AircraftNews.Com

The mumbling about replacing pilots is getting louder and any moment soon one suspects there will be cries to replace the fallible humans with the infallible (?!!?) computers which we have come to trust with so much of our lives. This has not been an unalloyed success as the Global finanacial Crisis and episodic web meltdowns have shown but there seems little likelyhood of going back
In the next months the University of Queensland will be conducting trials with unmanned aircraft to explore the blending of unmanned with manned traffic in normal airspace and researchers at Boeing, Airbus and numerous academic groups are progressively defining traffic management algorithms for UAVs.
There will be the predictable knee jerk from pilots with much muttering about how Apollo was saved by humans and dark mouthings off about Airbus computers but obviously the time is coming when the issues should be debated and options examined. Read more…

As has been noted in many places Boeing is a great company with a great past and we all hope a great future. It seems to have become the latest victim of near death as a result of Corporocidal Managerism.
Corporocide is a new word for death by Spin Doctors and incompetent management. There is a clear pattern apparent here yet to be adequately addressed.
The Boeing 777 is now a mature and superb product (Although still having its teething troubles – consider the RR ice crystal thing). It was however years late and associated with serious cost overruns.
The A 380 similarly ran into serious trouble and was also years late and a huge embarrassment to Airbus.
The fact that such huge projects run into this sort of trouble is a clear indication of a major problem and it is up to management to find the answers.
In the case of Boeing it is said by many to be a matter of denial, shoot the messenger and technical ignorance or even worse, contempt on the part of Management for all others.
Looking back over the history of groups like the Skunk Works of Lockheed with a history of superb performance in delivering on time and on budget (even early and under budget) high Tec project it seems obvious that there is a way to avoid these problems.
If you think this is unfair consider what is involved in the latest delay of the first flight of the Dreamliner. What sort of management can announce a first flight on a given date and then delay yet again after a stream of delays years long?? Who is it that does not know what and why?
The various bloggs of disgruntled employees and generally interested parties have some consistent themes very much to the point. There are some total gems in the blogs eg very descriptive and seemingly accurate “MacDonnell Douglas used Boeing money to buy Boeing” and another “The management of MacD bit Boeing severely before finally dying”.
So what are the lessons? One is that stratospheric salaries do not buy common sense and another surely is that Management as a specialty has a long way to go before it is a Science and that maybe applied psychopathology has a good dealt to offer. To some extent we have the situation where the monkey is in charge of the cookie jar.
Lets see how Boeing gets out of this one. I am sure they will but who will be hung out to dry??

A new system to help guide pilots away from severe storms and turbulence in remote ocean regions is being developed at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) in Boulder, Colo., NASA said this week. NASA is funding the development of a prototype that should be ready for testing next year. The system combines satellite data and computer weather models with artificial intelligence techniques to identify and predict rapidly evolving storms and other potential areas of turbulence. “Turbulence is the leading cause of injuries in commercial aviation,” said John Haynes, program manager at NASA headquarters, in Washington. “This new work to detect the likelihood of turbulence associated with oceanic storms using key space-based indicators is of crucial importance to pilots.” Turbulence has been cited widely as a possible factor in the recent loss of Air France 447 in the Atlantic Ocean, but it is not yet clear what role, if any, it played in that accident.

The prototype system will identify areas of turbulence in clear regions of the atmosphere as well as within storms. Pilots on selected transoceanic routes will receive real-time turbulence updates and provide feedback. When the system is finalized, it will provide pilots and ground-based controllers with text-based maps and graphical displays showing regions of likely turbulence and storms, NASA said. “Pilots currently have little weather information as they fly over remote stretches of the ocean, which is where some of the worst turbulence occurs,” said scientist John Williams, one of the project leads at NCAR. “Providing pilots with at least an approximate picture of developing storms could help guide them safely around areas of potentially severe turbulence.” Click here for the full NASA news release, which includes to a link to related graphics.
From Avweb http://www.avweb.com/eletter/archives/avflash/1411-full.html#200686

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Air France pilots have accused French and European air safety bodies of failing to prevent the crash of Flight 447 off Brazil last month because they ignored a history of dangerous failures in Airbus speed probes.

The Union of Air France Pilots (SPAF) made their charges amid suspicion in parts of the aviation world that French investigators, the airline and the Airbus firm may be reluctant to pinpoint a design flaw as the cause of the disaster that killed 228 people.

Their view was reinforced today when Pierre-Henri Gourgeon, chief executive of Air France, suggested that pilots’ failure to manage weather radar correctly may have led to the June 1 crash of the Rio-Paris flight.
Read more…

The ATSB has issued its final report into the collision which took place at Parafield in SA on 7th of February 2009. It is the usual competent, thoughtful, constructive and highly professional effort.
A number of recommendations are made which will contribute to mitigating the risk of such potentially tragic events.
Despite this I have the feeling that there is an elephant in the room and it has not been talked about.
Until now the tried and true “see and be seen” strategy has worked well. This is just as well because there has really been no alternative. Time however has passed and now it is time to recognise that a new way has to be found to address the matter of traffic avoidance.
There are a number of existing technologies which address this problem and a choice should be made and a strategy devised to incorporate appropriate new technology into the SOPs of GA.
Cost and technical difficulty will be cited as reasons not to do this but if the Aviation industry does not take the initiative others will take action and the decisions they take might not be informed and may not be optimal for anyone.

On 7th July a highly modified Antares Motor glider took to the air under the power of an electric motor driven by a hydrogen and oxygen powered fuel cell.
The electric motor has a maximum power of 25 Kw and an over all propulsion efficiency of 52% in the cruise and 44% in the climb. It has a range of about 750 km and a maximum level cruise of 170 kph.
The aircraft is a significantly modified Antares Glider constructed by the Lange company and is manufactured from state of the art composites with input from the DLR (Deutsches Zentrum fur Luft und Raumfahrt) BASF Fuel Cells and Serenergy Denmark.
The Antares DLF H2 is configured in the more or less standard motor glider manner with a pusher propeller mounted above the fuselage behind the single pilot seat cockpit with the Hydrogen fuel in one pod slung under the Port wing and the Fuelcell reactor slung under the other.
It emits no CO2 and is almost silent. If the hydrogen is obtained from renewable sources no CO2 is produced at any point in the energy chain of the flight.
For full details go to the DLF portal web site http://www.dlr.de/en/desktopdefault.aspx/tabid-1/86_read-18278/

In a brave but sensible decision a multi-million dollar fleet of new training aircraft has been launched by Massey University’s School of Aviation in Palmerston North.

The high-tech Canadian-built air trainers replace the school’s old fleet of aircraft in which two student pilots died following a mid-air collision.

The 14 new aircraft, costing more than $8 million, represent a huge commitment for the university, but one it hopes will see its unique Bachelor of Aviation programme really take off.

“These planes will put us back at the cutting edge of the technology. It’s what pilots and companies want,” says Steve Maharey, Vice Chancellor of Massey University. Read more…

There is a telling moment in a recent interview Richard Quest of CNN did with an Airbus spokesperson while sitting in the cockpit of the company’s 330-200 model, the same one that crashed in the Atlantic on May 31.

Quest is going over with the spokesperson all the incredible features in the giant aircraft, noting that it is controlled by a central computer, which controls the plane automatically, receiving instructions from the pilot on what to do when necessary.

As the spokesperson explained, when there are problems the computer is programmed to automatically degrade functions to the basics. Quest next asked what happens in the event of a complete electrical failure. Does the pilot then have the ability to take over control of the plane completely so he or she can fly it himself without the computer. The spokesperson continues with his story of the back-up systems, in effect avoiding answering the question directly.
Read more…

French officials out of SAINT-DENIS, Reunion now say the black boxes of the Yemeni Airbus 310 that crashed off the Comoros Islands have not been found.

The French army says a signal detected from the debris of the downed plane was from a distress beacon and not one of the plane’s black boxes.

Commander Bertrand Mortemard de Boisse has told The Associated Press that the frequency of the signal detected corresponded to one of the plane’s distress beacons.

Earlier Wednesday, two top French ministers had said one of the black boxes from Yemenia Flight IY626 that crashed early Tuesday had been found.
From AAP

So much for experts. Consensus about the tragedy had been that the A 330 lost airspeed indications and then suffered an in-flight upset from which it did not recover.
Available evidence contained in a report issued on 2nd of July by the BEA the French investigation agency, is that the aircraft was intact at the time of impact, traveling essentially in a straight line at high speed and with a high vertical velocity.
The fact that initial evidence conflicts with expert expectations makes the retrieval of the data recorders even more important.
On this front the French have announced that they will continue the search for the pingers until July 10 after which other strategies including Sonar will be utilized.