Flight International

Unfortunately aviation safety in DR Congo hasn't the greatest track record.

A small bunch of people gathered at the Eurocontrol headquarters near Brussels Zaventem airport on 18 December to draw up a programme for persuading countries not to start inquiries into aviation accidents and incidents by initiating a criminal investigation. The most common targets for criminal prosecution are front line operatives like air traffic control officers and pilots.

IATA has said at the recent US FAA's safety forum that safety "has taken a big step backwards" in 2007.

A special kind of scrutiny was applied to the European Aviation Safety Agency last week.

On 27 September the Royal Aeronautical Society (RAeS) imported five of the top executives from EASA, seated them behind a long desk facing a packed hall of industry people, allowed them a few words each to update the audience on current issues they face, and then opened the session for about two hours of questions.

This doesn't normally happen to the senior executives in European agencies. So why EASA? And why did the agency's big five - executive director Patrick Goudou, communications head Daniel Holtgen, quality and standardisation director Francesco Banal, certification director Norbert Lohl and deputy head of flight standards Eric Sivel - agree to undergo this public grilling?

There is an interesting post on our forums that discusses a discussion about safety logs that occurred on a BBC Radio 4 programme on Saturday.

Fred Bruggeman, representing Aircraft Engineers International (AEI), voiced his concern that pilots that do not immediately log their technical issues until the last leg of their rota, thus increasing the potential of incorrect data or even worse no data whatsoever.

It would be interesting to note whether any other engineers or pilots have any other similar experiences.

Men in motion get lost because men on the move won't ask for directions, or so the saying goes.

With Rockwell Collins' new ParaNew GPS however, males, at least those hanging on a parachute, will be able to find their way without ever asking.

The avionics maker says the new system, which consists of a miniature flight management system and GPS receiver integrated into a helmet with a small Head-Up display, will help with situational awareness and allow the parachuter to find the right landing zone. Failing that, he'll be able to plop down at a proper alternate.

Photo credit: AP

NTSB investigators yesterday offered up a perfectly plausible explanation for why two very seasoned airline pilots on a perfectly dawning summer morning pulled their perfectly fit CRJ100 regional jet onto a tragically unfit runway (too short) and ploughed into trees and other obstacles before coming to rest a half mile from the airport, killing 49 of the 50 aboard...

Confirmation Bias.

They've been complaining about it for years and now the UK's pilots are doing something more concrete about the way they're treated by airport security. More than 1,300 of them have taken advantage of an e-petition system introduced by the Blair administration to make their concerns public. The effort was co-ordinated via the Pprune website.

It's mostly anecdotal of course, but there does seem to be plenty of evidence that security staff at numerous airports are quite unable to get their heads round the fact that, if the pilot has decided to re-enact 911, then taking his Swiss Army knife from him is really not going to prevent it. And he has simpler techniques at hand than mixing together liquid explosives disguised as after-shave.

You've probably seen the video that just turned up of the A380 evacuation trial last year - it's fascinating viewing. But I think that trial should be the last one.

At risk of boring you, I'll just remind you that I took part in the trial, blogged about it a few hours later here, and wrote a piece in Flight International a week later. But since then I've been thinking about it a lot more and I'm pretty convinced that there are much better ways of doing this work.

The Blue Angels crash last week has provoked extensive debate and I was interested to see this comment turning up regarding the durations of military and civil investigations.

It's not terribly often that a Boeing vice president discusses her maternal instincts in public, but the charming Marsha Bell (pic below), VP first officer program(me) at Boeing's Alteon training division was doing just that in London today. Let me explain...

Alteon is currently hard at work devising a programme to train pilots to obtain the newly developed ICAO-approved Multi-Crew Pilot Licence (MPL). This is a licence for which pilots would be trained from scratch to be qualified airliner pilots so long as they fly in a multi-crew aircraft - which of course they all do anyway. It's a very big deal in China and India because it could enable them to produce the staggering number of pilots that they will need over the next 20 years quicker than is currently possible. We've written about it in the magazine and will be doing so again a lot I suspect.

One oddity of the MPL is that there is no ICAO requirement for the pilot ever to fly solo. And, as a large part of the whole idea is to cut training time, Alteon don't really intend that their curriculum - which is still under development - will include a solo flight. Although their customers could request it of course.

Alteon are going to use the Diamond DA40 four-seat trainer for the early part of the course, intending that on each sortie there will be on board: an instructor, the primary student acting as pilot-flying, a student acting as pilot-monitoring, and a student observing. Arranging for a true solo would obviously be an interruption.

However Ms Bell concedes that individual airlines may well decide that the value of the solo is worth a little extra cost, and individual regulators may conclude that they'd be happier if everyone goes through that "rite of passage". She sympathises with them, commenting: "Maybe it is the maternal instinct in me but I want these guys to have a first solo and cut their ties. But people who are perhaps less emotionally engaged always explain to me that it is just not necessary."

And she reflects, that maybe actual flight-time is truly overated, saying: "I have been around simulators for about 20 years and there are plenty of times that pilots emerge soaked in sweat from the simulator with a renewed appreciation of what can go wrong."

Alteon's first MPL course will be run in Brisbane and, as it happens, the Australian regulatory authority - CASA - is still thinking about whether it wants true solos or not. Perhaps you've got a view on that - leave a comment.

Brazil's blog forums are buzzing, if you can read Portuguese, and there appears to be a concerted opinion forming.

The topic of interest is the fatal crash of Gol Lihnas A駻eas flight 1907. Indeed, type in "V 1907" into a blog search engine such as Technorati.com and a multitude appear, such as those from Varanda Cuibana, As M痊imas do Joe Baloo, O Blog do Barretto and the well-read Primera Clase.

Among the postings you'll find lots of detailed official-looking diagrams of the mid-air collision, all purporting to be from sources within the accident investigation (one example pictured below).


These show the wingtip of the Legacy scoring the underside of the 737-800's wing, forcing part of it to shear off, causing a death spiral of just less than 2min. This is close to the theory of most informed observers, including Flight (although clearly there are many unanswered questions).

Yet dig deeper and there is quiet a conspiracy theory being developed among some posters. I'll let you go and find it yourself, rather than risk libel on these global corporatation-owned pages.

But needless to say, the Brazilian public is upset at the tragic loss of close to 160 passengers over dense jungle.

But there is anger at the US response to the detention of the two Exelaire pilots in command of the Embraer Legacy 600. The Legacy pilots have had their passports confiscated pending military investigation into the crash and could face manslaughter charges if found to be to blame.

While the Brazilian press is remaining neutral, the online community is baying for blood. Someone has to pay the price, and all the better if it's a yanqui, they reason.

Brazilians have long been outraged that the post 9/11 security arrangements force them to apply for a visa, along with visitors from the developing world. So when US congressman Steve Israel (Dem-NY) said he was to raise the issue of the pilots' treatment at the hands of the Brazilian authorities with US foreign affairs supremo Condoleezza Rice ahead of her South American tour, bloggers went into overdrive. The fact that Rice expressed support for the Brazilian authorities was overlooked in the wave of paranoia that saw Os Gringos going into bat to free their hero pilots in the face of a "third world regime" (in the minds of the majority of bloggers). Media in the USA was far less jingoistic in the main than the bloggeristos made it out to be. 

Inconsistency also plagues the blogs. Different reports had the Amazon Two either locked up in a military prison or ensconced in a plush Rio de Janeiro hotel.

Worst were the horrific pictures purporting to those of the victims posted on many sites. The provenance of the photos is unchecked, but they are designed to shock the USA into reversing its perceived campaign to free the pilots.

The main US blog presence, meanwhile, has not been opinion or Brazil-bashing, but the sensitive, descriptive blogs of the journalists onboard the Legacy, principally those from the New York Times and the Washington Post.

Explore the Brazilian blog jungle at your peril.

On our homepage we've been running a poll asking which manufacturer's aircraft you believe are safest out of Boeing, Airbus, Embraer and Bombardier.

For a while it ran pretty much neck and neck, then after a couple of days Embraer suddenly shot up to about 40% of people considering it the safest - and an awful lot of people voting. Hmm...

I had a quick look this morning and, surprise, surprise, found another 4,000 people had suddenly voted - taking the turnout to 11,000, about five times more votes than we've ever had before - and pushing Boeing up to roughly equal. At the time of writing we have 12,747 votes, with Embraer and Boeing running at 44% and 43% respectively. Airbus and Bombardier are at 8% and 5%.

I don't think that tells us much about safety, or even perceived safety, but it's quite illuminating about the web habits of manufacturers' staff!

Thanks to everyone who read, and better still commented, on my earlier account of experiencing the A380 evacuation up close and personal. As promised, there will be a more detailed story in next week's Flight International which will of course appear on www.flightglobal.com as usual.

Among other things, it will describe just how I personally got out of the aircraft - and perhaps spark an interesting debate about game theory and actions that are good for an individual not necessarily being good for a group. You'll see what I mean.

But I did immediately want to clear up one loose end that I left hanging in my first post and which I've since been able to discuss with Airbus. That is the mysterious question of what happened to evacuee number 737.

You may recall that I mentioned previously that this was a woman who was escorted off the aircraft a short while before the evacuation - this was important because it appeared to leave only 852 on board and not 853 as planned. Other passengers said she looked ill and we assumed that was why she'd gone.

Well, I am assured that in fact the poor lady needed the bathroom and furthermore that, categorically, she did get back on. Fact is that I didn't see her return, but it is quite true that there were a lot of comings and goings by various programme staff and I'm happy to accept that I just missed it. Hey, I had a lot on my mind!

It's Sunday morning and as usual I'm wearing a numbered bib and doing agility tests in an aircraft hangar with 1,000 Germans I've never met before!

As you'll have guessed, the one thing we had in common is that we all thought it sounded interesting to be a volunteer in the first - and probably only - evacuation trial of the A380.

So here we are on a miserable, wet airfield in one of the biggest hangars in Europe at Airbus' Finkenwerder production facility next to the River Elbe.

I'm number 873, proud of it, and with a white bib numbered in black to prove it. We hand in everything in our possession which, though I don't realise it then, is going to make the next five hours pass very slowly indeed.

First the agility test. Line up, run along the wobbly board, bounce on the trampette, up on the vaulting horse, through the maze of cones without falling over and you're in. Immediately a tall, blond chap who looks like a candidate for the German decathlon team vaults about a metre over the horse.

No, no, no  says the supervisor sensing a long day ahead, you have to stand on it. We chuckle, the decathlete gives us a dark look, then grudgingly clambers onto the horse. He passes, we all pass.

We've handed in our watches and there then passes an interminable five hours or so while the 1,000 or so volunteers get whipped into whatever mysterious order Airbus, EASA and the FAA have decided. I don't speak any German - everyone else in the hall is speaking German. It's no fun at all.

We're all sitting at endless trestle tables, with neon lighting and a concrete floor, drinking soft drinks - the whole thing looks like a church-hall coffee morning on a gigantic scale.

An a capella group comes on and sings Lollipop, in English. It's cute. Then a sort-of comic comes in and talks in German. I laugh when everyone else does. The a capella group comes on again, with suits - I think the first performance was actually a sound-check.

We get fed two choices of near-indistinguishable creamy pasta that make us crave airline food, but presumably set us up with our slow carbohydrate fix for the afternoon's activity.

Finally we're on. We get an epic briefing of which I understand not a word. When the blonde with the number next to mine moves off, I follow her. We all warm up properly, now looking like a church-hall yoga session, and then it's through a sinister elevating steel connecting door to the other half of the hangar.

What we see is the nose section of an A380 in zinc-chromate green with one upper-deck door and one main-deck door exposed, and stairs leading to them. The rest of the aircraft is shielded by a huge black curtain so that we can't see which of the upper-deck slides has been pre-deployed, as agreed with EASA for safety reasons. The void under the aircraft is stacked with cardboard boxes so that we can't see through for the same reason.

We board the aircraft and are greeted by a Lufthansa cabin crew treating us as if we were all off across the Atlantic.

Boarding is painfully slow - the 853 seats are just numbered like our bibs from 1 to 1,200 and something with no indication of where they are across the aircraft. We're first on the top deck and have another interminable wait while all the other groups board. I'm in an aisle seat immediately ahead of what should be the lavs, the nearest door is immediately the other side of the lavs - no problem choosing the door anyway.

To get that many people in, the aircraft is of course in all-economy configuration with extremely basic seats and definitely no IFE. The window shades are down to stop us looking out at the slides again. The clocks came forward the previous night and I have the quick snooze I've needed for a couple of hours.

The cabin crew brief us with Airbus' first attempt at an A380 safety card, apparently showing the aircraft being strangled to death by 16 escape slides. The good news is that there is only one type of door on the aircraft - look, lift up the swing handle, hit the button, look again, jump onto the slide if there is one. I can do that I think.

We all sit in economy class for another half-hour or so. Where the lavs and/or galley should be there is actually a wooden cubicle with two letterbox shaped slots in it through which two pairs of eyes - one male and scary, the other female, sexy, and also scary - are blinklessly watching us. (I made the blink-bit up, but you get the idea.) I start to feel I know how lab rats feel.

A woman is led out of our cabin looking faint and doesn't return. Ironically she's got bib number 737 (for you conspiracy theorists.)

Two anonymous guys, presumably from the regulatory authorities, wander through throwing blankets and simulated baggage - lots of it - in the aisles. They also make notes about all of us on clipboards. I start to feel a hint of adrenalin. How we all behave in the next few minutes has very serious ramifications for the A380 programme one way or the other.

The lights are dimmed in a pre-take-off sort of way. We sit for a while and I start to lose focus. With no warning it goes totally dark, but there's no other indication of anything being amiss. I hear shouts in German, which as usual I don't understand, but I get the message.

I'm out of my seat like a snake and reach my favoured door just in time for the male flight attendant to turn round and tell me it's not working. I knew the regulators had disarmed half the doors, and now I know at least one of the ones they chose.

I know it's irritating, but I'm going to have to save what happens next for my feature piece in Flight International next week. Suffice it to say that a short while later I'm standing in the pitch black hangar looking back at the utterly surreal sight of the towering bulk of the A380 with slides hanging from it everywhere, bathed in a pale yellow light from the slides' LEDs, and literally hundreds of shadowy black figures plunging down them.

The simulated ground rescuers are screaming at them to run, the flight attendants are screaming at others to jump. Suddenly I realise the people coming down the slides are wearing uniform - it's the cabin crew and it's all over. I feel the adrenalin drain away and wonder why I also feel utterly exhausted after not really doing very much. I suspect I'm getting a tiny inkling of what the real thing must be like.

I'm certain it's been fast and, sure enough, already Airbus programme officials in their bright green tee-shirts are punching the air and hugging each other. One senior manager who I know mutters something about 75 seconds as he passes and we shake hands.

Finally it's all over, a German debrief that I don't understand, and off I go to hear Airbus and EASA give the rest of the media the official line.

Airbus CEO Gustav Humber, A380 programme chief Charles Champion, and a party of other Airbus execs have flown up from Toulouse this Sunday to see all this and I'm gently reminded that, had it gone wrong, they would all have been back in Hamburg to do it again next week. And if that went wrong then this multi-billion dollar programme would be in serious difficulties.

Journalistic objectivity aside, I'm pleased as Punch for them. And I forego the €60 that each volunteer gets. Sometimes it's worth it just to be there.

This thread  over with our good friends at Pprune prompts me to warn our pilot readers not to read Flight International while flying. It's the contribution by username Klink that got my attention.

The debate there is over the question of whether it is OK for airline pilots to read while in the cruise. Klink says you shouldn't read novels because they get too much of your attention. Stick to something lighter, he recommends.

Excellent point. As responsible publishers we're urging you not to read Flight International either - because if novels grab too much of your attention, then think what this cracking magazine will do! Especially the jobs section!!!

I'd be interested to hear suggestions as to suitable cockpit reading material which takes so little mental effort that it does not pose a hazard.

And I'm happy to point readers (who contact me privately I think) at publications that carry no risk of distracting their attention at all, leaving them bright and alert and ready to respond in an instant to their next TCAS RA. (Not that they'll need to be for much longer it seems.)

I've argued before that blacklists do little to help aviation safety, and the publication today of the European Union's long awaited list of banned and restricted carriers has done nothing to change my view. Here's the list in full.

The news is that any of you who were considering flying to or from Europe on the airlines of Equatorial Guinea, Liberia, Sierra Leone or Swaziland will now find that impossible. It's also going to be even harder to put yourself in the tender hands of North Korea's state airline, and you can tear up your frequent flyer cards on a handful of carriers from Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Rwanda, and the Comores. There's more detail, but you get the idea.

The EU says this will make a substantial contribution to air safety in Europe, but I can't for the life of me see how. A miniscule contribution perhaps - anyway, I hope nobody spent too much time producing the list. I rather fear they did, but maybe they just looked up the US FAA's IASA list which would have largedly saved them the trouble.

Perhaps most significantly for the people of Europe, the methodology that appears to have been employed would not have prevented any of the accidents that resulted in all the political furore that culminated in the publication of the list.

Well the much awaited Ryanair documentary on Channel 4's Dispatches programme in the UK aired last night and contained pretty much what Ryanair had cleverly already told the world it would contain. Smart move.

It was fairly unimpressive stuff - a decent 5 minute news bulletin stretched into a creaky 1 hour documentary after 5 months of covert filming. But it will hurt Ryanair.

Incidentally, Dispatches producer Steve Boulton yesterday suddenly started calling on a recent Flight International opinion piece on low-cost airlines in support of his programme. What we concluded in that piece was: "Now the Irish Aviation Authority should lead the world by commissioning an academic study of the human factors of low-cost operations." For the record, we don't share Mr Boulton's view of Ryanair and our view isn't based on the lightweight material his programme came up with.

Dispatches didn't make any safety charges about Ryanair stick, but it did highlight weaknesses in the aviation system that won't have come as news to anyone who works in it. Although the UK CAA may have told Ryanair it didn't plan any further action before the programme, I sincerely hope both the CAA and the IAA are planning on visiting the school that trains Ryanair's flight attendants after seeing the attitudes on display there. What we saw was evidence of a cavalier attitude to examinations and some weirdly inane remarks from an instructor in respect of passenger safety. I'd be having a very firm word in the ears of the individuals concerned.

The other serious issue is the checking of passports at the gate. But as everyone knows the idea is pretty nonsensical. Gate agents are not trained to recognise fake passports and are never going to be. It's nothing more than a final deterrent to the bad guys - but frankly if they've got that far then they're not likely to be caught at the gate. And it's a regulatory issue - not a Ryanair one.

The rest of the programme was a hatchet job on Ryanair's service product, supported by secret filming of staff members being rude about their employers. Well it's hard to have much affection for Ryanair's service model - but everyone, including me, flies with them at least occasionally. I don't look forward to it, but I do look forward to my week in the sun and I like the idea of giving my (fairly) hard-earned cash to Spanish and Irish seafront restaurants rather than the airline. Let's face it, in the UK you'd have to be a cave-dweller not to know what Ryanair's product is like - if you don't like it, don't buy it.

Weirdly enough British Airways (BA) is yet again on the receiving end of a public dressing down from the UK's regulatory authorities. This time the Air Accidents Investigation Branch is giving them a very hard time indeed over what it found when it dug down into BA's maintenance empire after a medium-embarrassing incident with a 757 back in 2003.

That comes just a few weeks after the AAIB also jumped on an incident when a BA A319 crew shrugged off a mid-air electronics failure with rather more sang froid than the investigators felt was appropriate. And that was distressingly close to another report which also widened its remit from looking at a panel loss on take-off to several other events that the investigators felt were looking alarmingly like a pattern.

Surprise was also expressed in the business (though not unanimously, and mostly in the USA) when a BA crew flew a loaded 747-400 from Los Angeles to the UK after suffering an engine failure shortly after take-off.

Now all this, remember, concerns an airline with a quite superb safety record and which more or less literally wrote the book on some aspects of safety management - notably the BASIS programme which was in large part the driver for the global spread of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) concept that is one of the single most important factors in achieving today's extremely high safety rates in the developed world.

So what's going on? Well, there is no doubt that morale in BA's engineering world has taken a thumping over the last few years and people are not happy there. On the other hand, even those who are yelping the loudest are not alleging that safety has been reduced (well, only the occasional voice, and there's always a couple in any airline.)

Here's my view - commercial aviation in the UK is a) practised by some of the finest exponents of the art in the world and b) is more tightly regulated than just about anywhere in the world. In particular, the AAIB boasts some of the wisest heads in the industry or, to put it another way, some canny old dogs who've seen just about everything.

I confess to love reading AAIB reports. The best of them are drafted with a dryness bordering on irony so that you can practically see the author's fractionally raised eyebrow as he listened to an erring pilot's explanation of his, umm, novel way of flying an ILS.

But when the subject is the multi-billion pound corporation that is BA today, the AAIB, in an ever so gentlemanly way, takes its gloves off. And if you're BA then by far the best course of action is to pay attention, say as little as possible in public, and take some very energetic action indeed in private.

I wouldn't have it any other way. And actually I doubt BA would either.

(You can read the whole report on the 757 here.)

It takes a lot to impress British Airways. Losing all your flight instruments at night, for example, hardly merits a mention. Respect!

So, in this story an A319 crew is climbing out of Heathrow on a clear night when suddenly everything goes dark. No flight instruments at all, a standby horizon that it seems almost certainly wasn't illuminated, and just the external horizon to fly by. No radios either.

Unsurprisingly the captain, aged 53, with 11,800 total hours and 4,000 on-type, coped serenely. When the power equally mysteriously returned after a couple of minutes, he spent 40 minutes in the hold fruitlessly investigating the problem and then pressed on to Budapest.

In Hungary, BA's engineers failed to find a fault and cheerfully put the aircraft back into service. The pilots duly filed a mandatory occurrence report and life carried on much as usual.

When the MOR landed at the CAA however the reaction was less relaxed. Not long after it was at the Air Accidents Investigation Branch, and not long after that the aircraft was grounded with Farnborough's finest climbing all over the avionics.

I doubt that my mortal flesh is ever in safer hands than when it's securely inside a BA aircraft, and particularly with a 12,000 hour, silver-templed veteran guiding us through the skies - night or otherwise. But I think there will be some debate over this one.

Journalists, even those with a good knowledge of their subject matter, like to feel that with the right questions the truth will out. That under scrutiny the senior executives and others we interview will wilt under the perceptive questioning, the velvet interrogation, with a smile. But the reality is that any organisation can keep their secrets and without some sort of precognition the journalist, and public, will simply never know.

At the Paris Air Show the A380 never raised its landing gear and the official story was that the lengthy time it takes to raise and lower the wheels was problematic for such a short demonstration flight. But at the UK Royal Aeronautical Society A380 Avionics conference held from 4-5 October Airbus vice president for flight test, Harry Nelson, revealed the truth about the gear issue and an unknown fact about the first flight that was broadcast around the world.

The A380, and Nelson is adamant Airbus has now resolved this problem, had a faulty latching system with its right undercarriage door. On the first flight as the giant two-deck beast rose into the air the test pilots got a red light on the right carriage door. Checking with the chase plane, it confirmed that the gear was up and the door closed. But the reality was that the door had not latched and could drop, a potentially dangerous situation. So the 30,000ft altitude planned for first flight was abandoned and the historic aircraft was brought back to Earth early. 

This problem had not been resolved by Le Bourget and that was the real reason the gear wasn't raised then.

One wonders how many more technical issues have arisen with the A380 and have never been mentioned. One wonders how many technical issues on the Boeing 787 will be kept secret. This is the reality of the world inwhich we live, organisations, whether they are airframe makers or information technology service providers can hide the truth easily. With a plausible story they can obscure the reality.

Its something to remember whenever you read a newspaper or listen to radio or television reports. Since becoming a journalist five years ago I now rarely read a newspaper. Why buy something whose contents you can't trust? And that's not always because the journalist has been hoodwinked. Much of the UK press, and print media elsewhere in the world, is biased in favour of their owner's world view. The public relations managers give the limited "truth" they convey one spin and then the "journalists" give it another; war is peace, freedom is slavery, ignorance is strength.

Its said that history is written by the victor. Now its written by the largely ignorant.

Well, it finally happened. Passengers on the JetBlue A320 that landed with a cocked nosewheel in America yesterday were able to watch live TV coverage of themselves during virtually the whole incident. Fittingly enough this quintessentially 21st century event took place in the entertainment capital of the world - Los Angeles.

For sheer in-flight weirdness this probably exceeds even the September 1995 incident in which passengers on a Northwest Airlines DC-10 watched in bemusement on seatback maps as the aircraft flew to Brussels and landed instead of Frankfurt as planned, with the pilots, who had no access to the seatback system, essentially lost.

On JetBlue, passengers were watching themselves courtesy of the seatback LiveTV service - a satellited-based system which the airline itself operates through a wholly-owned subsidiary that it was forced to acquire to prevent its probable commercial failure three years ago.

Staff of NBC television who happened to be on the aircraft reported that the system was switched off only 3-4 minutes before landing, along with other electrical systems. So it seems that JetBlue doesn't share the concerns of other airlines who have long insisted that news progamming provided on board aircraft is doctored to remove anxiety-inducing coverage of aviation safety.

In Europe, BMI of the UK and TAP of Portugal are about to trial on-board mobile phone access, which will also enable Blackberrys and similar devices to function, and will mean that precious little happens on aircraft that isn't reported in near realtime to the rest of the world. And Connexion by Boeing already gives users full internet functionality - including the ability to post public messages and operate blogs like this one - from in the air. Camera-enabled phones and digital cameras complete the link - it's seems only a matter of time before on-board images of a catastrophe end up on the web.

Leaving aside the philosophical implications of this, it means business has changed forever for the airlines. I'm giving a presentation to airline PR officials in a couple of weeks and I'm really looking forward to discussing this turn of events. They're going to need all the help they can get working out their disaster management strategies for the future. 

The loss of a TANS Boeing 737 yesterday was the fifth major airliner accident in 21 days and takes the death toll to at least 338. That is a pretty awful record and the cost in human misery scarcely bears contemplation. So just what is going on?

I wish I knew. What we've seen is a mixture of some very odd things and some depressingly familiar things.

On the familiar side we have the two Latin American losses: we don't know the root causes, but it remains true that the combination in that part of the world of wild terrain, often challenging weather, earlier generation aircraft, and thinner infrastructure are unforgiving when anything goes wrong.

Less familiar are the losses of two well-equipped aircraft with experienced crews in the benign operating conditions of the Mediterranean summer, and both in yet to be explained circumstances.

Stranger still are the losses of two aircraft with double engine failure - rare enough at any time, an extraordinary coincidence within 10 days of each other.

And then there is the A340 loss in Toronto - thankfully non-fatal - involving an aircraft boasting the finest design features that today's industry can offer, operated by one of the world's premir airlines, and being lost at one of the world's most modern airports.

At this stage in the investigations the common factors are not obvious, though they may become so, and it is difficult to see what conclusions can be drawn.

Not for the first time there is a statistical blip in the distribution of accidents - albeit an unusually marked one - but 2005 overall remains a generally safe year. It is now going to be less safe in terms of fatalities than 2004, but on current trends will still be better than almost any other year - depending of course on events in the remaining four months.

The European Commission has been talking about creating a so-called blacklist of unsafe airlines for just short of a decade now. It hasn't managed to produce one yet, but suddenly transport commissioner Jacques Barrot is planning to come up with a firm proposal. Good luck to him, he'll need it.

Frenchman Barrot's remarks were at least partly in response to the deaths of his countrymen in this week's MD-82 crash in Venezuela, but the EU has also been embarrassed by the conflicting actions taken by member nations in respect of airlines that some banned and some didn't. Matters came to a head over the case of Onur Air of Turkey.

On this occasion the individual nations are ahead of the commission. The only sort of blacklist that works is one that bans the airlines on it.

What on earth is a traveller supposed to make of a list that effectively says "we have safety doubts about the airlines on this list"? The only rational response is not to fly with the airline. And if you are the airline your only choices are to sort out the problem, sue, or hassle your own government for some heavy diplomatic action.

But if the Commission is ready for that sort of response then it should bite the bullet and ban airlines, not smear them.

That's when things get tricky. How do you know an airline is unsafe? In particular, how do you know an airline based in a far away country is unsafe? The reality is that the non-European charter carriers that are actually the focus of the EU's concerns are almost invariably revealed as being unsafe only in the wake of a disaster - when blacklisting them is pretty superfluous. And in any case the fact that your airline had an accident does not mean you were or are an unsafe airline.

The troubled birth of EASA really does give the Commission a chance to tackle the issue properly - but it will take tough-minded thinking to make it work.

There are mysterious aspects to the loss of the Helios Airways Boeing 737 last weekend, but the fact is that if the depressurisation emergency procedure is not followed rapidly and efficiently then things can quickly go wrong. At least two reports of earlier incidents show just what can happen.

In this 1998 incident the highly experienced captain of a UK-registered Boeing 737 lost consciousness at 35,000ft when his oxygen mask became entangled with his spectacles as he tried to put it on following a suddent depressurisation. A flight attendant who tried to help him also collapsed. Only the first officer remained conscious. Investigators found that a 17 year-old fatigue crack finally led to the failure of a cargo door at altitude.

And in this 1996 incident the captain of a Boeing 727 in the USA collapsed at 33,000ft when he delayed putting on his mask while manipulating the controls to cure a pressurisation problem probably caused by human-error in using the system. Again in this case a flight attendant collapsed in the cockpit and so did the flight engineer who fell across the central console. Once more only the first officer remained conscious.

In both cases the cabin emergency oxygen systems for passengers worked pretty as much as advertised.

But masks can be donned very quickly, as this movie produced by emergency equipment manufacturer Avox-Eros, which equips some 737s, illustrates.

Although the US Air Force has got into difficulties with its RQ-4A Global Hawks, the incident that sparked the trouble is actually quite comforting.

One of our reporters listened in as military controllers warned nearby aircraft that a Global Hawk was returning Edwards AFB after an engine failure. It's the sort of situation that, if it had been a manned aircraft, would have had everyone for miles around fearing for the safety of the crew, other aircraft, and even people on the ground.

But the outcome was entirely benign, with the aircraft following a pre-planned pattern to glide back to base. That's impressive: up close the Global Hawk is a fair-sized aeroplane, powered by a serious jet engine, and generally to be treated with considerable respect. Such a smooth outcome to what was a challenging situation bodes well for the unmanned aviation community, especially to the parts of it with aspirations to operate in civil airspace.

Systems will malfunction on these aircraft just as they do on manned types, but, as with manned types, it's what you do next that counts.

It has been a while since a major world airline operating a state-of-the art aircraft has been involved in an accident sufficiently telegenic for the 24h news media to stay with it for a day. Telegenic maybe, but thankfully the Air France flight AF358 accident was not tragic - nobody on board or on the ground was badly hurt.

It seems no-one in the broadcasting media has noticed that serious airline accidents rarely happen nowadays. Listening and watching, it was if flight safety was still back in the early 1980s, despite the fact that - according to ICAO figures - fatal accident rates then were six times what they are now.

On publishing our annual airline flight safety review the last two years (Flight International, 20-26 January 2004 and 25-31 January 2005) we put out a media release providing the figures and a synopsis. The figures were good, and so were the long-term trends. The feature - and the release - made the point about how devoid of major accidents the world was happily becoming, and cataloguing the technology, ideas and effort that had made the difference between then and now. Only one station in the world took up the good news - BBC News 24. It was really surprising to them, and they ran it as a kind of freak fact. Both years.

Now AF358 happens, and all the old clich駸 roll out once more on all the stations. When it became clear that there had been no fatalities, it was universally agreed that this was a miracle.

It may have been many things, but a miracle it was not. The fuselage had clearly not suffered major impact damage despite ending up in the notorious shallow ravine at the end of Toronto Pearson's runway 24L that has taken lives before now. It is no miracle when passengers all escape from an un-deformed modern aircraft fuselage before a fire takes hold. That is what the aircraft design, the airline's procedures, the crew training, the airport crash rescue and fire services all aim to ensure, and the system worked. That is not a miracle: that is science, training, and hard work. Why is it that even quality media stations and newspapers revert to the language of religious superstition when people survive an airline accident?

I was talking to a 747 pilot the other day and he asked me whether the aviation industry had considered steepening the traditional three-degree glideslope approach for landing to 3.2 degrees. The benefit would be that aircraft would come down the approach using less engine power, therefore burning less fuel, with the added benefit of overflying local residents at a higher altitude. This 747 pilot reckons his aircraft can cope with 3.2 degrees with no problem. Seems like a sensible idea, so should we launch a campaign for the 3.2 degree approach?