AircraftNews.Com » Opinion

The passing parade

mgiles — Sun, 03 Jan 2010 01:11:41 +0000

I was wondering what were the most important developments of the Decade. So perhaps for starters I will ask all those out in the blogosphere. What has been the essence of it all for the world, the West, the East and the developing world? In Oz it has been as usual a hectic end of the year but not too much pivotal stuff in the last month of Aviation. In the decade, lots of stuff but still sorting it out. Efficiency, Security (much madness still about) the end of piloted planes etc. Much to think about. More to come. Tell me your thoughts.

Frog in a pot phenomenon

mgiles — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 06:45:32 +0000

Frog in pot

There is a saying that if one slowly heats a pot of water with a live frog in it the frog will go to sleep and not get out and so get cooked whereas if he is dropped into a hot pot he will leap out. So it is in many situations in life. We have it in aviation where slowly evolving situations get way past a point where some action should be taken because each development is incremental and not so different from the last situation. So it is with Airbus pitots and standby instruments and now with Flight 188 overflying its destination I think we have the same thing. It does not really matter if they went to sleep or lost track of time there was considerable potential for trouble. Much has been made of the poor match of the human physiology and performance and yet steadily the man is being taken out of the loop in flying so that such things can happen. An extraordinary number of RPT flights pass uneventfully but where a trend emerges it should be addressed. Ground control is now possible and studies should be made, discussed and decisions taken. Pilots do not have to leave the cockpit. It is just another logical progression. The Helios tragedy where apparently a cabin crew member was walking about with a portable O2 system but unable to enter the cockpit is another situation where ground control could have saved hundreds. The reasons why this has not happened are many and various and to do with how aviation has evolved a rigid and inflexible regulatory process. Vested interests are many but it is mainly a sort of general inertia and no one has had the courage really to say come on guys wake up or more to the point, hear those who have been saying such. As usual there will be wails of technical difficulty and cost but it seems clear that it is going to be a small cost in the long-term and long over due for considerations. Maybe the risk of different sort of hostile take over is behind the resistance but we seem to find ways to trust our fellow men in many other situations. Why not?

911 Impact

In this last episode apparently, the pilots were so engrossed in conversation while checking their laptops that they lost contact with ground controllers for about 90 minutes.
The two pilots involved have had their licenses revoked, the Federal Aviation Administration reported.
The Wall Street Journal described the episode that occurred last week as illustrating two of the biggest problems in commercial aviation: cockpit discipline and pilot complacency. Surely, said airline experts, they must have fallen asleep. Apparently not. According to interview notes from the National Transportation Safety Board: – Both pilots are experienced and have never had an accident, incident or violation.
- Neither reported medical conditions. Both said they were not sleepy or fatigued. They had just had a 19-hour layover before the flight from San Diego to Minneapolis. Yet, from 6:46 p.m. Central Time until 8:14 p.m., the pilots did not communicate, reported The New York Times. More than a dozen controllers in three radar rooms tried to contact the pilots. Was the plane hijacked? Were the pilots in a medical crisis? Four fighter jets were on runway alert in case they were needed. What happened?
In short, the pilots radioed to controllers that there was “cockpit distraction” and “dealing with company issues.” It appears the pilots were discussing a new workplace schedule system following the merger of Northwest and Delta Air Lines, The Wall Street Journal reported. In the meantime, they failed to switch radio frequencies for a different set of air traffic controllers. Besides this inexcusable (? I’ll bet they dont ever do this again so why terminate thier careers?) example of incompetence, this points out several areas needing correction. Are cockpits too cozy? So much piloting is done automatically, in dark cockpits, that it’s easy to nod off or become inattentive. Airlines need to take steps to put the pilots at work doing something useful during that “down time” in the air. Some Boeing aircraft are equipped with warnings when pilots fail to adjust controls, The Wall Street Journal reported. Are voice recorders adequate?
The box recording the cockpit discussions only had the last 30 minutes available, leaving no record of the earlier distracted time. Every box should record every minute of every flight.
And what about video cameras? They should be used in every cockpit. This is not a privacy issue for the pilots, it’s a safety issue. When so many lives are at stake – 144 passengers, two pilots and three attendants – every reasonable means should be taken to protect them.
The good example of being prepared has been well documented, when Chester “Sully” Sullenberger safely landed an aircraft in the Hudson River with only a few minutes from warning to landing. As for the Northwest Airline pilots, every possible lesson should be learned from this strange incident. It would be appropriate for Congress to hold hearings – not to sensationalize this particular incident – but to probe for issues it has revealed. from http://jacksonville.com/opinion/editorials/2009-10-30/story/aircraft_safety_incredible_failure

Frog in pot

Green Airliners a must

mgiles — Sat, 24 Oct 2009 03:24:12 +0000

Today the Bow Bells will chime 350 times to mark an International Day of Concern about Global warming. Might take quite some time. And hopefully give many pause to think. Many are left more than a little bemused by the various claims made about the climate and who is doing what to whom. The press in an allegedly high minded attempt to achieve balance seems to print back to back articles by doom sayers and climate skeptic which serves to confuse rather than inform. Some actually seem more bent on inflaming the debate than informing or analyzing. An example is the local Australian Provocateur Andrew Bolte in the Sun Herald.
For what it is worth I have been running thru the literature with a view to reaching some sort of understanding. My qualifications are: an interest and a rather stale PhD from a good university in an unrelated field of Science so make of this what you will.
Once one start trolling thru the literature it emerges that there is a consensus that is truly impressive. The globe is warming and man has contributed to this. The closer the area of expertise of the sources is to climate the more there is the agreement. When the arguments of the skeptics are examined they seem to all be readily shot down. The longer it goes on the more the persistent skeptics seem to be willfully blind and self serving (IMHO).
This being so what are we to think? Well one thing is that we better nudge the political apparatus into a much more vigorous form of action and another is that those with an interest in any particular area should get into the action and start consciousness raising. For Aviation this means getting on the green bandwagon and pushing for more rational ways of achieving our goals.
Aviation is here to stay. It is hard to imagine that the world will relapse back into surface only transport but maybe we need to be more thoughtful about how it is done and what travels by air and when. For a variety of reasons expert propulsion engineers see Hydrocarbons as the drug of choice for large and fast passenger aeroplanes and see that it will be so for some time. Considerations like energy density and the problems of alternative suggest that if hydrocarbons are to be used at all applications such as air transport are the appropriate ones. For many applications however some lateral thinking is going to be necessary. Maybe we should resurrect sail power for freight. Maybe the age of the airship is here again? Maybe many things but for sure one of them is we should think long and hard and also act decisively and early. Mutually contradictory but that is life. My expert friends tell me that capitalism will solve it all. The market will ensure all the necessary trade offs will take place. I fear not. The market seems not to be able to see very far into the future and increasingly the Scientists tell us that the longer we wait the worse it will be. Certainly the market will respond eventually but it could be a tragedy for much of humanity if we wait for that sort of regulation by catastrophe to take place.

Shoot downs in the land of the free

mgiles — Sat, 03 Oct 2009 01:59:28 +0000

F 16s Formate

It is perhaps time to consider this topic. One of the problems with having weapons is that the time comes when there is an opportunity to use them and there is also a time when they should be used. The two may not be the same occasion. We have seen repeated episodes of tragedy arising out of this quandary. the British police in their shocking and tragic pursuit of an illegal immigrant whom they had erroneously concluded to be a terrorist was the victim in part of a genuine concern about a threat but in part a recently introduced doctrine. This was the doctrine of “rapid neutralization” or “CNS shut down” to use two of the euphemisms for filling someone’s head with as many bullets as one can so as to ensure their dying twitch does not allow them to set of a bomb. It is disturbingly likely that this horrible technique was so fascinating that whether they knew it or not the Police were waiting for a chance to demonstrate that they could do it.
There are regrettably lunatics who somehow think it is right to kill people they don’t know, who have never and never would, do harm to them and theirs in the name of one cause or another and authorities have a duty to protect the populace against them. It is an aweful responsibility that has to be faced.

The aviation community has its own version of this dilemma but so far has avoided the tragedy that is waiting, of a well meant and indeed commanded shoot down of an innocuous aircraft deemed to be a terrorist threat.
As time goes by without much public debate it seems possible that the time will come. It is now known that Cheney the VP approved the Military to shoot down civilian aircraft under certain circumstance in the wake of 911. There has been a sort of denial arising probably out of the unreality of the situation but the latest incident in the US where a Mooney pilot became unresponsive and eventually crashed raises this important question again. let us have a bit of a think about this
How close did jets come to shooting down an out-of-control plane?

– The F-16 military jets that were tailing a single-engine plane Wednesday before it crashed in a Randolph County corn field were prepared, if necessary, to shoot the aircraft out of the East Central Indiana sky.
“It’s a tough call,” Michael Kucharek, a spokesman for the U.S. North American Aerospace Defense Command, told the Associated Press on Thursday. “The pilots that are up there, that’s not something they
want to do, but if they’re called upon to do it, they’ll do it.”
The military jets were scrambled to intercept the plane after its pilot apparently lost consciousness late Wednesday morning during a flight in Michigan.
The plane strayed from a southward course when it reached the greater Muncie area, which it circled before hitting a tree line in northwestern Randolph County and crashed into the field along Ind. 28 east of
Fairview.
Kucharek told the AP that the decision to fire on a civilian plane would be made at the highest levels of the military, with likely involvement by the White House. Then -Vice President Dick Cheney had given the military permission to fire on incoming civilian aircraft during the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington on Sept. 11, 2001.
Authorities on Wednesday night removed the body of the plane’s pilot — assumed to be the aircraft’s owner, David Joseph Eyde, 42, of Michigan. An autopsy was conducted Thursday at Ball Memorial Hospital, but formal identification was not expected to come before next week, after Randolph County Coroner Duane Petry and pathologists review Eyde’s medical and dental records.
Todd Fox, the National Transportation Safety Board investigator assigned to the case, said during a Thursday teleconference that a fire that engulfed the plane immediately after it crashed “consumed the majority of the cabin cockpit, including the passenger-occupant area.” The NTSB probe will focus in part on the plane’s oxygen system, some of which has been recovered at the crash site.
Authorities speculated Wednesday that the pilot might have lost consciousness due to a lack of oxygen when the plane reached an altitude of up to 25,000 feet.

The plane, a single-engine M20M Mooney, is

capable of flying at such heights, but

pilots are required to have supplemental

oxygen at altitudes of 14,000 feet or

higher.
Advertisement

Fox said the plane’s pilot took off from a

Grand Rapids, Mich., airport at 9:44 a.m.

Wednesday, and informed air traffic

controllers he intended to make a “round-

robin flight” north to Traverse City, Mich.,

where he intended to turn around, without

landing, and head back to Grand Rapids.

The pilot — then flying at an altitude of

23,900 feet — said in a radio transmission

at 10:09 a.m. that he was making the turn to

return to Grand Rapids.

His last communication with controllers came

at 10:11 a.m., when the plane’s altitude was

at 25,000 feet.

The pilot did not respond to air traffic

controllers asking when he intended to make

a descent to land at Grand Rapids, at 10:39

a.m., and he was not heard from again.

“We have no indication of the pilot’s intent

to come to Muncie,” Fox said, and there was

no immediate explanation for why the plane

left its southbound course and circled the

Muncie area, beginning the wayward descent

that ended in Randolph County.

A preliminary report on the crash is

expected within two weeks, but a “factual”

report on the cause of the accident might

take up to a year to complete.

The plane, which lost both of its wings when

it struck trees near the Mississinewa River,

was removed from the corn field late

Wednesday, according to Indiana State Police

Sgt. Rod Russell.

The burned aircraft was taken to a salvage

yard near downtown Muncie, where it remained

on Thursday.

Delaware County Sheriff George Sheridan

credited local response to the crash to many

hours of training involving numerous police,

fire and ambulance agencies as well as a

speedy flow of information that began with

air traffic controllers then extended to

military authorities and the FBI then local

law enforcement.

Sheridan — who was completing a third day

of required firearms training on Muncie’s

east side at the time the emergency began —

was notified by a deputy of the wayward

plane.

“Communication from the state and Homeland

Security was coming into 911, and that

information was immediately relayed to us in

the field,” Sheridan said.

“It’s a matter of literally minutes how fast

all that goes,” the sheriff added. “These

agencies all train together. There’s a lot

of cross-pollination that goes on with these

agencies.

“I think yesterday’s response could be

attributed to the amount of training

everybody’s done since 9-11,” he added.

“From the air traffic controller once they

lost contact and the aircraft started coming

our way, all emergency services are notified

and it went all the way up and down the

chain the way it should.”

From

www.thestarpress.com/article/20091002/NEWS01

/910020305

Death by Computer

mgiles — Mon, 07 Sep 2009 02:15:55 +0000

There has been a deafening silence in the general press about the AF 447 tragedy of recent times. What with drones running round in various places bombing baddies with the occasional bit of collateral damage generally agreed to be regrettable by the responsible (what a way to use the word) parties and regular suicide bombings not to mention ferries turning over and NSW Cabinet Ministers being laid low by spurned lovers it does not take long for even such a monumental tragedy to fade into the background but those of us who fly are worried and will not rest until some sense can be made of it.
At present the official position is that we do not know the cause but suspect a perfect storm of events starting with a sensor failure led to a loss of control. The more time passes the more this seems pretty thin. If this could be the case then thousands are daily in danger. I expect that behind the scenes this is being taken very seriously and I also suspect that given the propensity for litigation currently prevailing loose lips sink financial ships is guiding the dissemination of information i.e. what you don’t know wont hurt you (or more accurately in some cases wont hurt the company).
It seems we have reached the point predicted frequently by experts where systems too complicated to be completely analyzed have been created and are in daily world wide service.
In the design philosophy of the Airbus et al a very serious effort has been made to build in protection by redundancy but as reports come in more and more evidence of startling failures emerges of the type which warrant drastic action.
I have collected reports of a total of 52 incidents in which malfunctions of automated flight systems with computers at their core have created situations where there was a serious risk of the loss of an aircraft and all aboard. As my research has not been exhaustive likely ther are many more. Two of these situations did lead to the loss of aircraft. In one case, the crash of a B2, the crew were able to eject but the bomber worth about $250 mil was lost while in the other case – AF 447, the aircraft and all on board were lost.
Why are we continuing to fly them? In the case of the Air force and B2s the failure was diagnosed and corrected but in the case of the AF447 it is clear that in actual fact the risks are regarded as acceptable in the face of the cost of the only rational action which is to stop using these aircraft till we understand what is going on. Or am I just just being alarmist?

Governments and Industry Ignored Warning Signs
Letter from John T Halliday
To: The Honorable Robert A. Sturgell, Acting FAA Administrator
Copy: European Aviation Safety Agency
Subject: NTSB Safety Recommendation
Date: July 22, 2008
On January 25, 2008, a United Airlines A320 lost three of six cockpit electronic flight displays after takeoff from Newark as the plane headed for downtown New York. The landing gear would not retract, all radios died, the overhead systems panel went blank. The emergency attitude indicator failed. The copilot testified, “If Newark had fog, and my attitude indicator had not recovered, we could have crashed.” Airbus reports 49 similar incidents — 17 when five or six displays blanked. 7 planes lost all flight displays. The UK Air Accidents Branch examined 14 display-blanking incidents. The NTSB believes these multiple losses create challenging situations. The United pilots reported multiple scrolling failure messages with corrective actions the computer removed so quickly, they were unable to interpret them. Blanking of flight displays coupled with systems failures is a significant safety risk because of increased pilot workload. Airlines have not informed their pilots, nor provided training. Crew attempts to troubleshoot these unusual problems may even lead to loss of aircraft control.
And as the London Times wrote on July 1 of this year:
The European Aviation Safety Agency is likely to be asked why it had never taken action to remedy the trouble well known within the Airbus 330 and 340 series. ‘EASA has a legal and moral obligation to get to the bottom of this problem. If there is a defective system and the aircraft is unsafe then it should be grounded,’ said James Healy- Pratt of Stewarts Law in London. Suspicion over the air data systems on the Airbus 330 and 340 series has increased after disclosure the aircraft experienced 36 episodes similar to the one that brought Flight 447 down. We mourn the loss of these souls. Our hearts go out to their famlies. We share their sorrow and we hope the tragic loss of their loved ones sparks long-overdue change.
There were snakes on this Airbus — snakes that left no trace evidence. Can pitot tube moisture turn computers rogue, leave pilots helpless to override, and crash a plane? The Air Force gets it. The pilots of this
$1.4 billion dollar B-2 couldn’t override their rogue computer:
Stars and Stripes Report Faults Computer in Guam B-2 Crash. The crash was caused by bad data sent to flight computers from three tiny wing sensors. General Floyd Carpenter: ‘The B-2 was on takeoff when the computer falsely told pilots it was moving along the runway at 140 knots, fast enough to fly. The computer then sensed the aircraft was going into a nosedive just as pilots tried to lift the craft off the ground. The (rogue) computer then ordered the B-2’s nose to pitch up to 30 degrees. The pilots desperately tried to override the computer, but it took the aircraft into a fatal stall. The aircraft performed as designed; all systems were functioning normally.’ Replacing Airbus pitot heaters is a good shot in the dark, but they have little to do with this tragedy. Maybe the heaters did it. Maybe a software bug did it. Maybe a rogue computer. Maybe a virus. Maybe the Tooth Fairy did it. Maybe the captain and copilot decided to commit mass murder, so flew into a thunderstorm. Maybe it was Colonel Mustard in the kitchen with the knife. But if it waddles like a computer, quacks like a computer and crashes like a computer . . . We may never know what happened without those missing black boxes, but need to pay attention to the computer-generated elephant sitting on our chests. The captain that horrid night was the Little Dutch Boy, trying to jam his fingers into the leaking dike of crashing computers amid their scary screams. Only he couldn’t plug holes as fast as the computers drilled more and more. He couldn’t keep up with the runaway holes, then ran out of fingers. And the sea rushed in and consumed them — murder by computer. His computers should have been fail-safe. They were fail-deadly — more interested in saving themselves than human beings. Bottom line? Designers have built machines humans can’t control. Replacing the pitot heaters plugs just one of the dike holes that killed 228. At some point, you have to build a new dike. Dr. Jordan Grafman, Chief of Neuroscience at the National Institute of Neurological Disorders, explains: “One of the big problems about multitasking is it’s impossible to gain a depth of knowledge of any task you’re doing; you only get surface-level knowledge.” Replacing those pitot heaters amounts to giving a cancer patient aspirin. The heaters are mere symptoms of the underlying fever. Air France 447 was a massive, beyond-human-control, China Syndome, chain-reaction computer system failure that rivals the Hindenberg tragedy that marked the end of hydrogen-filled airships. The question is: what about this computer system’s design allowed it to pinball out-of-control and why wasn’t there a way for the pilots to stop it?
Dr. Lisanne Bainbridge, Engineering Psychologist at the University College London, helps us understand in her “Ironies of Automation”: The classic aim of automation is to replace human manual control, planning and problem solving by automatic devices and computers. The automation designers’ view is that the pilot is unreliable and inefficient, so should be eliminated. The irony is that designer errors can be a major source of operational errors. Designers computerize the easy parts of the pilot’s job and make the hardest jobs even harder, leaving pilots the toughest tasks that designers can’t think how to computerize. Designers put computers in planes because computers remember more and make quicker decisions than humans. There is, therefore, no way pilots can check in real-time if the computer is following its rules correctly. Pilots have no way to check on if what the smarter machine is doing is acceptable. So if the computer is there because human judgement and intuitive reasoning are not adequate to keep up, which decisions is the human to accept? The pilot has been given an impossible task. See http://www.huffingtonpost.com/john-t-halliday/government-and-industry-i_b_276367.html

Boeing Dramaliner Overseer to leave

mgiles — Wed, 02 Sep 2009 02:53:31 +0000

Boeing Commercial aircraft CEO Scott E Carson

Did he jump or was he pushed? Personally I have been looking for the rolling heads in the Dreamliner program for some time as I have formed the opinion, surely widespread that there is more management than technical problems at Boeing and a scapegoat would be found somewhere. All the usual flatterning things are being said about Scott E Carson who has been in charge of the Boeing commercial plane programs since 2006. It does look as if enough is enough for him either in terms of butting his head against a brick wall or simply pushing a pile of unpleasant material up hill with a pointy stick but what ever is the real reason Carson is leaving early.
The Boeing Company said Monday that the executive overseeing its commercial-plane programs, including the delayed 787 Dreamliner, would retire. Scott E Carson, an executive at Boeing in charge of its commercial-plane programs since 2006, is retiring. Carson, 63, has led the commercial division since 2006, a period in which the new plane was delayed repeatedly by a variety of problems. He will be succeeded on Tuesday by James F. Albaugh, the company’s top executive for military programs, though Mr. Carson will not formally retire until the end of the year, Boeing said in a statement.
Dennis Muilenburg, 45, will succeed Mr. Albaugh, 59, at Boeing’s military systems division. Four days earlier, Boeing, based in Chicago, set a new schedule for the Dreamliner. The company said that it expected the plane’s first test flight to happen by the end of the year and that deliveries to airlines would start in the fourth quarter of 2010. Boeing’s chief executive, W. James McNerney Jr., told reporters and stock analysts that Mr. Carson, who had a background in finance and marketing, had made the decision to retire on his own. “The decision to retire was Scott’s,” Mr. McNerney said, adding that Mr. Carson felt that, with the new schedule, he would be “giving his successor a clear path forward on the program.” Scott Hamilton, managing director of the Leeham Company, an aviation consulting firm, said he believed that Mr. Carson had been planning to step down for some time. Mr. Hamilton said Mr. Carson told him at the Paris air show in June that he intended to retire once both the 787 and 747-8, an updated version of the jumbo jet that is also expected to fly later this year, completed their first flights. Mr. McNerney praised Mr. Albaugh as one of the company’s most experienced executives. He also said that Mr. Albaugh, an engineer who has headed Boeing’s military, space and related businesses since 2002, “is a technical guy himself.” Mr. Albaugh holds bachelor’s degrees in mathematics and physics from Willamette University, and a master’s degree in civil engineering from Columbia. He will soon relocate to the Seattle area. Mr. Albaugh “has a deep appreciation for the kind of oversight we need to blend into our development efforts here,” Mr. McNerney said. Mr. Carson had been credited with reviving sales of commercial aircraft before the recession hit. But the 787 Dreamliner, lighter and more fuel-efficient than other airplanes, has been plagued by delays stemming from supply problems, a labor strike, parts shortages and structural flaws. It is Boeing’s first major new airplane in a decade and the most popular program in the company’s history, with more than 800 advance orders. But its first test flight is more than two years behind schedule and the plane, which will make extensive use of lightweight plastic composite in place of aluminum, was originally planned for delivery in May 2008.
Mr. Albaugh has been at Boeing for 34 years. While he led the company’s military and space businesses, the unit’s revenue grew to $34 billion, from $25 billion, the company said, though its revenue flattened out as Pentagon spending peaked. During the last two years, Boeing transferred other executives from its military business into top management roles on the Dreamliner project as it tried to get it back on track.
NY Time See http://www.nytimes.com/2009/09/01/business/01boeing.html

Political correctness weakening national industrial base

mgiles — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 03:04:42 +0000

Industrial base of USA

WW 1 and to a lesser extent WW2 caught the US and Europe unprepared for conflict and with an industrial base of modest proportions. Despite many warning signs political decisions were it seems based on what government officials hope to be the case rather than what experts were warning to be the case. As the sage said those who do not learn the lessons of history are doomed to repeat them. There are some commentators who see a similar situation developing again. World War I caught the U.S. military unprepared, and although Congress was quick to order a massive buildup of guns, tanks and planes, with “virtually no defense industrial base … the war was over before U.S. industry could deliver any of them.” Today’s Pentagon budget cuts risk a return to the same situation. James Carafano a Washington Examiner comlumnist warns. “Washington has not seriously worried about the industrial base since the end of the Cold War,” and “production could virtually vanish” over the course of the next decade.
It isn’t easy to put U.S. defenses back on track after they’ve endured a season of neglect as Gen. William Snow found that out firsthand. Snow’s job, when he arrived in Washington in the World War I era, was to direct the buildup of artillery for the Allied Expeditionary Force. He thought his office should have stationery reflecting the importance of the task. His request was rejected. Rather than fund this extravagance, it was suggested the general purchase a rubber stamp to mark his correspondence.
Snow had joined a War Department completely unprepared to fight a war. The Army hadn’t been used to buying much of anything since the Civil War. It had forgotten how.
Nor was there much to buy. The United States had virtually no defense industrial base. When America entered the war, Congress handed out unprecedented contracts for artillery, tanks and planes. The war was over before U.S. industry could deliver any of them. Doughboys went into battle riding British tanks, piloting French planes and firing artillery made by their allies.
America in 2009 is returning to the 19th century, a world where America will be incapable of producing the instruments needed to defend America. Worse, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates’ defense policies are pumping steroids into the speed of that decline. Both houses of Congress have passed the defense authorization bill, giving their rubber stamp to dismantling the defense industrial base. Last week, President Barack Obama made a speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars cheerleading the decision. The White House has couched many of these defense cuts in rhetoric that makes them sound like smart business decisions — axing unneeded weapons and killing costly programs. We’ve seen massive cuts to everything from missile defense to how many ships and planes America needs.
The truth is that the administration is more interested in budget slashing than smart buying. And its ill-advised cuts are endangering operations in Afghanistan and Iraq. The proof of this is simple. They are cutting programs and replacing them with … nothing. The Pentagon plan is to simply ignore future needs or else push the decision to buy new equipment far into the future, when paying for new planes, combat vehicles, missile defenses and ships will be somebody else’s problem.

What Washington has not explained is how it’s going to sustain a defense industrial base when it doesn’t buy anything. Today, defense purchases account for about 10 percent of the nation’s industrial output. In a decade, that production could virtually vanish.
In fairness, Obama did not invent this problem. Washington has not seriously worried about the industrial base since the end of the Cold War. While Gates’ cuts have been trumpeted from the Pentagon’s E-Ring, folks forget that his predecessor, Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, slashed about 100 procurement programs.
The problem is that neither administration really considered the effect of these decisions on the capacity of the American industrial base to support any future Pentagon strategy. A recent study by the Aerospace Industries Association found that some of our defense sectors were already on life support. Regardless of any strategy the Pentagon might pick, the industrial base for developing rotary-wing systems (like combat helicopters), long-range bombers and some space assets is now so crippled that companies would have a difficult time responding to new requirements, even if the military decided today that it wanted a lot more new stuff.
There is only one answer. The Pentagon should immediately start a sustained program of modernizing its military capabilities.
Otherwise, the defense industrial base is going to dry up and blow away. With it will go more than just high-paying jobs and technical innovation. We’ll be saying goodbye to America’s capacity to defend itself at a reasonable cost. And that’s simply unacceptable.
From http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/columns/jamescarafano/James-Jay-Carafano-Obama-Gates-are-gutting-Americas-defense-industry-56248742.html

Shoot the usual suspects

mgiles — Sat, 15 Aug 2009 07:19:34 +0000

Twin Otter crash in PNG

The recent tragic loss of a DHC 6 twin otter in PNG with the loss of at least 13 lives has brought out into the open all the usual suspects. The pilot a young PNG National has callously and unreasonably been dubbed inexperienced and the aircraft affectionately know to many as The Twatter described as poorly maintained. With these and other stories such as that the co pilot had been “forced” to fly on his day off all coming from no where it seems likely that after the ususal shock horror tsk tsk reaction an enquiry will be called and what is already is known will be pointed out (flying in PNG is very difficult, aviation infra structure has been allowed to decay to a point which would be unacceptable in many other places in the world etc) and then a few people will be blamed preferably I suspect people outside PNG such as Australia or the EU and nothing will change.
I surely hope not. It is technically possible to avoid such incidents and relatively cheap and simple so to do. Augmented GPS approaches and rotary wing transport would transform such operations as the Kokoda one with a much lower level of risk. The Augmented GPS component of this solution is available now and should be put in place with dispatch. I suppose there will be a fight over who will pay for it. Couldn’t the interested parties do it now and decide on final distribution of costs later? It would cost much less than a Stealth bomber or an AWAC.

Time for collision rethink?

mgiles — Sun, 09 Aug 2009 10:38:14 +0000

FLARM

Another mid air collision occurred this Sunday in America but this time there was no miracle over the Hudson river. The helicopter and private PA 32R plane involved crashed with the death of nine people.
See and be seen has been for many years the accepted AND ONLY form of collision avoidance in the majority of aviation traffic situations and the obvious risks involved has always been accepted for the lack of alternatives.
An accident such as this latest one surely tells us this is no longer acceptable. The time has come for urgent and thoughtful action.
A technological solution must be found and there are several potential routes to a solution.
European and Australian gliding use the FLARM technology (Flight alarm) which uses GPS technology to provide aircraft to aircraft proximity warning. Examples of this device cost of the order of $1000 and provide distance and azimuth information with an audio signal and a visual display.
The purpose of this is to enhance the normal see and be seen by providing a timely alert so avoidance after visual acquisition of the target can take place.
It may be that this is not regarded as suitable for the higher velocities of general aviation aircraft.
There may be other ways of achieving the same goal but why not use this one for the time being?

Dreamliner becomes Albatross

mgiles — Thu, 23 Jul 2009 23:08:26 +0000

As has been widely reported the Boeing Dreamliner program is in further trouble with the current structural problems turning out to be more difficult of solution than had at first been thought (Or admitted?). It beggars belief that a team of such demonstrated competence could not see this coming so it has to be assumed that some in the company knew full well that they were going to miss the mark and that others dared not let them publicly admit it. When this has happened repeatedly surely the industry as a whole must be starting to doubt the entire public face of the company.
Will head roll? will changes be made or is it case of tough it out and hope as all involved have too much to lose to change directions?
Maybe it is a case of Management to destruction.