AircraftNews.Com

In the light of the recent very understandable outpouring of concern about the safety of public transport by air it might be time for a new approach to informing the public as well as a time for a very thorough rethink of procedures.
Despite the inevitable conspiracy theorists who will contend that the Airlines and manufactures “know” that modern airlines are unsafe there is really no sense whatsoever in this sort of thinking. The public can rest well assured that enormous effort ingenuity and thought will be put into resolving this matter.
Not only is there the normal duty of care humanitarian stuff it is actually enormously important economically that this be the case. So the conspiracy theorist are silly. There is however a clue here to something that might now be necessary.
Education.
Until recently it has seemed that the best solution to the fear of flying was a sort of total trust much as people used to have in Drs. They are super humans and not to be questioned and all will be well. They know better sort of stuff.
Now the worm is turning and the population is asking questions and perhaps more effort should be made to explain that Air transport is indeed still one of the safest if not the safest means of transport and is being relentlessly improved.
Maybe it is a time for a barrage of informative educative press releases from the various interested parties.
There would certainly be a very attentive audience.

The loss of AF 447 has rekindled simmering doubts about the safety of advanced composite aircraft and lent new wings to old concerns.
In 2007 a Boeing Employee alleged that he was fired for raising doubts about the long term safety of composite airframes as applied in the Dream liner and reports of the 2005 incident in which an A310 lost most of its rudder en route from Cuba to Canada have resurfaced.
This is the stuff conspiracy theorist love. Big Business suppressing vital safety concerns to protect profits.
While there is good cause for caution when introducing new technology it seems to have escaped the notice of the fear mongers that high performance Gliders have been using highly stressed composites for years without trouble and the A330 is still basically a metal aeroplane structurally.
It does seem that these concerns have been very carefully investigated but it also seems sure they will be revisited with a vengeance.

Regrettably even in the Hypersafety conscious world of Civil Aviation there is a tendency for the good old steady as she goes, conservative let’s not rock the boat character traits of people with turf to protect to work against innovation and constant vigilance in the search for a better way. Just as the People of the State of Victoria in Australia are discovering as they look at the aftermath of their recent tragic fires even a quick look at this disaster shows that there are very doable technological fixes which may have contributed to avoiding this diaster as well as very doable strategies for ensuring the retrieval of the vital black boxes (which are actually red).
Real time satellite surveillance of Airlines en-route with real time satellite derived weather could radically reduce the probability of a weather induced in-flight break up (which seems to be the current favoured theory) and an automatically ejecting and buoyant Black box is quite easily possible now.
Risk will never be absent but lessons should be heeded and what ever actions will reduce the possibility of such a terrible event in the future should be implemented.

It is possible that the fury of an equatorial storm brought down Air France flight 447.

The plane’s flight path seems to have taken it through what meteorologists call the inter-tropical convergence zone.

This is where two air masses meet, sending huge storm clouds more than 40,000ft (12,000m) into the sky.

Eight years ago, former British Airways captain Roger Guiver was confronted with an enormous storm during a flight from Cape Town to London Heathrow.

“You take weather like that extremely seriously,” he says. “You don’t go anywhere near it.” Read more…

Small Fragments of aircraft wreckage have been sighted along the flight path of the Lost Air France Airbus A330. In addition Airline crew on an opposite direction flight reported flaming debris sighted in the area of the last report. This last report incuded indictaions of depressurisation in addition to mutiple electrical anomalies. Loss of cabin pressure is a particularly ominous sign.

From ABC

The Horrifying loss of an Airbus raises many questions but one thing it does underline is the wisdom of the constant real-time information sharing which is now possible and which is being incorporated in the next Gen Airliners such as the A330 and A380.

Unfortunately the last data transmission from the stricken A330 suggests an in flight break up possibly after a lightning strike. For all their sophistication one thing often missed by the general public when they are shuddering at the thought of a flight in a little GA aircraft is that the big ones are like a blob of Jell-O compared to the little one. Anyone with reasonable skill should survive a C172 or  Cherokee 140 being turned on its back but if a 747 were to be turned totally upside down it would be a very risky business to recover it successfully from such an upset.

Let us hope for a speedy closure for all those involved

Air France-KLM Group, whose Rio de Janeiro-Paris flight disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean today, hasn’t suffered a fatal accident since the Concorde disaster almost nine years ago.

The twin-engine Airbus SAS A330 model involved has never had a fatal crash in a commercial flight.

Air France flight 447 with 228 people on board went missing after taking off from Brazil bound for Charles de Gaulle airport, according to a statement from French President Nicolas Sarkozy, who said he was “deeply concerned.” Air France said the plane had encountered an area of strong turbulence during the flight and an automatic message was received indicating a breakdown in the electrical circuitry. Read more…

MUMBAI: Two aircraft carrying nearly 250 passengers between them were speeding down separate runways of the Mumbai airport on Sunday morning before aborting their take-offs, seconds before reaching the intersection point of the runways.

The planes were seconds away from a collision which would have been catastrophic. Read more…

The British Ministry of Defence has admitted there was a litany of faults with a

military transport plane that crashed in Iraq in 2005, killing 10 servicemen

including an Australian navigator.

Royal Air Force Flight Lieutenant Paul Pardoel, 35, was flying on the Hercules when

it was shot down by insurgents.

Last year a British coroner found there were serious systematic failures in

measures to protect the 10 men on board.

Now it has been revealed that the C-130 had other faults.

In the Ministry’s response to a negligence claim filed by the Australian airman’s

widow, Kellie Merritt, it admits the plane had outdated wings and intelligence

system failures. Read more…

Federal investigators said today they believe two small aircraft involved in a midair collision over the Pacific Ocean departed from Long Beach Airport, but they have not confirmed the number of passengers aboard.

The search for victims and clues continued today, with a security zone established around two debris fields, authorities said.

The collision was reported by the pilot of a third aircraft, who told authorities he saw the crash at about 5:45 p.m. Monday, roughly five miles south of Long Beach Harbor, said Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration.
Read more…