November 2012 Archives

The world's air traffic management systems will seize up before 2030 unless states all agree a way of acting more harmoniously and seamlessly.

This warning came from ICAO Council president Roberto Kobeh Gonzales as he opened the 12th Air Navigation Conference here in Montreal today. This is the global gathering at which the world's 191 aviating states have assembled to ratify the agreements that will enable progress. At the end of the next eleven days of haggling, Kobeh will be able to declare the conference a success or a failure,

If the states fail to agree on the fundamentals for advance, he said today, the global ATM system will be unable to cope with predicted demand, which is estimated to grow from 2.7 billion passenger journeys a year now to 6 billion by 2030. The number of flights will double from 30 million to 60 million, with the biggest growth concentrated in the Asia Pacific region.

Kobeh said he believes he has already got consensus that the way ahead begins by carrying out "Block Upgrades" to ATM performance, and the meeting's task is to ratify that agreed aim. Block Upgrades happen when groups of states agree regional plans for technical and regulatory ATM advance, like Europe is doing under its SESAR Joint Undertaking. 

Head of the ICAO Air Navigation Commission Nancy Graham explained it like this: "We have consensus on why we need the Block Upgrades. What this meeting is about is deciding when, how, and where the money is coming from."

ICAO makes it clear that there is room for some local flexibility in implementation rates and means because some areas have high growth and high density traffic, others low traffic and more manageable growth, but all the systems must harmonise. IATA's head of operations Guenther Matschnigg pointed out that the airlines want their onboard communications and navigational equipment to be able to take them anywhere in the world without need for a freight-bay full of rarely-used kit for rogue ATM providers.

Graham said that there are a couple of areas in which there will be less room for negotiation: ATM datalinking methodology and equipment must be completely globally compatible and advance at a similar rate everywhere, she said, as must participation in the SWIM (system-wide information management), which will be the industry's equivalent of the human body's neurological network.

We'll see what the next eleven days brings. If the meeting fails, prepare for a future of increasing air traffic control delays and inefficiency.

Living where you can easily have an off-duty beer with the ICAO director general is better.

 

ICAO is where the world thrashes out its common standards for international aviation.

And watch this space. Montreal International, which is pitching shamelessly to consolidate the city it represents as the undisputed aviation policy capital of the world, is working on IFATCA (International Federation of Air Traffic Controllers' Associations), CANSO (Civil Air Navigation Services Organisation), and the Flight Safety Foundation.

But actually it's not going to be easy to aviate there, even when St Helena has a runway. More of that later.

For most people who've even heard of it, St Helena is notorious as the British Dependency to which Napoleon was exiled because they knew he couldn't leave without someone noticing. The Brits were right. His grave is there.

This is why Napoleon couldn't leave

Now Thales has just won the contract to provide the airport's navaids, which will include an instrument landing system for precision guidance on final approach to the 1,550m (5,100ft) runway, a Doppler VOR for bearing, and a DME to provide range information.

St Helena has been awaiting an airport for a long time and it's still three years away. This mountainous island is Lat 16ºS, Long 5º 40W, and the nearest land - the also-remote Ascension Islands - is 700nm away to the north-west. The Angolan coast is almost twice as far to the east.

 

The island's mountainous terrain will make the new airport's location - Prosperous Bay Plain on the island's east coast - a challenging place to operate into. It isn't a plain for a start, it's hilly. Early work is about levelling and filling. No-one has offered accurate runway orientations yet - that will depend on terrain and approaches as much as prevailing winds.

St Helena's distance from its nearest potential diversion airports - the US air base in Ascension Island (if the Yanks will allow it to be named as a diversion) and Lubango in Angola mean that carrying diversion fuel will constitute a payload penalty, and extended range twin-engine operation (ETOPS) regulations will apply to the Airbus A319s or Boeing 737-700s that have the performance to land there.

It's a beautiful island with a population of about 4,000. It's fragile in all ways. Aviation will change it, maybe bringing relative prosperity, with tourism as the planned main earner.

Jamestown, the capital

The fight against aerotoxic syndrome has taken a major step forward with the announcement that a scientist at the University of Washington, Seattle, has identified modified chemicals that will reduce the toxicity of anti-wear additives in aero engine oil without reducing the lubricant's effectiveness.

Several recently reported incidents of cabin air contamination in German airlines (see previous blog entry)  have brought to the fore once again the risks of engine oil fumes harming human health, particularly pilot cognitive and motor capacity while they are flying the aeroplane.

This discovery has the potential to reduce the health risks of oil fume events in aircraft, which has been an intractable problem since identified first in the 1950s.

The organophosphate tri-cresyl phosphate (TCP) is an essential component of the oil anti-wear additive, and it has long been accepted that certain organophosphates are neurotoxins. 

Clement Furlong, Professor of Genome Sciences and Medicine at Washington University's School of Medicine explains that he has proven a test for identifying which are the neurologically harmful isomers of TCP, and which the less harmful.

Tri-ortho-cresyl phosphate was believed to be the only harmful TCP isomer, so the oil manufacturers tried to reduce its presence in the additive to very low levels, but it turns out that other TCP isomers which they believed harmless - and are present in large quantities in the oil-  are in fact the culprits.

In simplified scientific terminology Furlong explains what he and his team have achieved: "An in-vitro screening protocol for potential toxicity of triaryl phosphates was developed...Isomers of tert-butyl phenyl phosphate produced the least BChE inhibition in vitro." BChE is butyrylcholinesterase, a naturally occurring and essential chemical in the human neurological system the beneficial action of which is inhibited by certain isomers of TCP, leading to neurological damage.

When also tested on mice, Furlong explained: "BChE inhibition by in-vitro bioactivated TAPS correlated with esterase inhibition in vivo [in the live tests]". TAPS are toxic triaryl organophosphate anti-wear lubricant additives.

In other words, this is the chemical and biological proof of their neurological harmfulness, which large sectors of the industry still deny.

Finally, Furlong has discovered that extracts from grapefruit can reduce the harmful effects of TCPs, and has demonstrated their effectiveness: "The flavonoid naringenin reduced bioactivation of TCPs into BChE inhibitors." 

Eureka.

Clem, you are a genius!

AND CLEM HAS ALREADY CORRECTED ME AS FOLLOWS:

I should clear up a couple of points from the text below.

1) BChE is not a necessary enzyme for neurological function. It is just a good biomarker protein.

2) I don't know if the tri-tertbutyl phenyl phosphates have good lubrication properties. Only Eric Piveteau [Nyco Oil] will know.

3) While naringenin can block the in vitro conversion of TAPs into toxic esterase inhibitors, we should not push the concept that it can protect against exposures without important follow-on in vivo experiments.

It is important not to claim progress that industry could easily refute or criticize.  The generation of potent enzyme inhibitors from D125 and from tri-p-cresyl phosphate are indeed important contributions.  The naringenin inhibition needs in vivo follow-up  experiments. It will be great if it blocks the toxicity of the exposures, but it is important to demonstrate in vivo.

Kind regards,
Clem Furlong