Jetstar flight JQ-517 had to return and make an emergency landing at Sydney Airport, Australia, on Jun 19.
The Airbus A321-200, en-route to Melbourne, Australia, had to return due to an unusual odour on board.
The plane landed safely.
No one was injured.
Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
Contact photographer Andreas Mueller – Spotterteam Graz
What: KLM Boeing 777-200 en route from Atlanta,GA to Amsterdam
Where: Amsterdam
When: Feb 3
Why: After a successful flight from Atlanta to Amsterdam, the flight crew reported a flat tire prior to landing.
* (The plane’s indicators include a tire pressure indicator. As a rule, when 5 of the 6 main landing gear tires are correct, the pressure is adequate for landing.)
However, they made a successful landing and taxied to the gate.
Blue Air flight 0B-9361 returned and made a safe emergency landing at Bucharest Henri Coanda International Airport, Otopeni, Romania, on July 2nd.
The Boeing 737-800, en-route to Antalya, Turkey, was climbing out of Bucharest when the crew reported an abnormal landing gear indication, prompting the plane to return.
The plane landed safely. All people onboard remained unharmed.
The passengers were accommodated in a replacement plane.
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.
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.
KLM flight KL-809 had to divert and make an emergency landing in Phuket, Thailand, on May 9th.
The Boeing 777-200 plane heading from Amsterdam, Netherlands, to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was diverted after a passenger’s cell phone overheated.
The plane landed uneventfully. Everyone aboard remained safe.
Air Iceland Connect flight NY-336 had to return and make an emergency landing in Reykjavik, Iceland, on August 9th.
The plane took off for Egilsstadir, Iceland, but had to turn back due to an engine issue.
The plane landed back safely. All passengers and crew members remained unharmed.
Update
U.S. District Judge Mary Lou Robinson issued e a ruling Friday in Amarillo judging suspended JetBlue pilot Clayton F. Osbon as mentally competent to stand trial on federal charges stemming from a March 27 in-flight incident that forced his co-pilot to divert a Las Vegas-bound jet to Amarillo’s airport. He has no trial date set. It should be noted that the ruling that he is currently competent does not mean he was mentally competent at the time of the incident, at which time he was incoherent, racing inside the cabin, yelling about the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and pounding on the cockpit door
What: Jetblue Airbus A320-200 en route from New York to Las Vegas
Where: Amarillo
When: March 27 2012
Who: 1 medical emergency, 135 passengers, six crew
Why: While en route, the pilot of the JetBlue Airbus suffered a panic attack. He was locked out of the cockpit and restrained, and another JetBlue pilot who was aboard assisted the first officer in the cockpit as they diverted to Amarillo and made a safe landing.
