It will not be long before accident investigators reveal the reasons why the Jeju Air Boeing 737-800 crew felt they had to commit to a flapless, gearless landing on runway 19 at Muan, South Korea. But the reason so many people died was not the landing as such, but the fact that the aircraft (HL8088) collided with a very hard obstruction just beyond the runway end.
That collision broke up the hull and caused a conflagration. What was the obstruction, and why was it positioned on the runway extended centreline only about 200m beyond the runway threshold?
It looks as if it was a concrete anchorage for the Instrument Landing System (ILS) antenna array. ILS antennae are often just beyond runway ends, but they are normally designed to be frangible so any aircraft that collides with them suffers only minor damage. This was hard. Very, very hard.
The sequence of events that led to this accident began with the aircraft approaching runway 01, cleared to land, but the crew elected to go around just after ATC had warned them of a potential birdstrike. It looks as if a birdstrike did, indeed, take place, and the crew declared a Mayday emergency shortly after that.
The crew then elected to land on the same runway but in the opposite direction – on runway 19. This was not much of an issue because the wind was very slight and the visibility was excellent.
But when they returned for the fatal landing on 19 they touched down with no flaps and no landing gear. Why? Perhaps because the birdstrike caused the right engine to fail, and all or some of the hydraulics with it. And the gear and flaps are hydraulically powered.
We don’t know yet, but we will know soon.
Meanwhile the touchdown was as good as a flapless/gearless touchdown could be: wings level, nose not too high to avoid breaking the tail. But being flapless, the airspeed was very high – probably around 200kt.
Look at the video of the landing run. The aircraft slid the full length of the runway with the fuselage, wings and engines substantially intact, and with no fire. It slid over the end still going fast – maybe 70kt or so, but still with no further substantial damage to the structure and no fire.
Then the aircraft hit the obstruction about 150m beyond the hard runway overrun, but until impact it remained substantially undamaged and fire-free. At impact, the hull buckled and broke up, the wing fuel tanks were ruptured and instantly exploded into flames. The wreckage came to rest just beyond the obstruction, near the wire perimeter fence.
If the obstruction had not been there, the aircraft would have slid through the antenna array, across the level ground beyond it, and through the wire perimeter fence. It would have come to rest with most – possibly all – those on board still alive.
We will soon find out the whole truth about why the landing took place as it did. But because the accident killed all on board except two of the cabin crew, those answers will be almost academic. The question to answer is: what was that obstruction, and why it was there?
If a new search of the southern Indian Ocean goes ahead as proposed, the expedition may clear up once and for all the most perplexing aviation mystery since the second world war: the fate of the missing Flight MH370, and all 239 people lost with it.
The majority of those on board the lost flight – which took off from Kuala Lumpur bound for Beijing more than ten years ago – were Malaysian or Chinese. Now Malaysian transport minister Anthony Loke has provisionally accepted a “no find, no fee” bid by Southampton, UK-based survey company Ocean Infinity, to search a new area of the remote southern Indian Ocean, where previously rejected data suggests the MH370 wreck could be resting on the sea bed.
Loke explained his rationale for a new search: “Our responsibility and obligation and commitment is to the next of kin…We hope [the search] this time will be positive, that the wreckage will be found and give closure to the families.”
Ocean Infinity vessels took part in a previous search near the planned fresh objective, but they were carried out under the direction of government agencies from Malaysia, China and Australia, and were unsuccessful. This time the company will be using independently supplied data from multiple expert sources, and it will consider alternative theories as to how the aircraft was directed in the last sector of its flight before it finally entered the ocean. This will take the search further south than Ocean Infinity’s vessels have scanned before.
On 8 March 2014, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 took off from Kuala Lumpur on a scheduled flight to Beijing. Over the South China Sea, only 39 minutes into the flight, all radio communication with air traffic control was lost, and the aircraft’s data disappeared from ATC radar.
Military radar later revealed that, when it disappeared from ATC radar because the aircraft’s transponder had been switched off, MH370 almost did a U-turn and headed back across Malaysia, out into the northern Andaman Sea, and finally went out of radar range. What it did then has been the subject of endless speculation, but all plausible theories led to the south-eastern Indian Ocean, where the previous (unsuccessful) searches have taken place.
Since that time a few pieces of wreckage identified as part of the missing Boeing 777 have been found washed up on beaches around the Indian Ocean, thousands of miles from the aircraft’s flight planned route.
But the resting place of the wreckage and the remains of 239 people who had set off innocently on a commercial flight are, to this day, still undiscovered.
If the Malaysian government confirms its planned agreement with Ocean Infinity, the world may finally learn the fascinating truth about this mysterious flight.
“Oh I have slipped the surly bonds of earth and danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings” (Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee Jr RCAF)
There are probably millions of people aged in their twenties who have flown many times and never felt the magic. Before the new century arrived, almost all air travellers would have felt that frisson at the moment of unstick.
What has changed? That is the question.
Where is the excitement? Where is the airfield? Where are the aeroplanes?
For at least two decades now, economy air transport has been far cheaper than it was twenty or 30 years ago. But, Humble Traveller, you sacrifice much for that privilege! Almost certainly far more than you realise, especially if you are less than 30 and have never experienced anything different.
Today, from the moment of clicking into the online booking process to the point of your expulsion into your destination arrivals hall, the total air travel experience feels as if it is designed to humiliate air travellers. There are definite parallels between the way the low cost carriers (LCCs) treat their passengers and the way reality television shows test minor celebrities’ capacity to cope with public acts of debasement for the entertainment of viewers.
But it doesn’t have to be like this! Dear Ryanair (et al), it’s quite possible to deliver the absolute basics of air travel without making passengers feel they they are being punished for their parsimony!
Indeed one of the industry’s extant personalities, Ryanair’s chief exec, Michael O’Leary, almost encourages the impression that he chuckles at the pain he can persuade his passengers to undergo to knock a Euro or two off their fare! They just keep coming, he crows. And he’s right, they do – in ever larger numbers!
Why do passengers accept it?
Consider, Humble Traveller, what you are persuaded to undergo to purchase this flight.
At the website, you choose your departure point and destination, then scan the flights for the best value trip. That done, you decide what baggage – if any – you will check in, and what you may carry on board. Both these choices will add to your fare.
Then select the seat you want. Airlines, of course, are obliged to provide seats, but choosing a specific seat may drive your fare yet higher.
Finally, you are asked whether you want to pay a premium for the privilege of boarding ahead of other passengers. Quite why anyone would want to occupy a cramped seating space for any longer than necessary is not clear, but some people volunteer to pay for it, which adds to the impression that the airline, having successfully captured you, is playing with you like a bored cat.
You may, by now, have paid a total price for your trip that is up to three times the face-value of a luggage-free flight. And you haven’t even made it to the airport.
Airports, once exciting places to visit, with open-sky vistas of aeroplanes doing what aeroplanes do, are now a challenge to reach, hidden within concentric zones of increasing security designed to deter all but the most determined passengers.
Friends or family delivering you to the airport by car are confronted, on approach, with signage directing drivers to specific lanes for short-stay parking, long-stay parking, public transport drop-off lanes, VIP drop-off lanes, private drop-off lanes, all monitored by video-cameras with number-plate recognition software. Don’t dare get into the wrong lane or security men will swarm your vehicle and direct you around the system a second time to collect a second drop-off charge – or at least the fear of it!
Finally, when you drop off your passengers, the terminal entrance is several hundred metres away, with no porterage. Trolleys – if available – are distant.
A particularly awful airport to deliver to is London Gatwick North Terminal. It used to be light and easy, but now the infrastructure surrounding it has burgeoned, and innocent passengers find themselves dropped off in a skyless concrete chasm between the row of multi-storey car-parks and the terminal itself. This underground labyrinth feels like one of those abandoned warehouses in which criminals and cops have their final shoot-out in the movies.
Within this scary underworld the hapless travellers – rapidly abandoned by their driver who fears being charged for exceeding the permitted drop-off duration – are challenged to find a terminal entrance that will, hopefully, deliver them to a well-lit space for check-in.
The relief, when they do make it to the check-in hall, is overwhelming.
But that’s only the first hurdle. Now they have to negotiate the self-service bag-drop and baggage-labelling process, plus hefting 23kg bags onto a raised belt. Heaven help people who are old, frail, or partially sighted, because the airline won’t.
Having dispatched their bags – an act of faith – to god knows where, the travellers submit to robot-managed identity checks followed by security searches. Bags and belongings need to be hefted into trays, laptops separated, valuables exposed to public view, jackets off, watches off, pockets emptied, belts, shoes and spectacles removed, and all this personal kit is travolated away from you into the dark maw of the X-ray machine. Will you see it again, you wonder?
You, meanwhile, have to stand in a scanner arch with your hands held high, then undergo a pat-down check while your shoes are prodded by a hand-held sniffer wand designed to detect explosive traces.
All this is immediately followed by getting dressed again, in public, and recovering and re-packing your scattered possessions.
You have now made it to “airside”.
The assaults on your senses are not yet over. Immediately you are forced along a long and winding path through blindingly floodlit displays of costly bottles of scent, malt whisky, and other non-essentials before making it to the departure concourse, where you are confronted with the information that your flight has not yet been allocated a gate.
In most terminals, at this point, there is still no view of the outside world. There is still no sense that you will soon be “slipping the surly bonds of earth” in your sleek, 21st century version of a magic carpet. Still absolutely zero sense of anticipation.
Suddenly your flight is allocated a stand, and you have ten minutes to walk about a kilometre along blind corridors to a gate lounge which may – if you are lucky – provide a first glimpse of your flying machine.
At this point the boarding charade begins. The passengers all know they have an allocated seat, yet many choose to stand in a queue for the final security check before shuffling slowly down a blind, steeply sloping boarding pier toward the door of an aeroplane they are – seemingly – not permitted to see.
The last act before take-off is stowing bags and getting into a seat row so tightly spaced that, once there, the ability to move any appendage is painfully limited.
Remember, all this suffering has been entirely voluntary on your part. You knew it would be like this, but you chose it. Don’t blame O’Leary!
Or should you?
Yes you should. This has to change. You don’t have to endure this.
The LCCs have made their point, and have delivered cheap flying. We, the passengers, are educated now, and will not demand expensive privileges on the basic A to B service we can reasonably expect.
But the airlines and the airports have now to deliver that service with respect for their customers. They could. It would cost little, and improve business.
For the airlines, that will start with respecting their crews. A happy airline attracts happy customers, and that’s good business.
The airports have more work to do, starting with better design of the passenger spaces from drop-off to boarding. Retail maximisation should not dominate policy. Stressed, bored passengers are not in the mood for spending money en route.
Finally, make use – once again – of the natural glamour of flying to attract people back to the sky, by letting them see the airfield and its activity. Give them space to dream – along with Pilot Officer John Gillespie Magee – of “topping the wind-swept heights with easy grace”.
Research I have been conducting into my grandfather’s Royal Flying Corps/RAF service in the Great War (1914-1918) has yielded unexpected detail about basic flying training for pilots in those early days. Or, more accurately, the lack of it.
When I began the research task – some three years ago – I was focusing on WW1 front line operational flying techniques. But it gradually dawned on me – as a former RAF Qualified Flying Instructor – that very little – even now – has been written about initial pilot training in 1914 and 1915.
Just consider the training context at that time. The Wright brothers first flew in 1903, so in 1914 aviation was still in its infancy.
When mankind first ventured into the sky he didn’t know what he would find, nor how to deal with it. You cannot select “the best” prospective pilots when you don’t yet know what skills or aptitudes aviators need, nor even how to recognise them when they are present in a candidate.
Indeed, the army and navy leaders in 1914 had only a rough idea of how aeroplanes might best be employed in the military context. So, beyond the obvious need to inculcate in pilots whatever magic skills are required to get the aircraft airborne and keep it there, they didn’t have a clear idea of what mission skills the crew might need, nor how best to teach them.
Right from the start, soldiers and mariners definitely knew that the ability to see over the horizon – or even over the nearby hill – would be highly desirable, and a bird’s-eye view would enable the aviators to identify and observe enemy positions and logistical preparations, then report back to surface units.
Air-to-air combat skills did not even begin to become an issue until mid-1915, because most of the aircraft in use at that time had originally been designed as unarmed reconnaissance machines.
In order to appreciate fully why pilot training was so primitive in 1914 and 1915, it is essential for researchers to remind themselves constantly how primitive the technology was, and how little the practitioners knew about aviating. In the RFC there were no trained instructors and no formal flying training syllabus until late in 1916. Learning to fly was an exercise in trial-and-error. To learn more, you had to survive each sortie.
Maurice Farman Longhorn, a training machine in 1915
Estimates of the number of pilot and observer deaths in the Great War have been set as high as 14,000, with 8,000 of them occurring during training. More recent studies, combining fatalities, missing, shot down, and captured suggest 9,000 is closer to the mark for the total, and the number of specific training casualties is uncertain – but it was staggeringly high by today’s standards. A young American aviator training with the RFC at its Montrose, Scotland training base in 1913 wrote home that “there is a crash every day and a funeral every week.” And that was just on his base.
At the end of my grandfather’s training course in June 1915, his flying log book recorded exactly 24 hours airborne time. To train for a private pilots licence today you would need 35 hours or more to gain the necessary skills to satisfy the examiner, and today’s aeroplanes are far more reliable and much easier to fly.
In the remarks column against the entry for Learmount’s last training flight at Brooklands aerodrome, Surrey, on 9 June, he wrote the following: “Pancaked over sheds, smashed undercarriage and one wing landing.” That was clearly good enough for the RFC, because three days later he joined No 7 Squadron at Saint-Omer in France “ready” to fly and survive in the hostile skies over the Western Front.
Evidence abounds that, until mid-1916, young aviators were sent to the front-line squadrons with the basic ability to get airborne, fly cautiously, and recover safely to their base aerodrome. The pilots were little more than drivers for the observer/gunners who would gather the intelligence the army needed. Mission training took place “on the job”. Pilots who survived multiple sorties, possibly by luck, acquired additional skills and knowledge by default, but almost certainly picked up many bad habits and misconceptions too.
Major Raymond Smith-Barry – a graduate of the very first course at the Central Flying School, Upavon in 1912 – and today credited with being the founder of modern aircrew training standards in the RAF – had served as an RFC pilot in France from August 1914. By 1916 he realised that the standard of flying among the arriving aviators was simply appalling, and he decided something had to be done. By late 1916 he had compiled a formal pilot training syllabus, which he first introduced at Grange airfield, Gosport, on England’s south coast near Portsmouth, where he was appointed Commanding Officer of No 1 (Reserve) Squadron – a training unit – and took up his appointment there in December 1916.
Smith-Barry also invented the Gosport Tube, a tube through which the instructor could speak to the student, which was widely fitted to training aircraft from June 1917 onward. The new flying training syllabus, plus the improved instructor communication, benefited training hugely.
Smith-Barry was clearly not the only RFC aviator who had noticed how inadequately trained the young arrivals in France were because, by mid-1916, some training bases back home were beginning to provide basic mission training for pilots who had completed their primary flying tuition. 2nd Lieutenant LW Learmount, my grandfather, who had only graduated from his primary training a year earlier, was made commanding officer of a training unit, No 15 (Reserve) Squadron, at Doncaster, South Yorkshire, in May 1916. Within days he was promoted to Lieutenant, then Acting Captain, to provide him with the authority to carry out the task.
There was clearly a realisation by then that German machines were getting faster and better armed, and that pilots were not only going to have to be drivers, but fighters and also bombers. Smith-Barry’s controversial (at first) insistence that pilots should be trained to fly their aeroplanes to the very edges of their flight envelope, and to recover successfully if they strayed outside it, was gaining ground.
Fast-forward a year or so to September 1917, and by that time Learmount – now an Acting Major – had been the commander of No 22 Squadron for about 9 months, flying Bristol Fighters over the Western Front in France, and he made it clear that he was not happy with the skills of the pilots arriving on his unit. He complained in a letter to HQ 9 Group that arriving pilots had no training in aerial gunnery, formation flying and navigation.
The written response – almost a rebuke – came direct from Brigadier General Hugh Trenchard, Officer Commanding the RFC in France, who made it crystal clear to Learmount that that the resources to do more were simply not available, and that he considered it the squadron commander’s task to bring the skills of his new pilots up to standard where they were found lacking.
You can find much more in my nine-part serial “Leonard’s War”, which traces Learmount’s path through the RFC/RAF from training in 1915 to demob in 1919. For any of you who have read it before, since then it has been considerably expanded and edited as new historic material has come to light, and it remains a work in progress to this day!
There are still two months to go before the end of 2024, but the number of fatal airline accidents worldwide this year already comfortably exceeds the 2023 total. We’re not in disaster territory yet because the previous year’s total was exceptionally good.
Prominent risks facing the airlines today, according to incidents this year, include repeated runway incursions and airport air traffic control errors causing collision risk, and a rising number of in-flight turbulence incidents in which passengers and crew are severely injured or – in one case – killed.
Two countries that have had bad safety performance levels for many years – Indonesia and Nepal – have each suffered fatal accidents already this year, suggesting they have yet to get to grips with their national aviation safety cultures.
Each year for the last 44 years I have produced the world airline safety review for FlightGlobal and Flight International, and I have been commissioned once again to carry out their reviews for the current year. As usual, in January, it will provide fine detail of significant accidents and incidents, and analyze changes, trends and safety culture issues around the globe. The last annual review is here.
We wait to see whether November and December will add to the year’s accident total. Or not.
Aircraft cabin air contamination, a persistent issue for airlines because their crew and passengers face the risk of consequent neurological harm, may soon be alleviated by advances in chemical science, according to a new scientific paper published in the UK-based Journal of Hazardous Materials.
The study, sponsored by French industrial lubricant manufacturer NYCO, says: “The research underscores the urgency to replace hazardous industrial OPs [organophosphates] due to their documented neurotoxic effects and associated risks.” The study states analysis of OP chemical structures reveals that “one of the identified clusters had a favourable safety profile, which may help identify safer OPs for industrial applications”. Those applications include aero-engine lubricants, which at present are proven to be the source of contaminants released into aircraft air conditioning systems when “fume events” occur. NYCO has, for years, been researching the possibility of producing aero engine lubricants that are as effective as existing ones, but less toxic.
Also to be presented at the conference is the detail of new tests on passengers and crew that can reveal “biomarkers” in their blood proving that they have been exposed to toxins specific to aircraft cabin air contamination, enabling appropriate remedial actions to be taken by those affected.
In terms of mitigation options while the OP risk to airline passengers and crew remains at its present level, also presenting at the conference are Sweden-based CTT on the subject of cabin air humidification and active carbon filters; BASF on dealing with volatile organic compounds and ozone conversion; and PTI Technologies which will reveal its latest bleed air filtration capabilities.
There are those who attribute Boeing’s ongoing quality control scandals to its decision to move its HQ out of its Seattle engineering base to Chicago in 2001. Others blame the 1997 merger with McDonnell Douglas for a dramatic change in company culture in favour of cost-cutting and upping shareholder pay-outs.
Kelly Ortberg, formerly of Rockwell Collins, is Boeing’s new CEO
Whatever the arguments, Boeing knows it has to get a grip, and part of the plan has been appointing a new CEO who started on August 8. Kelly Ortberg is a 64y-old engineer, and was recently CEO of avionics company Rockwell Collins, where he built a reputation for being a “man of the people” as well as a diligent executive with an eye for detail.
He says he is going to base his family in Seattle, and explains why: “Because what we do is complex, I firmly believe that we need to get closer to the production lines and development programs across the company. I plan to be based in Seattle so that I can be close to the commercial airplane programs. In fact, I’ll be on the factory floor in Renton today, talking with employees and learning about challenges we need to overcome, while also reviewing our safety and quality plans.”
It was only four months ago, on 16 April this year, that Boeing’s board blocked a shareholder proposal calling on the company to move its HQ back to Seattle. The question now is: will moving back to Boeing’s historic base and its main assembly plants be the silver bullet that will slay the company’s demons? Sceptics abound, but it seems the new CEO is not one of them.
The HQ move 23 years ago was a result of priority shifts driven by the merger with MDC, but it reinforced the culture change away from engineering prioritisation by locating the board 2,000 miles from the engineering front line. As if that wasn’t enough, in 2022 Boeing moved the HQ another 1,000 miles east to Arlington, Virginia, closer to Washington DC, lobbying opportunities, and the Pentagon.
So what? With today’s communications, distance should be no barrier to good management.
Well, that might be true for many big companies, but for an engineering-based manufacturer producing complex, high-tech machinery for a safety-critical industry, this move physically separated the engineering from the managers, accountants and policy-makers. The expression “safety-critical” – in the case of the airline industry – is not a piece of marketing-speak, it is a crucial selling point for the operators. In the early 2000s when fatal accidents happened significantly more often than they do now, airline reputations could be broken by a single crash, and they knew it.
Of course it’s not as simple as that. It never is. Much has happened to the commercial air transport and aerospace industries in the 27 years since the Boeing/MDC merger. The need for corporate adjustment to today’s business environment would have driven changes anyway.
To understand the forces at play around the turn of the 21st century, its helps to look back to the late 1970s, when the process of US domestic air travel deregulation – set in motion under the Carter and Reagan administrations – brought painful change to US airlines in the form of unfettered competition. At that time the US domestic airline industry alone represented 45% of the whole world’s air travel activity.
It took a couple of decades for the industry to adjust fully to deregulation, in the process waving goodbye to giants like Pan American and TWA, and ushering in a process of consolidation among the survivors that saw names like Eastern Airlines, Braniff, Continental, Northwest and multitudes of others swallowed up.
A little later, and more gradually, deregulation within the European Union single market began, and by the mid 1990s early examples of today’s ubiquitous low-cost carriers were spawned both sides of the Atlantic.
About the same time, aircraft manufacturing consolidation in Europe resulted in the creation of what would become a powerful multinational consortium, Airbus Industrie. Its gentle beginnings in the late 1960s led to the entry into service – with Air France in 1974 – of the world’s first twin-engined widebody, the A300. It was unique and very good, but conservatism among potential buyers meant it sold slowly. Nevertheless, its arrival signaled change, and its engineering standards would see the eventual demise of the confident US slogan “If it ain’t Boeing I ain’t going”. Gradually it became clear that the USA was no longer unchallenged as the world’s supplier of big jet aircraft.
Today, however, Boeing and all the other manufacturers should be laughing all the way to the bank. Air travel is doing well. By 2019, the year before the global covid pandemic hobbled air travel everywhere, the size of the global airline fleet and the volume of world demand for air travel had grown to be a multiple of the size of the 1990s market. Now, in 2024, covid is under control, the global demand for air travel is powerfully resurgent, and that demand shows no sign of being tempered by economic dark clouds nor environmental considerations.
If the industry and business environment are so different now, why the persistent calls for Boeing to get back to its roots? The manufacturer’s serious underlying problems became dramatically visible when, in 2018 and 2019, two of its new 737 Max aircraft crashed out of control, killing all on board. One crashed in Indonesia, one in Ethiopia. The cause of both accidents was a control software change developed by Boeing to modify – in a modest way – some of the new 737 marque’s handling characteristics.
External aerodynamic data input to the system – known as the Manoeuvring Characteristics Augmentation System (MCAS) – came from sensors near the aircraft’s nose that measured the aircraft’s angle of attack (a crucial measure of the wings’ lift-generating performance), and MCAS accordingly applied nose-down force – if required – by adjusting the horizontal stabilisers at the tail. But in both crashes, damage to the external sensors meant they sent incorrect signals to the MCAS, and it repeatedly pushed the nose down despite the pilots’ control inputs. The pilots did not know or understand what they could have done to counteract the nose-down force, and the aircraft dived to fatal impact.
The crux of the matter is that, in designing the MCAS and its associated sensor hardware, the manufacturer had ignored a basic maxim that aircraft designers are expected to adhere to, like the Hippocratic Oath for medical doctors: Boeing had not designed the MCAS to “fail safe”. That is, to work out what failures could occur, and ensure that if they did fail it would not lead to disaster. This could be done either by duplicating or triplicating the system and setting up a voting system to isolate a fault, or designing the system so the effects of failure can easily be overcome by other means. Boeing ignored this philosophy, and its only excuse at the time was that it did not see the MCAS as a safety-critical system.
The two official accident inquiries (Indonesian and Ethiopian) and the many parallel US institutional post-mortems uncovered shocking evidence about attitudes at Boeing – and at its overseer the Federal Aviation Administration. After the crashes it took about three years to discover that Boeing did not have a formal safety management system (SMS), a jaw-dropping fact that must have related to a belief within the company that although everyone else needed one, Boeing didn’t. It has one now.
For those who, like me, had watched Boeing for nearly 50 years as an aviator and professional aerospace journalist, this was breathtaking. It was not the Boeing we thought we knew.
That question again: would a move back to Seattle cure all the ills?
The Boeing Field, Renton and Everett locations around Seattle wield a powerful symbolic and historic influence, and a move there would signal a faith in the engineers, mechanics and Boeing traditional values. Ortberg clearly knows this. But what of the philosophy that drove the HQ relocation to Chicago, and eventually to Arlington? Does that need to die too?
At the time of the Boeing/MDC merger, Boeing’s Phil Condit remained the CEO of the merged company and MDC head Harry Stonecipher was appointed chief operating officer. Stonecipher, together with former MDC chair John McDonnell, owned a larger shareholding in the merged company than the senior Boeing men. The MDC influence on subsequent developments was dominant.
Soon after the HQ move to Chicago, Stonecipher confided to the Chicago Tribune: “When people say I changed the culture of Boeing, that was the intent, so it’s run like a business rather than a great engineering firm.” He was signalling the developing business philosophy of the new era: shareholders were king. Despite the banking crash of 2008, which should have imparted a message, that philosophy prevails today, along with CEO remuneration packages that launch company chiefs into a different galaxy from the one that their employees and customers inhabit.
Meanwhile Ortberg says he is moving his family to Seattle, with Boeing Commercial Airplanes, but the corporate HQ looks as if it is to remain in Arlington. How does that work? And will Ortberg, the “man of the people”, inhabit the same galaxy he does now?
Having recently revealed in Learmount.com that air travel could easily be rendered less of a global-warmer than it is (see previous article Airline climate harm can be halved), another significant discovery enabling further advances on that front has just been chalked up.
Sustainable aviation fuel (SAF), if used at 100% concentration rather than a mix of about 50% with fossil-derived aviation fuel, appears to be able to reduce – by more than half – the global warming effects of high level cirrus cloud formed from persistent aircraft contrails.
Use of SAF is, at present, the most tangible action airlines can take to reduce their global warming effect, although its production is nowhere near sufficient to power the entire world fleet. Deriving from waste vegetable oil and production processes that consume global warming gases, its sustainability is its most obvious benefit. It is turning out, however, also to have unpredicted advantages, like a higher energy output per unit weight as well as a much cleaner burn.
This clean-burn effect has come to light as a result of trials conducted by Airbus, using one of its A350-900s, fueled with 100% SAF and cruising at 35,000ft over the Mediterranean Sea, trailed by a Dassault Falcon 20 chase aircraft carrying out contrail sampling. The trial has found that burning 100% SAF produces 35% fewer soot particles per unit burned than normal aviation kerosene, and an even higher reduction in ice particle formation, at 56% less. Visible contrails result from the water produced by fuel combustion condensing on soot or other particles in the atmosphere, and it is when high level aircraft contrails consist of ice particles that they persist longest in the upper atmosphere, creating cirrus cloud that would otherwise not exist.
Air travel has recovered vigorously from the dip experienced as a result of the Covid 19 pandemic. Indeed the pandemic lock-downs seem to have heightened travellers’ desire to fly, so any progress the industry can make toward reducing its climate change effects is more than just desirable, it is essential.
If the world’s airline industry were to agree to take the necessary action, commercial air transport could cut its global warming effects by 50% within a week. Permanently, and at virtually no cost.
Do I hear gasps of disbelief?
Disbelief would be understandable, because politicians and the media as a whole are ignorant of the causes of aviation’s climate-changing effects beyond production of the well-known global-warming gas, carbon dioxide (CO2), a by-product of burning fossil fuels in jet engines. It transpires, however, that CO2 is only half the story.
For aviation, finding alternatives to fossil fuel for power is particularly difficult. Electrically powered large aircraft are creatures of the distant future, and even the hoped-for widespread use of SAF (sustainable aviation fuel) may not be the answer that everyone dreams of, because its true sustainability has yet to be proven. CO2 will be with us for a while yet.
Yet the world needs aviation. For business, for trade, for government, for diplomacy. Also for leisure, for education, for tourism, to expand people’s minds and make isolationism less likely. Meanwhile the world is warming dangerously, so if they can, why don’t the airlines act to reduce their contribution to that warming?
Artificially curtailing leisure flying would seriously damage the economies of countless small or impecunious nations, no matter how virtuous the motive for grounding it. Large, rich countries would suffer too. Frankly, therefore, flying will continue. As Professor Ian Poll, Emeritus Professor of Aerospace Engineering at the UK’s Cranfield University, put it in a recent presentation on Aviation and the Environment, “In terms of the environment, aviation is both part of the problem and part of the solution.”
So, if there is an immediate way of halving aviation’s malign environmental impact without stopping people flying, what is it? What does the industry have to do? Why hasn’t it done it already.?
The necessary information to make this transformation is in the public domain, according to Poll, but it exists mainly in scientific papers. Scientific understanding of non-CO2 emissions, says Poll, is incomplete but “developing rapidly”. The data is there for politicians and the press to see, but no-one has picked up the ball and run with it. Perhaps no-one believes it?
Then on 29 November Professor Poll delivered his presentation on the subject to members of the Royal Aeronautical Society. I was among those who attended thinking I’d probably heard it all before.
Anyway, the specialist audience – gathered in the historic clubhouse at Brooklands Museum – despite being mostly aeronautical engineers and pilots, had never heard before about the potential for positive environmental action that Poll had just revealed to them. A few boffins at the Met Office definitely do know about it. Airline boardrooms, on the whole, don’t.
Yet.
Poll summarized the problem before proposing a solution. Global mean temperature (GMT), which has been rising for decades, is driven by the difference between incoming solar radiation and outgoing thermal radiation from the ground – the net result of which is known as radiative forcing (RF).
Anything that reduces the outgoing radiation – eg increasing the level of a greenhouse gas – increases both RF and GMT. Anything that reduces the incoming radiation – eg increasing Earth’s reflectivity to sunlight – decreases both RF and GMT. The key to global warming reduction – or at least its control – is action to reduce human-generated radiative forcing.
Contrails – or at least controlling them – contain the key to beneficially influencing aviation’s effect on RF. It is a more complicated issue, however, than the widely-held (wrong) belief that “condensation trails” are purely the result of the jet engines’ production of visible water vapour in the combustion process.
Professor Poll revealed that the current scientific consensus on aviation’s contribution to GMT rise is that one sixth of it is caused by the secondary effects of two combustion products – nitric oxide and nitrogen dioxide (NOx); one third by CO2; and half of the total by contrail-induced cirrus cloud.
If the airlines knew what to do to avoid generating this cloud, according to Poll, they could eliminate that 50% of aviation’s malign global warming very quickly, and at very little cost.
To act effectively, all the individual effects of aviation on the environment need to be understood. These include:
Aviation adds CO2, water vapour and particulates to the atmosphere.
Combustion produces NOx.
In very cold air the water vapour sticks to the particulates and freezes, forming an ice contrail.
All the above factors contribute to RF.
Key to the solutions in this case, Professor Poll revealed, is identifying the precise location of “ice-supersaturated” regions of the atmosphere. These phenomena have a lateral extent of tens to hundreds of kilometres, but their vertical extent is only 2,000-3,000ft. Their characteristic is very cold air with a low level of natural particulates, and within them water remains in the invisible vapour state at temperatures well below those at which ice would normally form.
Inconveniently, these phenomena occur within the height band of cruising levels that commercial jets use. When a contrailing aircraft encounters ice-supersaturated air, it precipitates the supercooled vapour into ice, and a persistent contrail forms. A persistent contrail may last for hours and even develop into cirrus cloud. This, Professor Poll emphasizes, can have a major effect on climate.
The effect of persistent contrails depends on the time of day or night that they are formed. At night, outgoing radiation can be reflected back to the earth by the ice cloud, causing net warming. In daytime, some outgoing radiation is absorbed, but solar radiation is reflected back into space, sometimes contributing a net cooling effect.
If airline operations continue precisely as they are flown now, the long term net effect, Poll points out, is a “large” amount of warming. If airlines were able to eliminate all contrails, the total net global warming effect would be halved. But if they were to eliminate only the warming contrails and keep generating the cooling ones, the total net global warming effect would be reduced by 60%.
Such a course of action, Poll states, is within the capabilities of the airlines, whose most obvious tactic would be to vary the aircraft’s cruising level by a couple of thousand feet, which would have very little effect on specific fuel consumption. Military operators like the Royal Air Force have known for nearly 100 years how to avoid creating contrails, which is essential to avoid being spotted and attacked. Poll describes adopting this course of action as “simple, safe, ethical, cheap, instantly effective, and available right now.”
The naysayers among scientists make the rather muted point that the “uncertainty” in the science is too big. Professor Poll fires back with the undeniable point that the experiment could be abandoned instantly upon the observation of any unpredicted ill effects.
For aviation, there are no other short-term solutions to its net global warming effect. So, this reduction will have to do, for now. The science about this effect has mainly been developed in the UK but, as so often happens with new science, it is beginning to look as if the first action based on it may take place in the USA.
Meanwhile, any editor out there who is churlish enough, at this precise moment in history, to headline on the fact that aviation has simply discovered that it was causing twice the global warming effect that everybody already knew about, has missed the point.
PS: Journalists please note that this is the first release of this information – apart from Professor Poll’s presentation – in a digestible form, so if you run it without acknowledging its source as Learmount.com, your work will be identifiable as plagiarism.
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