Flying Lessons

F-WWCF the Airbus A350 MSN #2 in Newark on Thursday

The Airbus A350 XWB that flew into Newark Liberty International Airport this week on another stop on its tour of the Americas looked awfully pretty parked out on the ramp by Signature Aviation Services. But like many of us gals in the prep stage of a special event, one should not look too closely or the hairclips and Spanx might be visible.

That's because this plane MSN #2, just one of two prototypes with a full cabin configuration, is still running a variety of tests. Is the cabin too humid? How are the structure and seals handling the 6,000 foot cabin pressurization?

Below the mood-lit, 252-seat extra wide-body cabin, (XWB, get it?) four tons of test and computer equipment is humming in the front cargo bay. Parked at the head of the coach section, engineers pay attention to a fancy array of monitors displaying the information collected from all the probes and sensors distributed throughout the plane. Another screen displays the data from the cockpit, flight controls and the effect of pilot actions on the cabin.

Jaime Angoloti (L) and fellow engineer observe A350s activities

"We are the bosses," Jaime Angoloti one of the flight test engineers told me, motioning to flight test engineer Bruno Bigande who I'd met in the cockpit and convinced to show me all around the airplane. "They operate, but the test is managed from the back,"

"They can watch, but we fly," Brigande replied.

In early July, MSN #2 started its tour in Sao Paulo and Campinas Brazil, then conducted some high-altitude auto land testing in the Andes, flew on to Bogota and Atlanta before arriving in Newark. Next stop, Chicago before making a special fly-by and landing at the EAA AirVenture at Oshkosh.

Carbon fiber-themed livery on the A350

With Boeing's Dreamliners flying for 4 years and more than 1000 sold, it's hard not to make comparisons with this, the 787's chief competitor with 780 on order. Like the Dreamliner, the A350 is half composite material, which Airbus makes abundantly clear with its carbon fiber-themed livery on the A350's hind quarters.

While Boeing's 787 boasts a 20% improvement in fuel efficiency, the A350 is promising 25%. The A350 has opened up the view too with a sizeable improvement in the size and placement of windows, though the Dreamliner still wins the prize for the biggest and best windows for those of us whose prefered inflight entertainment is the view through the glass.

After visiting the plane today, I had a lunch and a debrief with aviation writer Jeff Wise and we discussed how Airbus seems to have benefited from not being first in the long-range, mid-sized widebody market. The world's airlines are clamoring for this kind of plane. It is bad news for the Queen-sized ladies of the sky, both the Airbus A380 and the yes-I'm-gonna-say-it ICONIC Boeing 747.

Frank Chapman (L) and Bruno Bigande, Airbus flight test engineers

But its a brand new day for flying. If that makes you feel sentimental, check out Patrick Smith's most recent Ask the Pilot post in which he poses the question, what flights changed the world. The answers might surprise you.

Some winglet!

It’s an exciting possibility that a piece of Malaysia Flight 370 may have washed up on the beach in Reunion Island, 3700 miles across the Indian Ocean from Perth. What looks to be a piece of wing is nine feet long and 3 feet wide. A statement from the French air accident bureau says it is not possible yet to determine whether the part is from a Boeing 777 or Malaysia Flight 370.

The ATSB's Martin Dolan

For months I’ve been wondering why the search for MH-370, has been entirely focused on the most difficult place to find the plane, under the storm-tossed South Indian Ocean. Why hasn’t a small fraction of attention been paid to an aerial or land-based search along the ocean's coastlines?

Martin Dolan, chief commissioner of the Australian Transportation Safety Board explained police in Indonesia were asked to keep an eye out particularly in Sumatra where some analysis suggested debris could wash up, but that was in August of 2014. A survey of Indian Ocean shoreline was primarily "through the police and civil populations of the areas" Dolan told me.

While Dolan says a few items have been reported and examined nothing so far has come from the plane. (Quite obviously or it would have been big news.)

A search of the beaches of all the nations bordering the South Indian Ocean would be easier, faster and cheaper than the multi-million dollar underwater extravaganza now it its second season. Finding a piece would not help find the airplane, though because no drift modeling of currents is likely be able to work backwards over the course of more than a year.

Still, the benefit of finding something, anything from MH-370 would put to rest some of the wilder speculation regarding the fate of this flight. And don’t underestimate the advantage in that.

Just today, I was interviewing Larry Stone for my book on aviation mysteries. Stone's Metron Scientific Solutions is responsible for turning the hunt for Air France 447 into a methodical, math-based calculation of probabilities that by gosh, actually did result in turning up the missing airplane after a two year search.

Stone is a mathematician and I am not, but the formula for how find a missing airplane lost at sea - even I could comprehend.

"It's not just somebody putting up a map and saying ‘okay we searched those areas’," Stone said downplaying the idea circulating these days that since the plane hasn't been found, it must be somewhere else. A very important part of the search is the evaluation of all the information; before, during and after - including evaluating the chances that information is wrong or the target has been overlooked.

“If you searched for an area and didn’t find the target and you think, ‘it is not there’ often that’s not correct,” Stone told me. Half the battle in a search seems to be the evaluation.

I don’t know if Australia and its search contractor Fugro are using this Bayesian mathematical evaluation to find MH-370. But it seems like they ought to be.

And even if the shell encrusted wing found on Reunion turns out not to be MH-370, searching more actively on the shore wouldn't be a bad plan either.

In the past I’ve referred to them as the kids who couldn’t get a date for the prom. Now, I bet the engineers at the British satellite communication company inmarsat will be the coolest kids of summer if the portion of an airplane found in Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean turns out to be from Malaysia Flight 370.

Jonathan Sinnatt, director of corporate communications for inmarsat said the company is not making any comment – certainly not before a determination is made about whether the 6 foot long piece of what appears to be part of a wing, is actually from the missing Malaysia Boeing 777.

They’re mum now, but pocket-protector wearing communications technologists at inmarsat haven’t been quiet in the past. They’ve shared with the scientific community the complicated formulas that allowed them to estimate where Flight 370 may have ended up. They opened their thought process to outside review so others could comment and expand on what is known about this mysterious flight.

This is crowd sourcing at its finest and may provide a lesson to the Malaysians and the Australians who have not been as open about sharing details of what they are up to.

Since selecting Fugro, a Dutch sub-sea engineering and exploration firm, to look for the airliner, all has been silent down under according to Colleen Keller, a mathematician at Metron Scientific Solutions. Her company helped the French air accident bureau find Air France 447 when it fell into the Atlantic in 2009. She and others in the underwater search community complain about the lack of information from the Australian-supervised search. Publishing details of their experiences would enable others to make suggestions and advance the knowledge base.

Graphic courtesy Fugro

“We don’t know how well they’ve looked,” she told me. “And we don’t have ship tracks that show where they dragged the sensors or at what depths.” Answers to those questions and many more can be programmed into a Bayesian math theory that weighs probabilities and helps narrow and direct search efforts. It can also assign a likelihood to the question, 'if the plane has not been found, does it mean it is not there?'

How helpful is it when a global community of specialists contribute thoughts on a particular problem? Ask inmarsat. They didn’t pull their assessment that the plane flew south into the Indian Ocean out of a hat. Their initial report evolved with the contributions of others.

Not all ideas are useful, however. For every valuable tip a far greater amount of nonsense is generated. I got that. The obvious big benefit to finding a piece of MH-370 in the South Indian Ocean is that some nonsense, what Keller calls the “anywhere else in the world” probability goes away.

Photo courtesy NZhistory.net

Because aviation involves a considerable number of sophisticated and highly technical components, it can be hard for the casual news consumer to separate the plausible from the preposterous. This is crowd sourcing’s dark side.

In my book being published by Penguin Books next spring, I tell the story of several air disasters where it is the investigators who take advantage of this complexity to bamboozle the public. Probable cause reports on air accidents that just don’t hold up under scientific scrutiny include the crash that killed Dag Hammarskjöld in Zambia in 1961 and the death of 256 American soldiers and air crew on a charter from Gander Newfoundland in 1985 and the flight of a sight seeing Air New Zealand DC-10 into Mt Erebus in 1979.

For the most part, I’m upbeat on crowd sourcing because I believe the scandalous deception in those crash investigations should be harder to accomplish in light of the 21^st Century’s global visibility. And I’m sure that the families of MH-370 victims feel similarly though transparency in the investigation and the search is a mixed report so far.

As we talked about the hopeful news from Reunion Wednesday, Keller reminded me of something that everyone assigned to solving the cash of the missing Boeing 777 ought to remember. “The whole world is waiting,” she said.

And their bamboozle detectors are armed.

Updated with pilot comment

Radome damage

Glass half full: This American Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner, returned to Beijing safely after flying into a hail storm at 26 thousand feet (ish) after takeoff on July 27. All 209 passengers and a crew of 13 were able to continue on the way to Dallas albeit on a different airplane and with a delay.

Glass half empty: Travelers had the beejeebies scared out of them during the encounter. Passenger Dallas Rueschoff told a reporter, "We were going sideways, up and down...we dropped a good few hundred feet at least." Or as a 787 pilot I know characterized it, "I bet that was a hellava ride and I'm glad I wasn't there." Then there is the damage to the brand new $200+ million airliner.

The radome is smashed in, the L1 window is cracked, wing lights are busted out of position on both sides and there is damage on the leading edges of the wings, component panels, tail and engine cowling.

One has to wonder abut this, the second hail-storm to wreak havoc on a U.S. airliner this summer. The first was the Delta Air Lines Boeing 747 that was taken out of service and parked in the desert after being damaged flying through unexpected hail in Chinese airspace in June. You can read more about that event here.

Part of the reason could be the problems pilots report having with air traffic controllers apart from ordinary communications. "Everything is more difficult", my 787 pilot friend told me of transversing Chinese airspace. "There is not as much help with diversions or warnings. And if we say we want to do this, the answer we get back is 'Standby'."

But another aspect of the problem is the increased sensitivity and complexity of the weather radar on the Dreamliner. "It is harder to interpret the information you are getting."

My source for this assessment is a man who has flown the Dreamliner since 2013. He is not complaining about the radar data which seems to slice and dice the information six ways to Sunday and then present it to pilots after applying software that contributes its own analysis. He finds the accuracy good. So good in fact, it may make some weather appear more worrisome than it really is leading to a false impression of hazards. For pilots transitioning from other aircraft, the training should not short-change these challenges in adapting to new weather radar technology. That's his advice anyway.

Back in stormy Beijing meanwhile, maintenance workers from American are having a good look at the damage and it ain't pretty. Still this won't be a case of grounding the plane, as Delta chose to do with the 747. That baby was 16 years old and as we know, the Queen of the Sky is being retired around the world for lots of reasons.

The Boeing 787 Dreamliner, the pride of the American Airlines fleet, still has that new plane smell. Heck, it's just a few months into service. The plane is expected to be returned to Dallas or the airline's maintenance center in Tulsa later this month where the damage, including to that fancy new weather radar, will have to be repaired. It is sure to be a mighty big job.

Shattered window

A number of lights were knocked out

The section of wing found on Reunion Island in the South Indian Ocean last week came from missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370, or at least enough of a positive identification was made today for the Malaysian Prime Minister Najib Razak to announce he's satisfied.

While not a surprise to anyone who has seen or read the news since the part was found on a rocky beach, Razak’s statement is a six foot bit of certainty in the still-mysterious disappearance of the Boeing 777 on March 8, 2014.

File photo of the lab in Toulouse (but not the part)

Even the confirmation today is not without equivocation, as Razak says yes, and others say, probably. The Prime Minister sees this as the first positive proof that the plane did crash in the sea and I'm guessing he's eager to be the one to share the news. That's the only explanation for getting out there ahead of everybody else.

Behind the suspense, I am told, is the fact that the wing flap’s serial number is not visible without actually disassembling the part. And no tear down could proceed without examining and documenting the piece as it first appeared.

Since the weekend, engineers and scientists have been putting together a protocol setting the order of testing before the actual destruction for purposes of further exam and identification could begin.

Fingers are crossed that more interesting news will follow, that news to include what if anything the exam indicated about the flight and the plane’s impact with the water.

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo courtesy Jay Davis

In his statement, the Prime Minister promised families of victims that the government is “committed to do everything within our means to find out the truth of what happened.”

That can be talk or that can be action. If the nation’s leader wants to prove it is the latter he will show the families, the public and all those working on the case, just what his country has learned so far. There’s a deep well of information right in Malaysia about which we’ve heard very little.

I’m talking about the airplane's maintenance history and all that intriguing cargo on board. What if anything has been learned about whether any of the hundreds of cell phones on the plane received or transmitted to towers as the plane crossed the Malaysian peninsula? And for heaven’s sake, what progress has been made on that perplexing loss of power on the airplane two hours into the flight and shortly before it turned south for the last time and flew into oblivion?

Black boxes are great, wreckage is fine. But not all the clues reside there. To fulfill the promise Razak reiterated today, the Prime Minister will pressure his folks to do more and share more. Now that investigators have a piece of the wing, let’s see how more transparency flies.

One month before Orville Wright's birthday (which we remember today on National Aviation day) he was injured in a plane crash while demonstrating the Wright Flyer to the U.S. Army in Ft. Myers, Virginia with Lt. Thomas E. Selfridge on board.

On their fifth circuit of the field, the Flyer’s right propeller broke unleashing a cascade of other problems that caused the plane to nose dive. Selfridge, a pilot and airplane designer was killed.

There is little doubt in my mind that these aviation pioneers understood the risks associated with taking to the sky. Of the uncertainties for aviation pioneers, Wilbur Wright wrote this beautiful warning; "If you are looking for perfect safety, you will do well to sit on a fence and watch the birds; but if you really wish to learn, you must mount a machine and become acquainted with its tricks by actual trial."

It is a lesson for life itself, as so much of aviation is. Today I am thinking about this risk/benefit analysis as I work on the last section of my forthcoming book Lost & Confounded, because I am closing in on the most uplifting (yes, pun IS intended) section of a manuscript filled with mystery, conspiracy and fallibility in the world of aviation.

But under the heading of resiliency, you will read about people who turned near-certain catastrophe on its head; pilots who drew on their uniquely human capacity to respond to novel events with novel solutions, pilots who reversed bad fortune and saved the day.

I was inspired to explore this subject by James Reason. You know him, the father of human factors who in adorable self-deprecation refers to himself as the guru on “human as hazard”. Human can also be hero which is the message of his 2008 book, The Human Contribution. But don’t take our word for it. Read for yourself in the thumbnails below. The full stories will be included in Lost & Confounded when it is published by Penguin next Spring.

British Airways Flight 38 Capt. Peter Burkill First Officer John Coward January 17, 2008

After an otherwise uneventful 10-hour flight, the Boeing 777 from Peking experiences double engine failure on final approach to Heathrow at about 500 feet. Coward was flying the plane and Burkill who could see houses below, followed by highway and radar towers at the end of the runway has just seconds to decide what to do. He considers raising the landing gear to reduce drag but decides no, the gear will help absorb impact on landing. With 15 seconds left, he moves the flaps from the landing setting of 30 degrees to 25 degrees to reduce drag and get the plane beyond the last of the obstructions, but it was a gamble. “I remember holding the lever” he said, hesitating for a moment then making the adjustment and finding, “the effect was immediate.”

The 777 with 152 people on board slammed into the field just past the radar array. Burkill’s later calculation was that the maneuver gave him an additional 51 meters of flight, getting the plane 40 meters ahead of the radar array when the plane finally hit ground. There were no fatalities.

American Airlines flight 1740 Capt. Cort Tangeman, First Officer Laura Strand June 20, 2006

After an overnight flight from Los Angeles to Chicago the crew realized the landing gear on the MD-80 was not extended and a fly by the control tower confirmed the problem.

Strand and Tangeman with cabin crew

With 7400 pounds on fuel on board, Tangeman and Strand decided to fly a box pattern to burn fuel and discuss possible solutions with maintenance. Unfortunately, there was no resolution so on landing Tangeman decided to stay on the main gear as long as possible without operating the thrust reversers. "We touched down on the mains and let it roll," he said.

When the aluminum skin of the DC-9 finally hit the tarmac the sound was like "running a Skil saw on a garbage can and we stopped really fast at the 7500 foot mark, fully loaded with no reversers.” None of the 136 aboard was injured.

Qantas Flight 32 Qantas Capt. Richard de Crespigny, First Officer Matt Hicks Capt. Harry Wubben, Capt. Dave Evans, (check captains on the flight) Second Officer Mark Johnson November 4, 2010

Wubben, Hicks, de Crespigny, Evans and Johnson
photo courtesy de Crespigny

Shortly after takeoff from Singapore’s Changi Airport, an uncontained engine failure on the number 2 engine of an Airbus A380 sent debris flying through the wing and into the fuselage. The effect was to cause three of the jumbo’s four engines to malfunction and that was just the start.

To a cacophony of error and advisory messages, the five men with a combined 76,000 hours of piloting flew for 90 minutes while diagnosing the many issues and getting a feel for how the plane was handling with a flight control check. It was this exercise that gave de Crespigny the confidence to continue with the landing back at Changi as practiced despite speed and stall warnings in the final seconds.

There were no injuries to any of the 469 people on board.

Jeff Smisek in happier days

United's boss Jeff Smisek resigned from the airline today, as a probe continues into whether he and other top executives agreed to provide favors for a government official in New Jersey.

In a statement, United says it has been cooperating with a federal investigation and in fact, that the airline had conducted its own probe into whether David Samson of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey demanded the airline reopen a route to Columbia, South Carolina in exchange for the go-ahead on several airport projects at Newark Liberty International Airport.

As reported by Bloomberg in April, the story reads like an plot from the hit TV mob show, The Sopranos. Samson promised when he became the top dog at the PANYNJ that he would "use the Port Authority as an engine for economic development and jobs in New Jersey." Instead he seems to have been more motivated to use his position as an engine to enhance his personal convenience. And conveyance.

In a dinner meeting with Smisek in September 2011 and reported by the New Jersey newspaper The Record, Sampson complained about the 150 mile drive from Charlotte to his vacation home in South Carolina. Why didn't United just reinstate the Columbia flight it cancelled in 2009, he reportedly asked the airline boss.

United had several very big ticket projects at Newark that it wanted approval for including the development of a rail link from downtown Manhattan to the airport, a wide-body maintenance center and terminal improvements. There must have been some heavy duty number crunching by the airline after the dinner bill was paid. How much would it cost to open a route previously considered unprofitable to accommodate one VIP traveler and his wife? How much greasing of the wheels would it be worth?

Waiting area at Newark Airport

The math must not have added up because the flight dubbed the "chairman's flight" didn't happen immediately. In the story reported by David Voreacos and David Kocieniewski, Samson seems to have continued to put the squeeze on United, tabling agenda items the airline wanted considered by the Port Authority. Once United started offering twice weekly service to Columbia, wouldn't you know United started seeing green lights for its development plans.

Corrupt politicians can be found anywhere, so I should not be surprised. Especially considering Samson's patron is Governor Chris Christie, a candidate for president linked with the George Washington Bridge-gate scandal of 2013, and also because of how the New York area airports fail to stack up compared to other international airports I've traveled through. The Port Authority's dysfunction is obvious to anyone who travels by air.

Frankly, when you read the details of the shakedown, its hard not to feel sorry for Smisek. Airline executives often complain that when it comes to the government, they are either being scolded or ignored. The lesson is that if you treat an industry like a naughty child you might just get the bad behavior that goes along with it.

Platinum Jet crash at Teterboro in 2005

Who is an air crash investigator? On those television documentaries, there’s always some government sleuth who cracks the case with extraordinary tenaciousness and a lot of taxpayer money to spend on labs, test flights and reconstructions.

The ever-popular NBC News commentator and Greg Feith usually makes an appearance, which gives me a chance to remind my readers that his nickname is “the Mud Stud” picked up during the ValueJet crash of 1996.

Bob Benzon appears on Aircrash Confidential

Bob Benzon, Bob MacIntosh, and other folks not named Bob but but with experience working for a government accident bureau are also featured.

Having spent eight years heading up the investigation department of the American aviation law firm, Kreindler & Kreindler, I’d like to add that there are lots of non-officials who also try to figure out what happens after an air accident.

In fact in my upcoming book, Lost and Confounded, an entire section is devoted to the non-official, in some cases armchair investigators who challenged the probable cause reports in some very controversial crashes including the Air New Zealand Mt. Erebus disaster in 1979 and the Eastern Airlines flight into terrain at Mt. Illimani in 1985.

All of us learn from each other. Conferences like the annual seminar put on by the International Society of Air Safety Investigators are great for sharing. Here are two other upcoming events that sound pretty darned interesting.

AViCON, a two day conference for legal and insurance professionals – focusing on safety, investigations and claims starts tomorrow in Stevensville, Maryland. NTSB Chairman Chris Hart will be there and I’m pretty sure RTI Forensics, sponsor of the event is going to show off some of their high-tech tools. I know this is last minute, but if you are interested, I’m sure the folks at RTI will squeeze you in.

https://vimeo.com/134668818

FAA’s Civil Aerospace Medical Institute is opening up its fancy pants injury lab for a two-day conference on November 3 and 4. Dennis Shanahan and Eduard Ricaurte, two of my favorite aerospace physicians will be speaking along with many others.

Plan to learn about the multitude of ways bodies get banged, burned, and otherwise mangled and what those injuries can can teach the industry about how to do this flying thing better and safer. Oh and for those actual on-scene tin-kickers out there, the Injury Mechanism Analysis Workshop has something for you, a lecture on how to do your job without becoming a victim yourself.

For more information on the CAMI seminar click here.

Instructor Ron Diedrichs with EVA cadets

You got to hand it to the folks at Taiwan’s EVA Airlines they’re taking the hypoxia threat seriously. Each of its pilot cadets learning to fly airliners at the University of North Dakota’s Mesa, Arizona flight training center will take a ride in a hypobaric chamber before leaving the USA to go back to Taipei and fly the airline’s big jets.

Nearly a decade ago, air safety officials in Greece suggested that that all airline pilots undergo hypoxia training, following the loss of a Boeing 737 on a flight from Cyprus to Athens that killed 121 people on August 14, 2005.

Neither the captain nor the first officer on Helios Flight 522 understood that the airliner was not pressurizing after takeoff from Larnaca, nor did they comprehend the meaning of the warning horn that triggered when the cabin altitude passed 14,000 feet. For this reason, the men did not put on their masks or descend to a lower altitude. 13 minutes after takeoff, both pilots were unconscious and the plane continued on auto pilot until running out of fuel and crashing near Athens.

Wreckage of Helios 522 near Athens Greek AAIASB photo

There’s more drama, more complexity and more controversy associated with this compelling story which you can read about in my book, Lost and Confounded when it is published by Penguin next Spring. But shamelessly promoting my book isn’t the point of this post though it may be a side benefit.

Loss of pressurization in high altitude air transport is no black swan event according to Jim Stabile Jr. of Aeronautical Data Systems. He's been crunching the numbers and has found that rapid de-pressurization incidents occur at a rate of from once a week (using numbers from Australia and New Zealand) and de-pressurization events of all kind happen even more frequently.

The NASA anonymous reporting system, which encompasses all decompression, shows "an average rate of 1 every 3 days," Stabile told me.

Ten years ago, the Greeks investigating the Helios disaster were concerned that the debilitating effects of oxygen deprivation were not appreciated by many pilots, creating an air safety risk. Military aviators undergo regular sessions in altitude chambers where they experience what it feels like to be in the oxygen-thin air at flight levels where they will be flying. This familiarity with the symptoms of the onset of hypoxia help them respond in a timely manner if they should ever find themselves in an unpressurized airplane. The Greeks wondered, would civilian pilots benefit from hypoxia testing?

The practice of “chamber flights” is not without its detractors. Because it is, by its nature, staged and highly controlled, with operators standing by ready to press a mask onto the face of wobbly participants, pilots may believe the situation is manageable. Mitch Garber an aerospace physician formerly with the National Transportation Safety Board says hypoxia training that relies on giving pilots a chamber experience so they can then self-identify is akin to relying on people who drink to say they are too drunk to drive.

“You’re in no shape to judge with hypoxia,” he told me.

Since a healthy chunk of Lost and Confounded details my theory of pilot incapacitation by hypoxia on MH-370, I thought it important to experience altitude sickness myself. This is how I happened to be in a classroom with two dozen EVA Airline student pilots in the Arizona State University’s high altitude chamber last week.

Now that it is over, I can say Dr. Garber is correct on one front. Nothing about a contrived experience, intended to protect our health as well as give us mild oxygen starvation is comparable to what it must have been like on the MH-370 flight deck on March 8, 2014.

First, the Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777 was flying at 35,000 feet - significantly higher in real distance and speed of hypoxia onset than the testing chamber at 25,000 feet. Second, those pilots didn’t know it was coming. We did.

Facts and figure before the chamber flight

Before entering the chamber we spent 4 hours looking into every nook and cranny of the phenomenon. The only question in our minds was how would we react? Faced with a sudden and dramatic decompression on MH-370 the pilots’ would be barraged with many questions the first of which had to be “What the hell just happened?” and only seconds to react.

Still, as EVA’s student pilots and I removed our masks for our five minute dabble with symptoms there was a sense of foreboding. Could something so intangible, so potentially blissful really steal our ability to think?

EVA cadets work on math problems at 25,000 feet

At 25,000 feet the time of useful consciousness for healthy non-smokers is several minutes. With that in mind, I eagerly started on my paperwork which included writing my name, doing some math problems, working on a maze and listing my symptoms as I experienced them.

Across from me, some of the young Taiwanese pilots were also scribbling answers but others were just looking around grinning. (Luis) Shih-Chieh Lu told me he felt like he was drunk. While (Josh) Yuchuan Chen said - with some disappointment - that he really hadn’t felt too different.

While I was hoping for the euphoria, giddiness and feeling of well-being that gives hypoxia the nickname, “the happy death” when the shortage of oxygen did start to affect me, my symptoms did not meet my expectation. It was a totally unpleasant experience. I felt nauseous, blackness in my peripheral vision, out of breath and very, very flush. After about one minute, my breathing was labored. My head lolling started after about 2 minutes in.

After two and a half minutes, all I could do was muster enough energy to push the talk button on my microphone and complain, “Hot” to the folks outside the box controlling the air conditioning. That was it for me because the next thing I knew I woke up with an oxygen mask on and worried faces were turned in my direction. I’d been out for about half a minute.

Before and after 2.5 minutes at 25K

Killing the journalist wasn’t the way Robert Garner, the chamber director expected the day to end nor was it my goal when I flew across the country for this hands-on lesson. Happily not dead, the day ended just fine.

Many of the students said they also anticipated more drama in the chamber but Dr. Garner insists this training is not about experiencing drama, happy or otherwise and it isn’t about seeing how long one can remain off mask. It is about learning to recognizing the individual early warning signs of oxygen deprivation so those in command of airliners can act fast and act right.

“Hopefully they remember their symptoms, what were the really big keys for them, that’s what you want,” Garner said. After a few days thinking about it, Yuchuan told me that was his take-away.

Garner (R), Diedrich and Gayla Marsh supervise the chamber

"This high altitude chamber training experience is quite helpful to the pilot training because we could make a more instant response," he told me, now that his experience has taught him to be properly cautious about the risks associated with high altitude flight.

When the safety hazard is an invisible thief of capable of stealing a pilot’s ability to be alarmed, pilots need to know in advance to be very afraid.

Too often air travel is an antiseptic experience for the passenger as we sit in tile-floored, waiting rooms, our heads down and our minds in cyberspace. It is so rare and so thrilling to actually smell the jet fuel and hear the whine of the engines at the few airports that still encourage a love of the journey. Amsterdam’s Schiphol Airport is one of them and it's the perfect place to reflect on commercial aviation's first century since KLM Royal Dutch is, at 96 years old, the oldest airline still in operation under its original name. (And what a nice name it is.)

Schiphol Airport embraces everything having to do with airplanes. In the shopping mall/food court/check in area called Schiphol Plaza, a widebody jet engine and landing gear are on display next to the airplane-themed gift shop which yields valuable retail space to an airplane cabin turned theater. Inside, comfortably relaxed on those wider original airplane seats, one can watch the historic footage of airplanes and pioneering aviators without spending a cent.

We start with the Wright brothers and Louis Bleroit and within minutes we are treated to the arrival of the A380 and the Dreamliner. This film is perfect preamble to a wander up and out onto the Panorama deck overlooking the gates where the world's jetliners await their next departure.

Dozens of spectators were there on Saturday morning; local families, travelers and notably a big crowd of Dutch plane spotters armed with with binoculars, cameras, notebooks and the Dutch Scramble, a listing of the global airline fleet by registration number. Uh huh, they got it bad.

From left, Kruijt, Smith and Goebel at Schiphol Airport

I chatted up Ben Smith and Willem Goebel, both retired and Pascal Kruijt, who must fit his passion into a life that still includes regular employment in horticulture. I'm not sure how he does it, considering he has traveled from Australia to the U.S.A. stalking tail numbers to add to his lengthy database. While in America in 1998, on a tour specifically for wing nuts, he was able to visit the tower at Chicago's Midway.

I'm not trying to call Pascal out or anything, but when I asked him if he was at Schiphol on Friday - presumably a work day - when Finnair's new Airbus A350 arrived on a post-delivery flight, he grinned and affirmed that he was there.

Finnair's new A350 lands in Helsinki Photo by Antti Lehto

“It was beautiful, it was special," he told me filling me in on the details, since I arrived in Holland too late to see it myself.

"It was special flight, it arrived in Helsinki last Wednesday and the first flight was to here." Unfortunately, Amsterdam won't see Finnair's newest jumbo often, the airplane is scheduled to begin flying the route from Helsinki to Shanghai beginning November 21. Three more from the nineteen A350s ordered by Finnair are expected to enter service in 2015.

In with the new and out with the old, seems to be the way it plays with these three aviation aficionados. Amsterdam is one of the few remaining airports where the Boeing 747 can still be found in number and KLM has no plans to retire them anytime soon, according to spokeswoman Lisette Ebeling-Koning. But one does have to wonder how much longer they'll fly and whether these men would shed any tears when the last Queen of the Sky departs Amsterdam.

"No," Willem Goebel said without pausing. "The new technology is much better and cheaper to use," he said reminding me that four-engine planes are a thing of the past. "We must go smaller," he said and Ben Smith and Pascal nodded in agreement.

Fearful of diverting their attention for too long, I left the plane spotters to their busy day while I climbed up into the KLM cityhopper airliner parked out on the observation deck and open for visitors. This was not just any airliner, either, but a Fokker 100, a Dutch-manufactured plane that was once a regular in fleets around the world, but now like many others, it is a shell of its former self, and a reminder of the ceaseless course of progress. Binoculars raised to their eyes, the plane spotters keep a watch out for the next new thing.

From left, Kruijt, Smith and Goebel at Schiphol Airport

Note: This post has been updated with new information from TUI Arkefly.

Two years ago, episodes of smoking and sputtering lithium ion batteries on two Boeing Dreamliners were so horrifying the entire fleet was grounded for months and the design was the subject of three safety investigations. But a mysterious transition has occurred, as if a spell had been put on the folks responsible for safe skies.

Just in time for Halloween and as I reported for Gizmodo, in the 18 months since Boeing was forced to confine its devilish batteries to a stainless steel housing so the plane could fly again, several more have misbehaved, emitting smoke and leading to at least one emergency landing.

A Qatar 787 at the gate in Doha in 2014

And yet, as swift as a witch on a broomstick, the cobalt oxide lithium ion battery tricks have flown from nightmare to “non-event” according to Laura Brown, a spokeswoman for the Federal Aviation Administration.

"Non-event" or not, Boeing opted to report one instance to the FAA and the National Transportation Safety Board. That was the diversion of a Qatar Airways 787 on October 4, 2014. The plane maker provided the information under a program intended to encourage the “industry to share significant safety related information.” The government incites disclosure by promising details won’t be shared with nosy reporters like me.

News of the battery-related diversion came to me from someone outside the government who is familiar with the goblins of the 787’s power storage system and who told me that the problem in October was not the first since the boxes were installed, which I knew, nor was it the most recent, which I did not know.

Not a 787, but a TUI 737 in Oslo

According to this person, who prefers to remain in the shadows, a 787 lithium ion ship battery went haywire the week before last, on a European operator of the 787. I believed and originally reported here that this was the Dutch carrier Arkefly, part of Germany's TUI. But several days after sending questions to their public relations office, spokesperson Kuzey Alexander Esener, told me, "TUI did not experience any battery issue on its 787 aircraft."

Boeing won’t answer any of my questions about Qatar’s problem (and there may have been two, the one the FAA confirmed in October, and a previous one in April) or about the one I was told occurred last week; a curiously defensive position if in fact, this is no big deal.

Don’t be afraid, the FAA says. If the containment box handles the discharge of smoke and fumes, then it will have “confirmed the effectiveness of the new battery and battery system design.” That’s what Brown told me.

Well naturally this made me wonder, how do they knowthe effectiveness of the box or the extent of the damage to the battery since neither the FAA nor the NTSB conducted an investigation? They know, Brown told me because Boeing looked into the matter and said everything was okay.

The 787 assembly plant in South Carolina

Well, how many other events have there been? I asked Brown to which I received this word-parsing reply.

“The redesigned 787 battery system has performed as designed during all battery events to date.”

"All battery events"? Okay, so what are the others? I decided to try my question again.

“Has the FAA been notified of any other battery events beyond the JAL in January 2014 and the Qatar event in October?” I asked.

As certain as poltergeists continuing to tinker with Boeing's battery cells, Brown’s reply was predictably non responsive.

“Christine, we don’t consider something an ‘event’ if it performs as designed.”

When Boeing announced with a abracadabra! That its engineering wizardry had solved the problem that had fifty 787s earthbound for four months in 2013, it might not have been apparent to the flying public just what that fix would look like but now we know.

Deep in the bowels of the Dreamliner; inside the box into which the plane’s lithium ion batteries are packed, the cells can boil, boil, toil and trouble, but travelers have no reason to fear.

You decide if that’s a trick or a treat.

It never ceases to amaze me how often senior airline bosses will prattle on regardless of what they know about the subject. The latest you've-got-to-be-kidding remarks come from Alexander Smirnov, the deputy general director of the airline, Metrojet whose Airbus A321 crashed over Egypt's Sinai peninsula on Sunday.

"We rule out a technical fault of the plane or a pilot error," the executive said at news conference in Moscow on Monday and adding fuel to the speculation that the Airbus A321 was brought down by a terrorist. "The only possible (sic) could be a purely mechanical external impact," Smirnov said.

Smirnov news conference photo from Poskotanews

Well he can say what he wants, but that won't make him correct. In truth, any number of events could have caused the airplane to break apart in flight especially considering the fact that the airplane was still in its ascent as it flew north from Sharm el Sheikh on the Red Sea to St. Petersburg.

The increasing pressure differential could have triggered a rupture at an undetected crack or weak point. This created all kinds of havoc on the first commercial jetliner, the Comet in the mid 1950s as you will read in my forthcoming book on aviation mysteries. In that case a series of design errors was to blame.

Pressure bulkhead from JAL 123 photo courtesy John Purvis

The A321 is unlikely to be harboring some heretofore undetected design issue. What is entirely possible is a scenario like what happened on Japan Airlines Flight 123 in 1985 where an inadequate repair subjected to repeated pressurization cycles finally gave way, causing a massive decompression and the loss of the Boeing 747's tail. Five hundred and twenty people were killed in the crash.

The Russian Metrojet plane reportedly had been damaged during a tail strike incident years earlier. Examining the company repair and maintenance records will be an important component of the investigation.

An altitude-triggering bomb could have caused the plane to come apart in flight, in an accident similar to the crash of Swiss Air 330 in 1970, and more famously, Pan Am 103 in December 1988. Or, a fuel-air explosion caused by some ignition source could be responsible.

Wreckage of TWA Flight 800 at NTSB safety center

It could be intentional like the bomb carried onto Avianca Flight 203 in 1989 and placed in the passenger cabin above the Boeing 727's center fuel tank. It could be unintentional such as a still-unknown ignition source that caused the center tank of a TWA Boeing 747 to explode on ascent from JFK Airport in 1996.

Speculation is the natural reaction to an unexpected event like a plane crash. No one expects the media or even the traveling public to be circumspect. But executives ought to be aware of their industry's own history and more, ought to be respectful of the fact that when the wreckage is still smoldering, it is not the time to make conclusive statements.

Mr. Smirnov is not the first to raise eyebrows with intemperate and inaccurate statements. I'm reminded of the public pronouncements of a few other airline bosses who would have been better off if they had relied on the communications professionals to do the talking for them.

Tim Clark Photo courtesy Emirates

Topping the list is Tim Clark, CEO of Emirates. He has been outspoken in accusing the Malaysians of covering up the truth about what happened to MH-370, which disappeared on March 8, 2014. In March of this year, he told Reuters the Malaysians had to know where the plane went because airlines have access to a "second-by-second flight path".

Someone from Emirates operations desk ought to send a memo to the boss, because out of radar range, the most conscientious carriers get position reports on a frequency of every several minutes not seconds, and that includes the planes in his own long haul fleet.

Andreas Lubitz photo socialchannel.it

Granted, Carsten Spohr, CEO Lufthansa had to be stupefied on learning that GermanWings first officer Andreas Lubitz had commandeered a flight from Barcelona to Dusseldorf and flown it into the French Alps in March 2015, killing all 150 onboard. The young pilot had suspended his flight training due to a severe depressive episode, and was required to get regular medical reviews. So whatever possessed Spohr to tell reporters the day after the crash, "There was never the slightest restriction on his competence and skills. He would seem to be fit in all areas."

O'Leary at a news conference in New York

Keeping track of the crazy comments of RyanAir's Michael O'Leary is a full-time job, don't expect me to keep up. I did note his total disdain of even the flight safety basics. A proponent of standing-room-only flights, he's perturbed about the requirement that passengers buckle up when hurtling through the sky. "Seatbelts don't matter," he said in 2012, data to the contrary be damned.

Among O'Leary's many colorful comments is his characterization of the irksome safety professionals obstructing his big plans. "They're all a bunch of plonkers," he said. A quick check of the dictionary for the meaning of this British-ism shows me its got several, some not suitable for family reading (that O'Leary!). But it can be used to describe an idiot and who better than O'Leary to prove the point that it takes one to know one.

UK Prime Minister Cameron Government photo

All over the news today is the story of the UK and Irish governments canceling flights out of Sharm el Sheikh. British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters “ a bomb was more likely than not” to have brought down the Airbus A321 flown by the Russian charter airline, Metrojet.

But be cautious about drawing conclusions based on the reaction of government officials concerned about protecting the lives of citizens flying out of the Egyptian resort town. It is the job of Prime Ministers and other political leaders to be prudent and investigate what could have happened to determine if a real threat exists. That's not to say what is worrying them is what actually happened.

It could be a case of political grandstanding with politicians leading journalists to the terrorism conclusion. It could be that journalists are taking ordinary caution out of context and making it something more conclusive than it is.

Either way, the wreckage and black box data will tell the tale. Which leads me to the thoughts of an experienced airline mechanic who upon studying the video of the Metrojet debris as shown on television told me this,

“Did you see how cleanly the tail broke off the Metrojet Airbus??? I'd bet my 401(k) on structural failure.” My mechanic friend, is just as influenced as anyone else by the media running off like a dog with a bone on the terror trail. Still after seeing new footage this morning, he came back to me a little less willing to put his retirement on the line, but still perplexed.

“I just find it peculiar how the tail broke off with straight lines rather than jagged tears.” Noting that the Metrojet plane experienced a tail strike several years ago and was repaired, my source added, “It conjures up memories of Aloha and Southwest -- structural failure.”

To be clear, what the politicians and unnamed intelligence sources are providing is not information about the accident investigation, it is what they are learning from their security investigation. That’s their job. What’s going on out in the Sinai is something else, actual tin kicking that will, if all goes as it should, not only determine the cause of the accident, it will identify previously unknown lapses in the system.

If the Metrojet flight to St. Petersburg blew up or came apart from some non-nefarious reason, it does not dismiss the validity of the hubbub over security at Sharm el Sheikh, though it does raise the question, why weren’t those security threats noted before the loss of 224 lives?

In this respect, it could be another case of Malaysia 17 where a failure to stay on top of security, allowed a disaster to happen.

The blast that took down a Russian Airbus A320 over the Sinai last month, had to be triggered by a bomb, an experienced explosives expert said today. "If the information about the plane being at 31,000 feet is reliable, it's not a fuel air explosion," Merritt Birky, a former safety investigator with the NTSB told me. Lacking any indication that a missile hit the airplane, Birky's conclusion eliminates the other possible scenario, that the plane came apart mid flight due to an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank.

Birky (L) in 1996

Birky, now retired, was the principal explosion and chemical expert in the four year investigation into the crash of TWA Flight 800 in 1996. While U.S. federal law enforcement officials were insisting for months that a bomb or missile took down the Boeing 747 shortly after it departed New York, Birky and his team were convinced an internal ignition of the plane's fuel tank caused the accident which killed 230 people. That was the ultimate conclusion of the NTSB, though theories of a cover-up linger to this day.

In analysing the Metrojet accident, Birky said the cause could be determined by simple science. At 31,000 there is not enough oxygen density in the air to support combustion in a fuel tank.

"That's about one-third of an atmosphere of oxygen," Birky said. "So if the satellite info is reliable, I assume they know the flash they saw was at that altitude, it has got to be an externally-initiated explosion, not from inside the fuel tank."

"What you have is in contrast to TWA 800," he told me. "You don't have to sort out what caused it other than a bomb or a missile." (My book on the TWA 800 accident is available by clicking here.)

Birky, who is also a chemist and a specialist in the toxicology of combustion products, suspects the explosive device was probably plastic, sometimes called C-4 or plastique and that there was plenty of it.

"It's not going to be a small bomb like Lockerbie," he said referring to the altitude-sensing device that detonated on a Pan Am flight over Scotland in 1989, killing 270. "It can’t be because you're not going to have a big flash that can be observed by satellite."

While "simple science" can eliminate a fuel tank explosion, that's far from the only clue that investigators can use to find out what happened to the Russian-bound airplane. Much more evidence is on the ground. The bomb would do massive damage to the airplane and that will be hard to miss when looking at the wreckage.

Observing damage to the metal, evidence of fire and direction of smoke, all can help determine where on the airplane the bomb was likely placed and that in turn can lead to who might be responsible.

Other experienced aviation safety experts say photos of the tail plane don't seem to show burn damage. Birky suspects the bomb was probably positioned in the landing gear wheel well or in a baggage or cargo compartment.

All of this means the crash of Metrojet 9268 is unlikely to remain a mystery. But for all those who predict the last sound recorded on the cockpit voice recorder will tell the tale, Birky says "that's crazy stuff", confirming my post on this subject earlier this week for RunwayGirlNetwork in which black box specialist Mike Poole said the same thing.

Who needs it anyway? As I told Robert Siegel on All Things Considered on November 4, what led to this disaster will not remain unknown for long. Evidence abounds. The only mystery is why the Egyptians are letting speculation run rampant rather than revealing what they know.

US Carrier profitability takes off

It will be a merry end of the year for North American airlines which will earn nearly $20 billion in profits in 2015, according to numbers forecast today by the International Air Transport Association. That’s more than half of the $33 billion profit expected to be generated by the world’s passenger carriers for the year about to come to a close.

“North American airlines are way out ahead of the pack and producing good operating margins,” said Brian Pearce economist for the trade association in a presentation to journalists in Geneva. But in an industry more comfortable with and more accustomed to worrying about where the next dollar is going to come from, IATA chief Tony Tyler was quick to put a moderating spin on the news.

IATA's Tony Tyler

“This is a normal level of profitability, it’s good but not outstanding compared to other elements of the global economy,” Tyler said adding that “Any profit is hard earned.”

A number of economic factors contributed to the whopping profits generated by the U.S. airlines, what Pearce said were “the best in the world.” These include a strong dollar, the drop in fuel prices and industry consolidation in America seen most recently with the merger of US Airways and American Airlines two years ago yesterday which created the world’s largest airline.

The per-passenger profit of North American airlines in 2015 was $22.48 up from $13.30 in 2014. That in itself is startling even before comparison tothe next highest per passenger profit generated by European airlines which was $7.55 and the Middle East carriers with $7.19.

It did not escape the notice of journalists hearing the news this morning in Geneva, that the announcement of US record profits came just a day after the chief executive of Qatar Airways blasted Delta Air Lines boss Richard Anderson and the complaints of Delta and other U.S. carriers that Gulf airlines were presenting unfair competition in the United States.

Al Baker, already aware of the numbers told reporters, "They wouldn't be making those kinds of profits that they're making, if any airline from the Gulf was undermining them."

Qatar's A350 Photo courtesy Qatar Airways

Baker’s New York news conference to talk about new Airbus A-350 routes from Doha to New York veered into another of the Qatari executive's typically caustic attacks when he claimed Delta’s Anderson wants to stifle competition, "so he can swindle American passengers even more."

Middle East carriers by the way are projected to earn $1.4 billion at the end of this year. European airlines nearly $7 billion and Asia-Pacific airlines $5.8. But it's going to be a coal-in-the-stocking sort of holiday for Africa and Latin America where negative revenues are projected.

A350 arrives in Brazil photo courtesy TAM

What a difference a week makes. Early this morning, TAM Airlines happily welcomed its first Airbus A350 when it touched down uneventfully in Brazil after a flight from Airbus HQ in Toulouse France. Earlier this week, however, it was quite a different experience when a Qatar Airways charter flight with aviation writers enjoying a look at the fancy new wide body, attempted to leave New York’s John F. Kennedy International Airport.

Honig's blog post on the Qatar experience

In that case, what appeared to be a normal takeoff roll was suddenly aborted.

Zach Honig, The Points Guy editor, who was on the flight called it the most memorable of his life and posted the flight cam video on YouTube.

Interestingly, Honig says he and another journalist were unable to disembark, despite making requests to do so. An hour and forty minutes later, the A350 was airborne to Doha where it arrived safely, to Honig's relief.

There’s no word on what happened to cause the abrupt halt to takeoff number one, but one can’t discount the possibility of mode confusion as a possibility when an airline begins operating a brand new airplane.

TAM's first A350 takes off Photo courtesy TAM

In Brazil, TAM is planning a one-month get-to-know-you phase with the A350 it received just in time for Christmas. This morning, after landing on Brazilian soil at Confins International Airport in Belo Horizonte, it received its Brazilian registration PR-XTA with which it will fly on to Sao Baulo/Guraulhos Airport on Saturday.

“We are very happy to celebrate receiving the first A350 XWB in the Americas," TAM's CEO Claudia Sender said in a press release. "We are pioneers in bringing this aircraft to the region."

CEO Claudia Sender photo courtesy TAM

Sender, a Harvard MBA grad, is herself a pioneer; one of the world's few top-level female airline executives. She could also have been talking about herself when she told people assembled for the arrival of the plane, that South America's largest carrier is committed to having "one of the youngest and most innovative fleets in the world."

At 40, Sender is also on the younger side of a business where most chief executives are grey, not blonde. She has been with TAM for just five years arriving right after LAN and TAM merged in 2012 making LATAM Airlines Group.

TAM's pilots, flight attendants, maintenance and operations staff will spend January learning about the new star of their long-haul fleet. After that the first revenue flights begin. In March, TAM’s A350 will operate on routes between Sao Paulo and Miami, Orlando and Madrid.

TAM is the fourth airline to receive the A350, a direct competitor to the Boeing 787 Dreamliner.

Finnair is already flying it between Helsinki and Shanghai with a New York route scheduled to begin for a limited time in January. I’ll be on that trip from JFK in early 2016, so here’s hoping unlike Honig's experience on Qatar, my Finnair takeoff happens exactly right - the very first time.

One of my Facebook messages today

Not long after my eyes opened this morning I enjoyed reading some of the early birthday greetings posted on my Facebook page. (Don't judge me.) It is heartwarming to be remembered by friends and family of course. Then I noticed something else; the remarkable number of countries from which those greetings came. I counted eleven even before 9:00 o'clock.

My host family during my 2006 stay in Syria, my daughter’s former boyfriend in New Zealand, an au pair from Spain, a tour guide from Morocco, a pre-teen acquaintance from Australia, an a septuagenarian from Japan, business associates from Norway, Italy and India and fellow aviation enthusiasts from Holland, Sweden and France.

With pilot Nur Uzmana in Kuala Lumpur

This international assortment of well-wishers reminds me of one of the great unanswerable questions. What has had a larger impact on the world, aviation or communication technology?

So many of my international friends would be strangers to me were it not for the miracle of flight. Air travel bridges the world. And yet, the phenomenal strides in communication technology incorporated within the machine are what turned flying into the experience in comfort and safety that it is today.

We have airliners that are computer systems, inflight entertainment that allows access to the internet seven miles above the earth, near constant transmission of aircraft and engine status and the pushing-the-edge calculations that enabled searchers to know the approximate location of the still-missing flight of Malaysia 370.

Aleppo in better days

Birthday greetings from Syria remind me also that for all the positives associated with 21st Century technology, the unchangeable nature of humans keeps our world in conflict. My lovely hosts in Damascus were not unlike most families around the world in their desire to raise their children in peace.

For all our great achievements in the sky or through the airwaves, we have been unable to make progress in the area that matters most that is learning how to live together in this world we share.

Thoughtful birthday messages from friends I have met during my travels by air and delivered to me via the world wide web aren’t important on the grand scheme, I know. Still at Christmas when many of us celebrate the birth of the Prince of Peace, I choose to see these small gestures from people in my life near and far, as glimmers of a future when we will fly on to a better world.

Birthday greetings from a market in Hanoi

A patient being carried
All photos courtesy Samaritan Aviation.

Mark Palm thinks he knows what Jesus might do if he were a pilot. He might climb into the left seat of a Cessna 206 Amphibian and fly the 700 mile long Sepik River in Papua, New Guinea helping transport the sick to the region’s only hospital.

It must feel a bit like being God, and not in a good way, when Palm and others with the medical transport charity Samaritan Aviation have to dispassionately triage passengers before giving them a ride on the air ambulance.

Only those at risk of death– but not so close to death that they are unlikely to survive – can fly. There are no beds in the hospital for the dying and not enough space, medicine or physicians to offer comprehensive treatment to everyone who might benefit from it. Practical realities must be considered by those who would play God in New Guinea.

Even so, Palm says Samaritan Aviation which he operates with his wife Kirsten has been able to make a difference. Since the float-equipped Caravan The Spirit of Paradise began flying on the river in 2010, residents with broken backs and toxic snake bites, spear wounds and complex pregnancies have been delivered to Boram Hospital in Wewak in an hour or less by air. The alternative would be a multi-day journey by canoe.

“We’re the only service like that in the entire country. It's unique service we offer,” Palm said.

In parts of the developed world, the inability to pay for medical care doesn’t influence its delivery, nor is there too much thought given to the fact that a patient occupying one bed means another will not be treated. I’ve written at length about emergency medical helicopters in the United States and the financial incentive the for-profit companies have to fly non-critical patients after which these unsuspecting patients are shocked to receive bills for $12,000 or more. It is a completely different calculation in New Guinea.

Canoe or plane? Samaritan Aviation makes critical flights

“In the U.S., we spend millions to save someone with terminal cancer,” Palm tells me. “The things I have to judge when I go out for a flight,” is whether it is a life or death situation. Someone has cancer and you know that, I won’t be bringing them in; the hospital can’t do anything for them. There is no cancer treatment.”

The limits of medical care couldn’t be more different than in the U.S. where Palm grew up, in a family of pilots and missionaries. “It’s a forgotten place,” he tells me not with resignation but with joy for the challenge. “We have an amazing opportunity to make a huge difference.”

Samaritan Aviation’s $850,000 yearly budget comes in part from the New Guinea government with a roughly equal amount of support coming from donations. The budget has grown as Samaritan expands with the addition this year of a second Caravan and a pilot to fly it.

Kirsten Palm with locals on the Sepik River

Now, during a five month home leave Palm is telling the story of his mission to anyone who will listen - trying to encourage contributions. And it being Christmas, the story of Samaritan Aviation has babies front and center.

“Sixty five percent of the lives we save are mothers and babies.” On one particularly fertile week on the river earlier this year Samaritan flew four women carrying twins to the hospital where all delivered healthy newborns.

At Christmastime, or anytime, that’s inspiring, and an improvement in comfort if nothing else from the story of Mary - nine months pregnant - hoofing it to Bethlehem on a donkey.

“Part of my goal when I talk to people is to inspire them,” Palm said. “I’m trying to get people out of their own space and comfort zone to say ‘What can I do to make a difference in the world?'”

In Papua New Guinea, people in need of emergency medical care, “don’t see us, they don’t see America. They see the hands and feet of Jesus in action," Palm told me.

“If Jesus was a pilot?” I ask.

If Jesus was a pilot, that’s what he would do.

Read more about Samaritan Aviation including how to donate by clicking here.

Harrison Ford and cast Disney handout photo

Star Wars dominated the end-of-the-year entertainment news. Harrison Ford, the ageless superstar most associated with the ageless film franchise also arrives on my list of top aviation news stories as I wrap up the year with a look back at 2015.

It was March (and the movie was already in the can) when Ford, a pilot for nearly a quarter century, lost the engine on his Ryan Aeronautical ST3KR, shortly after takeoff from Santa Monica Airport. He crash landed on a golf course about 800 feet from the airfield. The NTSB determined a carburetor malfunction allowed too much fuel to flow into the engine causing it to fail.

In other science fiction-like news, the portable jetpack moved closer to reality this year as New Zealand's Martin Jetpack held its first public demonstration of the P12 in Shenzhen, China. A number of companies there have signed agreements to buy the single-operator, single-engine aircraft.

I flew a simulator of an earlier version of the Jetpack a few years ago. That was thrilling but so is the eerie coincidence that Kiwi brain behind the project belongs to Glenn Martin. Yes, he shares the name of one of the world's earliest aircraft designers, Glenn Luther Martin, whose moniker is now part of Lockheed Martin.

Do you think the aviation pioneers of Glenn L. Martin's day could have imagined the 21st Century flying machine?

This year the Airbus A350 began service with Qatar Airways, Vietnam Airlines, Tam and Finnair, on which I'm happy to say, I'll be flying next month.

New plane hiccups aside, Airbus so far has avoided the drama that accompanied the equally revolutionary Boeing 787's first years of service.

2015 saw the Dreamliner's lithium ion batteries still malfunctioning, still causing diversions in the air and elevated blood pressure on the ground.

Turmoil also probably not imaginable to the early aviators cluttered the year past as Andreas Lubitz, a psychologically unstable young pilot deliberately crashed a GermanWings flight into the French Alps on March 23, killing 150.

In October, a charter airline, Metrojet, crashed under mysterious circumstances over the Sinai Desert. If it was an explosion - and the Egyptian investigators say there's nothing yet leading them to that conclusion - it had to be a bomb. But one wonders why governments in the UK, USA, and Russia have all suggested to the media that it was an bomb without providing the official investigative team any supporting evidence.

Bamboozle abounds and not just on a large government-sized scale. The activities of Chicago aviation lawyer Monica Ribbeck (sometimes called Monica Kelly) continue to keep the Illinois Attorney Registration and Disciplinary Commission busy.

Kelly/Ribbeck is a serial lawsuit filer and a judge in Chicago got sick of her antics following the loss of Malaysia 370. Background on the case is here. We will be well into the new year before the recommendation that her license to practice be suspended for sixty days is heard by the full disciplinary board, according to the commission's Jim Grogan.

9M-MRO on approach to LAX photo by Jay Davis

On the subject of the still-missing airliner, 2015 ended a sliver of the mystery when a piece of the Malaysia 777 wing washed ashore on the island of Reunion in July. Now we know the plane is not intact and hidden north of Malaysia as some had theorized.

The plane is still hidden in the Indian Ocean though precisely where is unknown. If the official investigators in Malaysia would do more work with what they have in hand, perhaps 2016 would bring the world closer to knowing what happened.

The new year will bring publication by Penguin of my book on this and other aviation mysteries in which I explain the past-is-predictive events that suggest what might have led to the MH-370 disaster.

The Martin 130 cockpit. Photo courtesy Pan Am Archives

From the disappearance of the Pan Am Clipper Martin 130 Flying Boat in 1938 (Yep, that Martin) to crashes into mountains explained by mentally ill pilots and inflight explosions attributed to ice, aviation history is full of deception and discovery, just like a Hollywood movie.

Happy New Year to all my Flying Lessons readers.

Warning to readers: Photos of toilets appear in this post.

Travelers at the airport hail from many countries and speak many languages but women arriving on oneworld flights into New York’s John F. Kennedy Airport have one word for the condition of the bathrooms in Terminal 8, “Ewwww.”

Kisha Burgos stopped at the bathroom in the baggage claim area and was shocked to see paper-strewn floors, filthy toilets and empty and broken paper dispensers in the stalls. “It’s bad,” she told me comparing it to the airports she visited in Bangkok, Vietnam and Laos on her recent five week trip.

“Everything was really clean,” she said of the bathrooms in places one might not expect to find them.

The American Airlines T-8 bathrooms on January 17th

In the airport of one of the world’s great cities by contrast, more than half of the auto flush toilets were not flushed and otherwise unclean in the bathrooms maintained by American Airlines.

In the pre-immigration hall last night only 4 stalls were serviceable which was an improvement - if only a slight one from the condition one week earlier when not a single stall was usable.

In an email, American Airlines spokesman Casey Norton blamed weather problems for the first instance of terrible toilets, those I discovered on January 10th. For sure, it was not a good night to be flying into JFK. Several arriving flights were late and landing at the same time. This meant “more customers using the facilities than what is anticipated under normal circumstances,” Norton said.

According to Anthony Bucci, a spokesman for U. S. Customs and Border Protection, nine flights came in at the same time; between 5:00 and 6:00 that evening. I returned on AA flight 398 from St. Maarten and congestion in the arrival hall as was so bad, people were unable to step off the escalators - the room was that jam-packed.

“Sixteen hundred passengers arrived,” Bucci told me of a scene that could only be described as madness.

Still the third-world bathroom conditions weren’t a one-off as I learned last night when I was back again in Terminal 8. The cavernous hall was nearly empty with just Finnair passengers present. So I paid another visit to both arrivals bathrooms.

In the immigration hall, some toilets were functional but now water leaked from one stall, pooling in the center of the floor. In the restroom by baggage claim a visitor from Finland told me the bathroom was the worst she'd seen in her frequent travels in the west.

Wanda Rivera, who works for LATAM was using the mirror to put on her makeup. “To me it’s bad,” she said. Elizabeth Perry, another airport worker said she pops her head into stall after stall just to find one clean enough to use. “Everytime, its eww, eww, eww,” she told me adding that the custodian has a tough job.

“I work at all terminals and I know it is sometimes very hard. They clean it and it’s unbelievable what people do. It’s unimaginable.”

Airport workers know the secret is to use the toilets on the departure level because passengers are better cared for there. Keeping them happy encourages them to shop and dine while waiting to board their flights. Arriving passengers on the other hand, are in a hurry and on their way out.

The most customer-friendly airport is Singapore’s Changi where every bathroom has a touch screen survey enabling users to immediately register their satisfaction.

User feedback in Singapore photo courtesy Changi Airport

But even without such sophisticated technology airport bathrooms on practically every continent - in both modern and developing nations - are in better shape than the two I visited at American’s Terminal 8 these past two Sundays.

“We are reviewing the matter with the company that cleans the facilities to make sure customers have a better travel experience in the future,” American's Norton told me.

Within sight of the bathroom where I was chatting with Kisha Burgos, a large illuminated kiosk greets visitors to New York. A more useful and more sincere welcome would be to meet the basic needs of air travelers on both sides of their flight. That's a message for American Airlines and oneworld that's true around the world.

Beauty Takes The Runway on A350 Tour (Just Don't Look Too Close)

Possible MH-370 Debris Should Trigger New Search Ideas

Egg Heads Unlikely Malaysia 370 Heroes in the Bamboozle Era

High but Not So Mighty American Dreamliner Damage Photos

Wing Flap Should Elevate MH 370 Investigation

Aviation Reveals the Mystery of Human Resiliency

A Soprano-Like Shakedown Squeezes Smisek out of United

Mud Stud or Desk Detective, Two Seminars for Air Crash Analysis

The Eye Opening Experience of Passing out at 25K

Passion but Few Tears in Amsterdam for Airliners That Fly into the Past

Don’t Be Spooked if 787 Battery Box is a Smoky Cauldron

Eyebrows Ascend as Airline Execs Demonstrate Their Plonker-ism

Prudence and Probable Cause Not the Same Thing in Metrojet Crash

Science Shows Metrojet Crash Triggered by a Bomb

Merry Christmas for U.S. Airlines With Record Profits in 2015

Nice Landing or Scary Takeoff A350 Enters Service With Both

Happy Birthday from Syria and Other Places in a Troubled World

WWJD? If Jesus Had Been a Pilot

Aviation Year in Review Has a Star Wars Sci-Fi Feel

Third World Bathrooms in OneWorld Terminal