Frog in pot

911 Impact

Frog in pot

Starlings swarm. Click to enlarge

YIKES!!. What a coup for photographer Stefan Sonnenberg. You can find him here…http://www.airliners.net/aviation-forums/profile.main?username=Whisperjet

Germania Boeing 737-300  registration D-ADII flight ST-8656The starlings had a bad day, as well as Germinia who have to fix the engines.

It was a lovely VFR day and the pilots did it well as a procedural engine fail on takeoff. Hopefully Stefan will get an award for his image, he certainly deserves that. In the event the aircraft returned to Dusseldorf with no problems other than those for the passengers to explain their late arrival. More here http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/worldnews/article-1217035/Bird-strike-The-moment-200-starlings-sucked-passenger-jet-engine-off.html

Getting back to aviation, think about what would have been the situation if some of the unfortunate birds had shut down the pitots as well, clearly visible in Stefans pic. Under the VFR conditions applicable the pilots would have done just as well, except that they would have been challenged a little. If however they were entering turbulent IMC they would be challenged greatly. Such is the importance of airspeed in aircraft operation.

More on this in a later post. Hope you liked the pic.

SA A380

Given there are four engines on each aircraft and the operators have been doing their best to fly the pants of them it is no surprise that there has been an in flight shut down and in fact one could even say it has been an eagerly awaited event for the voyeurs and pundits of aviation not to mention the industry in general.
Flight SQ333, with a crew of 27 and 444 passengers on board, left for Singapore at 12:35 p.m. yesterday. Two and a half hours into the flight, an engine message to the cockpit prompted a shutdown by the pilot, Singapore Airlines said today. The airline didn’t reveal the cause of the malfunction.

“While the aircraft is able to operate with three engines, the pilots decided to return to Paris as a precaution due to the long flight,” the airline said.

The A380 double-decker jet operated by Singapore is one of 19 in service. The craft is still in Paris, and affected passengers have been put up in hotels until alternate flights out of the French capital are found. The jet is being fitted with a new engine on the ground, the airline said.

The A380 is certified as safe to fly with only three of its four engines, which led the pilot to return to Paris, where trained mechanics and other ground personnel could address the issue, said Eric Heraud, a spokesman for France’s DGAC civil aviation authority. The Charles de Gaulle airport in Paris is equipped to accommodate the double-decker, wide-body A380 and is one of 60 airports worldwide that will eventually be certified for the plane, which has a maximum takeoff weight of 1.2 million pounds (544 tons) and a wing area of 845 square meters (9,100 square feet). The plane can fit as many as 853 people in an all-economy class configuration.

France’s aviation authority estimates about one in 10,000 flights operated by the national carrier, Air France SA, suffers a problem with an engine that requires it to land before reaching the planned destination.

Some 16 airlines have ordered A380s, and of the 14 airlines that have already made a choice on engine type, nine have chosen Rolls-Royce.

Rolls-Royce is working closely with the airline to investigate the reasons for the malfunction. The company said the engine has proven highly reliable, with a dispatch rate, or number of times the aircraft has left at departure time, of 99.8 percent.

Singapore began serving the Paris route in June, offering daily connections. The company first began flying A380s in October 2007 as the first customer for the model.

Emirates Airline, the largest carrier in the Middle East, is the biggest customer for the plane after ordering 58. The airline now operates five A380s. Qantas Airways Ltd. has four in service, with another two scheduled for delivery this year and three in 2010.

Air France KLM Group’s Air France is scheduled to take delivery of its first A380 by the end of October, and will fly the plane between Paris and New York’s JFK airport. Deutsche Lufthansa AG’s first delivery was pushed back from 2009 to 2010.

Airbus delivered one A380 in 2007, 12 in 2008, and has committed to delivering 14 this year, after deferrals by several airlines forced it to drop down from 18 units. The company has a total order volume of 200 for the A380.
Some content fromFrom http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601085&sid=aTIiIuPrLkbg

Southwest 737 hull failure

Federal safety officials at Dallas are investigating how a foot-long hole opened in the top of the jet, forcing the emergency landing in Charleston, W. Va.

The Boeing 737 jet lost pressure in the cabin, but no one was injured on Monday’s Nashville-to-Baltimore flight that carried 126 passengers and five crew members.

The plane was built in 1994, and government records indicated that an inspection in January turned up eight cracks in the frame that required repairs.

Southwest said Tuesday that it inspected all 181 of its identical Boeing 737-300-series jets overnight before putting them back in the sky. Passenger Michael Cunningham told NBC’s “Today” show Tuesday that he had dozed off in his seat in mid-cabin when he was awakened by “the loudest roar I’d ever heard,” and saw the hole above his seat.

Cunningham said people stayed calm and put on oxygen masks that dropped from the ceiling. “After we landed in Charleston, the pilot came out and looked up through the hole, and everybody applauded, shook his hand, a couple of people gave him hugs,” he said.
Passengers in the front rows didn’t know the full extent of the hole — that it went right through to the sky, said Charles Overby, CEO of the Freedom Forum, a free-press foundation that runs the Newseum in Washington. “I was just as happy not to know that,” he told The Associated Press. “It was pretty harrowing, but I’ve been through worse landings during turbulence.”

Southwest said it was unclear what caused the hole, which ripped open just in front of the vertical tail fin as the plane cruised at 30,000 feet. The jet flew on for nearly half an hour to Charleston.

Federal Aviation Administration records show that during the plane’s 14-year checkup in January, eight cracks were found in the fuselage frame and repaired.

Damage from wear and tear is not unusual in planes of that age, and the FAA requires special inspections for cracks. In March, Southwest agreed to pay $7.5 million to settle charges that it operated planes that had missed those required inspections.

FAA spokesman Lynn Lunsford said an initial review indicated that inspection orders for the Boeing 737-300 didn’t include inspecting the area of the body where the tear appeared on Monday’s flight.
The FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board sent investigators to the scene to interview the crew and examine maintenance and inspection records, but could take months to find a cause, said agency spokesman Keith Holloway.
Southwest spokeswoman Marilee McInnis said workers conducted “a walk-around visual inspection” of the airline’s other 737-300s and discovered no cracks. During periodic maintenance overhauls, workers use equipment designed to detect cracks that aren’t visible.

The 137-seat 737-300 makes up about one-third of Southwest’s fleet. All its 544 jets are various models of the Boeing 737. Southwest operated a normal schedule of flights — about 3,300 per day — with no cancelations or delays through midday, McInnis said. Experts said the tear could have been caused by damage from a dent or ding, or the plane’s skin could have suffered from age-related fatigue. Jet cabins are pressurized and depressurized with every flight, which can cause tiny cracks over time. The Southwest jet was built in 1994.
Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va., said a finding of fatigue would be more frightening. If that were the cause, it could force the FAA to consider more rigorous inspections for older aircraft, he said.

Alten “Skip” Grandt, an aeronautics professor at Purdue University who specializes in structural analysis, said that the fuselage of the Boeing jet performed as designed by preventing a sudden and catastrophic loss of pressure, and stopping the hole from expanding.

The cabin depressurized, he said, “but whatever caused that hole, it didn’t cause the whole airplane to blow up.”

In 1988, cracks caused part of the roof of an Aloha Airlines Boeing 737 to peel open while the jet flew from Hilo to Honolulu. A flight attendant was blown out of the plane and plunged to her death, and dozens of passengers were injured. The incident led to tougher rules for inspecting fuselages.

In March, Southwest agreed to pay a $7.5 million civil penalty imposed by the Federal Aviation Administration for operating nearly 60,000 flights in 2007 on planes that had not undergone required inspections for cracks in the fuselage.
About 1,450 flights took place after the FAA had notified Southwest of the missed inspections.

Dallas-based Southwest Airlines Co. carries more than 100 million U.S. passengers a year, more than any other airline.
Original article at http://www.fox4kc.com/sns-ap-us-emergency-landing,0,2481185.story

Qantas A330

The A330-300 aircraft plunged suddenly over Borneo early yesterday before landing safely at Perth International Airport just before 8am.

“All of a sudden the plane dropped — I reckon about a 30-storey building — and there was a hell of a kerfuffle in the plane,” passenger Keith Huckstable told ABC radio.

Qantas said crew on the Airbus, which was carrying 206 passengers and 13 crew, were given little notice of the approaching turbulence, four hours after leaving Hong Kong.

Qantas said last night it appeared nothing had gone wrong with flight QF68’s systems, and the airline retained confidence in the A330 despite several recent incidents.

Three weeks ago, an Air France A330-200 mysteriously crashed into the Atlantic Ocean, killing all 228 people on board, while last October 70 people were injured on a Qantas A330-300 flying over Western Australia when the plane suddenly lost altitude after an apparent computer malfunction.

Australian and International Pilots Association president Barry Jackson said he had spoken to QF68’s captain, Paul Flack, and the aircraft may have hit cloud-associated convective turbulence, which the weather radar could not pick up.

“The radar is designed to pick up moisture; it’s not designed to pick up turbulence or ice crystals,” Captain Jackson said.

“Around Borneo there is some high terrain and obviously that’s probably where the clouds have come from.”

After the jet landed in Perth, Captain Flack told passengers convective turbulence was not normally visible to weather radar, which was designed to detect moisture but not ice crystals.

Qantas corporate affairs manager David Epstein also said convective turbulence was likely to have caused the plane to soar 800 feet before falling back to its cruising altitude of 38,000 feet.

Six passengers and one crew member were taken to Royal Perth Hospital suffering neck and back pain after the plane landed. One man reportedly received a cut to the head.

All were released yesterday afternoon.

Passengers likened the experience, which lasted 15-20 seconds, to plunging into a deep hole. Lightning cracked outside, people screamed and those not wearing seatbelts were flung about the cabin.

Michelle Knight was part of a group of 12 people, including six children, returning to Perth from a holiday in Hong Kong.

“It really shook everyone up,” she said. “There were things flying everywhere. You just turned around and there were things all over the floor. We saw all the people in front of us all go up at the same time and all go down at the same time. Everyone sort of went sideways.”

Another member of the group, Elsie Hudson, said her friend Vicky Richards was one of those injured.

“There was this massive drop and Vicky, who was with us, she didn’t have a seatbelt on and she hit the roof, the console, and she actually cracked it and took one of the light covers off,” she said.

“She was in a lot of pain in the end, her headache progressed worse and worse and her neck got worse and worse, and by the end she couldn’t move.”

Passengers received an apology from Qantas and an offer of counselling and the reimbursement of medical expenses. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau will investigate the incident.
From http://www.theaustralian.news.com.au/business/story/0,28124,25674774-23349,00.html