November 2009 Archives

This is sent to me with the absolute assurance that it's a genuine picture taken by a flight attendant at American Airlines. The F/A took it to show her manager what was happening on the aircraft (757???) and why she was unhappy about it. Seems the guy paid for only one seat and the gate staff let him board.

You can see the F/A's point of view - how the heck is s(he) supposed to deal with it. Sympathise with the guy or not, he's a major safety hazard in an evacuation, a gross inconvenience for the cabin crew, and I would suggest a totally unacceptable travelling companion for the guy next to him.

I don't know what the actual outcome was but it seems unimaginable that he was allowed to fly in the end. Not that anything on a commercial airline is actually unimaginable, but close anyway. 

A good friend of mine had a similar experience sitting next to a guy who was big but I don't think as big as this, for a long-haul flight and was effectively injured by sitting for several hours in a contorted position with his fellow pax half on top of him. The airline that did that to him was utterly unsympathetic throughout a lengthy correspondence afterwards. OK, Emirates since you ask. Ironically my chum is now in a senior position with another carrier.

Anyone know how how the American affair turned out?

First frost of the year in London this morning and northern hemisphere aviation is entering the winter. There will doubtless be much airport angst ahead, especially in the US mid-west and northeast - so a quick reminder of just how remarkable it is that the video below is pretty unremarkable. Didn't even take a century to make this sort of thing routine.

This picture taken by someone who says they were an off-duty flight attendant is causing considerable consternation in UK regulatory circles. And it's being energetically discussed on Pprune.

It was sent to the UK's greatly respected CHIRP operation which is a confidential safety reporting system in which incidents are disidentified.

The F/A says (s)he told the senior F/A about the snow before take-off but the aircraft departed anyway. This picture was taken during the ensuing flight.

I'm not sure what type it is - no obvious sign of a nacelle, but maybe it's out of frame. If it's a hard-wing type though then this is really not a great situation.

In the Flight office we several times discussed what we would do if we found ourselves on an aircraft which appeared to be about to take-off with something amiss. I mean even if you knew you were right, what do you do exactly to stop the take-off going ahead? Imagine you're just about to roll on an MD-80 with no slats/flaps deployed.

Obviously the main thing pilots now do to pass the time on boring sectors is discuss what happened to the Northwest crew who overflew Minneapolis on a boring sector. But the bloggers among them are starting to put their thoughts into print.

Aluwings at The Wings Stayed On is educational about the inventive uses to which the flight management system can be put, but he's also good on why you really don't want to play with the aircraft systems and why SOPs are generally there for a reason.

And Aviatrix at Cockpit Conversation has been whiling away the hours by recording how she was whiling away the hours. In remarkable detail. She sounds good company.

All good, innocent fun. Although when the ACARS datalink was first introduced back in the early 90s, airlines were surprised by some of the data bills they started getting. Investigations followed and one carrier felt impelled to issue an edict banning the game of searching the weather data in order to bet with other crews on which airport had the lowest temperature in the world.

Hats off to Eric Torbenson of the Dallas Morning News for an intelligent and penetrating article on scheduling and pay issues in the US regional airline industry. Another piece of evidence adding to the growing certainty that this is not a sustainable situation.

US Regional Airline Association (RAA) president Roger Cohen is quoted as saying that "there's been very little research in this area". He needs to get out more.

Of course if you're familiar with this story (and who isn't) then the answer will be easy. What's wrong is the skidmarks on the taxiway. But it's still not at all clear what happened.

Interesting take on this incident and the Northwest distracted crew here, It's a sensible argument but I'm not sure I really agree - I think it's too narrow. Clearly the actual potential consequences of the NW incident on the day were not as serious as the DL landing at Atlanta, but I wonder if that's really the point. The question is how come that NW situation could have arisen, and when you've worked out how come, what other consequences could have arisen from those factors in different circumstances. Ditto the DL incident of course.

So DL may perhaps be more important than NW, but until you've worked back to the root causes you can't tell.