Hawkeye off runway

Bad brakes and pilot error led to an E-2C Hawkeye accident in March in which an aircraft swerved off the runway and sustained more than $10 million in damage.

The Hawkeye was landing after a training flight at Chambers Field in Norfolk, Va., on March 19 when it skidded off the runway and broke its landing gear, according to a Judge Advocate General Manual Investigation report obtained by Navy Times. No one was injured.
From http://www.navytimes.com/news/2009/10/navy_hawkeye_102509w/

The aircraft’s problems began as it was approaching for a roll-out landing on the runway only to realize that the cockpit lights that show whether the propellers are ready for landing — known as beta lights — were not illuminated.

When the beta lights don’t illuminate, it means the plane will have trouble decelerating on the runway. When this happens, pilots are trained to conduct an arrested landing if possible. The landing strip at Chambers Field includes arresting gear to simulate carrier landings.

Rather than land, the pilot came around for a second approach, the report says. A crew member pulled out a checklist and suggested an arrested landing, but the pilot dismissed the suggestion, saying the lights were probably on a dimmer nighttime setting and there was no real problem, the report says.

On the second approach, the plane touched down, blew a left tire and began to swerve. The pilot dropped the tailhook in a last-minute attempt to catch the airfield’s arresting wire. The plane veered off the runway, parts of the landing gear broke off, and the plane slid on its belly for about 250 feet, according to the report.

Mishap investigators recommended that Naval Air Systems Command modify the landing system controls and add a secondary signal system.

Cmdr. Donald Basden, the commanding officer of Carrier Airborne Early Warning Squadron 120, reviewed the investigation and suggested that NavAir should also develop a “more robust braking system for all E-2 and C-2 aircraft.”

NavAir said plans to improve the brakes are on the horizon.

“There are currently no funded programs to develop a more robust braking system for the E-2 and C-2 aircraft. However, funding is being requested for fiscal year 2012 to improve operational ground controllability on the E-2C, E-2D and C-2A aircraft,” command officials said in a written statement. “If funded, the program would address those system components which affect aircraft ground controllability, and the braking system would be included in the effort.”

Concerns about the brakes on Hawkeyes date back to 2006, when Lt. Shawn Frazier wrote an article discussing the issue in Approach, a naval aviation safety magazine published by the Naval Safety Center.

“The brakes on the E-2 aren’t much better than the ones on my mountain bike, and any amount of heavy breaking causes them to heat up — fast,” Frazier wrote in the September-

AF447: The crash of Paris-Rio was avoidable

The Union of Airfrance Pilots(SPAF) say in this report, it is the failure of the Pitot probes to measure speed that caused the crash.

Suddenly AF447 is back in the limelight. This will not go away, lawyers are on the case. The Black Box will probably not be found, but if it were ever to be found many anticipate it would simply elucidate the sequence. At some point the ADIRU gave up resulting in a handover to the pilots in impossible conditions.

Nobody knows exactly what happened to AF447 but what we do know is that airspeed measurement is of critical importance when we are flying at great altitude in subsonic airframes. In pilot slang, as you ascend you enter the coffin corner, the apex of which is a point where the aircraft is stalled and exceeding the speed of sound (MACH 1)
simultaneously, hence the name.

Coffin Corner (Wikipedia)

Here is a simplified graphic of coffin corner courtesy of Wikipedia. With increasing altitude the stall speed increases and the speed of sound decreases. Our long distance RPT jets spend a large percentage of their flight times in the vicinity of this no go point. The fact that jet travel is very safe is testament to the skills of the engineers, scientists and pilots who make all this viable.

Those of us that fly are well familiar with the airspeed pitot system, in fact most of us can tell a story about what went wrong. Insects, dust, ice, covers left on, paint, masking tape, and so on. There have been major RPT catastrophies outside of the coffin corner for these simple reasons. Shit happens, we all know that. The difference with coffin corner is that we are high and fast, a long way from home with poor or no visual reference, and in addition we are stalling or breaking up, all mediated and filtered by a computer which says over to you.

In the great Echo-Chamber of the Internet you will read that we are depending upon the 18th. century technology of Henri Pitot to measure airspeed. In fact there has been a steady development from the time of Darcy in the 19th. century until now. We are committed to subsonic flight for long range RPT, but this pneumatic sensor technology may have hit it’s use by date.

In the very early days the pioneers flew without air speed instruments. The Wrights used a crude angle of attack indicator, Bleriot flew the English Channel with no airspeed instrument. The onset of WW1 encouraged the development of the Pitot-Darcy pitot method of differential air pressure devices to measure air speed in support of the fast and high powered aircraft required to fight a war. The highly developed devices in use today are direct descendents. Essentially they tap ambient air using pitot probes and static ports, measure the pressure difference, then compute and display a calibrated airspeed.

Airspeed measurement technology is in the headlines now, for everybody, not just the aviation buffs.

AF 447 Wreckage

It had to happen and now we see the first move along the feeding chain of aviation litigation for the AF 447 tragedy.

lawyers want EUR1 billion as a starting point for AF447 – victims

The Air France crash on June 1 was the result of a preventable mix of human and technical failures, according to Stewarts Law, a UK law firm representing 50 of the victims’ families

Stewarts Law presented arguments in Paris this week after experts used a simulator to replicate the conditions experienced by the crew of the Airbus A330 in a storm off the coast of Brazil.

The firm wants Air France and Airbus to put the EUR1 billion into a pot to be divided among the families.

The hearing heard from John Mahon, an Airbus and Boeing training captain, that enough data was transmitted by satellite from the stricken plane to identify four factors that led to the crash:

– The aircraft flew into an area of storms which other aircraft avoided by steering around them.
– The Pitot tubes (speed sensors on the front of the plane) suffered faults.
– There was a malfunction in the ADIRU, the three air data computers that feed information to the flight system and the pilots.
– The pilots may not have had sufficient training to retain control of the malfunctioning aircraft.

“If any one of these issues had not happened to AF447, the accident would not have happened,” said Mahon, who is advising the law firm.

In a separate investigation in France, Air France and Airbus will be asked why no action was taken to replace faulty Pitot tubes on the A330 series although they had suffered multiple failures over a decade.

Meanwhile, the European Aviation Safety Agency has issued a new safety warning, telling airlines to check Airbus speed sensors from the US Goodrich company.
After AF447, airlines were advised to replace any French Thales Pitots with those from Goodrich.

Aviation Attorneys

From http://www.impactpub.com.au/aircargo/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=4446&Itemid=60

Federal regulators propose requiring modifications to engines of Boeing 777s powerd by the RR Trent engine to prevent ice from forming in fuel lines on long flights, a problem blamed for the British Airways crash last year.

The work would have to be completed by January 2011.

The Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) proposed the safety directive after a similar move by European regulators called for redesigning a heat exchanger in the RR Trent engines in which engine oil is cooled and fuel heated.

About 50 such planes operate in the United States.

In January 2008, a British Airways jet crashed short of the runway at London’s Heathrow after both engines lost power. No one was killed, but several passengers were hurt. The pwer loss was initially mysterious but careful investigation revealed evidence of cavitation damage in the engine fuel pumps whic was finally traced to ice formation after unusualy prolonged very low temperatures in the cruise segment of flight.

It was thought that ice built up during the flight over a polar route. They said that when the pilots applied thrust for landing, the ice dislodged and blocked the flow of fuel.

Ice buildup was also suspected in a Delta jet that lost power in one engine on a trip from Shanghai to Atlanta last November. The plane made a normal landing.

Boeing and Rolls-Royce have been working with the FAA and European aviation regulators to certify a redesigned heat exchanger with greater ability to handle ice.

The order would cover all American Airlines’ 47 Boeing 777s. Delta has eight 777s with Trent engines.

The work on each plane would have to be completed before the jet flies another 6,000 hours after the rule takes effect, but no later than Jan. 1, 2011.

Boeing 777s poweredwould be affected as many have engines made by General Electric and Pratt & Whitney.

Airliner on face

American spokesman Tim Wagner said the Boeing 767-300ER airplane was at American’s Alliance base in Fort Worth for a heavy maintenance check.
“The maintenance had been completed,” Wagner said, “and during some of our functional tests before putting the aircraft back into service, the nose gear retracted and put the aircraft on its nose.”

The wide-body jet “has been out of service for repairs since that time,” Wagner said.

Wagner disputed comments from the Allied Pilots Association, which said in a Thursday evening message to members that “initial investigation rumors indicate the aircraft may be damaged beyond repair.”

“We’re still in the process of assessing the extent of the damage,” Wagner said, “so we do not have an estimate yet for when the airplane will be returned to service.”

Wagner added that nobody was hurt when the airplane fell to the concrete.

“American will complete an internal investigation of the incident to determine exactly what happened and how another occurrence of this kind can be prevented in the future,” he said.

The union said the airplane was the youngest in American’s fleet of 58 Boeing 767-300ER jets, delivered between 1988 and 2003.

The Boeing 767-300ER is a wide-body aircraft that seats 225 passengers – 30 in business class and the remainder in the coach section – in American’s configuration. American, which received its first Boeing 767-300ER in February 1988, was the first airline to put the aircraft type into service.

Neither American nor the Boeing Co. discloses the prices American pays for its airplane. Boeing’s 2009 list price for a Boeing 767-300ER is $144.5 million to $161.5 million, but American has acknowledged it gets a steep discount.

The current market value of the airplane would depend on a variety of factors, including its age, the number of its takeoff and landing cycles and its general condition.

American uses the aircraft heavily on international routes. From Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport, the Boeing 767 flies two of three daily London flights as well as American’s daily flights to Madrid, Spain; Frankfurt, Germany; Paris; Santiago, Chile; and Sao Paulo, Brazil, as well as some domestic routes.

Wagner said the incident will not affect American’s schedule.

“With our capacity decreases recently, we have some flexibility with our aircraft to meet our schedules and have spare aircraft, as well,” he said. See http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/bus/industries/airlines/stories/072509dnbusairplane.70d1c570.html

A 2nd of July press release has details

Airbus has launched a study for reinforcing flight data recovery, including, but not limited to, extended data transmission for commercial airliners, so that in the event of accidents, critical flight information can still be recovered and released to the investigating authorities.

Tom Enders, President and CEO of Airbus commented: “Gathering information from accidents is vitally important to further improve the safety of flying. Various technical means for reinforcing flight data recovery and data transmission to ground centres are principally available. We will now study different options for viable commercial solutions, including those where our experience with real-time data transmission from our own test aircraft could support the further development of such solutions.”

The study will be conducted by Patrick Gavin, Head of Airbus Engineering, and Charles Champion, Head of Customer Services, and will need to address technological issues as well as data protection and privacy concerns. Airbus will include industrial partners, research institutions, and international airworthiness and investigation authorities in this study.

Note for editors:

1. Airbus does not receive direct information from Digital Flight Data Recorder (DFDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorders (CVR) – the so-called “Black Boxes”. The DFDR collects data from aircraft systems, while the CVR records crew conversation and aural warnings. Presently, the only possible means to retrieve information from the DFDR and CVR is to process them on ground with very specific ground tools. DFDR and CVR do not transmit real time information – that responsibility is managed and controlled by the investigation authorities.

2. Retrieving the DFDR and CVR when aircraft are lost continues to be a major challenge for the entire aviation community. Today’s existing air-to-ground links for ‘Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System’ (ACARS) maintenance data transmission do not offer the bandwidth that would be needed for a fully real-time transmission of all the data stored in the DFDR and CVR.
RSS 2.0 feed

Wrong priorities

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.

The underwater sonar search for the data and voice recorders from the crashed Airbus A330 is to be ended today but Mr Gourgeon said other methods would be used to hunt the hull and black boxes on the Atlantic floor.

In a letter to the French Civil Aviation Directorate and the European Aviation Safety Agency, the pilots’ union said the agencies had failed in their obligation to act to resolve known dangers. They referred to repeated incidents with faulty speed data on the A330/A340 long-range Airbuses over the past two years that were similar to the sequence that hit Flight 447.

“We consider that if the appropriate measures had been carried out by your respective agencies, the problem encountered by the crew of AF447…would have averted the start of the sequence of events that lead to the loss of control of the aircraft,” said the union, which is the second body representing AF pilots.

In a preliminary report last week, the Accident Bureau (BEA) confirmed that faulty speed readings had led the automatic pilot and computerised flight controls to disconnect – as in the other reported incidents.

Data on the failure started a cascade of alerts that the airliner sent automatically to its Paris base. However the investigators said that the unreliable speed data – apparently from ice on the external “pitot” sensors – was only an element in and not the cause of the disaster. The crew would have retained full control of a “flyable aircraft,” said the chief investigator.

The Bureau offered no explanation why the aircraft lost control over four minutes and fell belly-first onto the ocean 35,000ft below. However jet pilots say that the crew, flying at night in severe weather, were in an extremely tough predicament. An Air France A330 captain confirmed the view to The Times.

Mr Gourgeon echoed a theory that the crew erred by failing to divert around storm cells near the equator. The captain of Air France’s Sao-Paolo flight just behind AF447, reported steering round a storm zone that he said had been difficult to spot until he turned up his weather radar.

“Perhaps Flight 447 did not have the luck to have this first warning and perhaps was unable to avoid a very active storm zone,” said the airline chief. As a result, the airline is reviewing procedures for radar use “whether or not it was the cause of the loss of flight AF447,” he told le Figaro.

Mr Gourgeon defended Air France over the sensors. After a string of icing incidents starting in 2008, the airline was replacing them all its long-range Airbuses when the disaster occurred, he said. “No document from Airbus made replacement mandatory,” he noted. He acknowledged that “the day after the (447) accident, we said that perhaps there had been a problem with ice…”
Unhappy Air France pilots protested today outside the annual meeting of Air France shareholders in Paris. Half a dozen pilots from Alter, a minority union, handed out leaflets saying that pilots “have the painful feeling that not everything was done to avoid the crash of Flight 447″ and that “the confidence of the personnel in the company’s management is seriously affected.”

Holding back tears, Jean-Cyril Spinetta, the Chairman of Air France-KLM told the shareholders gathered in the Louvre museum that the company would get to the bottom of the crash “even if it is uncomfortable for the airline…There are injuries that never heal,” he said.

The criticism from the SPAF and ALTER unions represent a minority of more militant Air France pilots. The Air France division of the SNPL, the national pilots’ union, has raised serious concerns over the airline’s handling of the Airbus speed sensors but has stopped short of alleging dereliction or cover-up.

Even if no cause is officially determined, the absence of mandatory action over the pitot sensors and data systems is turning into the central question in the aftermath of the Airbus disaster.

The charges from the pilots’ union have added to calls from lawyers and safety experts for an explanation from the safety agencies on why no order was issued. Some have suggested that the long-range Airbuses should be grounded is its air data computers are flawed.

The United States Federation Aviation Administration is now becoming involved because the US accident agency, the National Transportation Safety Board, has formally opened an investigation into episodes of failed airspeed systems on two US-related A330 airbus flights over the past two months.

It has been disclosed that some three dozen sensor-failure episodes had been reported on the worldwide fleet of long-range Airbuses before the Air France disaster. Until AF447, crew had always succeeded in retaining control.

Other Air France pilots are using an internet site (eurocockpit.com) to counter what they say are attempts by Air France and the BEA to blur the truth about AF447. On Wednesday, they said that by following Air France procedures in the event of an airspeed failure, “it is reasonable to assume that the aircraft could have faced a high speed stall, without any possibility of recovery.”

The pilots added: “The case of flight AF447 has just begun, and we can announce today that it will be very difficult to hide the truth.”

Air France was also thrown on the defensive today by media leaks of a scathing internal report on sloppy piloting standards which was circulated to crew after the crash of an Air France Airbus at Toronto in 2005. No-one was killed in that crash but the aircraft was completely burnt after pilot errors led it to overshoot the runway on landing and break up in a field.

Mr Gourgeon said that all the recommendations in the post-Toronto report had been implemented, making Air France safer than ever. “Air France reaffirms its complete confidence in the competence of its pilots,” the airline said in a statement.
From The Times Air France and SPAF (Union of Air France Pilots)