January 2011 Archives

On a warm night in 1950 a four-year-old boy, holding his father's hand in manly solidarity, walked through the echoing terminal at Sydney's Mascot airfield and out across the pan. A long-legged Qantas Super Connie stood waiting in a halo of light, avgas fumes heavy in the humid air. Together the boy and his father climbed the airstairs - as he saw it - to heaven.

Today, the same person is strolling through the endless 21^st century souk that is Dubai's Terminal 3, a shining cathedral to consumption. Aviation feels secondary.

From the languid Emirates lounge, he is injected - as if intravenously - via the airbridge into the upper deck of an unseen aeroplane the size of a ship. He knows it's an A380 because it says so on the boarding card. He occupies not just a seat, but his personal space.

The New Aviation experience begins.

The pan's a long way down outside the window, as far down as the sea is from the deck-rail of a liner.

Within his touching distance is an embarrassment of electronic riches, comfort controls and comestibles. Where to start? He chooses "Flight View" on the inflight entertainment system.

The selected video camera is looking down over the length of the aeroplane from its mount in the tall tail-fin, and on his screen it shows the A380 in its dock surrounded by activity - what the navy would call victualling. The "coaling" had, presumably, been done.

Then, concurrently with his chosen external view, he selects an endless library of touch-screen-navigable musical tracks to be piped to his headset. He creates his own playlist - just because you can. A soundtrack for his trip. Emirates has chosen well and widely.

On the upper deck there is a ship's company of bustling, attentive cabin crew, no visible pilots at any point, but a captain - sounding reassuringly like a captain - welcomes the passengers via the PA.

Ready to go. Our passenger watches pushback through the nose-mounted camera, then witnesses taxiing progress, nosewheel tracking the yellow centreline, and he can feel the intimate bumps through the seat as the wheels pass over concrete joins. A bit like a simulator. But reality's available from the window beside him confirming that, yes, it is happening.

Clearance to line up, and he sees a pilot's-eye view of the runway stretched out ahead on his LED screen. After a momen't hesitation, just as AC/DC's "Shoot to thrill" surges into his headset, the take-off roll begins. As if powered by the music, the A380 gathers pace and, after a suitable time, casually shrugs off the ground in favour of its natural environment.

It's almost better than being in charge of the aeroplane, he thinks: the flightcrew don't have the musical accompaniment.

The seat belt sign extinguishes and the cabin crew spring to life in an orchestrated preparation for the passengers' lunch. Their well-drilled activity is hubbed on the kitchen-sized galley at the aft end of the cabin.

In an intimate space ringed by sofas just forward of the galley is a stand-up bar where Pearl, a Canadian stewardess with family origins in Kerala, southern India, is dispensing drinks, olives and chat.

Oz Ege (from Turkey), as he spreads a linen cloth upon the table in front of our passenger, describes his task in Emirates' A380 Business Class as being "like working in a restaurant", and deftly pours him another glass of Meursault. 

To the passengers also it's like being in a restaurant. The ambient calm has more in common with a civilised eatery than an aircraft cabin. The chink of cutlery on chinaware is the dominant sound. No chatter. The pax are inside their headsets, absorbed in movies, computer games or music.

Meanwhile Flight View's tailfin-elevated camera shows the big ship sailing the sky with the grace of a galleon, huge wings embracing the cloudscape that's slip-sliding away beneath. Rod Stewart and Paul Simon provide the appropriate accompaniment.

No pilots. No announcements. No turbulence. No big thrumming radial engines to leave you tooth-chatteringly deaf for days afterwards.

It may not be aviation the way it used to be, but if travelling big distances is what you have to do, this is definitely the way to do it.

My video briefing on Flightglobal's annual review of airline safety performance (on Flighglobal's homepage) contains this quote:

"The global picture of airline safety performance reveals two parallel worlds.

"There's a group of airlines that improved their safety performance dramatically in 2010 - and they were the group that was already good.

"But there's another group that are continuing to provide the world with the majority of serious accidents that take place nowadays. The latter group consists of those whose attitude to safety - and whose systems for managing it - are stuck in the 1970s. Things have moved on, but they have not.

"You want to know how to identify these groups before you buy your next airline ticket? You want to identify the attitude difference that separates the two groups, so you can check your own airline's approach to safety management?

"Then pick up the 18^th January issue of Flight International, or visit Flightglobal.com and hit SAFETY in the menu bar."

Meanwhile, at 1400 (UK local time) today, 19 January, I'll be running a live Q&A webchat at the Flightglobal homepage. If you have any questions that arise from the report, join me. 

The accident report by the Russian investigators, MAK, has been published. It does not make happy reading for the Polish people or their government, and indeed they are finding its truths difficult to swallow.

This understandable. That crash at Smolensk in April 2010 was a national tragedy for Poland. In a few seconds on final approach to the fog-obscured runway, the nation lost its president, his political retinue, and Poland's top military people, intelligentsia and churchmen.

As if that were not enough of a tragedy in its own right, the irony associated with their purpose adds to the pain. The 90 occupants of that Polish military Tupolev Tu-154 were on their way to commemorate the 1940 Katyn Forest Massacre perpetrated by the Stalinist Russian regime, which murdered 22,000 Polish military, professionals and intelligentsia.

A tragedy does not get much more emotional than that.

And now the report reveals, as anticipated, that this was an ordinary, avoidable, controlled flight into terrain accident.

The Polish government is not happy with the report. It does not deny the main findings, but would like to see the Russians accept some of the blame for the mistakes its own crew made. Their target is the air traffic controllers at Smolensk.

The Smolensk controllers did all they could to prevent this accident, given that the Polish crew were clearly operating autonomously, conducting their own FMS letdown and not requesting any help. Language was almost certainly a much bigger problem than the Russian report suggests. The Polish captain spoke basic, functional Russian, but he was the only crew member who did, and he was flying the aeroplane.

The fact that explains it all for me is that there was no approach briefing before top of descent. And this for a non-precision let-down toward an unfamiliar aerodrome wreathed in fog with visibility reports way below the limits of all the parties involved.

The fact that the head of the Polish air force was a presence on the flight deck, and that there were dark mutterings recorded on the CVR to the effect that the President would go ballistic if they had to divert, may have been the reason for the lack of a TOD briefing, and for the crew's persistence with attempting the approach even if only to prove it couldn't be done. But however obvious a reason that is - and the MAK considers it obvious - that does not provide the crew with a valid excuse for what happened, and the way it happened.

The whole descent was a series of mistakes, misjudgements and poor decisionmaking by the crew.

If the Polish government insists on dredging up procedural technicalities in an attempt to prove that the Russian controllers should shoulder some of the blame for the crew's actions, all it will do is dishonour the dead and obscure the lessons that Poland's military aviators must learn from this.

This was a truly Polish tragedy in which Polish leaders paid the price for Polish mistakes and misjudgements.