MH370: Two Years after

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Time passes. Shakespeare said “Better three hours too soon than a minute too late.”

As of today, the mystery of MH370 has gone unsolved for two years.

Better that the tower in Malaysia had been proactive and caught that there was something going on before it flew off course;

Better if maintenance had found the issue, if issue there was;

Better if safety checks had caught an issue, if issue there was;

We don’t have a clue what issue there was.

Hundreds of theories have been developed and discarded. Millions in funds have been spent on the search. Every penny could have been saved if something had been caught in a timely fashion; but whatever it was that we missed, we don’t even know, and won’t know, until the wreckage is found and studied.

The terrible irony with an accident like this one is that more money has been spent on looking for the wreckage than the families will ever receive. And no matter how much compensation there would be, it could never be enough.

Good things may happen as a result of a search, but it is difficult to define them. For example, look at the search for Air France 447 which sparked a rethinking of the black box. After that crash, battery parameters (for pinging) were a result. If only the battery could last as long as the boxes that protect the data from the weight of the ocean.

MH370 went so far afield, following the pinging of the battery never even came into play.

In the search for a lost plane, improvements are small and out of proportion to the loss. At times, it feels the tools we are working with are like spoons where a forklift is needed. The steps we have taken feel like inches in a journey of infinite miles. And that is what we face here. Until the wreckage is found, the journey is infinite. And I believe one day the wreckage will be found. I hope it will be in time to do some good; and that something will be learned from it to prevent similar accidents from happening again.

Check the date on today’s calendar—it is 2 years ago today.

Two years is a random number. It has been two years, and still the plane is just as lost. The people are just as missing. The families are still reeling. We cry out for justice and compassion for the families of who lost loved ones aboard MH370. For the sake of the families, we hope the calendar will not kill the search.

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  • Air France 447 DNA I.D. Good-Now Sophie’s Choice Awaits

    Read in Portuguese
    For those who may be reading this in another language, I must explain the phrase Sophie’s choice. The term originates from a William Styron novel of the same name, in which its protagonist, Sophie, is a mother who is forced to make an impossible choice: whether her son or daughter will be allowed to live. She is not allowed to choose both of them to live and sacrifice her own life (which is what most mothers would choose to do.) If she abstains from choosing, both her children will die. So the phrase Sophie’s choice has been accepted in American culture to mean any impossible choice.

    It is completely apropos in our current situation.

    According to police reports, completed laboratory tests extracted viable DNA from tissue samples of two of about 50 Air Flight 447 victim remains. The extraction proves that the DNA can be used to provide identification.

    However, earlier in the week, two Parisian judges in charge of the recovery, Sylvie Zimmerman and Yann Danielle, decided of the remains, “to preserve their dignity and out of respect for the families who mourn them, the remains of those too badly altered should not be recovered. While tests are carried out on those two bodies already recovered to see if they can be identified, no others will be raised.”

    Though judges have ruled the bodies must not be recovered from the sea bed because it is too traumatic for their families, there are families who want their loved ones recovered. So we will not be surprised if any judgment is challenged by family members who find it more traumatic to leave their loved ones at sea, especially while they are now so close at hand. It may be that the stated judgment was not hard and fast, however; it may have been meant only that recovery may be suspended as tests are carried out.

    Although the Brazilian victims’ families association president Nelson Marinho said that “This operation is very encouraging for those families who now have some hope of finding their loved ones’ bodies and being able to bury them,” it appears that some families do not want to be faced with the condition of the remains.

    The families or the judges will soon be facing a Sophie’s choice.

    It would be a non-issue if …

    -if the bodies were located in an easily found, easily retrievable location
    -if all the families agreed
    -if the testing were possible to do on the fly, under water, and immediately
    -if the remains were in an appealing condition

    But none of this is true. The bodies are in an obscure location, and will probably be transient unless actions are performed to secure them. If they are not recovered now, they will likely be lost forever.

    The families have different opinions and needs. Some are shaken by the trauma of recovery because it freshens the grief which is only of two years duration; some hope that a normal burial will provide closure; no doubt there are some who have deep feelings but cannot elect to disturb the remains or abandon them at sea.

    The testing of DNA must be done in a lab, and it is time consuming, and means that for the most accurate assessment, the remains must be recovered in order to be identified. And after two years in cold salt water under the same pressure the black boxes underwent, the condition of the remains either is not that nice, and will be less so upon recovery.

    Whatever is decided, let us remember the law is not cast in stone, but a living thing. Let us hope for the families’ sakes that those who feel qualified to sit in judgement over others choose, in this case, to facilitate individual family wishes, rather than presenting an obstacle.

    The families have been through enough already.

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  • The Headlines Say Sullenburger is Returning to the Cockpit.

    George’s Point of View

    It’s published so it must be true. Capt. Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger–hero of the Jan. 15 Airbus A320 miracle landing on the Hudson–is going to be part of US Airways Flight operations safety management team. This means he’ll be handling regular flights and also they’re giving him a suit and making him management. (Or would that be the uniform with the really shiny epaulettes?)

    Never has anyone deserved recognition more.

    Do you hear us Sully? We’re still applauding.

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    Door Switch Oops Rolls Nippon Flight


    Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
    Contact photographer Andrew Bowden

    What: All Nippon Airways Boeing 737-700 en route from Okinawa to Tokyo Haneda
    Where: Hamamatsu
    When: Sep 6th 2011
    Who: 2 crew injured
    Why: While en route, the co-pilot accidentally activated the rudder trim switch instead of the door mechanism.

    The plane descended 6000 feet and rolled, injuring a couple of flight attendants. The first officer—2400 hours— leveled off, and was able to admit the captain who was stuck outside the cockpit, waiting to get in.

    The flight continued without incident.

    In George’s Point of View

    If there is a problem, it comes out, eventually. My pilots tell me that after there is some kind of incident, we need to keep an eye on new incidents, reports, recalls, and especially advisories, directives and safety alerts. There can always be a relationship, no matter how obscure it seems at first glance.

    You know how everyone has been looking at Air France Flight 447 with a new eye, ever since examination into the Air France Flight 471 on July 22 apparently fooled the autopilot into quitting with a swift descent. And Airbus investigators looked at this event twice because you have two the same plane types doing something similar?

    Well, on the surface, this Nippon incident reminds me of Ethiopia Flight 409. It only reminds me because I saw a line drawing of the route of the plane as it spiraled out of control. It also was a 737.

    I’m not calling the situation identical. Certainly if one of the pilots were locked out on a bathroom break—not that a pilot would do this on takeoff!—it would turn up on the voice recorder.

    What if on Ethiopia Flight 409, someone had needed admission into the cabin?

    It just makes me wonder if it is possible that the cabin crew accidentally activated the rudder trim switch. The Ethiopian Airlines plane had just taken off; it would not have been high enough to drop 6000 feet before recovery.

    I know this thought is right out of the blue, and probably has no basis in anything but my wild imagination, but I am told by my pilots that although the switches are dissimilar, the door unlock switch is right next to the rudder trim. So, is it possible the trim switch could have been inappropriately engaged by accident on Flight 409?

    Some airlines rectify this by requiring a third party to open the door if someone leaves the cockpit, but I have to wonder if this could be a design problem.

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  • Hello 2014

    On the last eve of 2013, sunlight sank and sent me home to supper on prime rib, salads, lots of goodies– to think on what to write. For several decades our New Year celebrations were in Las Vegas, then we changed that to staying home just because it became boring to be out when we have such a lovely space where we live. There’s no place like home.

    To borrow a concept from Corinthians 13:11, last night I could say I was 2013, I thought as 2013, I spoke as 2013, I understood as 2013, I lived as 2013. But now is the dawn of 2014 and I have put away last year. Now I will henceforth speak in 2014. The language, and experience of 2013 is yesterday, gone forever. Looking at it like that, the year is fleeting (where did the whole year go so quickly?) Gone in a second, and I am, as are we all, faced with this new year, this tabula rasa. Where do I place my feet to not deface this drift of new fallen snow shortly to wear my footsteps? Forget resolutions—transitory things. These are our lives we are talking about. Our todays.

    On a new year, it seems that we hold time like water in our hands. However tightly we clench our fingers, it drips away. But if that water falls on a seed, a seed may grow, and become something. Maybe that’s how we scatter ourselves in time, like the ripplings of a pond, and a scattering of those seedlings we have watered as we lived through the last 365 days.

    On this eve, Nasa may be sending New Years Greetings from space to Time Square. I am happy to greet the new year from my home in California. After my most recent adventure in consulting, for one who travels so much, there is nothing to compare with the domestic bliss of home—except maybe the next venture.

    I hope to still do my business abroad and keep the home fires flourishing.
    I hope this year I always make the better choice.
    I hope that I don’t lose sight of what is most important.
    I hope I can help more people.
    I hope to make more friends around the world.
    I hope to do more than just live in my residence.
    It is not as if the fate of the free world hangs in the balance, but for me, in my little corner of the world, the choices I make every day feel very important. Next year I hope to make the right choices, facing each bump, and flat and fork in the road with an awareness of everyone else on the path. I do not say goodbye to my good friend 2013 or the years before. Like my grouchy window wipers squeaking in protest, the past is not swept aside like raindrops. It lives in me.

    This year I will not think of the year as an infant with a scant year to live. Instead, I will think of the metaphor of the dawn. How the dawn greets us with a fresh face every day, not just once a year. How brilliant is that? I am glad to be here, glad to be with my family and friends. I have worked with you, fought with you, wept with you, loved with you, laughed with you. I am sad for our losses, joyful for our successes. And with the dawn of 2014, I wish us all a bright new dawn of unlimited promise, hope, and maybe peace in the world. As Tiny Tim said last week and every Christmas since Charles Dickens brought him to life on December 19 1843, God bless us, every one.

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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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  • | | | | | | |

    Pilots Ignore ATC Directions, Hear Audio

    On March 11, 2013, an Air Canada Embraer ERJ-190 en route from Edmonton to Toronto,ON was on approach when ATC informed the pilots to abort the landing. Ground radar indicated something moving on the runway. Pilots continued to make the landing, and ignored ATC.

    Mechanics working on a Sunwing Boeing had left a van running and in gear, which subsequently rolled without a driver across the runway. At some point, the van impacted the Sunwing 737.

    In George’s Point of View


    While we can’t make assumptions, apparently the pilots saw the van safely flew over it and made a secure landing.

    However, there are a lot of errors here that could have been disaster. We are glad no one was injured. Safety first, everyone!

    • The maintenance crew for failing to secure their vehicle.
    • ATC for not using the call sign, even if it was evident to them who they were speaking to.
    • Pilots for ignoring ATC even if they saw the “threat” because there could have been an additional alert

    That said, of course we are glad no one was injured.

    Click Triangle below to hear audio

    [sc_embed_player fileurl=”https://airflightdisaster.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/03/Air-Canada-178-Ignores-Go-Around.mp3″]

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