Airlines: April 2009 Archives

I don't think there can any longer be any doubt that Emirates is plain wrong in sacking the pilots of the Airbus A340-500 who made the error that led to the near-catastrophe in Melbourne.
 
Australia's ATSB investigation agency has revealed its initial findings today and they make crystal clear that the whole question of electronic flight bag (EFB) use, at the centre of the incident, is going to be extensively investigated. Rightly so, this is unquestionably an industry-wide issue.

More remarkably, it turns out that Emirates has just introduced the practice of using a second EFB/laptop as a check against the first! So their position now is that the incident crew committed an error grievous enough to merit sacking, but they're worried that another crew might do the same thing.

So logically, if another crew makes the same error, but they catch it with the second laptop, then they should be sacked too for making the same error in the first place. And if they shouldn't be sacked, then neither should the incident crew since they didn't have the benefit of the second laptop.

Report and press conference highlights, with memorable pictures below. Emirates statement here.

That Turkish Airlines investigation in the previous post isn't the only one turning out to be more subtle in terms of pilot performance than first impressions suggested.

In a couple of weeks time the US NTSB will hold its public hearing on the Colgan Air Bombardier Q400 crash at Buffalo back in February. I understand it's going to be a messy business that will shine a light into some shady corners of the regional airline business.

The Dutch preliminary report on the loss of the Boeing 737-800 at Amsterdam in February is out and it shows that matters are more complex than first realised. No surprise of course.

A lot of commenters here and elsewhere were pretty critical of the crew's behaviour and the report gives the critics some added evidence, but also some additional points to ponder.

Last Friday I interviewed at some length American Airlines senior VP planning Henry Joyner. It was a wide-ranging interview and we talked about many things. In fact he actually commented to me afterwards that he was surprised at the different areas I pursued for our different publications, and I explained to him that at Flight we were trying to do more with less, owing to the lousy economy, internet effects etc.

Sadly I did not ask him: "Henry, when are you going to retire?" Which is regrettable because the answer, had he so chosen, would have been: "Now, since you ask Kieran."

I hope it wasn't anything I said, but given the timescales that Henry works to, it's more likely he decided a couple of decades ago.

祝您好運 Henry.

Regular readers will know I don't like returning from holiday without squeezing a blog post out of it, which brings me to the question of the dire state of Easyjet's fins (vertical stabilisers). 

OK, so below are the full-size pix of the Delta Connection / ASA Bombardier CRJ electrical fire I posted earlier. As commenters previously helped me establish - it's not a lightning strike as widely suggested around the web.

Apologies for the lack of posts - I'm on holiday, However, I've been given what seems to be a plausible version of events in the Emirates A340-500 tailscrape at Melbourne, which tallies with earlier rumours. To the best of my knowledge there's still no official statement on all this so I'll caution that this below is strictly unconfirmed.

OK, one last time, we all agree Boeing 767 looks great with winglets, and here's the most recent one to fly - it's Lan's first and flew Santiago-Buenos Aires (just to show off to the neighbours I suppose.)

Three days before the loss of the Fedex Boeing MD-11 at Tokyo on 23 March, there was very nearly a much worse disaster. The cause is unknown (publicly anyway - though as you'll see, it's probably pretty well established in fact) but I'll predict now that the lessons from it will be more significant than those of the MD-11 loss - tragic though that was.