July 2008 Archives

It seems that the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit's answer to aviation people who break rules is to make more rules. Doesn't that just create more opportunities for habitual rulebreakers to break more rules?

The Irish never struck me as a race who are in love with rules. In fact my many Irish friends are more likely than my British ones to be inventive and flexible in their interpretation of regulations.

One of my favourite examples of this is how Ryanair chief Michael O'Leary, faced like his fellow Dubliners with that beautiful city's appalling traffic, famously got himself licenced as a taxi driver so he could use the bus lanes.

Okay so that's rule avoidance rather than rulebreaking, but it's creative.

The AAIU recommendation is about tightening up regulations surrounding the charter sector of general aviation - effectively the air taxis, whether fixed or rotary wing - but also those who own aircraft that they either fly themselves or hire somebody to fly for them. 

The latter sector, especially, is populated by people who are immensely independently minded and value the ability to travel according to their own agenda, not somebody else's timetable. Among those will be some who will also knowingly break aviation regulations for their own convenience, or be creative in their interpretation of them. Whipping this lot into line is about policing safety, not giving them more rules to ignore.

The GA charter sector in Europe generally obeys rules. The fact that its average safety performance is well below the high standards set by the corporate GA sector is more a reflection of the fact that it encompasses a more diverse range of equipment and type of operation and is, in some cases, inclined to hire people with lower levels of experience than the corporate sector - but still without breaking any rules.

If the Irish Aviation Authority wants to see higher safety standards in the many sectors of GA in its own back yard, it should spend more time on propagating safety awareness, and motivating operators to adopt high standards, not appealing to the European Aviation Safety Agency to solve their problems by waving a regulatory wand in Cologne. 

Motivate how? Like President Roosevelt said: speak softly but carry a big stick.  

Boeing always pushes boundaries. It's a way of life. 

The "can do" spirit, and the preparedness to take the risk that the company might not be able to deliver on a new and ambitious objective is impressive. The company frequently succeeds.

The latest example of this characteristic I have in mind is Boeing's plans for 787 pilot training.

The manufacturer says it expects its 787 will handle so like a 777 and the cockpit interfaces will be so generically similar and so intuitive, that a five-day differences course and some time in a fixed-base, touchscreen simulator will suffice for converting 777 pilots direct to airline operations in the new aircraft.

I am prepared to believe the five-day differences training might work, but straight to the left or right hand seat of a 787 commercial flight from a fixed-base, hybrid simulator/touch-screen procedures trainer with no external visual system worthy of the name is stretching it a bit. "Stretching it a bit", for those unfamiliar with English English as delivered by an Englishman, is an understatement.

I am all in favour of doing more with today's increasingly smart simulation systems, but this is a step too far.

I suspect Boeing knows the FAA may reject its proposal. But what the hell: if you don't ask you don't get.

Qantas' Boeing 747-400 is not, by any means the first aircraft to survive damage to its pressure hull. The damage, in this case, however, is minor compared with what others have suffered and still landed safely.

In 1989 a United Airlines 747-100 climbing out of Honolulu bound for en route for Auckland suffered the dramatic loss of its forward freight door in flight over the Pacific, and in separating the door ripped away a large part of the pressure hull at cabin level.

Nine passengers were lost instantly the failure occurred, but the aircraft landed safely back at Honolulu. The problem was damaged and defective cargo door latches.

The year before that, also over the Hawaiian islands, an Aloha Airlines 737-200 lost the upper part of its entire forward fuselage just behind the flight deck while it was in the cruise at 24,000ft.

The damage to the pressure hull on both sides extended below the cabin floor line. The aircraft diverted to Maui airport and landed safely. One stewardess had been lost, but everyone else on board survived.

The cause was corrosion resulting - over the years - from Hawaii's humid, salty atmosphere, combined with the fact that this particular 737 had flown more trips than almost any other aircraft in aviation history at the time the damage occurred.

Sudden decompressions, for whatever reason they occur, are one of the most frightening in-flight events passengers can encounter because of the drill the crew has to follow to stay safe following the event. The event starts with a bang caused by the structural failure that has breached the pressure hull. The pressure drops dramatically hurting peoples' ears and causing an instant temperature fall that often causes mist to form in the air momentarily. Then the crew puts the aircraft into a steeper descent than the passengers will ever have experienced before, which leads many to believe the pilots have lost control. Actually they are getting the aircraft to a height where the ambient air pressure is sufficient for people to breathe normally before the limited supply of emergency oxygen to the passengers' masks runs out.

The workload for the crew at this time is so high they don't have time to send a calming message to the passengers until the situation has stabilised.

So what caused the Qantas event on 25 July? Since I'm blogging, we can enter the realms of intelligent speculation, but remember, that's what it is:

Most sudden decompressions caused by structural failure are caused by unnoticed pre-exising damage to the hull. The damage can been caused by impact which weakens the hull but does not breach it. This weakened area can, as the aircraft flies again and again, develop cracking which - if not discovered - can result in a local failure. The pre-existing damage could equally have been caused by corrosion that goes unnoticed, but the result can be precisely the same.

Finally, although at this point there is no public evidence to corroborate the theory, an explosion could have caused the damage. The location of this hole in the pressure hull, on the starboard side just forward of the wing, is in the wall of the freight bay where luggage is usually stored. All bags loaded into aircraft holds now are individually x-rayed, so if there has been a security breach the systems will have to be checked.

Whichever the originating cause of this relatively small breach in the 747's huge hull, the passengers were not at risk.

How can I say that with any confidence? Look at the pictures to see what aeroplanes have survived before, and then compare those to the damage to the Qantas aircraft's hull. It's amazing how much damage a modern aircraft can take and still survive.

Or to put it more accurately, it's not amazing, it's what they're designed to be able to take.

If you're on foot, airfields are big spaces. The township on one side of the old Farnborough aerodrome that springs up to support the air show every two years is pretty extensive in its own right, and during the trade days its one-way traffic grid system is permanently logjammed with powerful, expensive cars going nowhere with air conditioned people inside resolutely refusing to walk. Meanwhile fleets of electric buggies are trapped among them, unable to move either.

 There is a better way: bikes. But this year, for a couple of days, it looked as if Farnborough's organisers had decided actively to reject cyclists, which didn't exactly harmonise with the green theme that the show and its exhibitors have been claiming to have embraced.

 Using a bike to get around the airfield during the Farnborough air show is something of a tradition at Flight. I know former editor JM (Mike) Ramsden used one each show during his long sojourn from the 1950s to the 1980s, and I bet he was not the first.

So this year fellow biker and Flight colleague Andrew Doyle and I were surprised to be refused access at gates we had previously been allowed to use, and some cyclists were told they had to dismount on site and walk their bikes around. That seems to have been a perverse interpretation by the on-site security and traffic army which was the reverse of their actual instructions. I have been left with the distinct impression that these armies, once dispersed to the gates and around the airfield, make up the rules as they go along.

Motor vehicles need to be directed via specific gates and routes because they have to get to their parking space with minimum disruption to the life of the core show area.

But pedestrians and cyclists do not have parking requirements, and they don't clog the show's arteries.

SBAC, don't forget that Orville and Wilbur Wright were bicycle manufacturers. The experience of making and using these simple devices was where aviation engineering expertise started. 

 European FTOs: threatened

 If you think you've heard it all having read "European pilot training industry heads for paralysis", actually you don't know the half of it yet. Nobody does.

Europe is putting a significant proportion of its home-produced pilot training industry at risk by changing the rules about flight crew licensing (FCL), and also what is required of flight training organisations (FCL) and type rating training organisations (TRTO) to enable them to be approved as training providers. In addition, as currently framed, the notice of proposed amendment would put the US-based (and other foreign-based) FTOs used by European training organisations out of business, and it looks as if it may threaten about 40% of the business of big North American-owned TRTOs in Europe, like Alteon, FlightSafety International, and CAE.

I feel slightly sorry for the European Aviation Safety Agency, because all it wants to do is to convert the existing Joint Aviation Authority rules about European pilot licensing and approved pilot training organisations (JAR FCL) into EU law. The trouble is that the new regulations themselves have to follow a set of generic EU legal principles that are nothing to do with aviation. In other words, politics has intruded.

What politics? Well, ever since pilot licences in Europe ceased - almost a decade ago - to be different in each EU member state and the move was made to a single JAR FCL pilot licence, the European Commission has been looking enviously across the Pond at the US FAA system. US pilots have to be trained in America to FAA standards by FAA licensed instructors. To make that quite clear, FAA licences may not be gained by training at establishments outside America. It has the most inflexible training system in the world, and it is certainly not likely to go global or multinational any time soon.

Meanwhile at present, part of the flying that student pilots at almost all the larger European FTOs do is carried out in the USA, because it's cheaper, and since the weather is more reliable it takes less time. This will stop under the proposed new rules because the US-based instructors - at present allowed to be FAA-licenced even if they train to a European syllabus - would be required to win EASA licences and ratings. From the point of view of individual instructors that is just not worth it, because they could not be guaranteed a permit to work in Europe, and they probably don't want to anyway.

Europe has let it be known that if a European/US bilateral training agreement were to be signed, its proposed protectionist rules could be modified.

So let's look at how likely that bilateral is, and how long it would take to get it. The USA is running up to a presidential election, and the FAA Administrator is a presidential appointee. So the FAA would not be in a position even to advance this proposal to a new administration for at least a year, and it has so many other priorities this is certainly going to be well down the list. If the proposal were ever to get that far, Congress would almost certainly see the bilateral proposal as having no merit.

The risk, for Europe, is that it will seriously harm its own pilot training industry and also damage multinational FTOs and TRTOs that serve the needs of European airlines and business aviation. And would America get the message in the process? Probably not, but if it were to, the damage would already have been done.

 The Ivy: in vino veritas? 

It was over a glass of champagne at The Ivy restaurant in London I learned the real reason why the judiciary and police in most of the world rush to prepare prosecutions against pilots and air traffic controllers following a fatal airline accident.

Apparently judges and the police are so bored of handling tedious, everyday issues like divorce, fraud, and theft, that an airline accident offers them the chance to enter an unfamiliar world of exciting technology, a world in which they can exercise their legal and investigative skills on something new, and demonstrate mastery of impressive issues in what is guaranteed to become a high profile case.

Says who? Well, I was attending a dinner for the speakers at an aviation law conference. While there I became involved in a discussion about the Concorde fatal crash near Paris Charles de Gaulle in 2000 as an example of this urge to prosecute. The choice of subject was prompted by the fact that, just a few days before the Ivy gathering, a French judge had announced that Continental Airlines and five individuals from three other organisations are to face manslaughter charges over the death of all on board the Concorde and four people on the ground.

Why prosecute Continental? The metal component alleged to have cut Concorde's tyres is said to have fallen off a Continental DC-10 that took off shortly before Concorde did.

Given the French judiciary's scattergun approach to prosecution in cases like this, it mystifies me why they haven't gone for the throat of Aeroports de Paris, which failed to keep its runway clear of debris. Incidentally, that should not be interpreted by the French legal system as encouragement to do so; it just seems a strange omission from an otherwise comprehensive use of the list of potential targets for prosecution. It seems likely the only reason the judge didn't charge the pilots is that he couldn't because they died in the accident.

Early in the Concorde crash investigation Ken Smart, heading the UK team working with the French investigators, bemoaned the fact that, at the awful accident site, the police and judiciary were standing around not knowing what to do; but as soon as one of the professional investigators showed an interest in a piece of debris it was removed and locked up as evidence for the prosecution. Not a great way to find out what happened so as to prevent a recurrence, but, hey, this is apparently about creating a fascinating case for lawyers to work on for years to come.

It was a senior Paris-based French lawyer who explained this judicial fascination with aviation tragedy. I could have dismissed the statement as the natural product of relaxed, pre dinner banter, but she was serious. The French judiciary are not obliged to prosecute following accidents, she explained, any more than the British judiciary are, but in France they always choose to go for prosecution, while in the UK they hardly ever do - and then only when the technical investigation has been completed.

This contemporary lawyer's explanation of judges' tendency to over-indulge professionally when aviation accidents are involved reminds me of the judicial investigation into the 1979 Mt Erebus disaster. An Air New Zealand DC-10 on a chartered Antarctic sightseeing flight crashed into Mt Erebus, near McMurdo Sound. Justice Peter Mahon's verdict contained some sound judgements, but a court of appeal decided he had exceeded his authority in choosing to pursue an alleged cover-up by Air New Zealand, and his evidence supporting the allegation was demonstrated to be flawed in almost all respects. There was something about the zeal of Mahon's pusuit of his convictions that demonstrated that egotism can overcome judicial professionalism.

Today there is something worrying about the obsession demonstrated by Brazilian politicians, police and the judiciary with the 2006 fatal mid-air collision between a Gol Boeing 737-800 and Embraer Legacy. In the firing line are the two pilots that survived the collision - the Legacy's crew - and the air traffic controllers. At this point, justice has nothing to do with it, justification everything.