May 2009 Archives

Unfortunately I'm travelling and not in a position to check this out properly, but what appears to be a pretty authoritative account of some first-rate aviating by a BA 747-400 crew on 11 May has now turned up. Reports of this Johannesburg incident have been popping up over the last 48 hours, getting increasingly lurid and decreasingly accurate.

But I think this looks about right. In short, a heavy 744 out of hot 'n' high Johannesburg suffers slat retraction on rotation due to spurious double thrust-reserver reverser unlock warnings. Result is a very non-spurious stick-shaker at 12ft and no slats until 160ft. Remember, while this crew was flying the aircraft they had good reason to believe they might be dealing with a double thrust-reserver reverser deployment, in which case it's unlikely they'd still be around to tell the tale.

To repeat, I don't know if this account is correct, but assuming it is then it's a very classy piece of flying. A thought I'll take with me on my BA A320 in a couple of hours time!

Update: a factual account of this incident has turned up on the NTSB website, derived from the South African authorities who are conducting the investigation.

The RAF and Armee de l'Air are of course playing down the significance of this, but to any of us of a certain age it's highly significant - in an entirely good way.

Apparently coincidentally, the UK's Red Arrows and France's Patrouille de France are each fielding their first female pilots this year. In an ideal world this wouldn't in fact be of any great significance, but in the real world it's been a huge struggle getting to this stage and you can only salute the ladies involved.

I'd add that the UK military at least has always exemplified the best and worst of attitudes towards females at work, having for many years given them vastly better opportunities for advancement and self-realisation than most civilian employers, but also having harboured some of the most ghastly sexism.

(I think I'm right in saying the US military display teams have been way ahead in this regard, right?)

Here are the ladies involved:

Flt Lt Kirsty Moore and Commandant Virginie Guyot

Remarkable video today of the evacuation of a Boeing 737 with a landing-gear fire at Houston. Some people questioning how long it took to initiate, which is something like 2 minutes after the end of the landing run. Other people commenting on all the passengers coming down the one visible slide with hand-baggage, especially the guy with his briefcase chasing his papers over the tarmac. I'm not sure about the timing - seems an age when you sit here watching the video, probably seemed like no time at all to the crew. ATC tape here.

Good to see the crew not popping the doors on the fire-side of the aircraft though. Smart thinking.

This below is the text of a letter sent from Colgan Air VP flight operations Harry Mitchel to the chairman of ALPA's master executive council at Colgan, Capt Mark Segaloff.

The NTSB has released the transcript of the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) tape from the Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 in the Buffalo crash. It ends in the usual gut-wrenching way that these documents do, and no doubt some of you will have views on whether it should even be released.

It's important in this case though because it's widely known that the issue of the so-called sterile cockpit is, at the very least, a possible factor in what happened. This cockpit was clearly not sterile for a good part of the flight, but the talk was pretty much all of aviation and life on the line. Towards the end it becomes a grey area in which the crew, in their iced aircraft, are talking around the subject of icing as well as what's actually going on.

Anyway, it's all here. To be honest I'm not sure what I think about it, and I'm curious what pilots will say.

Buried in the pile of pretty incendiary documents on the Colgan Air Q400 crash that will start to become public today, I understand there is one that will cause particular angst in the pilot community. That's a suggestion from Colgan that cockpit voice recorder (CVR) extracts should become part of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) process.

Now that's what I call FOD! In case you doubted it, a General Electric CF6 can't swallow a standard baggage container. Actually what's interesting is that the container is still at least sort-of in one piece, I wonder if the crew had time to throttle back before the impact??? Will keep the AOG desks busy for a while anyway. LA Times story here.

Putting these sort of ripples in the fuselage of the famously beefy Hawker 800 is not an easy thing to do (click for full size). So how was it done?

Great answer here.

In the great tradition of US magazine journalism, Vanity Fair's William Langewiesche , a GA pilot himself, has come up with just shy of 11,000 words (count 'em) on the Hudson River Airbus A320 ditching. The majority of the piece is actually 'about' other incidents, philosophy and science of flight, history of Airbus etc - but nevertheless the author's managed to annoy the heck out of some pilots and other people. Quite a few have left comments on this Wall Street Journal blog about the Vanity Fair piece. I encourage you to read the article - it's good stuff.

The passage that's generated all the heat is the one below, (which mentions in passing Robert Piché who landed the powerless A330 in the Azores, and Airbus test pilot Bernard Ziegler).

What this apparently shows, apologies for the quality - security cam I guess - is a CHC Sikorsky S-92 being hit by lightning while sitting on the ramp in Malaysia. Presumably at its base in Miri, Sarawak. The story goes that the discharge into the concrete below the aircraft blew holes in it showering debris into the air. Anyone have the pix?

And here's Sikorsky at some length on the subject of lightning, although obviously they're more interested in airborne strikes. These incidents can have dire consequences.

These pix have it all - falling bodies, flying feathers, bloodsmeared fuselage. All captured by Michael Humpherson of Pumaknight Images who was photographing aircraft at Heathrow when a South African Airways Airbus A340 had this messy encounter with a flock of our avian friends. Nobody hurt (well, depends on your personal philosophy I suppose.)

See more of my birdstrike posts using the tag cloud on the right, more of Michael's pix here, and for a more in-depth review, I recently wrote this feature in Flight International.