October 2010 Archives

G-CPET is the aircraft that will carry out  the last scheduled British Airways Boeing 757 revenue flight, and the timetable below charts its last working day on Saturday 30 October:

BA1384 Heathrow to Manchester departing 0745 arriving 0840
BA1389 Manchester to Heathrow departing 1000 arriving 1105

BA1482 Heathrow to Glasgow departing 1215 arriving 1340
BA1487 Glasgow to Heathrow departing at 1425 and arriving at 1545

BA1454 Heathrow to Edinburgh departing 1725 arriving 1850
BA1463 Edinburgh to Heathrow departing 1935 arriving 2100

To mark the occasion, G-CPET has been liveried in the way that BA 757s were when they first arrived on the fleet in 1983. 

This is a nice touch, showing BA - despite these mean times - is not just a provider of dividends to shareholders, but retains its aviation soul. 

The other two other remaining BA 757s will fly from Heathrow on Spanish services during the same day. 
 
British Airways and Eastern Air Lines were the type's launch customers, and BA's first 757 took to the skies in 1983. At its height, BA's 757 fleet was 54 strong in the late 1990s.

The three remaining 757s, all of which entered service in 1997, have been sold to FedEx Express, along with eight other 757s retired in the past year.

Captain Stephen Riley, director of flight operations, says: "Almost everyone in the operational side of the business has either piloted, repaired, dispatched or looked after customers, on Boeing 757s during the past 27 years.

"We say farewell to the aircraft with a lot of happy memories and hope that customers on board the final few flights around the UK will enjoy the day as well."

Thank you, Capt Riley. I'll be enjoying the LHR-EDI-LHR goodbye sortie, helping to celebrate this little bit of BA history.

Love it or hate it, Heathrow's politically cancelled third runway will be back.

Why? It's the most environmentally friendly aviation solution for UK plc, even if not so for the thousands (millions?) of citizens living directly under Heathrow's arrival and departure paths.

Who says it's the most global-cooling air transport move? Richard Deakin, CEO of UK ATC provider NATS.

Any other location for an additional runway serving the UK's south east, or traffic pattern rearrangements to allow increased traffic from existing runways, would result in less efficient routeings and higher emissions, he says.

The now-abandoned Labour government air transport white paper had come to the same conclusion, so Deakin's not inventing an idea.

He's not saying the third runway will happen or should happen, just that it's the least-polluting answer if air travel demand is to be met.

But is air travel demand to be met?

Both member parties forming the current coalition government, the Conservatives and Liberal Democrats, claim demand can be met by alternative methods which do not include a third runway at LHR or any additional runways at Gatwick or Stansted either: they say increased demand for domestic travel can be met by improved rail services, and for international travel by allowing growth from regional airports, but not from the UK south east and London.

Is this realistic? Travellers can't afford the relative cost of UK rail travel (air travel is a fraction of the cost), and international trade and tourism depends heavily on international air travel. Artificially limiting freedom to travel on business and leisure when the good times return will become politically suicidal.

Of course one way the government could make rail travel competitive on price with air travel is to increase air passenger duty massively. There is a big increase in the pipeline already, but still not big enough to do the trick. But expensive transportation is not popular and it's an economic damper which the governments of competing economies are avoiding imposing on their home markets.

The change in political stance will take years to develop, but it will happen. Watching how the government will spin their U-turn is going to be the fun part. Less of a spin, more of a squirm.

Like Deakin, I'm not saying a third runway should happen. But I am saying it will happen. You heard it here first by many, many years. 

When a Filair Let 410 passenger flight crashed near Bandundu airport in the DR Congo in late August, the cause was something of a mystery. An aeroplane on a scheduled domestic passenger flight flown by two expat pilots (a Belgian captain, also the owner of Filair, and a British copilot) suddenly dived into the ground on final approach after an apparently trouble-free trip.

The crash killed the three crew and 17 of the 18 passengers, and the initial presumption was that the aircraft had run out of fuel.

Investigators, however, found sufficient fuel on board for the aircraft to have landed safely, and there was no obvious technical failure.

The sole surviving passenger has recently recovered sufficiently to tell the accident investigators what he saw happening: a passenger had brought a small crocodile on board in a bag, and it escaped into the cabin as the aircraft was approaching the airport.

The survivor described how passengers rushed forward to escape the reptile, and the aircraft nosed down and crashed.

It was a full cabin - the normal configuration for a Let 410 is 19 seats, and there were 18 people on board.

Many have asked whether the passenger action, if it is confirmed by the investigation  (the croc was found and killed after the accident) could really have caused the aircraft to be sufficiently de-stabilised to cause it to crash. The answer is yes, particularly when the aircraft was so close to the ground that the pilots would have had only seconds to attempt to resolve the situation before impact.

Press reports of this story have been slightly confused by the fact that another Let 410, this time on a cargo flight, crashed fatally in the DR Congo on 21 October, just as the croc story emerged. The second crash looks as if it may have a more conventional cause: it happened just after take-off from Bukavu, which is a high altitude airport, and is believed to have followed loss of power in one of the engines. Both pilots died, and there was no-one else on board. 

If the survivor's description of the passenger reaction to the croc is confirmed by evidence, and is determined to have been the primary cause of the crash, the painfully obvious solution to prevent further accidents like it is to prevent passengers bringing crocodiles - or other dangerous animals - on board. But in the DR Congo, which has had the worst aviation accident record in the world for two decades, this sort of event is, unfortunately, just 'part of life's rich tapestry'.   

For reasons I'll explain, I have thought for a while that professional pilots, once they have been practising their trade for a couple of years after ab-initio training, should undergo advanced training. A bit like following up a Bachelors degree with a Masters, but it doesn't need to take that long.

The reason is simple. The Colgan Q400 accident at Buffalo proved a lot of things, but one of them is how fragile a pilot's understanding of the basics can be when s/he emerges from training. If it is not consolidated quickly, knowledge can been lost, and experience on the line is not the answer. It's possible to win a licence and get a job despite some important gaps of understanding, because your learning, when you sit the written exams, is so recent that you can spout the answer by rote. And a final handling test can never test the full range of skills an aviator needs.

Ab initio courses don't contain any spare time; as soon as you have just grasped a basic piece of knowledge you're pushed onward into the next learning phase. You can enter line flying not only with gaps in your knowledge, but with actual misperceptions which might consolidate into bad habits.

Re-entering training once flying has become familiar means the trainee has the spare brain capacity for more advanced learning and consolidation of knowledge. My realisation of this came when, after a tour of duty on C-130s, the RAF sent me to its Central Flying School to learn to be a Qualified Flying Instructor.

The course takes you back to basics, but with a view to enabling you to explain the details of, say, Bernoulli's theorem, clearly to other people, rather than just believing you understand it well enough to make practical use of what it reveals. You cannot explain things properly to someone else unless you understand the subject matter well and completely, and there were many areas of knowledge in which I found, to my surprise, that my understanding was thoroughly imperfect. The upside was that, now that I was being re-introduced to the subject matter as a fairly confident aviator rather than a struggling student, I was quickly able to grasp the whole truth.

The point is that aviators should seek, early in their careers, any forms of advanced training they can lay their hands on, and their employers would be wise not only to back this, but to insist on it. A command course for a SFO would be an opportunity - it should, after all, be more than a course in CRM as practised from the left hand seat.

I have eulogised about Bombardier's Safety Standdown before: the instruction is free and amazingly good.

Meanwhile distance learning can help too. And operational bulletins, when they are good, can be very very good.

A superb example of the latter is a training leaflet just issued by the European Helicopter Safety Team (EHEST) innocently called "Safety Considerations". It says its purpose is to provide "methods to improve helicopter pilots' capabilities." It re-introduces rotary wing pilots to some of the most intractable and complex problems they can encounter: vortex ring state, loss of tail rotor effectiveness, static and dynamic rollover, and inadvertent entry into a degraded visual environment.

I urge all helo pilots to read it. It does not talk down to you, and I bet it tells you some stuff you'd forgotten, and even more that you didn't know you didn't know.