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By acquiring Oxford Aviation Academy, simulation and training giant CAE has accelerated the process of consolidation in the fragmented world of aviation training. In sheer size it is up there with FlightSafety International and Boeing's training division, but it has a wider spread of capabilities than either, from ab initio to airline recurrent training.

If this huge organisation works well - and there is no reason why it should not - it will be one of the principal providers of the air transport industry's future life-blood: expertly trained professional pilots and engineers. The airlines themselves have not been preparing for a future in which more skilled personnel than ever before will be required.

As the citizens of the world's emerging giant economies - particularly China - gain the disposable incomes they never had before, demand for air travel is going to boom. But it cannot do so without sufficient trained instructors, pilots and engineers.

A global vision of the industry's skilled personnel needs and how they can be met is desperately lacking. Perhaps a global training empire such as CAE will be better able to "think big" than the old fragmented system of civil and military suppliers. CAE recognises this unprecedented opportunity, but let us hope it, and its competitors, and the airlines, also recognise the need for unprecedented levels of investment.

(This article first appeared as the second comment in Flight International 22 May)

Even with their eerily bleak composition, fragments of modern machines embedded in a vertical cliff wall, the photographs taken after the Superjet accident do not carry half the impact of those taken before.

Pictures of glamorous young cabin attendants, a confident crew and cheerful delegates coldly closed the distance that normally separates images of wreckage from an observer's sense of reality, and laced the media coverage with a bitter sprinkling of poignancy in a way that a passenger manifest could never have. Walls of rock do not discriminate by passengers' youth.

Pre-empting any accident inquiry means running the risk of appearing arrogant, at best, and downright foolish at worst. But as the crash probe enters the analysis phase, there is no denying that sudden technical failure during low-level flight near a mountain would turn out to be a remarkable coincidence.

And if this latest unhappy encounter between granite and aluminium turns out to be a failure of man, rather than machine, then the non-routine nature of the flight will prove impossible to ignore.

Demonstration flights are not inherently unsafe but they have an ad hoc quality and carry a sense of occasion. Their purpose is to distinguish, and that doesn't mean acrobatics; it can be achieved simply by allowing guests the rare opportunity to visit the cockpit in flight.

Successful demonstrations mean balancing non-standard operating conditions and an informal atmosphere against the strict discipline required for safe flight. Part of the inquiry's unenviable task will be to establish whether that delicate balance was maintained in this case.

The accident, ironically, has generated more publicity about the Superjet than the promotional Asian tour in which the ill-fated aircraft was participating - the first half of which passed largely unnoticed outside of the countries involved - as well as the predictable ill-informed claptrap about the safety of Russian aircraft and the prospects for Superjet sales.

But it has also brought home the human element, through not only the pictures of those involved, but also the testimonies of those who took them, and who, by opting against joining the Superjet on its final departure, escaped sharing the same fate by nothing more than a thought impulse.

All of which makes this particular loss seem somehow even more personal, more unfair and, perhaps, more unnecessary.

(This article first appeared as the lead comment in Flight International 22 May)

Hands up: who would honestly claim no interest in seeing what happens to a full-sized airliner when it is purposely flown into the ground, given that the only casualties are a bunch of unfortunate mannequins whose reward for a lifetime's dedication to advancing safety is a one-way ticket to Scuppered-on-the-Sand?

Spectacle, such as the televised trashing of a Boeing 727 in Mexico, draws an audience. But it is the bit about "advancing safety" that seems to have been shoehorned into the picture. The accompanying publicity claims noble interests behind the experiment, but its relevance is not entirely clear. With its metal fuselage and rear-mounted engines, the 727 is hardly representative of current aircraft design and construction, where composite materials, underwing high-bypass turbofans and lightweight cabin fittings are typical. The automotive industry would surely scorn any suggestion that crash-testing a 1960s car would give genuine, valuable insights into modern passenger safety.

Ironically, the experiment precisely simulated controlled flight into terrain, long acknowledged as a primary safety concern, the prevention of which would do far more for passenger survival than any number of airframe-design tweaks. There is no global shortage of wreckage from such accidents over which to pore.

Staging a full-scale air crash for television is no mean achievement, and no doubt it is art. But is it science?

(This piece first appeared as the second leading article in 8 May Flight International)

Hang in there. That was the advice business aviation was being given when the banking system went into meltdown in 2008. The industry has been hanging in there now for three and a half years. Things are getting better, but very slowly, and too late for some.

We have been here before. After 2001, the dotcom crash and 9/11 sent the US economy and business aviation into a nosedive. The recovery was rapid, building to an peak in 2008 - but that pattern is not being followed this time.

The US has begun a hesitant bounceback, and corporate profitability figures would suggest more companies ought to be spending some of their cash replacing ageing equipment. The trouble is, economic uncertainty is making them reluctant.

In Europe, traditionally business aviation's second market, things are going from bad to worse, with ailing economies threatening to drag down the strong ones. Few would venture the opinion that the eurozone economy will be in a better state in 12 or 24 months.

Also, business aviation got such a bad press in the crisis - whether it was car bosses flying on corporate jets to beg money from the government, or financiers blithely continuing to enjoy private air travel while others suffered - it has struggled to rebuild its image.

Only in the developing economies is there a bright spot. A new breed of billionaires in China and the
CIS is fuelling demand for top-of-the-range jets, while directors of young companies in Africa, Southeast Asia and Brazil are discovering the time-travel benefits of using business aviation.

Makers of large-cabin types have been less affected than those - like Cessna and Hawker Beechcraft - much more dependent on smaller jets. But so too have those who saw the writing on the wall and reoriented sales and support towards emerging markets.

EBACE is unlikely to see business aviation turn a corner. But - unlike the US automotive industry in the 1970s - it has not turned in on itself. Though cash is tight, virtually all manufacturers have continued to invest in new products. Business jets are among the most technologically advanced flying machines around. Brands remain strong.

The most successful airframers in the next few years will be those that furthest penetrate the virgin territories of the BRIC nations and beyond. As for the traditional markets of North America and Europe - well, hang in there if you can.

(This piece first appeared as the leading article in Flight International 8 May)

This year's meeting of the Global Cabin Air Quality Executive in London was a nexus of scientific, engineering and medical expertise. There was a gathering consensus that the evidence associating "fume events" in aircraft cabins with long-term damage to cognitive capacity and general health is reaching critical mass.

Maybe, but it is unwise to underestimate the spoiling power of those who wish to obscure the correlation of cause and effect by sneeringly accusing the GCAQE and its experts of using a cum hoc ergo propter hoc (with it, therefore because of it) logic.

Among the speakers at the GCAQE meeting was Prof Jeremy Ramsden, who recently lost his job at the UK's Cranfield University after challenging the scientific integrity of Cranfield's report on cabin-fume events. His presentation was on the philosophy of association and causation in science and statistics. It examined the tactics of those in the industry who would prevent this investigation's progress.

Association - the apparent correlation of two events - can, said Ramsden, be the driver for attempts to determine causation; and even if it is not proof they are cause and effect, at least it is a hint that they might be. Meanwhile, the authorities have accepted short-term causation, and soon the bio-markers will be established to yield findings for the long term, so industry had better be ready with its solutions.

(This first appeared as the second leading article in Flight International 1 May) 

The Greek judicial system has just provided a reminder of how little the world has learned about the application of criminal law to airline accidents. A Greek court has just sentenced all four defendants in the Helios Airways case to 123 years each in jail - reduced to 10 years because that is the statutory maximum sentence for the offence.

Indeed, recent evidence from Brazil, France and Italy suggests that governments and judiciaries in most of the world's states are in fact retreating from enlightenment on this much-debated topic, causing upset at the International Civil Aviation Organisation.

Accidents, by definition, are usually accidental. A criminal conviction requires evidence of intent, or at least of a conscious decision to take a line of action in full knowledge of an unreasonable risk.

Significantly, three of those four Helios defendants had already been tried on the same charge in Helios's state of registration Cyprus, and the verdict was "not guilty" in all three cases. Greece took up the case because the accident happened on its soil.

The law seems to have very little to do with cases like this. Put simply, the evidence is the fatal crash itself, and the only legal logic applied to its examination is that someone must be held criminally responsible for it. The only question remaining is who. The Greek court in the Helios case did not seek to establish independent proof of the facts; it just took the technical accident report and used it as legal evidence - which it is not. Information assembled by accident investigators is not gathered using the same methods or criteria required of the police or the courts, and Greece is a signatory to the Chicago Convention, which ratifies that fact.

The harm from verdicts like this, if they become the norm, is that witnesses called to assist at a technical accident investigation, knowing they could be charged with a criminal offence, might seek to be legally represented and to exercise their right to silence. This would cripple accident investigation.

When the chief accident investigator in the Helios case was being examined by the prosecution, he testified that a maintenance action carried out before the accident flight by the only engineer among the defendants was neither wrong in itself, nor causal. That engineer, by giving evidence, was attempting to assist the investigation, but the result of his co-operation was that the court found him guilty. It is to be hoped that the appeal reverses the verdicts.

(This first appeared as the main leading article in Flight International 1 May)

Some leapt on Air Canada's interplanetary close encounter to highlight fatigue risks, but the real irony is that the aircraft and its passengers would arguably have been safer if the tired co-pilot had stayed asleep.

This was not, after all, an unresponsive ghost-ship haunting the transatlantic skies but an aircraft under the control of a capable crew, one of whom understandably felt the other would be better off with a good rest.

And there's the rub. Sleep is counter-intuitive; a prolonged doze can be worse than a short nap. Fatigue is a bogey-man stalking every pilot, not only those on eastbound red-eyes, but how many crews accept and carry out strategies to mitigate the effects of sleep without understanding the principles behind them?

Far less complex, of course, is the principle behind the seat-belt. By fortunate coincidence the captain, expecting turbulence, had switched on the seat-belt sign.

There is no knowing how many of those on board were belted, either because of the sign or because they were sleeping, but several were injured - some needing hospital treatment - as a result of not buckling up.

There is no simple solution to the fatigue problem - an intricate, nebulous issue. The best one can expect is risk management rather than risk elimination. But there is a simple solution to avoid being bounced off the ceiling, whether the cause is turbulence or sleep-induced astronomical hallucinations at the pointy end.

(This article first appeared as the second Comment in the 24 April issue of Flight International)