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Hawaii, Cleveland, etc…

I should note at some point that every day there are dozens of small events that occur that we don’t talk about. For example, there was the event on the 7th when a 65 year old pilot beached his Cessna 310 (flying out of Monteray) in the ocean when he ran out of gas. He had notified authorities of his fuel situation, so the Coast Guard was on hand to rescue him…

Or the fiasco 22 year old Jason Laurence Delta University student (Cleveland Mississippi) survived when the 1972 Cessna 150 he was flying failed, and flipped during an emergency landing in a groove in a cotton field, rolling end over end.

Or the Piper PA-32 Saratoga went missing heading to Johnstown, Pa, and in which Michael Garrone of Allegheny Township, Pa., 52-year-old Chas Armitage Jr. of Parks Township, Pa., and his girlfriend, 49-year-old Laura Stettmier lost their lives when it crashed 12 miles southeast of the Grant County Airport in Petersburg.

Or the United Express flight from Chicago to Omaha which landed in Des Moines on Friday with an undesignated engine problem.

Or Thursday’s Pia birdstrike in Pakistan that ended with an engine shut down and a return to Islamabad.

Or the fatal crash thursday of an experimental Rand Robinson KR-2 which took off from Mountain Empire Airport and killed the pilot a mile north of the airport at 1:10 pm.

Or the experimental Quickie Q200 which crashed and burned when 60-year-old Gerald Brinkerhuff from Gobles was practicing touch and goes in Holland Michigan. Brinkerhuff did not survive.

Every day there are numerous events that happen, and sometimes there’s just not enough detail available, or sometimes conflicting accounts make it difficult to determine what happened.

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    NCAR Beta


    Funded from NASA’s Applied Sciences Program, the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and several partners developed an 8-hour convective weather forecast based on fuzzy logic and cloud top and moisture level input from the two Geostationary Operational Environmental Satellites (GOES) that cover a large portion of the Atlantic and Pacific oceans.

    Storms and turbulence, are noted in deep magenta (closest to the value of 1.0). Visitors to the site can then click on any of the eight hourly forecasts that follow, or play all of the pictures together in movie mode.

    See NCAR Atmos News

    The NCAR beta site is live here:
    http://www.rap.ucar.edu/projects/ocn/realtime_sys/global_extrap/

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  • One Flyer’s Opinion on lithium ion batteries

    Airbus is planning on using the same lithium ion batteries the A350 as the Dreamliner is using (remember those batteries that have gotten Boeing in hot water?) but they’re not changing anything.

    At Airbus’s annual commercial results presentation Chief Executive Fabrice Bregier said “we are confident our design is robust” and “don’t see any reason to change.”

    Apparently the billions in extra costs that Airbus has racked up has been due to everything but the batteries.

    Personally, I don’t know, and I don’t care. At least, I only care in so much as the planes can fly, and are safe safe safe. The competition is great as long as it makes the planes safer. NOT so great when competition pushes these aircraft giants start cut cut cutting edges so they can cut costs so they can secure bragging rights.

    If some additional testing needs to be done on the A350 due to lithium ion batteries, DO THE TESTS. Better safe than sorry. When your planes crash or burn and kill people, you can’t give back their lives.

    Can we please stop measuring our belts boys, and concentrate on safety? That’s what we frequent fliers want most of all.

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    US Airways Emergency Landing in Salt Lake

    What: US Airways Bombardier CRJ900 regional jet en route from Edmonton, Canada, to Phoenix, Arizona.
    Where: Diverted to Salt Lake City –Salt Lake City International Airport
    When: 10:20 am
    Who: 86 passengers and three crew members transferred to other flights to Phoenix
    Why: Diverted due to a crack in the front windshield.

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    Raising the Bar on Pilot Training

    Whether one looks at what happened in US cockpits on the Colgan Air flight (49 aboard killed, 1 on the ground, 4 injuries on the ground), or at Air France Flight 447 (228 killed), or if one looks at foreign crashes such as in Mangalore (166 aboard, 8 survivors), it appears that pilots need better tools to indicate when they are in trouble; and better training on how to respond in emergency situations such as when components fail, or flight is becoming unstable for whatever reason. It does little good to be warned that something is wrong if the warning comes at a point when it is too late to do anything about it.

    One wonders if the Thales pitot tubes are equipped to warn when there is a heating failure; or if there is a backup heating system for the tubes; if that backup system were equipped to give a warning. One wonders if there might not be an additional set of pitot tubes installed, one that might be stored internally, but that the pilot might be able to engage automatically if the tubes fail; or barring that, one wonders if there should not be some other mechanical (as opposed to digital or mathematic) “speedometer device” alternative on board for emergency situations… in case pitot tubes again happen to fail in the dark of night over an unlit ocean hurtling for the duration of a four minute stall to an inevitable watery grave.

    I do not advocate reverting everything to fly-by-wire. The best way I can express this is with a simile: Forcing pilots to use fly by wire is like forcing a healthy person to always ride in an electric wheelchair because there is a possibility they might trip.

    If you do this, the person stuck in the wheelchair becomes less able to walk. Their leg muscles will atrophy and their walking skills will deteriorate. They become a passive passenger rather than an active participant. Thus ultimately, relying on a mechanical device to perform what the human being should be doing actually cripples their abilities rather than enhances them. Fly by wire should only be a tool an otherwise competent pilot can use on occasion, not part of the status quo.

    It seems ironic that the automatic pilot quit at the point that it was most needed. But face it–the automatic system was as confused and disoriented as the pilots were at the incoming faulty data.

    We will never know, whether, if the AF447 data crash occurred during daylight hours, if the pilots would have known better how to deal with the situation. Or if the notification of approaching flight crisis was a death knoll rather than a warning, i.e. a warning that came too late for any corrective measures to be applied. But we can be fairly sure that if there were better training and better warning, the catastrophe would not have occurred.

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    All In The Family

    George’s Point of View

    Maintenance abroad, no matter how good the mechanics are; monitoring; who does it; how good is it?

    • If something terrible should happen, our hands are tied in the courts.
    • If the person at fault is in, subject to, and adjudicated in a foreign country, the laws may be antiquated, inadequate, indefensible or unenforceable.
    • In the U.S., suing a company from a foreign country does not guarantee that a court here will hear the case. The injured or the victim families suffer unrequited consequences.

    Let’s keep our U.S. planes serviced right here in the U.S.

    Scene: Back to the future


    Doc Brown
    No wonder this circuit failed.
    It says “Made in China”.
    Marty McFly
    What do you mean, Doc?
    All the best stuff is made in Japan.
    Doc Brown
    Unbelievable.

    What is the quality of imported products? It all depends on the decade. The appetite, desire and need for imported spices impelled the development of trade, forced Columbus to hop in the Nina, Pinta and Santa Maria and go looking for a trade route, and we all know that he found, instead, the American continent.

    Spices, fruits and veggies out of season, products are all imported.

    So should airlines based in the US be exporting their maintenance outside of the country? Aside from ridiculous logistics, I think the problem here is regulation. How can standards of regulation be upgraded to optimum levels if our maintenance is shipped out of the country? Aside from that, it is impractical and somewhat silly. Think about it–when our bathroom faucet springs a leak, do we send the house to China? Do we uproot the bathroom and send it to China? Do we even send the part? No, we have maintenance–the plumber, ubiquitous panty line notwithstanding–comes IN and with his expensive clock ticking away, replaces the part and saves the day.

    That’s not to say that Mohammed must always come to the mountain. But in the wake of proliferating engine shutdowns, defective parts, structural design issues and hull failure, maybe we need to rethink sending our maintenance out of the country. Maybe it is cheaper, but is it better?

    Let’s look at the big picture, where relying on non-US standards takes us: Look at the fiasco of Chinese drywall–where families across the country are suffering with degrading, stinking, sulphur infested drywall as their home values and quality of life plummets. Look at the ongoing stream toy recalls, as warnings of children’s toys covered by lead paint, or lead components are broadcast daily. Look at the massive pet food recall of 2007, where 17,000 complaints and over 2000 pet deaths were related to melamine in dog food with chinese rice components containing melamine.

    Until every outside resource is going to have the quality rating of Quantas, do we really want to export our maintenance? Not only does it not make sense…well face it, it just does not make sense. Maintenance and the maintainers should reside under the umbrella–and the sharp teeth–of our legal system. Under our own US regulatory system, we need to hone the edge of our own country’s in-house maintenance, exercise the craft that once made “Made in the USA” the top of the line INTERNATIONAL standard, and frankly, let our corporate dollars feed—not bleed—our own job-hungry nation.

    SEE: http://www.wbur.org/news/npr/113942431

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    Man vs Wire

    George’s Point of View

    As opposed to Boeing, where the pilot always has the upper hand over the machine, the basic tenet of Airbus philosophy is machine knows best. That must be the case, because when all else fails, here comes the Airbus autopilot and the pilot can’t do anything. We’ve seen this bite pilots in the *** in a number of circumstances, but the first one that comes to mind, for me, is the big TAM crash in Sao Paulo. Not being a pilot, I’ve had to ask airbus pilots about this, and believe me, I’ve heard some horror stories that would curl your hair. Maybe that’s what is at the root of my negativity toward the Airbus. The other would be their tendency to crash and kill a lot of people at one time.

    Anyway, Airbus recently started production of the A320 series in China. They just did a maiden flight on the first plane. I like China very much but I don’t know about getting on China-made planes. It is bad enough that they are Airbus.

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