Airbus: the New Edsel

George’s Point of View

Commerce and business growth is the sign of a healthy economy. However, news that …“groundwork has started on a wing assembly facility for Airbus 320 aircraft in the northern municipality of Tianjin” brings up the question:

Do we really NEED more Airbuses in the world?

Whether it is A380 design flaws, rudder problems, Airbus wiring flaws, , faulty Airbus latching system, with all of these hidden flaws coming to light, do we really need another Airbus Factory?

OF course it is insulting to the Edsel to make this comparison, because the Edsel was a well designed vehicle of its time. It was marketed badly, but it was not a lemon. But the Airbus…

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  • Don’t Hold Your Breath in the Lavatory

    Rest assured we still have opinions, and believe this important stuff should be widely published and easily accessible but we probably won’t be posting too many press releases any more since Google tends to frown on that. So we didn’t update the news about Docket No. FAA-2011-0157

    This reminds me of one of those “THIS IS HOW YOUR TAX DOLLARS ARE SPENT” parodies.

    They’ve ruled on oxygen generators in airline bathrooms. It’s just important to remember now, if you happen to be in the bathroom during an aviation crisis, if there’s an oxygen crisis, you better get back to your seat pronto, at least if you are fond of breathing. They’re taking the oxygen mask out of the lavatory. So is it a security threat, a warning, or has there been chatter? At the Nolan Law Group website, David Evans (Aviation Safety Journal) speculates about
    EMERGENCY OXYGEN ORDERED REMOVED FROM LAVATORIES

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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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    Joy Flight Steals Joy

    Before the Sukhoi Superjet smashed into a ledge on Wednesday, killing 45 people and raining debris down the slopes of Mount Salak, I had never heard the term “joy flight.”

    The “joy flight” is the airline equivalent of you going down to the Ferrari dealership and taking a test drive. Or it would be if you were being driven in the Ferrari for fifty minutes or so, in a party atmosphere courted along with a bunch of other potential buyers.

    The “joy flight” is a selling tool for the manufacturer. They host this ride for potential buyers to show off the features and quality/qualities of a new plane they are trying to sell.

    Until the black box is recovered (we hope one was on the plane!), we won’t have any idea if the pilots had been asked to “buzz” the mountain, or if their request to fly low was a response to the heavy cloud cover. United Aircraft Corporation which built the Superjet says that pilot Alexander Yablontsev (who had logged 10,000 hours in Sukhoi prototypes) was their best test pilot, and had overseen “everything from the designing of the aircraft to its certification.”

    Buzzing mountains renowned as an airline graveyard would not be the smartest thing to do, but everyone does wonder why the pilots requested to lower their altitude right over Mount Salak. Family members are already protesting the hazardous route that had been planned for the demonstration flight.

    There were 35 Indonesians, 8 Russian crew members, 1 French and 1 American.

    The American, Peter Adler was a consultant for Sriwijaya Air, a domestic Indonesian carrier. Adler had been born in São Paulo, Brazil to Auschwitz survivors, grew up in Los Angeles and leaves behind a wife Randi, and family.

    Joy flight is a cruelly ironic term. In catastrophic loss of life cases, loss of joy can be considered part of the damages, as families inevitably remain haunted by the loss of their loved ones.

    We offer our condolences, but we know how insufficient that is, as relatives are only beginning the harsh journey of grief that begins with shock and a sense of immeasurable loss.

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  • Air France: Blithe Unconcern, Unconcern or something more?

    At Père Lachaise cemetery in Paris, the memorial dedicated to the victims of flight 447 will have its grand opening. Family members of those lost in the crash are invited.

    Sometimes Air France displays a disturbing lack of propriety, even when they’re doing their public best to appear sensitive and thoughtful.

    Case in point: Generously, Air France provided tickets to the family members of the victims of Flight 447 , the flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, that final notorious, fatal flight which disappeared into the Atlantic Ocean on 1 June 2009, killing all 216 passengers and 12 crew members.

    Guess which flight Air France put the grieving families on? Flight AF445 on an Airbus aircraft–it is, in fact, exactly the same flight as the one which killed their family members. (“447” was discontinued; “445” is the current designation for the same flight.)

    The victim association is intending to rebook on Boeing flights.

    It’s difficult to figure out, impartially, what is going on in the heads of Air France management. Are they deliberately ignoring the 400 lb gorilla in the room? (Actually, they’re planning to replace the 400 lb gorilla—the Airbus A330-200— with an even bigger model, the A340. Essentially replacing the 400 lb gorilla with a 500 lb gorilla… but I digress.)

    Meanwhile, the families agonize over the details: would the plane have crashed if the pitot tubes had been replaced with another model? Or if the pitot tubes had been maintained properly? And how can Air France possibly expect them to set foot on a plane–especially the same flight as the one that carried their family members to their deaths?

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    Anniversary of Bhoja Air Crash

    The anniversary of a plane crash is always a sad day;

    It is a day few people recall if they didn’t lose someone;

    It is a day remembered by children as the moment they found themselves orphaned–and mothers and fathers who found themselves without a child; and husbands and wives who found themselves widowed.

    It is a day with consequences that reverberate through the lives of those affected like ripples in a pond–except that ripples in a pond eventually come to rest, and the victims of a crash will be victims forever.

    We remember the day Bhoja Air crashed. It was en route from Karachi to Islamabad, with 121 passengers and 6 crew.

    The owner of Bhoja Air remembers too, and the FIA is not likely to let him forget:

    FIA Sindh Director Muazzam Jah Ansari said Bhoja Air owner Farooq Bhoja was taken into custody for questioning during the Bhoja Air plane crash and was released on Sunday after initial investigation.

    Farooq Bhoja was not arrested. His office was raided and the FIA seized official documents.

    Press Release Below:

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  • Hudson Crash May Provide AF477 Answers

    The one thing that stands out the most in today’s NTSB statement [about the US Airways Airbus A320 that crash-landed on the Hudson River] is that there is nothing but praise and admiration for the crew, whose quick reflexes, cool heads and complete professionalism saved the lives of everyone aboard.

    The NTSB is NOT so positive regarding Airbus, the manufacturer of the plane involved in that crash. See the NTSB’s Executive Summary

    There was no appropriate checklist for the event in the manual; and some procedures were so precise they could not be carried out.

    Ingesting birds into an engine is rarely so dramatic, mostly because it doesn’t usually happen to both engines. The circumstance allowed experts to examine cause and effect on the plane and a number of surprising things were concluded. Certainly more than I am talking about here.

    Some of the concerns conceivably could have applied to Air France Flight 447…if it had landed intact (although we are assuming it did not.)

    That the cockpit instrumentation did not reflect the status of the engines.
    Did the pilots of AF 447 also not have inaccurate reportage of the status of the engines? We think this is true. How can a pilot in the middle of the Atlantic in the midst of a storm with inoperable speed sensors know what the fly by wire engines are doing of the operating system doesn’t tell him something is wrong? The answer is: he can’t.

    That the rate of descent in the manual is unrealistic (claiming a safe 3.5 feet per second when in reality 13 feet per second caused damage.)
    Although there’s no telling what the rate of descent was for AF447, it appears likely that neither did the pilots. Also, 447 was not guided/glided down by Sully; if AF447 came down intact at all, it probably fell at a high rate of speed with only limited awareness of the pilots when it was too late.

    That in the Hudson event, slides were not flotation devices; wings did not float; and there were no rafts over these wings although the passengers scrambled out there.
    In the Hudson crash, the passengers exited to the wings, expecting flotation resources. Fortunately rescue came quickly before they sank. There were no “wing rafts.” Could AF passengers, had they survived the landing have exited, and been able to access rafts? We think not. Of course this is a moot point as we doubt they survived hitting the water–whether or not the plane was intact.

    Given that the NTSB called the Airbus manual unrealistic and inappropriate, that Airbus’s claim that for the Hudson crash “LaGuardia Runway 13 was technically feasible from an aircraft flight performance point of view” seems equally unrealistic. In fact, Airbus has a lot of nerve to extend a pseudo-panglossian commendation to Captain Sully for appropriately considering the high urbanization of airport surroundings. At this point, any statement from Airbus is highly suspect.
    At this point I consider Airbus itself, “theoretically feasible” but highly unlikely.

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