 killing all but one of its 154 passengers.

https://airflightdisaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/04/list_en.pdf

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    NTSB to Hold Forum on Safety Culture


    The National Transportation Safety Board today announced that it will hold a forum addressing the importance of safety culture in transportation on September 10 and 11, 2013, in Washington, D.C.

    “In our accident investigations we’ve seen instances of weak or non-existent safety cultures,” said Chairman Deborah A.P. Hersman. “In this forum, we want to highlight what’s present in strong safety cultures as well as identify what works to build these cultures in order to more effectively prevent accidents.”

    The forum will review the progress and innovations that have been made in developing safety cultures throughout the transportation community and pinpoint areas where there are opportunities for improvements. Participants — including operators, labor groups and oversight authorities — will outline their roles, responsibilities and methods for developing effective safety cultures, with emphasis on the remaining challenges and steps needed for further improvements.

    The two-day forum, “Safety Culture: Enhancing Transportation Safety,” will be chaired by Hersman; all five Board Members will participate. Panelists include researchers, regulators, and leaders in both transportation and non-transportation industries.

    The forum will address ways of enhancing safety by providing first-hand accounts of efforts from both transportation and non-transportation industries to develop effective safety cultures and to implement specific safety-enhancement techniques. Highlighting progress while recognizing remaining challenges, the invited panelists will discuss advances in safety culture research, and describe the roles, responsibilities, and methods for developing effective safety cultures within their industries.

    The forum panels will include:

    Research Perspectives on Organizational Accidents
    Techniques to Enhance Organizational Safety
    Non-Transportation Perspectives on Safety Culture
    Organizational Leadership Perspectives on Safety Culture
    Safety Culture Management and Oversight in Transportation
    Companies and their Safety Culture Experiences.
    There will also be a review of some recent organizational accidents that have been investigated by the NTSB. Invited panelists will include researchers, regulators, and industry leaders.

    The forum will be held in the NTSB Board Room and Conference Center, located at 429 L’Enfant Plaza E., S.W., Washington, DC. The public can view the forum in person or by live webcast. Webcast archives are generally available by the end of the next day following the forum, and webcasts are archived for a period of 3 months from after the date of the event.

    Organizations and/or individuals can submit input for consideration as part of the forum’s archived materials. Submissions should directly address one or more of the forum’s topic areas (identified by the panel titles) and should be submitted electronically as an attached document to: SafetyCultureForum@ntsb.gov. Input received will be entered into the public docket for this forum.

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    Co-Pilots to the Rescue

    Capt. Lee Collins of the Coalition of Airline Pilots Association said pilots are prepared for emergencies in the air. The pilot of a transatlantic flight died over the Atlantic Ocean, but the jet landed safely.

    What: Continental Airlines Boeing 777-200 en route from Brussels Belgium to Newark, NJ
    Where: en route
    When: June 18th 2009
    Who: 247 passengers and 3 flight crew
    Why: Four hours into the flight, while over the Atlantic, the captain died. The two first officers took over and landed the plane safely in Newark.

    A doctor on board was called to the cockpit, and the on board defibrillator failed to revive the captain who apparently had died of a heart attack.

    George’s Point of View

    It’s a small world.

    Recently I’d been in a conversation with someone about the Colgan flight.

    Remember the Colgan flight? The one that crashed in Buffalo? The wings iced over, the captain was ill-trained, and the co-pilot was too inexperienced and too exhausted to know how to respond to the particular emergency. The combination resulted in disaster for everyone on board.

    So, I was in this conversation with someone about the Colgan flight, and the question came up about the value of the co-pilot’s experience. The rate of the co-pilot’s pay was released, ($11.00/hr) and that provoked me to write about co-pilots needing “professional” pay. What would happen, we speculated (in this conversation) if the pilot died? The copilot becomes the de facto pilot.

    Then, lo and behold, today a pilot dies of a heart attack. Luckily for Continental and everyone on board, there were two co-pilots on hand, and both of them apparently qualified enough to handle the flight. (Apparently so, since they did manage to finish the flight.)

    I just wasn’t expecting that speculative question to manifest itself in a headline today.

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    Pilots Notorious from GOL Case Find Four Year Sentence Commuted

    Joseph Lepore and Jan Paul Paladino were sentenced to four years and four days in prison in the Amazon plane collision case when the Legacy 600 jet they were piloting made physical contact with a Gol Airlines Boeing 737. All 154 passengers and crew of the Boeing 737 were killed.

    Their sentence was commuted to being banned from flying for four years, and also community service to be carried out in the US. The sentence accuses the pilots of being imprudent and inexperienced, and contends that they turned off the transponder, which the pilots deny.

    The Gol jet collided over the Amazon rain forest with an Embraer Legacy 600 executive jet owned by ExcelAire Service Inc. of New York. The GOL InvestigatIon alleges that the pilots of the New York-based executive jet had placed the transponder and collision avoidance system on standby before colliding with the Boeing 737 operated by GOL Linhaus Aereas Inteligentes SA on Sept. 29, 2006.

    The Legacy landed safely but everyone on the GOL jet died.

    Flight controllers failed to alert pilots that they were on a collision course and also did not notice the transponder was off; in fact they deny turning it off.

    On September 29, 2006, at approximately 4:57 pm, Brasilia standard time, a midair collision occurred over the Brazilian Amazon jungle, between a Boeing 737-800 (PR-GTD) operated by Gol Airlines of Brazil, and an Embraer Legacy 600 business jet (N600XL) owned and operated by Excelaire of Long Island, New York.

    The accident investigation is being conducted under the authority of the Brazilian Aeronautical Accident Prevention and Investigation Center (DIPAA). Under the provisions of ICAO Annex 13, the United States, as state of registry and operator of the Excelaire Legacy, and state of manufacture of the Boeing 737 and Honeywell avionics equipment in both airplanes, has provided an accredited representative and technical advisors for the investigation. The U.S. team included the accredited representative from the major aviation accident investigations division of the NTSB, as well as technical advisors in operations, systems, air traffic control, flight recorders, and aircraft performance. Additional technical advisors from Boeing, Excelaire, Honeywell, and FAA have also been included.

    If the transponder is off in either one of two approaching each other aircraft, the T Cast anti collision avoidance system will not work for either. We know there was no aural
    warning in either plane to “pull up. Pull up.” Or vice versa.

    So for sure the transponder was off in at least one of the planes, and that was probably the Legacy. However, in this Honeywell transponder, it is relatively easy for the
    transponder to go off without the crew knowing that (due to design flaws.)

    ATC put both aircraft coming at each other from oppostive directions at the same altitude, FL 370, and failed to track and warn, even though they had to know that for some reason the transponder in the exec jet was not working properly.

    And who should we look for accountability to if the pilots are being held responsible for a Honeywell issue?

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    France: Air Traffic Control Strike

    French air traffic controllers are on strike.

    Strikers are protesting France’s pension reform that would raise the country’s state pension age for all workers in France from 60 to 62 by 2018. Although public announcements tried to assert that only short haul travel would be affected most strongly, air travel has come to standstill. British Airways has cancelled 90% of flights to France, and Ryanair has also cancelled flights over French airspace. Easyjet cancelled 61 flights; Iberia cancelled 34 flights yesterday alone.

    Spanish airports report some delays.

    French train service has also ground to a halt.

    Reports are that the general strike in France affect French airspace until 0600 hours on Friday, September 24.

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    Air France, Airbus Playing “Hot Potato” with Responsibility

    Air France denies responsibility for the Air France Flight 447 crash, saying that they had raised concerns about the sensors before the crash.

    If they did so, it would seem the memorandum they presented indicates that they were aware of the problem, and therefore responsible. Though Air France “submitted a memorandum to show it had taken ‘all possible precautions” after a series of earlier sensor failures,’ ” it would seem the memorandum would indicate that they were aware of a problem, and should have cancelled flights until the problem was corrected. Certainly passengers were not made aware that there was a potentially serious issue.

    If Airbus had really been concerned, they would have installed the $50,000 backup system used by other carriers in the event of a multiple airspeed sensor failure.

    Watching Air France and Airbus (and Thales) shift blame for the crash back and forth is like watching a child’s game of “hot potato.” When they are finished passing the buck, who ever ends up officially responsible, the victims are still just as dead. Time for someone to “man up.”

    There are rumors that a request will be made to Transport Minister Thierry Mariani to continue the search for the black box. Three earlier searches failed, seeking the Airbus SAS A330, which crashed into the Atlantic on June 1, 2009, en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 people aboard. 6,700 square miles was searched for the acoustic pings, but the batteries are now dead, and searches changed to sonar imaging.

    The BEA claims that only the black boxes will tell the truth of what happened but drags its feet in continuing the search. On May 6th 2010, a French deputy minister told the public that the black boxes had been found (meaning, apparently, that their general location had been pinned down.) That report was withdrawn. That fact, combined with the BEA reluctance to continue searching, has led to persistent rumors of a cover-up.

    Private shareholders own 81.4% of Air France, 37% held by former Air France shareholders and 21% held by former KLM shareholders. The Government of France owns 18.6% of Air France—putting the BEA in the awkward position of heading an investigation where it has essentially owes 18.6% responsibility.

    Air France was fined €310 million this month for price fixing. Read about their response to the fine

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