Air Canada flight 549 made an emergency landing in Toronto, Canada, on January 29.
The plane, en-route from Newark, New Jersey, to Vancouver, Canada, was diverted after it lost cabin pressure due to a fault in an air conditioning unit.
The Airbus A319 plane landed safely. All 107 passengers aboard remained unhurt.
Alaska Airlines flight AS-959 made an emergency landing in Portland, Oregon, on May 13th.
The Boeing 737-800 plane flying from Phoenix, Arizona, was on short final to PDX airport when the crew reported a possible fire on-board.
The plane landed safely and was attended by emergency services.
All passengers and crew members remained unharmed.
A US Airways flight returned to Bluegrass Airport, Lexington, Kentucky, immediately after taking off at around 12:40 p.m. on June 14 and made a safe emergency landing.
The small plane was scheduled to go to Philadelphia with 33 people on-board.
Airport officials said that the decision for emergency landing was made after the thrust reverser of the plane, which is used to slow the plane down during a landing, got overheated.
A small plane crashed in the Canton of Valais in Switzerland, on August 20th.
Authorities said the plane was carrying three people when it went down near the Sanetsch Pass.
All three occupants of the plane were killed in the crash.
The accident is being investigated.
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.
An EasyJet flight had to make an emergency landing at Liverpool John Lennon Airport, England, on August 7th.
The plane heading from Edinburgh, Scotland, to Gatwick Airport, England, was diverted due to a medical emergency.
The plane landed safely. The patient was taken to a hospital.
An ultralight plane crashed south of Townsville, Queensland, Australia, on November 29.
Authorities said the plane was taking off from an air strip in Woodstock when it experienced some difficulties and went down.
The pilot, who was the only aboard, was killed in the crash.
The incident is being investigated.
