Author: David Learmount

When they find MH370, what then?

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , ,

The determination to find the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 is palpable, shared by the three main parties to the search: Australia (leading the search process), Malaysia (obviously) and China (more Chinese citizens were lost on the flight, whose destination was Beijing, than any other nationality).

These nations, aided by expertise from many others, work together through the Joint Agency Coordination Centre, an organisation set up by the Australian government at the end of March 2014, the month in which the aircraft went missing.

The specialist search vessel Fugro Discovery returned to the search area on 3 December after an interruption caused by a crew medical emergency. The operation so far has searched 75,000 square kilometres of the southern Indian Ocean floor, but the JACC says there are 45,000 more yet to search in the areas calculated to be the aircraft’s most likely resting place.

Fortunately, as summer advances in the southern hemisphere, search operations become easier and suffer fewer interruptions.

So when they find it, what next? This is what the JACC says: “In the event the aircraft is found and accessible, Australia, Malaysia and the People’s Republic of China have agreed to plans for recovery activities, including securing all the evidence necessary for the accident investigation.”

For relatives of those lost with the aeroplane, that also means hope of recovering some remains. The Chinese affected have been so horrified and angered by the MH370 story that it has soured relations between China and Malaysia.

If the aeroplane was ditched intact, this hope could be borne out, but no-one can pretend they know it was. The indicator the people cling to is that only one small piece of wreckage from the aircraft has been found, so they hope this indicates that the aircraft sank more or less intact.

For those interested in finding out more about how the search areas have been defined, the Australian Transport Safety Board has just released a report.

For some background, look to the blog entry I posted in November which explains why I am optimistic about this phase of the search.

 

Loss of control, loss of nearly 2,000 people in crashes

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As the Air Asia Indonesia accident investigators confirm the crash was caused by loss of control following an electrical snag, the tally of people who have died unnecessarily on commercial airliners has taken another step up.

There have now been 18 loss of control accidents since the year 2000, and 1,886 people have died in them because the pilots failed to maintain control of aeroplanes that were completely flyable, and most of which had nothing wrong with them.

The Air Asia accident involved an Airbus A320 at 32,000ft in the cruise over the Java Sea last year on 28 December 2014. The report says an electrical fault – known to the airline and the captain but not resolved – caused an alert to be repeated three times before the captain attempted to resolve the issue by tripping and resetting the circuit breakers for the flight augmentation computers.

The autopilot had been coping with the control effects of the electrical fault, but when the FACs were switched off the autopilot tripped out and left the pilots to fly the aircraft, and they clearly were not ready for that.

The electrical fault was caused by a crack in the solder on a printed circuit board associated with the rudder travel limiter, which prevents the rudder being deflected too far at high speeds. As soon as the autopilot was disconnected, the effect of the fault was to offset the rudder by 2deg, which is not much, but enough to cause the aircraft to roll left to a bank angle of 54deg. Most airliners bank about 20deg (maximum 30deg) for ordinary manoeuvres on commercial flights.

The copilot was flying, and he failed to take action immediately to roll the wings level, so the nose dropped. Some 9sec later when he did roll the wings almost level he also pulled the nose up. Then the bank angle returned to 53deg left, and the pull-up demand on the copilot’s sidestick moved to maximum, actions that suggest the copilot was already seriously disorientated. The aircraft climbed to a maximum height of 38,500ft, stalling on the way.

Once stalled, it descended at a rate of 20,000ft/min into the sea.

The pilots never recovered from the stalled condition. As in the AF447 tragedy the copilot’s nose-up demand – the opposite of what was required to regain control – continued.

There is some evidence that the captain may have left his seat to trip the FAC circuit breakers. At one point in this upset he gave the copilot the confusing instruction to “pull nose-down” (the pilots were different nationalities and neither was a native English speaker), but he then failed to act correctly to take override control with his sidestick.

The industry knows it has this huge weakness in its pilot workforce. The death of 1,886 people since 2000 testifies to it.

There are various components to the problem:

  • highly reliable and accurate automated systems in today’s aircraft mean pilots almost never get the physical or mental exercise of controlling the aircraft and its flight path, so many are not ready when they have to take control;
  • statutory recurrent training requirements are out of date and do not relate to the task of today’s pilots in modern cockpits;
  • most pilots now have no training for recovering aircraft from upsets involving significant attitude deviations from straight and level;
  • most have never handled an aircraft at high level and therefore are not familiar with how small the flight envelope is in thin air, and what to do if the aircraft goes outside the flight envelope (like entering a full stall).

Some airlines, in countries where the aviation authorities allow advanced airlines to vary their training according to evidence of need, the carriers are dealing with this weakness.

But in others where the old recurrent training requirements still dictate training minimums, airlines are still working to the minimums.

And there are even questions about whether, under the stress of aircraft malfunctions or upsets, some pilots’ brains just go all funny and there’s nothing training can do about it. In Toulouse, France, the ISAE is researching this.

Meanwhile, it is a tragedy that, in an industry that is very safe and getting safer, there will inevitably be more of these unnecessary fatal accidents. It only takes the smallest snag to trigger one.

EU prepares guidelines on multinational airline employment practises

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The European Commission is drawing up guidelines to try to prevent new employment practices having a harmful effect on highly mobile transport industry workers, and ultimately on the industry itself.

This includes cabin crew and pilots.

The European Commissioner for Transport Violeta Bulc talks about “a social agenda for transport”. She describes individual examples, explaining:

“For instance, should Andrzej, 40, a truck driver from Warsaw, sleep in his cabin when spending his weekly rest time abroad? Some Member States have decided to sanction such practices, but do they offer adequate alternatives? Should Andrzej be subject to different rules depending on whether he takes his weekly rest in Belgium or in Slovenia?”

She moves her focus to aviation:

“How can Nicolas, 20, living in Toulouse and dreaming to become a pilot afford to pay for his flight hours if he is subject to the so called pay-to-fly scheme?” That is a system for persuading copilots who need more flying hours in their log book to improve their employability, to pay an airline – or a crewing agency – for the privilege of flying as a copilot on commercial operations.

Or requiring, say, a Belgian pilot to be self-employed but to contract to fly exclusively for one carrier registered in Ireland but operating out of a base in Spain. In a case like that, whose jurisdiction dictates his contract, which protects his rights, where does he pay taxes?

Norway’s State Secretary for Transport and Communications Tom Cato Karlsen, speaking at an aviation safety conference in Oslo last year, said that Norway does not want to see “brutal” employment practices institutionalised within the EU airline industry and that businesses deserve a “level playing field” in Europe without being forced to join “a race to the bottom on employment practice”.

The Commission says that in the context of “rising global competition, new business and employment models” have emerged including “atypical forms of employment or pay-to-fly schemes”. It intends to “bring clarity to the legal framework for highly mobile workers through the issuance of interpretative guidelines”.

This sounds promising, but as usual with EU promises to deal with complex legal problems in a multi-national, globally-influenced environment, don’t hold your breath for solutions.

 

Flying as a computer game

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The RAeS called its conference this week “Simulation-based training for the digital generation”.

One of the premises is that a full flight simulator is just a particularly immersive computer game.

Well, isn’t it?

If so, the new generation of kids training to be pilots should be brilliant at playing it. And they’ll surely get high scores not just in the simulators, but also in today’s digital flightdecks.

According to Ryanair’s recruiting experience, however, the standards of new pilots today is no better than those in the past, and maybe they’re actually worse.

So perhaps there is something here to analyse and understand, as the RAeS has surmised.

Ah, but today’s 20 to 30-year-old new pilots are the transitionals, not “digital natives”. They did plenty of gaming as children and adolescents, and all their schooling involved digital interfacing at various levels, but they were not given their own iPad when they were two or three years old, as kids are now. Are the latter – the digital natives who have never known a non-digital world – going to be any different?

The industry already knows it has to develop pilot training to be more appropriate for today’s highly automated, ultra-complex smart flightdecks, but maybe at the same time training also has to change to cope with the differences in the learning styles and cerebral knowledge-banks of the digital natives.

Now, with smartphones, no digital native needs a cerebral knowledge bank: answers are available instantly at all times.

But they undoubtedly have a cerebral knowledge bank. What does it contain? They are multi-taskers. Is this good? They may have weaknesses, but what are their strengths, and can these be harnessed for the good of aviation?

These were the questions under examination at the RAeS this week.

Since iPads and other competing tablets were launched beginning in 2010, the first true digital natives will reach pilot training age in about 2027. Will they genuinely be any different from those presenting themselves for training today, whose entire formal educational experience has taken place with digital computers and Google-search an integral part of it?

Although the RAeS pressed its Young Person’s Workshop into service on this issue to good effect at the conference, the decision-makers overseeing the whole process are experienced aviators, engineers and academics with an average age of – probably – about 50. And mostly – although by no means all – male. How would they understand the needs of the next generation when their formative years and learning experiences have been so different?

This is just one of the elusive issues debated at the RAeS this week. The conference sub-heading was: “Attracting, selecting, recruiting and training digital natives for careers in simulation and training.”

But in keeping with the arrogant belief among my self-satisfied generation that the young don’t have an attention span that could cope with it all at once, stay tuned for more about the conclusions and revelations from the RAeS conference on this site shortly.

Meanwhile give us your thoughts – especially the younger brigade, please.

EZY, 20, woos lovers, 25

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , ,

Having transformed Europe’s flying habits since 1995, EasyJet celebrated its 20th birthday at the airline’s Luton HQ today, using it to launch new plans to woo travellers.

Among these is a loyalty system utterly unlike any on offer at the legacy carriers.

It’s by invitation only. If you are a frequent flier EZY knows who you are, your flying habits and has a pretty good idea of why you travel, so it knows what you want. For example, “long distance lovers”.

If you are in that category, your average age is 25, you fly to your lover’s arms eight times a year, and there are no favourite lovers’ routes. As EZY’s press release puts it, “love is all around”. There are some other fascinating categories, but more of that later.

Founder Stelios Haji-Ioannou (now Sir Stelios) was at the party along with chief executive Carolyn McCall, the captain of the first EZY flight Fred Rivett, and Lisa Burger who checked in the first passengers and is now head of customer services.

Stelios and Carolyn

EZY past and present, including Haji-Ioannou and McCall

Lisa said: “I’ll always remember the energy, excitement and hype surrounding our first flight.” Remember everyone had booked then with a personal phone call to the number printed on the aeroplanes.

She continued: ““From day one we began to educate customers how to interact and travel us and that we could make travel more affordable by cutting out complexity, overheads and costs that didn’t add value or that would compromise service.” Stelios himself said he knew it was a risk, and Lisa knew the customers reckoned they should grab the fares on offer before the upstart airline went bust.

McCall and her crews

McCall and her crews at Hangar 89 today

It’s got a fleet of 250 aircraft now, carries more than 60 million passengers a year and still has ambitious expansion plans within Europe. EZY’s trademark cheerful optimism pervaded Hangar 89, its Luton HQ, today.

Apart from separated lovers, here is just a taste of some of the other frequent flier categories EZY wants to nurture:

  • Independent business travellers, av age 43, fly 20 times a year or so, favourite destinations London, Paris, Milan, Geneva, Amsterdam, Berlin, Edinburgh and Lisbon.
  • Second home owners, av age 45, fly five times a year booking six passengers each time, favourite routes UK to Malaga and Faro, Paris to Nice, Geneva to Porto, Berlin to Barcelona.

Other categories include commuters, and those visiting friends and family including expats visiting home, and students or parents separated by time at university.

So what do they get for their loyalty? McCall says they don’t want air miles or Avios that are impossible to redeem on anything they really want, they want an extension of the travel simplicity they already like. The rewards are cost-free booking changes, free traveller name changes, and ticket price promises. All this launches next year.

Also just upstream in the pipeline is a smart new uniform with a bit more class but still a fair amount of orange, incorporating “wearable technology”.

The technology could be LEDs incorporated in seams or hems to make engineers visible on the pan, cabin crew visible leading an evacuation, and embedded video cameras to enable remote engineering inspections.

Cabin crew will have uniform-embedded microphones for in-aircraft communication. And EZY has already launched the idea of drones for aircraft inspection.

There was a refreshing restlessness in the air at Hangar 89 today.

Latest phase of MH370 search gets interesting

David Learmount Uncategorized , , , , , , ,

On 3 November the Australian Transport Safety Bureau resumed the deep sea search for the lost Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 [but see update at end of story].

Refuelled, replenished and ready to go, the ATSB’s survey ship Fugro Discovery has arrived on station once more in the southern Indian Ocean (see footnote for an update).

For those seeking a reason to be optimistic following a discouraging 20 months of searching the ocean without a result, there is definite cause for renewed hope this time.

Since it began the search the ATSB has been scrupulously methodical, scanning the ocean floor within a long, slender curved rectangle that encompassed what became known as the “7th arc”. This is a long line on the earth’s surface established by vestigial radio responses from the fatal aircraft to Inmarsat satellites just as it was running out of fuel.

Theoretically the Boeing 777 could have come down anywhere close to it, but working with the aircraft’s last radar position the ATSB identified the arc sector where the aircraft could realistically have come down, and has searched almost all of the identified curve and its close vicinity.

Since it has now trawled almost all the 7th arc’s viable sector and not found the wreckage of MH370, there is not much more to search. Logic says they must be getting close.

But not only logic.

For those who doubted MH370 came down in the sea at all, the fact it did so was established in July when one of its flaperons was washed up on a beach on the Indian Ocean island of La Reunion. This fact was forensically confirmed more recently by the French air accident investigation agency BEA.

But there’s another reason for optimism: on 22 December last year Flightglobal published a mathematical/geometric calculation by Boeing 777 captain Simon Hardy, also a mathematician, which indicates precisely where, according to his calculations, MH370 came down.

The search sector that Fugro Discovery has just begun to trawl encompasses Hardy’s predicted position for MH370. His recent refinements to the aircraft’s final descent profile put it at S39 22′ 46″ E087 06′ 20″. He adds, however, that depending on how long the aircraft floated, the main wreck could have drifted some time before sinking, and even during the descent could have travelled laterally. At this location he would expect to see mainly “some moveable aerodynamic surfaces, like the missing part of the flaperon that we already have, and parts of slats and flaps and maybe even the RAT [ram air turbine].”

This could be said to be the last chance for the search under present estimated criteria, because 777 performance dictates that the aircraft could not have flown further than this extreme southern end of the 7th-arc-defined potential ditching area.

Anyone who has published material on the web knows that it may receive praise, but it will certainly receive criticism. The impressive fact about Hardy’s mathematics is that, despite hundreds of thousands of hits on the article containing his calculations, nobody has been able to blow a hole in them.

By 3 December Fugro Discovery expects to have completed the search of the area containing, according to Hardy’s calculations, the wreck of MH370 and the remains of those who went down with it.

Hardy says he says he is excited about the next month’s search, having invested more than a year of mental and emotional energy into working out where MH370 flew, and why. He wants it found.

He’s not alone.

Watch this space for more on MH370.

LATE NEWS: On 5 November Fugro Discovery had to suspend the search and return to Fremantle, Western Australia, according to Australia’s Joint Agency Coordination Centre, because one of the crew developed suspected appendicitis.

UPDATE: Fugro Discovery was due to arrive back in the search area on 3 December.

 

Sinai crash update

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The wreckage field for the Metrojet A321 crash in Sinai is wider than originally reported – about 5km across at present, and in time maybe even more wreckage will be found.

If this report is accurate, it indicates an in-flight break-up of the aircraft, but the cause cannot be determined with certainty at this point.

Causes of in-flight break-up could be related to a missile strike or a bomb on board, but there is no proper evidence for those right now. There has been an “Islamic State”  claim of responsibility, but it has not been backed up with any evidence either.

Speculation in the media has begun about a possible fuselage failure caused by damage to the fuselage that was – allegedly – not properly repaired by the airline, causing an explosive decompression and in-flight structural failure. The kind of damage suggested in this speculation is a tailstrike on the runway during landing or take-off. But this is guesswork. It is not based on evidence.

Modern engineering makes aircraft extremely strong, so total in-flight break-up without extreme stress being applied to the structure is impossible. Thousands of Airbus aircraft in this series have been flying since 1988 and no such event has occurred.

Sinai A320 crash

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The Russian Metrojet aircraft lost in north-central Sinai today was a leased Airbus A321 that entered service 18 years ago. Its reported passenger load was 224 people, which means its cabin was full or nearly full.

It had left the southern Sinai coastal resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh heading north for its destination, St Petersburg in Russia. Its route took it across Sinai – where the weather was good – and it would have continued northward over Cyprus and Turkey.

According to commercial flight tracking service Flightradar24 the aircraft was seen to suffer a disturbance which caused rapid variations in its speed and height, reducing the speed to 6okt at one point, which would put it into a deep stall condition unless the crew acted rapidly to recover speed again. Then the aircraft developed a high rate of descent – about 5,000ft per minute, and the position, height and speed information from the aircraft’s transponder was lost.

Flightradar24’s information about the Germanwings aircraft lost in the French Alps earlier this year proved to be highly accurate, and ahead of official information from the investigators it became evident that the A320 had  begun what looked like a deliberate descent to impact, and so it subsequently proved.

In this case the information is more complex because of the apparent speed and height variations that preceded the fatal descent.

The Egyptian authorities have been quick to rule out terrorist action in the form of sabotage or a missile strike, but it is too soon to rule anything out. Sharm el-Sheikh is an important Egyptian tourist resort, and any suggestion of security breaches affecting travellers there would be harmful to trade.

The aircraft was cruising at 31,000ft, at which it would be safe from the kind of man-portable missiles that terrorists in the area could obtain fairly easily, but the aircraft was 2,000ft lower than the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 that was shot down over eastern Ukraine last year by a more powerful ground-launched missile.

Early information suggests the aircraft came down in one piece and broke up on impact, making the missile strike theory less likely. On-board sabotage, however, does not have to break an aircraft up in order to damage its controllability.

So at this point it is certain that the aircraft suffered a serious upset during the cruise, but there is no indication why that occurred.

Clutha questions

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Within hours of the police helicopter crashing through the roof of Glasgow’s popular Clutha Vaults Bar at 10:22pm on Friday 29 November 2013, it became clear this was not a straightforward accident.

Why did the helicopter come down on a building although there was plenty of open space near it, including the river Clyde? Pilots directing a distressed aircraft avoid buildings in favour of open space for obvious reasons, not least the reduction in risk of injury to those on board. As it happened, all three crew in the helicopter died, and so did seven people in the bar.

Perhaps the pilot had no control for some reason, but early evidence suggested the Eurocopter EC-135, operated for the police by Bond Air Services, did not break up in the air nor shed critical components.

Now the Air Accident Investigation Branch has published its report. It reveals that the fuel system had been mismanaged and, as the helicopter flew west along the Clyde toward a landing at the Glasgow City Heliport, within 30 seconds of each other the two engines stopped.

The investigation determined that, upon losing power, the pilot’s physical reaction was more or less the opposite of what was required to put the aircraft into a successful autorotative descent to a forced landing. As a result the main rotor rapidly stopped turning and the aircraft dropped like a stone.

Also extensively examined by the AAIB was the fact that, about an hour into the flight, the main tank fuel feeder pumps were switched off. There was no evident reason for this to be done, but it was.  Subsequently the pilot was provided with a succession of low fuel warnings, and acknowledged them by suppressing the alert chimes, but did nothing to correct the situation. All that would have been required was to switch the main tank fuel transfer pumps on, and the two small engine feeder tanks would immediately have been replenished.

The pilot’s regular communications with air traffic control were calm and measured throughout the sortie. The EC-135 had taken off from the Glasgow heliport, and the crew proceeded with a planned sequence of surveillance tasks in the region between Glasgow and Edinburgh, and it was on its return to land that the engine feeder tanks ran dry. There was no emergency call nor indication the crew faced any problems.

The AAIB’s report has a drier than usual style, reflecting its clear puzzlement as to why an experienced helicopter pilot with a good professional record would demonstrate such incompetence. Protocol would allow the AAIB to discuss possible reasons, but it has chosen not to do so.

A post-mortem examination of the crew demonstrated that they had no alcohol or drug traces in their blood. If the pilot was feeling unwell he didn’t say anything about it, but one wonders whether he was suffering some form of subtle incapacitation without realising it. The AAIB, however, has chosen not to pose that question in the report.

If the subtle incapacitation theory were true, a normal flight data recorder and cockpit voice recorder would not necessarily prove it. But a video recording of cockpit activity and of the instrument panel might record evidence suggesting it.

 

MH17 and the denial option

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The Dutch-led international inquiry into the MH17 shootdown has clearly anticipated the organised denial that would follow its publication.

This is evident from the extraordinarily degree of thoroughness in its forensic examination of the wreckage of the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777.

The inquiry was far more thorough than would have been required simply to confirm that an unidentified missile brought the aircraft down.

But as far as Russia and the eastern Ukrainian rebels are concerned this careful work is irrelevant. They can claim truthfully – although not with honest intent – that the wreckage was not secured, and that it could have been tampered with.

That makes them untouchable in law unless even more detailed evidence is uncovered that proves precisely where the missile was launched from.

Actually, there is a chance that evidence may be found.

But even if it’s not, the care to which the Dutch-led investigation has gone to identify the precise physical damage to the aircraft and chemical traces on the airframe is such that the report has real credibility: it makes clear that a Russian-built Buk missile did to the Malaysia 777 and its passengers and crew what Buk missiles are supposed to do.

The consequence of this report’s credibility is that the credibility of the deniers will be fatally damaged in the eyes of the global community as a whole.

So what else has the world learned as a result of MH17?

The day that MH17 happened the world’s airlines learned that intelligence about the safety of high level airspace is not guaranteed. Ukraine had closed its airspace below 32,000ft in the belief the rebels only had limited-performance weaponry. They were wrong.

ICAO has since set up a system for improving the communication of intelligence about conflict zones to airlines. But they could be wrong too.

So should airlines, from now on, avoid airspace over a zone in which – it is believed – small arms only are being used?…on the grounds that they might be misinformed about that too.

No easy answers here.