American Airlines flight AA-1803 had to make an emergency landing at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, Texas, on May 17th.
The Airbus A321-200 plane heading from San Francisco, California, to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, was diverted due to issues with the weather radar and navigation systems.
The plane landed uneventfully. Everyone aboard remained safe.
Peruvian Airlines flight P9-234 had to return and make an emergency landing at Rodríguez Ballón International Airport, Peru, on July 1st.
The Boeing 737-500, en-route to Lima, Peru, had to return due to failure of weather radar.
The plane landed safely.
No one was injured.
United Airlines Flight 594 had to make two emergency landings at Kansas City International Airport, Kansas City, Missouri, on May 26.
The flight originated from Washington, D.C. and was heading to Denver, Colorado, when it was diverted to Kansas City due to weather radar issues aboard the Airbus A-320 aircraft. The plane landed safely and all 142 passengers and crew members remained unharmed.
The plane was taken for repair and was cleared to take off again around 3 hours later. However, it had to return and make another emergency landing due to hydraulic issues.
The aircraft was grounded while the airline provided meal and hotel vouchers to the passengers and accommodated them in other flights.
What: Iberia Airbus A340-300 en route from Sao Paulo Brazil to Madrid
Where: Sao Paulo
When: Nov 12th 2010
Why: While en route, the flight developed problems with their radar and returned to Sao Paulo where they made a safe landing.
Pictured: An Ethiopian Airlines Boeing 737-86R
Click to view full size photo at Airliners.net
Contact photographer Konstantin Von Wedelstaedt
What: ETHIOPIAN Airlines Boeing 757-200 en route from Bamako Mali to Addis Ababa
Where: Ndjamena Chad
When: Jan 29, 2010
Who: 150 passengers
Why: After circling N’Djamena for an hour and dumping fuel, the plane made an emergency landing in Chad on Thursday. The emergency was attributed to a radar problem. Earlier the same plane had electrical problems on an earlier leg of the flight.
Why does this sound to me like an accident waiting to happen? Maintenance! Please!! Let us not have more bad news!
Radar failure over the Amazon is just one among a host of problems plaguing Brazil’s suffering aviation industry. The failure forced Brazilian and International flights to ground or to turn back. This from the country that sent a piece of the fuselage off thinking it was the flight recorder.
The radar was out from midnight until 2:30 am, and caused by an electrical problem. Travellers found themselves trapped in airports, unable to catch flights home. There was mass confusion in spite of the president’s speech primishing safety measures.
“Our aviation system, in spite of the investments we have made in expansion and modernization of almost all Brazilian airports, is passing through difficulties,” Silva said. “The security of our aviation system is compatible with all the international standards. We cannot lose sight of this.”
A new airport location will be chosen within 90 days but will take five years to build and is not a high priority. Congonhas, the nation’s busiest airport, has a slick, short runway considered a likely factor in the crash of the TAM flight that killed nearly 200 people; and the planned repair and remediation does have priority. The crash was the country’s worst disaster until Tuesday’s accident and it exposed widespread problems with the country’s air traffic control system.
Analysis of the recorded conversations should be available within a few weeks.
A radar outage from 11:15 p.m. Friday to 2:30 a.m. Saturday, caused by an electrical problem, forced planes heading to Brazil to return to their points of origin and make unscheduled landings.
The nation has had chronic problems with delays and cancellations on domestic flights over the past 10 months but this is the first radar outage.
Sao Paulo’s Mayor Gilberto Kassab said that building a new airport could take between five and 10 years and is not a priority.
Officials mistakenly sent part of the plane’s fuselage to the United States, thinking it was the flight recorder.
The real flight recorder had been located and would be sent to Washington for analysis.
The radar outage occurred when a short circuit cut off electricity during routine maintenance in the jungle city of Manaus. Power was restored by 1:30 a.m. Radar coverage was working again an hour later.
The ailing industry has not recovered from months of work slowdowns by air traffic controllers protesting precarious working conditions. holes in the country’s radar coverage, antiquated equipment and flight controllers with only rudimentary knowledge of English.
Radar failure over the Amazon forced Brazil to turn back and ground international flights yesterday.
Authorities mistook a piece of the fuselage from the accident for the flight recorder.
The loss of radar from 11:15 p.m. Friday to 2:30 a.m. yesterday caused planes s to return to their points of origin or make unscheduled landings.
A short circuit turned off electricity during routine maintenance. When power went out, 17 flights were within the coverage area. Nine planes continued to their destinations, and eight were rerouted. None were in danger.
“This is total chaos. I have never seen anything like it, and it makes me feel very unsafe,”
The radar problem prompted American Airlines to divert 13 Brazil-bound planes.
Delta Airlines said six of its flights were also diverted.
Jose dos Santos, a 43-year-old cafe owner, was aboard a cancelled flight when the crew announced Brazil was not letting airplanes enter its airspace because of the radar failure. “I was saying, ‘Oh, my God, my life is over!’ I was in a panic, all I could think about was the Gol jet that crashed in the Amazon last year,” Santos said,
Four United Airlines flights were also canceled.
The flight cancellations and diversions followed a nationally televised speech by President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva.
Authorities plan to build a new airport in Sao Paulo, where an Airbus A320 operated by TAM Airlines crashed Tuesday, killing 191 people.