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Bhoja Air Flight 213

In George’s Point of View


It pains me to write this. I had just put down my pen from writing about an engine failure where the flight made it safely back to the airport, and heard the news of this. Bhoja Air Flight 213 down in Pakistan after losing contact with ATC. Another flight down in stormy weather. The loss is unique, but it has happened too many times.

Again a plane, or pilot, or airline failed to bring its passengers safely home. That’s all we want—for the families to be reunited, for the father who just lost his daughters to have them back, for this to be a nightmare that will just go away. But the Bhoja crash is one of the nightmares that doesn’t go away.

Soon the whole world will hear the names, see the faces, hear the stories behind the tragedy. Maybe it is the stories that make a disaster like this so hard to take for the rest of us. The stories bring life to the loss, take our imaginations from black and white to living color, carry us from the place where statistics rest on paper to where they mingle in our hearts with our own memories of love and loss. Soon we will hear the mourning of the families, the fathers, mothers, siblings, spouses, friends. The investigation will begin, and the experts will find whatever they find, but there’s always the one truth that remains.

It is the families who will bear this, who will hereafter live their lives like shattered china pieced back together. And what is the glue? The chemistry will be different for every parent, every child, every sibling, but its ingredients are memories woven with grief and resilience, bitterness, hope, faith—and the support of friends. You will get through this. You already know that time will ease the pain, but for now, true as it is, it is only words. To the families, we can only say we grieve with you. Your loss is our loss.

It is as true now as it was in 1624 when John Donne wrote it. “No man is an island…All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language…” Your loss is our loss. To the families, we can only say we grieve with you and wish you peace.

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    A 380-Just a note

    George’s Point of View

    Airbus wants to do the impossible. Always pushing aviation physics to be bigger than we thought it was possible to be.

    There’s a whole lot of buzz about Airbus’s superjumbo elephantine double-decker, wide-body, four-engine jets with seating for up to 853 people. The families who have lost loved ones at sea–especially those in the recent Airbus flight 447 and the Comoros crash–must feel crushed when they hear about expensive Airbus efforts to make their already huge aircraft series break more size records.

    Maybe Airbus should stop trying to be the biggest plane on the block, and work a little harder on safety. If they were as safe as they are big, there would be 380 families not in mourning today. Yes, 380. Here’s the biggest irony.

    There were 152 fatalities in the Airbus crash in the Comoros. There were 228 fatalities in AF 477. Does anyone else find it macabre and frightening that that adds up to 380? I’m not a numerologist, but that’s awfully disturbing–

    Airbus needs to rethink their entire aviation philosopy, stop making these monstrous death traps, go back to the drawing board, and correct the defects of the planes they already have in service.

    If they had done so already, there would be at least 380 mothers, fathers, and children still alive.

    Or they should be responsible, and ask that their planes be grounded until they are made safe.

    Airbus needs to stop throwing money at air shows, and start compensating the families of those that have died or been injured due to design flaws of Airbus planes.

    Yes, even the much vaunted new jet has niggling problems surfacing all of the time, but the flaws in the Airbus 380 skywhale behemoth are being downplayed by the powers that be.

    Issues have been found with all of these systems:

    • a braking system fault
    • a plethora of system nuisance warnings based on alleged over-sensitivity
    • weight growth during development
    • fuel tank indication
    • nose wheel steering

    This is just what has come to light so far.

    Please, let’s go back to the drawing board Airbus, for the sake of your human family. There is nothing, nothing, nothing you can do to bring joy back to 380 families who remain wounded, broken, with holes in their lives that can never be filled, lives that have been deformed by damage that can not be undone. Airbus, you want to do the impossible, be ever bigger. How about doing something in the realm of the possible? Let your heart be big. Step up to the plate, and compensate the grieving, who are suffering from lives lost in Airbus planes. This is beyond the physics of aviation and above the laws of man. It’s the right thing to do.

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  • | | |

    The Investigation of Sukhoi Superjet’s Crash holds Answers to Many Questions


    Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
    Contact photographer Egor Naumenko

    Today I read an article saying that the SuperJet that crashed on a promotional flight boils down to one question: pilot or plane? I have to disagree. It is not that simple. It takes a lot of coordinating systems to get a plane in the air, and it usually takes more than one error to take a plane down.

    If there is a problem with the plane, it is most likely the investigation will reveal it, and anything that comes out before the investigation is just speculation. (How much of the investigation will be made public often depends on the transparency policies of government, however.) So I am speculating here.

    Russian Aviation does have a lot riding on the success of this entry into the global aviation marketplace so we know it’s not a paper airplane they folded together in ten seconds or as many months. We suspect that the quality of the teams performing the design, construction, training and troubleshooting that went into the jet’s creation is about par for contemporary jet design. Which is to say the teams are probably very good. The plane has fly-by-wire technology but Sukhoi consults with Boeing on a “step-by-step project management … fully explored and translated into business reality by SCAC.”

    There are a number of problems that are coming to light with this flight.

    • Only the cockpit voice recorder was found. The FDR was not found.
    • The Emergency Locator Transmitter (which goes off, like an airbag, on hard impact) did not go off. The Sukhoi only has one(instead of two, which is the norm) Emergency Locator Transmitter which uses 121.5,203 Mhz. Indonesia receivers operate at 121.5,406 MHZ
    • The Terrain map is recorded in the panes database and shows on a display in vertical and horizontal forms. (Did this plane, which was a substitute plane) have an updated terrain map?)
    • The Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning System/EGPWS should have gone off with terrain warnings after descending to 6000 feet, and these warnings should be in the black box. Wait…no black box was found.
    • Was this substitute plane compliant with all airworthiness guidelines and laws?
    • Multifunctional Transport Satellites (MTSAT) data revealed that the weather on the Salak Mountain at the time was bad. Cloud and raincover at Salak Mountain was 100 percent.
    • The Halim-Pelabuhan Ratu flight plan was considered safe, but on descent to 6000 feet, the pilot detoured from the flight plan.

    Sometimes investigations take the easy path and just blame the pilot. I’ve seen happen a hundred times before, when the pilot was blamed simply because he was not longer able to defend his actions. And while pilots are only human, and sometimes do make mistakes, sometimes those mistakes are caused by corporate pressures, pressure to meet deadlines, fuel quotas, scheduling, etc. What is pressure of corporate expectations on a joy flight pilot? Do we know if he was under orders to showcase the plane’s agility, possibly even to make the very move that crashed the plane?

    The pilot, 57 year old Alexander Yablontzev was experienced. He was Sukhoi’s chief test pilot and had spent more than 14 thousand hours flying. After retiring as Lieutenant Colonel from the Russian Air Force, he flew for Transaero and had a lot of hours. But the fatal flight was his first time flying in Indonesia. Did the crash occur because he was flying a strange, possibly wrongly mapped terrain, and recklessly “buzzing” the peak of Mount Salak to show off the plane’s versatility?

    No answers here. I’m just saying that the question is not so simply put.

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  • A December 23rd Spin on the American Airlines Crash in Jamaica.

    While last night’s American Airlines Boeing crash landing in the Jamaican rain with limited visibility, with significant tailwinds on ungrooved pavement, with patches of residual tire rubber no less, was catastrophic for the plane, it is rather amazing that even though the Boeing was subjected to forces powerful enough to split the plane into at least three pieces, it neither caught fire, hydroplaned 10 more yards to end up in the bay, nor lost even a single one of the passengers.

    An achievement in survival. A testament to piloting skill. Or maybe it is just an improvement in plane design.

    I hope that someone out there is appreciating how different this crash is from the Tam (Airbus) crash in Brazil, where a bad landing in rainy conditions on an ungrooved surface was exacerbated by a malfunctioning thrust reverser, and the plane ended up crashing a perimeter fence, crossing a thoroughfare and causing a blazing fire that annihilated a warehouse across the street from the runway.

    Someone more versed in plane design could explain the difference in dynamics between plane crashes; someone expert in runway physics could explain how the runway surfaces did or did not play a part, but that analysis will come later during the NTSB investigation.

    For now, I predict that you’ll be seeing the powers that be blaming the pilots for breaking the airplane, rather than applauding the fact that no one died. There has already been at least one article blaming the crash on the fact that the pilots were in the 12th hour of their (up to )14 hour shift.

    This is just a taste of the spin-doctoring to come. I’m sure we’ll see the crash “arm-chair” analyzed a dozen different ways, depending on the writer’s agenda. We will watch the groups lobbying for in-country maintenance flipping this story to blame it on out-of-the-country maintenance; the pilot fatigue people will be using this as a morality tale about long pilot hours; the Norman Manley International Airport improvement people will be talking about fixing runway surfaces or maybe doing other needed airport alterations.

    For now, I think we should all spend a few moments taking a good hard look at the mess that used to be a Boeing 737-800. How did anyone live through that? In fact, everyone survived.

    Some families in Jamaica will be hugging their loved ones just a little bit harder this season. Anyway you look at it, we had a little bit of a Christmas miracle this time.

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  • FAA and DOT Sued For Not Acting On Recommendations

    It all started 15 years ago, when the NTSB first issued a list of safety recommendations. Fast forward 15 years, and the US Department of Transportation (DOT) and the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) still hasn’t taken those recommendations.

    Tuesday, Feb. 24, 2009– Newark, N.J. news conference on aviation Spokesman Mary Schiavo, former inspector general for the U.S. Department of Transportation, blamed the FAA for lagging in safety improvements.

    National Air Disaster Alliance/Foundation is suing federal transportation officials, believing the lack of adoption of safety practices has resulted in accidents like the Continental Connection Flight 3407 crash near Buffalo.

    We just posted some of those safety issues;
    Or you can take a look at some NTSB’s issues in their report NTSB Icing Safety on Aircraft Ground Icing

    Mommy and Daddy are fighting.

    But what they’re really doing is shifting the blame to the other guy so when the Buffalo NY lawsuits come down, it’ll be the other guy’s wallet that gets sacked. D’ya think?”

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  • Small Steps in face of the Greater Tragedy

    George’s Point of View

    The first items found that were attributed to the airbus were from somewhere else. However, now a ship’s crew has recovered several bodies, luggage, etc. For all the families sake, I hope they can find everyone. It becomes ever more tragic each day a victim goes unfound.

    Days tick by as searchers look for the beacon-small enough to fit in someone’s hand- lost somewhere in the Atlantic.

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  • | | |

    The Official’s Unofficial Official Opinion…

    About last tuesday’s Fatal Rusline/RusAir Tupolov crash in Russia, the Russian Deputy Prime Minister, Sergei Ivanov, mentions that familiar phrase “obvious pilot error” while simultaneously promising he is not pre-emping the findings of the actual investigation. Officials have made spontaneous statements in the past, and lived to regret it, so that point remains to be seen.

    The question of pilot error is questionable. The plane was flying in at too low an angle, (I may have read somewhere that the angle was what was directed by ATC but my source could be mistaken.)

    Flying too low, the landing gear caught on electrical wires which caused an area blackout that included the local town and the airport runway lights. Is being unable to land on a runway without lights something that could be called pilot error? I suppose that remains to be seen, also.

    So the cause is up for grabs: bad weather, technical malfunction or human error. What’s left? We do not know yet. We rely on the investigation to reveal the facts.

    Irrespective of what caused this horrible tragedy, the decedents were fault-free. Rusline and RusAir are responsible for compensating the families who had entrusted the safekeeping of their loved ones into their care.

    There is no amount of money that will bring back the loved ones, but compensation is due.

    For 44 individuals, it was fatal; for 8, it was nearly fatal. I hate to sound too judgmental here, but a government official should probably not make sweeping generalizations about the causes of a tragic event without making it clear what is personal opinion and what is an official statement. Every supposition before the official report is released is guess work. All the conjecturing that will take place between now and when an investigation report is released is just that–conjecture. Some of it will be based on emotional responses; some of it will be based on varying perception of what may or may not be facts. For now, we can offer condolences to the families.

    All we know for certain is that the crash that should not have happen, did, and people’s lives were cut short because of it.

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