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??

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.

Should AF 447 prompt a massive rethink?
It seems clear from the AF 447 tragedy that the time has come for a complete rethink about the Black box CVR (Cockpit voice Recorder) and maybe even who is in charge in Modern RPT.
As the story goes a frog being a cold blooded animal can be slowly cooked alive if the temperature of the water in the pot he is swimming in is slowly raised whereas if he is dropped into hot water he will jump out.
It could be that modern aviation is like the frog in the pot with the temperature slowly rising. Something very dangerous might be happening but complacency and inertia are preventing action.
Could it be that the AF 447 episode adequately analyzed will help us recognize that we need to jump out of this pot before many more die?
Read more…

Some years ago (maybe 30) I read in Flight that the time was coming when a latest generation Combat aircraft was going to take the entire GDP of a small nation. At the time I took it seriously and though it a bit of an exaggeration but as time has worn on it seems they were joking at the time using delightful British irony but that they had unwittingly hit the nail on the head. That day is here with the F22 that the US wont sell to any one because it cost them so dear and mega Airliners taking many Billions to create and 100s of millions to buy.
As the financial crisis looms and doomsayers prattle away I wonder whether now is the time for a paradigm shift. Skip the A380 and A350 and B787 etc and go for a highly standardized no frills blended body well and truly subsonic alternatively powered (fuel cells and props?) solutions that will halve the cost per kg per kilometer (Note I use metric as I am talking of the future)
Anyone with the courage to do it should (?!) clean up.

An insidious changes in recent times in Military aviation has been the advent of Unmanned aircraft. Pilots sit at desks on one continent flying remote drones on another. These can and do launch missiles that can wreak enormous damage. The pilot then goes home to his dinner and watches TV or does his chores. There is the potential here to fundamentally change the nature of warefare with some very unpleasant consequences such as the further dehumanisation of the “target”.
Just imagine how easy it may become to make a decision to bomb a village in Afghanistan because the choice is seen as eliminating a risk to “our boys over there” with on the one hand the saving of noble souls fighting for freedom to be balanced against on the other hand the unavoidable collateral loss of some Ethnic non-combatants.
There is now a proliferating multitude of both big small and in between unmanned vehicles.
Maybe it is now time for some more general discussion of what is being done in our name on the battlefields of the world.
As an example of the capability now being offered consider the KillerBee® Unmanned Aircraft System offered by Ratheon. Read more…

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.