So why could Singapore radar see them, then?

5,000ft is not a height at which any crew flies to avoid primary radar. To fly “under the radar” like military strike aircraft do in hostile territory, you fly at 250ft or lower and, if terrain allows it, you fly “nap-of-the-earth”. Your aircraft should be kicking up the dust – literally.

5,000ft is nearly 1.5km high. It is not dangerous unless you are surrounded by mountain peaks that are more than 5,000ft. But it is not a height anybody chooses to fly at if they are in a jet because fuel consumption per distance travelled at that height is so high that your range is more or less halved, compared with flying at 30,000ft or more.

So in a jet there is absolutely no good reason to be there because it confers no advantage whatsoever, and a whole lot of disadvantages.

This information only adds to the truth that whoever was doing this, if indeed it was deliberate – and that is still only a guess – may have been a victim of the adage that a little knowledge is a dangerous thing.

A week later, by Saturday 15 March, most expert observers had come to the conclusion – and Malaysia had announced – that the Boeing 777′s disappearance was deliberately engineered by someone on board. The action to switch off the aircraft’s transponder and – as we found out later – also its ACARS technical datalink, was carried out before the aircraft was turned west from its north-easterly Beijing-bound track.

Now with hindsight we can see that the switching-off of the transponder at the ATC handover point from Malaysian to Vietnamese airspace – assuming it was deliberate – was a clever move, because the Kuala Lumpur controllers would assume the flight was now the business of their Ho Chi Minh City counterparts and could ignore it, while the latter would assume it had not yet made radio contact nor appeared on radar but would soon do so. The predictable effect was to delay the raising of the alarm by either party.

But on Sunday, the day after the aircraft’s acknowledged disappearance, Malaysia either had not investigated what its military had seen on its primary radar, or they were not admitting they had. On Monday they leaked that MH370 may have turned west, and suggested  the search should be widened beyond the Gulf of Thailand/South China Sea into the Malacca Strait to the west of the Malaysian peninsula. On Tuesday they confirmed that a primary radar contact in the area where MH370 was last seen had indeed turned west, but they could not be sure that it was definitely the missing aircraft. Clearly they had let an unidentified aircraft pass through Malaysian sovereign territory without bothering to identify it; not something they were happy to admit.

Even by Friday 14th the Malaysian transport minister was still saying the unidentified westbound contact had not been definitely accepted as being MH370, so he was reluctant to switch the multinational search effort entirely to the west and to abandon the Gulf of Thailand where the last transponder return had been seen on Saturday 8th. But that day Inmarsat stated that its geostationary constellation of ten communications satellites had picked up vestigial automated signals from MH370 many hours after the aircraft had “disappeared”.

On Saturday 15th the Malaysian authorities, by then well briefed by Inmarsat and its aeronautical communications partner SITA, acknowledged the significance of the satellite communications data, and redesignated the search areas. One search area was designated on the assumption the aircraft had tracked north-west for up to seven hours, the other to the south – into the Indian Ocean – for the same length of time, making it clear that the position signature derived by the satellites was not definitive.

This automated communication was the product of a tracking and data service that Inmarsat offers but Malaysia Airlines had not subscribed to, so the satellites were sending out interrogation signals – “pings” – to link up with service users, but aircraft like the MH370 777 that were equipped but had not subscribed would only respond vestigially. But these responses are accepted as being proof that the aircraft continued its flight, even if not information about its precise track.

Today – Sunday 16 March – the signs of really practical thinking and coordination of the search and investigation are beginning to appear for the first time.

The Malaysian government has called upon all the countries to the north-west as far as Turkmenistan and the Caspian Sea to check their primary radar records for unidentified contacts in their airspace in the seven hours after the 777 went missing. Depending on the actual track the aircraft followed, if it had headed approximately north-west this could include some – if not all – of the following countries: Thailand, Myanmar/Burma, China, Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Turkmenistan.

If the aircraft had gone that way, surely military primary radar in one of those countries – or several – would have picked up the signal from this unidentified aircraft, and the vigilant radar operator would have scrambled a fighter to intercept the intruder? Wouldn’t s/he?

Or maybe not. Maybe these states’ air defences, like Malaysia’s, are not what they are cracked up to be. And maybe they wouldn’t want the rest of the world to know that.

Meanwhile the Malaysian authorities are checking the crew and passenger lists of MH370 with a view to doing much deeper background checks on them all. After all, if this “disappearance” was engineered by someone on board, surely something in their history will provide a hint as to a motive.

But the big problem is the sheer size of the search areas to the north and south.

If the aircraft went north it will be found one day. If it went south there’s no guarantee it will ever be found in the vastness of the southern Indian Ocean.

This Boeing 777, if the uncoordinated information released by Malaysia is to be believed – and maybe it isn’t – was last seen offshore from Malaysia within primary and secondary radar range. Air traffic control uses secondary radar, which interrogates transponders on board aircraft and gets an identified signal in response. If the signal disappears it could either be because the aircraft itself has had an accident, or because the crew has turned the transponder off.

The terrorists that hijacked the four American airliners on 9/11 (2001) turned off their transponders once they had taken charge of the aircraft, so they were lost to ATC, but the military could still see them on primary radar, and at that time there was no provision for direct communication between the military and the civil ATC to establish what was going on.

There is now.

The Malaysian military has primary radar to provide surveillance of surface and airborne activity off its coasts and borders. It clearly knew more about what happened to MH370 than any other Malaysian agency, but the authorities do not seem to have tapped into this expertise, and the military may have been slow to volunteer it.

There are so many information sources that do not appear to have been used effectively in this case. As a result the families of the missing passengers and crew are being kept in the dark, and the search areas now extended to both sides of the peninsula have become so wide that it is clear that tracking information on the aircraft has not been used effectively.

Nothing has been said about the 777′s ACARS system (airborne communications addressing and reporting system), a datalink that provides technical information about the health of aircraft systems to Malaysian Airlines’ base. In the 2009 Air France 447 loss case, just before the fatal sequence of events an ACARS transmission told AF’s base that an airspeed sensor disagreement had caused the autopilot to trip out. That information was made public.

If MH370 was lost to civil radar screens because the transponder had been switched off, it raises questions as to why that would be so. If the military, who are now quoted as reporting that the aircraft turned off its northerly track and headed west, descended and flew across the peninsula, saw that happen, why has the information taken so long to be released?

There has been no report about attempts to pick up signals from the aircraft’s emergency locator transmitter, although the increasingly international fleet of search vessels are clearly doing their best. If MH370 has come down in the Gulf of Thailand, South China Sea or the Malacca Straits, the water there is shallow – less than 200m compared with the 4,500m depth of the South Atlantic where AF447 was lost.

There is an all-pervasive sense of a chaotic lack of coordination between the Malaysian agencies which has hindered the establishment of an effective search strategy.

Meanwhile the failure to provide timely information when simple facts have been established shows a total lack of consideration for the families of those who are missing.

The airline subsequently confirmed that one of the aircraft’s engines had “surged”, and the crew elected to shut it down and return to Heathrow to land.

No-one was hurt in the incident, but the south runway was closed for about 15min to cope with the precautionary landing and its aftermath. The aircraft had been bound for Lyon, and BA says it put the passengers up in a hotel overnight for departure to their destination the following day.

Now to the event itself. One witness close to the runway described flame emitting from the back of the engine, and hearing a loud banging sound.

With apologies to my knowledgeable aircrew friends who have flown turbine-powered aircraft, here’s a bit of information on engine surges to put the issue in context.

The engines which power BA’s A320-series fleet are International Aero Engines V2500 turbofans. An engine surge is a phenomenon that occurs when something disturbs, and thus destabilises, the flow of air through the engine compressor, resulting in sudden momentary reversals of that flow. The flow reverses can cause some damage in their own right, and when they occur there is a loud banging sound, but the engine doesn’t lose all its power – just some of it. The equivalent event in a car engine would be a “backfire”.

The cause of this particular surge event is not yet known, but BA’s engineering department is investigating. A birdstrike could start it, or unnoticed damage to a compressor blade, but there are many possibilities. The events, however, are pretty rare nowadays.

The usual procedure for pilots when a surge occurs depends on what phase of flight the aircraft is in, although surges normally occur at high power settings, so take-off and climb is surge-risk phase.

Crew action – if it occurs in the early climb – is to leave the surging engine alone if it is still generating power, while the crew ensures they have a safe airspeed and a stable climb with gear up and flaps at an appropriate setting for the speed. Once that is achieved they can throttle the engine back to see if the surging stops, and if it does, they check for any evidence of damage or engine fire risk. If there is no such threat they would normally leave the engine running, but if threats exist they shut it down. The aircraft flies easily on one engine – as do all modern twin-engined aircraft.

A crew faced with a surging engine on take-off at Heathrow would advise ATC, probably with a Pan call rather than a Mayday, and would level off at a height of about 2,000ft (610m) or above, as agreed with the controller.

When cleared by ATC, the crew would aim to carry out a circuit to land back on one of the runways in the same direction that they took off. Finally, fire and rescue crews would meet the aircraft as a precaution and follow it to its parking place.

He told the Conference from the podium that watching ATM developments in Europe’s Single European Sky programme was “more like watching geology than Formula 1″. That was David McMillan, former DG at Eurocontrol, now chairing the Flight Safety Foundation’s board.

The audience completely missed the joke. At least I think they did, or maybe they’d just heard it all before and knew what a sad truth it is.

Singapore says it is going to be even worse in the rest of the world.

Poh Theen Soh, assistant DG at the CAAS was talking about the recent resolution at ICAO that the world’s air navigation service providers should start thinking regionally instead of locally, and he said he is very pessimistic about it. He was talking about a programme called the Aviation System Block Upgrade.

If the European Union, with its strong regional structure and all the assistance from the European Commission can’t stop its ANSPs thinking nationally and start them thinking regionally, what hope did the rest of the world have when there is no such structure and no incentives? No-one in the CANSO-led panel of experts said he was wrong.

What puts the brakes on the system everywhere is that nations, especially small ones, think that if they cede ATM functions to a regional system they risk losing their expertise in a high-tech area, and losing a high-skills employer. But even the big players – France is the classic European example – are equally intransigent for the same reason.

This nervousness is very human. The only way everybody can win in this game is to focus on the horizon that everybody wants to reach, and ensure that all the players have a chance of taking part, but not restricted by a territorial template.

If ATM goes on being a nationally-based patchwork  it will never be an efficient system regionally or globally.

But if dividing up the system functionally instead of territorially is what it would take to get everybody on the same bandwagon, then let’s look for a way of doing it.

The Reds and the Blues (the Reds’ engineering team) show off the new tail livery which has been adopted to celebrate the team’s 50th display season.

Before the Red Arrows? The Black Arrows, of course. A team of 16 Hawker Hunters. They were good too

About time.

This is how the accolade has been announced: “The former Guild of Air Pilots and Air Navigators has unveiled a new name, reflecting the notable honour bestowed upon it by Her Majesty the Queen. The leading independent organisation promoting the highest levels of safety, training and best practices for pilots around the world will in future be known as ‘The Honourable Company of Air Pilots’.

Master of the Air Pilots, His Honour Judge Tudor Owen FRAeS, has said: ”As an active 21st century organisation we are privileged to receive this rarely-bestowed historic title.”

To put it all in a historic context: “The ‘Honourable Company’ status is a rare distinction, which is in the gift of the monarch and has only previously been granted to three companies; ‘The Honourable Company of Master Mariners’ (by King George V, when their Master was Edward Prince of Wales), ‘The Honourable Artillery Company’ (in 1656) and “The Honourable East India Company” (now defunct).”

My grandfather was one of the early British pilots, serving in the Royal Flying Corps in the Great War as commander of No 22 Squadron. His first licence was issued 100 years ago. Taking that particular pilot as a tangible (to me anyway) representative of the first generation, he has been followed by three more generations of pilots since his day.  It is time that professional aviators were honoured.

Air navigators are still included in the Honourable Company, as they were in GAPAN, but – perhaps in recognition of the demise of the aviation sextant and the rise of GPS – they are recognised invisibly.

Being a Guild was already a fine thing, but my heartiest congratulations to the Master, and to the members of the new Honourable Company of Air Pilots.

So what’s the issue? Here’s what the European Cockpit Association thinks about this new NAS subsidiary, called Norwegian Air International.

“At stake: the particular business model which Norwegian long-haul – currently registered in Norway – uses to sidestep stricter regulations and labour laws. This ‘model’ currently includes 2 wide-body aircraft leased and registered in Ireland, trans-Atlantic operations and crew based in Thailand with contracts governed by Singaporean law. Such a business model which navigates between Oslo, Dublin, Bangkok, Singapore & Washington is a book example for a ‘flag of convenience’.”

The ECA continues: “Ireland’s low taxes and flexible regulatory environment have been attractive for many companies within and beyond aviation. For NAI – although not flying out of Ireland – the Irish AOC means a favourable tax regime, traffic rights to the USA, as well as avoidance of Norway’s stricter employment conditions and higher labour costs.”

Well, that’s business nowadays, isn’t it?

ECA president Nico Voorbach is not happy with the arrangement: “This is an opaque setup which corrupts the European idea of an open market, embedded in Europe’s social model, and spirit of fair competition. The proposed setup of NAI is designed to tilt the playing field in its favour with respect to other transatlantic carriers. The one thing we do agree upon with NAI is that their model is indeed “innovative” – in the sense that it offers creative ways to circumvent European and national regulations and disregard fundamental labour rights.”

I must admit the corporate tortuousness feels all wrong, but it’s definitely legal, and there’s nothing the ECA or – on the other side of the Pond –  ALPA, can do to stop it. There is a small possibility that the US DOT may contrive to stymie it, but I doubt that because the NIA proposes to base some of its transatlantic service pilots in the USA under US employment law, and its entire existing fleet is Boeings, including the 787, with more on order.

A very recent quote from NAS founder and CEO Bjørn Kjos in a UK newspaper looks as if it confirms Voorbach’s worst fears. The Guardian report says: He [Kjos] claims politicians have yet to wake up to the opportunities that cheap air travel can bring: he thinks the numbers of incoming tourists add up to millions of jobs to be created in Europe. That far outweighs any race to the bottom in a few thousand airline employees’ jobs, he said.”

And here is the quote: “If I was a politician, I wouldn’t give a shit about the airline side.”

Of course this may just be bravado in the grand O’Leary (Ryanair) tradition. He says if he was a politician he wouldn’t give a shit, not that he himself didn’t give a shit. But if it really is the way Kjos thinks about his skilled, safety-critical employees, he has me worried.

On 10 February 2011 a commuter airliner crashed fatally at Cork, Ireland, and the Irish Air Accident Investigation Unit’s report about the event has just been published.

The AAIU was highly critical about the carrier’s governance. The ‘airline’ was called Manx 2, and I blogged about the accident, headlining it “Virtual airline, actual risk“.

In its initial factual report the AAIU described the organisation fronted by Manx2 like this: “The operation of the flight involved three separate undertakings; a Spanish holder of an Air Operators Certificate (AOC) that operated the flight, a Ticket Seller based in the Isle of Man, and a second Spanish company that supplied the aircraft and flight crew under an agreement with the Ticket Seller. The Ticket Seller held a Tour Operator’s Licence issued by the Irish Commission for Aviation Regulation.”

Extending the diversity further, the aircraft owner was a Spanish bank, and maintenance was carried out by a Spanish third party engineering company. Manx 2 – the company that sold the tickets to the passengers – was headquartered and registered in the Isle of Man, a UK offshore tax haven.

The final report shows that the Swearingen Metro twin turboprop was badly maintained, the captain and copilot were both new on type and yet were rostered to fly together, and they were fatigued. They lost control during an attempted go-around well below decision height in bad visibility. The aircraft flipped onto its back, killing both pilots and four of the passengers.

One of the accident causes was judged to be “inadequate oversight of the remote operation by the operator and the state of the operator”.

The AAIU also observed that “the ticket seller’s [Manx 2's] marketing and operational activity was such that it was portraying itself as an airline.” The implication is that this was a deception.

Would if be a deception if an airline marketed and liveried as Norwegian Air International was registered and administered from Ireland and did not employ Norwegian staff?

Perhaps, but it’s legal.

Would the passengers care?

Probably not if the fare was low enough.

Is it socially responsible to cherry-pick the globe for low taxes, low labour costs, and tax avoidance purposes? No, but it’s legal, and what has it to do anyway with the running of a modern multinational business?

Well, in the BBC’s Richard Dimbleby lecture a few days ago the speaker was Christine Lagarde, head of the International Monetary Fund.  Addressing the rapidly changing world of the 21st century she pleaded for a “new multilateralism” among the world’s decisionmakers, for “an ethos to serve rather than to rule”, and warned nations that “a race to the bottom” among countries competing to attract multinationals to base there tactically would lead to an increase in income inequality that will destroy the stability of global society. It is already doing that, she said.

Will that warning keep Bjørn Kjos awake at night?  No.

It’s not his job to change the world. Capitalism has always needed to be regulated to stop it going rampant, which becomes a lose-lose. Like it was for the banks. And us.

It’s governments that need to take a multilateral stand to keep global capitalism on its rails. If they don’t, they simply cede control to the corporations. They have already ceded too much, and in doing that they are creating a world in which democracy is non-existent and corporate power becomes global totalitarianism.

When I started writing this I didn’t know quite where it would take me. But here we are.

Airlines depend, for safety, on highly skilled, valued people who are well-led. Company culture matters.

Remote leadership is not the best kind, so NAI’s devolved structure has a built-in risk level that Bjørn Kjos has to be prepared to live with.

I am sure he is prepared to live with it.

So what? Well, if your airport is not operating at full capacity, this doesn’t provide you with much of an advantage. But if, like Heathrow, you are operating at capacity almost all the time, it matters a lot.

Time-based – rather that distance-based – separation on approach increases the aircraft landing rate when the airport is affected by high winds, and reduces consequent flight cancellations and delay. High winds are the biggest single cause of delay and flight cancellation at Heathrow.

When there are strong winds, distance-based separation increases the time between aircraft as they pass overhead any given point on the approach, and thus, of course, the time between landings. This occurs because although the aircrafts’ speed through the air remains the same, their speed across the ground is reduced by the headwind velocity.

Departures have always been separated by time because brakes-off time is easy to control, but asking controllers to visualise a time delay between approaching aircraft in varying wind has always been considered too difficult and potentially dangerous.

NATS says flight cancellations caused by high winds can be “almost eliminated”, and the system will save 80,000 minutes of delay per year. The system goes fully operational at LHR in Spring next year.

One of the reasons aircraft have, at present, to be separated by distance has been the fact that wake vortices from the aircraft ahead have to be given time to dissipate some of their energy before the following aircraft becomes affected by them.

Dr Jennifer Sykes of NATS’ operations strategy division says the company has studied over 100,000 approaching flights at Heathrow using Eurocontrol’s Lidar wake vortex detector to measure accurately the behaviour of aircraft wake vortices in strong headwinds. The results show, she told me, that vortices dissipate more quickly in windy conditions, therefore allowing aircraft to be closer together on final approach and still be safe.

The enabling tool for the controllers is called an “indicator support tool”. Using Mode S data from each aircraft about its type, airspeed and groundspeed, the device puts moving marks on the radar display of the approach path that indicate the correct time separation between each pair of aircraft.

Film of the radar display with the indicator support tool in use can be found on NATS’s YouTube site at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2jBvbpbq0SM

“We have read with great interest your latest blog on ECA’s MPL position. We welcome another expert opinion, especially when it comes from a well-respected journalist.

“But we do feel a short clarification is in order. We are a pilots’ association and as such we are driven by the objective of ensuring the highest possible level of aviation safety. As clichéd as it may sound, ECA’s mission lies at the basis of all our positions. In the past few years we have watched closely how pilot training standards have been under constant pressure, leading to their deterioration. For ECA and the pilots we represent, developing and maintaining excellent flying skills has become a crucial agenda point. A few recent serious incidents and accidents, which you have rightly reported about on a number of occasions, have only reinforced our belief that pilot training standards, particularly basic flying skills, knowledge and airmanship, are under threat. 

“I am sure there’s no need to argue this point as you have yourself often called for reinforcement of pilot training programs. Our “Pilot Training Compass”, which we’ve previously discussed with you, highlights pilot training program deficits that need to be addressed.

“In the same spirit we also scrutinise MPL and we do believe that for the sake of aviation safety, MPL needs urgent improvements. With MPL pilots coming on the line, Captains are gaining direct experience on the strengths and weaknesses of MPL programs with new MPL First Officers in their right hand seat. Some of our members are also directly involved in running MPL programs. These collective experiences have helped form our concerns, as well as identified positive aspects of MPL (which we also address in the position paper).

“However, we cannot close our eyes to the various deficiencies with ‘traditional’ training (for a CPL) that are aggravated in the MPL schemes. We also cannot deny that there are indications the MPL syllabi requirements may be lowered even further. MPL needs improvements and nobody wins from downgrading pilot training.”