Flying Lessons

Two U.S. airlines made headlines on Wednesday; Dallas based-Southwest Airlines generated ink when it reported to the Federal Aviation Administration that it failed to do required rudder inspections on 128 of its Boeing 737s. Meantime at the Chicago Headquarters of United, public relations executives were trying to slow heavy media breathing over a letter sent by the airline’s safety and operations honchos to United pilots, warning them to be careful up there.

Should the traveling public be concerned?

When I was asked about this by Ismat Sarah Mangla a reporter with the International Business Times, I told her while the public usually focuses on deadly crashes, a truer indicator of whether an airline is safe is not the highly unusual fatal airplane accident, but rather how it handles everyday maintenance and operations.

By reporting to the FAA that it failed to do required inspections Southwest opened itself up to a news cycle or two of bad press. It acknowledged shortcomings in the way it schedules and completes important safety tasks. And make no mistake this is not a “technicality.” Southwest has some remedial work to do.

Southwest’s news was still trending when United’s letter to its pilots started to go viral, in another case of self-reporting, even if it was intended (presumably) only for in-house consumption.

United’s flight operations chief Howard Attarian and Mike Quiello, vice president for corporate safety reminded pilots of several woulda’ coulda’ shoulda’ events that but for the love of God could have caused real live disasters; a ground proximity warning alert, an airport arrival with an airplane in a low fuel state, an undesired aircraft condition on departure. In the letter, United’s pilots are asked if they have their “priorities in line” and whether they are paying close enough attention to risk evaluation and crew resource management.

“Recent events in our operation have dictated that we communicate with all of you immediately. Over the past few weeks, our airline has experienced what we would categorize as major safety events and near-misses.” reads the letter provided to me by one of the pilots to whom it was written.

Far from causing worry for the traveling public, United’s “brutally honest message” is a sign the airline is open to examining the many changes that could be causing distractions or a decline in performance. Pilots there tell me, integrating the vastly different cultures of the former separate airlines United and Continental remains difficult.

Six weeks ago, the US Secretary of Transportation Anthony Foxx, FAA Administrator Michael Huerta and the head of Airlines for America Nicholas Calio stood before reporters in Washington DC to tout new federal requirements that airlines institute safety management systems by 2018. Granted, it has been a long time coming. Done right SMS can have far reaching effect; empowering all employees to see safety as their personal responsibility.

“In the past the focus on improving safety has been on finding the causes of accidents,” Huerta told the reporters. “Fortunately today we have few accidents.” Prevention is today’s challenge.

Prevention seems squishy, passive, like holding ones breath with fingers crossed. This week a better image came to mind when two airlines did the tough thing revealing their weaknesses and taking the PR hit, but with the more important goal of making improvements. That should have the traveling public feeling pretty good.

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis

The adage that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it, can be appropriately applied to the search for answers to the disappearance of Malaysia 370, now approaching its first anniversary.

Oh no, I'm not talking about the theories that the plane was flown to Diego Garcia. I'm talking about the breast-beating accompanying the reports that the deep sea search for the missing airplane may come to an end and with it dies all possibility of knowing what really happened and why.

That's not true. While having the airplane would be nice, not all investigations are tied with a bow and presented to crash detectives. Public pressure should be put on the Malaysians who have used a lack of progress in finding 9M-MRO to absolve themselves of any responsibility to conduct a probe right there in Malaysia, where many clues inevitably reside.

The digital detective work of the eggheads at inmarsat has been magnificent, providing at least a quadrant of the ocean to search. What, I ask you, have the Malaysians been doing?

Why have we heard nothing about the many promising avenues available to them? This would include what they found out about the airplane's maintenance history and cargo on board, whether any communication signals were transmitted or received from the hundreds of cell phones on the plane. What theories have emerged from talking to the satellite specialists about the first loss of power on the airplane, which came early on in the ghost flight, while the Boeing 777 was still flying north west over the Malacca Strait at 2:25 a.m. Malaysia time?

We know that for the plane to log back on to the satellite system at that time, just 2 hours from departure and still with plenty of fuel in the tanks, it had to experience a total loss of power and then regain it. What would the impact have been on any previously programmed route or auto pilot function? What is the significance of this timing, within minutes of the plane's last known position and change to a southern course?

We know the flight was carrying a lot of lithium ion batteries as cargo - 2400 kilos worth - some packaged and some loose according to the cargo manifest. It is not a leap to suggest that this hazardous material known for its propensity to create fire, smoke and very, very, very hot temperatures, could have incapacitated the crew or damaged electrical systems. What have the investigators uncovered about the cargo on board?

We know a depressurization leading to hypoxia has led to accidents quite similar in many details to MH 370. How recently was the airplane's pressurization system and the cockpit crew emergency oxygen checked? Had any problems been reported?

Steve Woods searches from a P3 Orion Australian government photo

Every scrap of knowledge provides a way forward. Instead all hope is tied up in the extremely unlikely possibility that the plane will be found in the South Indian Ocean.

There is a lot of mystery about Flight 370. But what is patently obvious is the huge conflict of interest in Malaysia. This is a country whose ministries of defense and transportation bungled the initial response and then put Hishammuddin Hussein, the then-leader of both departments in charge. Hishammuddin patronized the families offering them "hope against hope" while dishing out nonsensical or contradictory information to the public.

It should speak volumes that Malaysia did not even initiate a committee to investigate the accident until months after the plane went missing. Just a reminder, the Malaysian government also owns the airline.

As someone who has covered and written about many air accidents I've learned this; Investigators never know what they're going to find out until they start asking questions and digging through records. I spent five weeks in Kuala Lumpur watching the drama unfold and it was many things from political theater to media madhouse, but it looked nothing like a serious investigation.

This is why I don't accept the conclusion that without finding the plane there can be no solution to riddle of Malaysia 370. Before the Malaysians give up, first they have to try.

The story making headlines on the anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 is the news that the battery for the locator beacon in the plane’s flight data recorder was not changed on schedule as it should have been. This raises the possibility that one of the plane’s two black boxes may not have been emitting an audible signal for searchers to have picked up.

Failing to replace a dying battery and the consequences of such a lapse is a scenario everyone can relate to, which is why this particular revelation is big news, even though it is exceedingly unlikely that the towed pinger locator was ever within a few miles range of the missing Boeing 777 in the first month after it disappeared.

What I found incomprehensible in the 500+ page report was the tragedy of errors that played out in the operations office of the airline and air traffic control centers in Malaysia and Vietnam.

Kuala Lumpur controllers handed Flight 370 off to their colleagues in Ho Chi Minh at 1:19 am. No one seems to have been much interested in the status of the flight after that. The pilots on Flight 370 failed to contact Vietnam as expected at 1:22 am, which should have gotten someone's attention within minutes. Instead HCM ATC waited half an hour before asking KL what was up.

In a timeline that baffles, KL responds by trying to raise MH 370 on the radio. Failing to get a reply, it takes another 22 minutes to get back to HCM only this time with curious information. “The aircraft is still flying is somewhere over Cambodia” HCM is told. The source is Malaysia Airlines.

Well you know and I know that the plane was not flying over Cambodia at 2:04am. But Malaysia Airlines thought it was because - and I am not making this up - the airline was using a web-based flight tracking service to keep tabs on the plane. No wonder the controllers were confused.

By 3:30 Malaysia Airlines has come to understand that “Flight Explorer” uses predicted routes, not actual data in presenting flight tracks to its users.

MH 370 is long gone by this time, and it will be many days before officials have a good idea even in what direction it has flown. But be prepared to be further surprised because the analysis of the activity in the radar centers that night shows that from the time that MH 370 went nordo to the time an alarm was raised to begin searching for the plane, 5 hours passed.

Like the dying pinger locater battery, it is unlikely that swifter action on the part of those who were supposed to be keeping their eye on the plane, could have changed the outcome. But their indifference to what should have been an alarming lack of communication from a plane carrying 239 people across the sea is mind-boggling.

The report itself is an odd mix of tedium (organizational charts and systems descriptions seemingly cut and then pasted into the document by the chapter-full) and interesting not-before reported tidbits including the intriguing news that the cockpit emergency oxygen supply had been serviced before the flight.

I’m inclined to the theory that some depressurization event occurred on the airplane, leaving one or both of the pilots partially incapacitated; Conscious enough to try and fly the plane to an airfield but diminished enough to have made inappropriate decisions. This could explain why the plane appeared to be under a pilot's command, but not following any logical course.

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis

The maintenance report shows that the day before the ill fated flight, the crew oxygen system was serviced because the pressure reading was 1120 psi and the “nominal” pressure was 1850. The report characterizes the servicing as uneventful.

I'm not convinced. If there's one common theme it is that this is an airline that engages in some peculiar practices. Its not a leap to wonder what, if anything, the airline's shortcomings may have to do with what happened to MH 370.

Wreckage of 9M-MRD Dutch Safety Board photo

The conclusion that Malaysia Flight 17 was likely downed by a missile that penetrated the cockpit as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014 has a certain, no-shit-Sherlock quality to it. After all, there was plenty of evidence within hours of the plane's breaking apart in flight and landing in pieces over an eight mile area in Eastern Ukraine that the plane was felled by a missile.

In a preliminary report released nearly six months ago, the Dutch Safety Board investigators released photos and a debris field plot that indicated the cockpit and forward parts of the airplane came off closest to the last recorded data point on the flight data recorder, "indicating that these parts broke off from the aircraft first. The center and back of the Boeing 777 "continued in a down and forward trajectory before breaking up."

The report also contained photographs of holes the cockpit floor, side wall below the window and roof, damage that the board concluded was consistent with what "would be expected from a large number of high-energy objects that penetrated the aircraft from outside."

Now, in a report leaked to the media in The Netherlands, we learn that the Office of the National Prosecutor in The Netherlands has concluded, "a Russian unit is responsible for the shootdown. Now that is news.

That's a big step beyond what the tin kickers charged with investigating the accident have so far revealed. Then again, its not up to the safety board to say who fired the missile.

Within hours of the loss of the plane with 298 people on board, some pretty damning allegations were made that a Russian-owned battery of Buk-M1-2 surface-to-air missiles was towed into this part of country under the control of Russian separatists. But in a he said/she said that continues still, Russia claims Ukrainians pulled the trigger while Ukraine claims Russian-backed personnel controlled and fired the missiles.

If the Dutch news reports are reliable and I can't say if they are, the safety board has determined the missiles were brought into the country prior to the shoot down based on photos, videos and interviews with witnesses.

Still, having done its job with the evidence it has collected including 12 train cars of wreckage secured from the accident scene in November, it may be that the safety board's job is nearly done.

Fred Westerbeke of the Office of the National Prosecutor in The Netherlands is said to have told reporters that the next steps are his to determine; who controlled the radar that provided targeting information for the missile, and who decided to fire at the plane.

Getting into criminal prosecutions is not the job of accident investigators nor should it be. Where the Dutch and other air accident professionals should be turning their attention is to the difficult question of whether enough is being done to protect civil aviation flying over the world's hot spots.

It was no secret that MH 17 and dozens of other airliners fly over war-torn regions every day. Should they be? Determining why MH 17 was lost may be the easiest part of this particular, multi-layered, multi-national investigation.

It is too early to say what caused Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 to crash into the mountains in the French Alps. But the actions of the crew in quickly bringing the Airbus A320 registration D-AIPX down from 38 thousand feet suggests to me that this was a "get this plane on the ground" event.

That suggests one of a few scenarios; decompression of the aircraft, structural failure (which could also have triggered the decompression) and smoke and or fire.

After pushing the theory that Malaysia Flight 370 might very well be pilot incapacitation by hypoxia, I'm naturally a little skittish about throwing that theory out there again. But a very quick search shows several depressurization at altitude events on the Airbus A320, two in the past few years.

There was one in 2006 at 36 thousand feet and one in December 2012 at 38 thousand feet. These come from NASA anonymous aviation safety reports and do not identify where the events occurred.

On September 12, 2013 Swiss Flight 2140 registration HB-IJQ was at 37 thousand feet when cabin pressure began to fall. The crew requested a lower altitude and were cleared to 35 thousand feet but no lower. Only after the crew declared an emergency were they given clearance to descend further.

The story of the plane that was delayed in its clearance to fly to safety naturally wound up in the newspapers where among pilots the question of whether an emergency should have been declared immediately was widely debated. Keep in mind at the altitude at which Germanwings was flying, pilots had only 15-30 seconds at best to respond appropriately, don oxygen masks and begin a descent.

After the Swiss event in 2012, one can assume the procedures for promptly getting down to safe levels in depressurization events was given a thorough review at Swiss and probably the other carriers in the Lufthansa group.

That the experienced pilots on flight 9525 opted to bring the plane down, rapidly and in uncertain, mountainous terrain tells me they were alarmed by the circumstances they faced. Joseph Szot, a Flying Lessons reader with pilots in his family makes this chilling point. "You can run into all kinds of crazy wind patterns coming off the mountains."

QF 32 commander, de Crespigny

It may be lost on the ordinary air traveler, but the truth is many aviation emergencies do not require an immediate descent, just the opposite. In his book, QF32, on the uncontained engine failure of a Qantas Airbus A380 in 2010, Capt. Richard de Crespigny describes wanting to keep the plane in the air while the five men in the cockpit figured out how to deal with a cascade of problems.

The three most useless things for a pilot in a pickle, so the saying goes, are runway behind, fuel consumed and altitude above.

Pilots recognize the blessing of altitude even in a tough situation. But it wasn't an assist on this particular flight. Investigators will certainly focus on finding out why.

CVR as recovered from Germanwings flight BEA photo

Investigators looking to discover why Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 flew into a mountain in the French Alps yesterday were handed one very good clue when the cockpit voice recorder was located and brought to the headquarters of the French Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses.

At a news conference in Paris today, Remi Jouty explained "We just succeeded in getting an audio file which contains usable sounds and voices. We have not yet fully understood and worked on it to say 'It starts at this point and ends at this point' and 'We hear this person saying that etcetera.' It is ongoing work we hope to have rough idea in a matter of days, and having a full understanding of it will take weeks and even months."

It may seem odd to think that 30 minutes of sound could take so long to comprehend, but Jouty is confusing what investigators want to know with what reporters want and those are two very different things.

Mike Poole, CEO of Plane Sciences based in Ottawa and specializing in flight recorders, has listened to hundreds of CVRs over the years. He explained that for good quality recordings that produce reliable transcripts, investigators rely on pilots wearing individual microphones which will pick up their voices even over the sounds around them. Pilots may not be required to wear these microphones at all times during the flight. After leveling off at cruise, one or both may remove the headset microphone leaving their voices to be recorded by the area mic, this could create difficulties.

"The area microphone can be difficult to understand," Mike told me. "There can be ambient noise in the cockpit, potentially incoming radio calls will trample over the internal conversation especially since the radio is close to the cockpit microphone." This could be the first challenge facing the BEA's recorder specialists.

In cautioning reporters Jouty also said that the CVR, "cannot be analyzed by itself. We need to understand the sounds, the alarms, attributing the voices to the people involved. It will take a few days for a first approximation." A true and faithful transcript will take longer he said.

The group that will read, listen and analyse the activities on the flight deck of the Germanwings A-320 will likely include A-320 pilots, sound frequency specialists, language specialists and people familiar with the the nuances on the flight deck along with representatives of the airline and the plane's manufacturer.

The general public is less concerned with those granular details. They just want to know what turned a normal flight into what appears to be a controlled crash into the mountains. Were the pilots aware of the peril? Were they in control of the plane? Or was whatever happened on the flight deck so grave that the pilots had also become passengers on a final flight?

As I reported yesterday, if the pilots activated the immediate descent at 38 thousand feet that ended with the flight into the mountain, it could indicate a cabin depressurization or smoke or fire event on the airplane and the pilots' desire to get to a lower altitude quickly.

Today's Mirror puts forward another interesting scenario. In December of 2014, safety authorities in Europe ordered an emergency change to the flight manuals of the Airbus 318s, 319s, 320s and 321s, after finding blocked angle of attack probes could cause the airplane to nose down. In the worst case this could result in the loss of control of the airplane. The emergency airworthiness directive followed an event on a Lufthansa Flight, the Mirror reported.

Armchair investigators and journalists (and I count myself a member of both camps) can speculate all we want about what happened. The BEA's probe requires a far more sophisticated level of detail. They will try to answer the question "Why?" and go farther to answer to the follow up question, "What can be done to make sure it doesn't happen again?"

That will be going on long after this particular news cycle is over. People who travel by air ought to be thankful for that.

Special thanks to Ira Rimson for calling the Mirror report to my attention.

The news coming from French prosecutor Brice Robin regarding Monday's crash of Germanwings Flight 9295 is shocking, but on what is it based? Surely Mr. Robin knows something he's not sharing with the rest of us, or how could he possibly come to the conclusion that "the co pilot wanted to destroy the aircraft"? And yet that is what he is saying based on facts that still suggest other possibilities.

The evidence so far shows first officer Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the plane to a lower altitude winding up flying the plane into a mountain, the question Mr. Robin has not answered is how he knows the pilot had that end in mind.

We know the plane was commanded down to a lower altitude after reaching 38K. The question is why. This is not answered yet.

We know the Captain, identified in web postings as Patrick Sonderheimer, left the cockpit and was unable to get back in.We do not know that he tried to enter using the passcode or that the door was blocked beyond the normal locking function. All we know is that CVR shows he tried to enter by knocking.

There may be reasons for trying to enter by knocking, including confusion or lack of presence of mind due to alarm.

Andreas Libitz

We know that the first officer Lubitz failed to heed the knocks on the door. We do not know if this was deliberate. We know Lubitz was breathing. Both his inappropriate action in not heeding the knocking on the door and his breathing is consistent with incapacitation OR deliberate action.

We know the plane descended. We do not know if this was via programming the plane to descend or flight by hand by first officer. A conscious and lucid pilot does not fly a plane into a mountain unless it is deliberate. An addled or unconscious pilot does not see or recognize the threat of a mountain and does. Either one is possible but the evidence presented so far does not allow conclusions.

CVR as it arrived at the BEA

Finally, unlike in the United States and other countries, the French judicial authorities are in charge of CVR/FDR which makes them available to the air safety agency the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses. There's a reason for this. In the crash of an Airbus A-320 in 1988 BEA was suspected of tampering with FDR data.

As a consequence, air accidents in France are seen through the prism of criminality rather than as in other countries where seasoned air safety investigators understand there is a multitude of factors that contribute to a disaster and will wait to have evidence before drawing conclusions.

This is the only way I can understand how the Marseilles French prosecutor made the tremendous leap of logic in concluding that the first officer wanted to crash the plane killing all 150 onboard.

The evidence so far shows Lubitz flew the plane into a mountain. The question not answered in anything I've heard or seen is whether he intended to do so. This is not a subtle quibble it is a monumental difference in what really happened to Germanwings Flight 9295.

Yes, I attended Lufthansa Flight Training school with Andreas Lubitz. Astute readers of Flying Lessons may remember that in the fall of 2010, I published here a series of posts about the week I spent as a student at the Airline Training Center of Arizona, the flight school owned and operated by Lufthansa. (I also wrote about it for The New York Times.)

Nearly all of the more than five thousand pilots who work for Lufthansa and its subsidiary Germanwings, learned to fly at the ATCA. It is the first step of a several year training routine. Among the young people with whom I bunked at the dorm on the property, few had ever been in a small airplane when selected by Lufthansa to become airline pilots. Here at the spacious complex at Goodyear Airport just outside of Phoenix, they would learn the very basics of piloting and just as important, I was told by the school's instructors, learn to work as a team.

Andreas Lubitz, the now famous first officer alone in the cockpit when Germanwings Flight 9525 inexplicably descended into the French Alps, was among the fresh-faced men and a few women who studied here during my visit, though if we met, I do not remember it.

Ostensibly he lived in the same dorm where I stayed, swam in the pool or barbequed on the deck and stayed up late at night worried about the tests he would face in the morning - both written and inflight.

Which is why when Lufthansa's CEO Carsten Spohr told reporters he was shocked, that the young pilot had been "qualified, trusted and showed no signs of physical or psychological distress," I believe it. This is an airline that takes pilot selection seriously.

Students and their instructor at ATCA in 2010

One evening gathered around the large dining table in the dorm's common area, I sat with about a dozen of the students who were learning to be pilots. I was curious to know why - since they didn't bring piloting skills to the game - Lufthansa had selected them. Training would take years, Lufthansa was spending a lot of money per person to take them from green barely-out-of-their-teens to aviation professional. Why them?

Each described a grueling procession of interviews with multiple people each specializing in another aspect of human performance and psychology. They took aptitude tests that required the memorization of lengthy numbers and pattern recognition sometimes involving keeping mental track of one thing while concentrating on some physical coordination task. English skills, math skills were stressed, and then, the coda: before they arrived, they had to already possess the ability to work well with people, team membership as it were. That is what separated them from the pack.

A student gets simulator instruction

It was easy to see this was an eager bunch, as psychologically healthy a group of young people as I've had the pleasure of living with and as the mother of 4, that's not a statement I make lightly. I've been around a lot of young people.

So if I hadn't already been saying, "wait for more information" to arrive before hanging this murder/suicide by airliner on young Lubitz, I'd be saying it again, in light of my recollections of my time attending flight school with him.

There is evidence in the mountains still awaiting collection and analysis. For heaven's sake, what is the rush?

BEA's chief Remi Jouty

As if awaking from a stunned stupor, (incapacitation with breathing perhaps?) the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses, the French air safety investigatory authority, has suddenly spoken. After six days in which French law enforcement has all but wrapped up the case of the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the spokeswoman for the BEA has told The New York Times, her agency's ire was focused on the shocking leak of the content of the cockpit voice recorder, but had no statement about the appropriateness of concluding the cause of the accident without recovering crucial pieces of evidence.

That wise disclaimer was left for Jean-Pierre Michel an official with the judicial police who, in one of the only moderate statements to emerge from this fiasco told the Times, “we have no right today to rule out other hypotheses including the mechanical hypotheses, as long as we haven’t proved that the plane had no problems.”

Jean-Pierre Michel

Michel arrived in Germany on Friday “to coordinate the action of French investigators” which I can only hope is bureaucrat speak for, trying to regain control of an investigation that turned into a media circus when the prosecutor in Marseilles concluded the pilot wanted to destroy the aircraft.

This rocket scientist made the statement that investigators knew the pilot was not incapacitated because they could hear him breathing. Well incapacitation means alive and helpless therefore breathing. (Should I have to point that out to someone who went to law school?) It was at that moment that I realized the gravity of the shift of this probe from the tin kickers to the law enforcers.

Martine del Bono, spokeswoman for the BEA, has been completely silent, failing to answer my calls or emails. From the quote in the Times, however, I see where the blame for the mess is going from her perspective.

For years, I've listened to accident investigators gripe about social media and how quickly news is disseminated. From runway overruns to macadamia nut fracus to #hashtag #trending with a single click.

Investigators don’t know about social media. They don't like social media. About the bitching and moaning on this subject at an air safety investigators' conference in 2013, I wrote, "aviation regulators and airline executives are frustrated by social media as a communication source - about which they know little but the disturbing fact that they cannot control it, even when the information is distorted or flat out wrong."

The crash scene, BEA photo

The scenario in Germanwings, as explained to me, is that once Nicola Clark of the New York Times broke her fabulous exclusive that the captain was locked out of the cockpit based on the statement of an unidentified military official, it began a cascade of events that culminated in the “we can all wrap it up and go home” conclusion of the Marseilles prosecutor Brice Robin.

This would have been the time for the BEA to use its considerable knowledge base to call its own news conference and explain to reporters that accident investigations are complicated affairs. That much, Much, MUCH, information lies on the mountainous terrain of the Alps and that their sworn duty is to collect it, examine it and let it lead them scientifically to the cause. Or at the very least to urge moderation in their reporting.

Instead the department sat silently by while journalists and criminal investigators used a mountain of speculation, innuendo and pseudoscience to create a portrait of a quiet maniac based on shredded doctors notes and an interruption in the first officer's pilot training.

I have no idea what happened on that airplane, but I know how accident investigations are handled and this one has been off the rails since the criminal investigators got involved. There's no getting it back. The BEA can blame the Times. It can blame unnamed "leakers". It can blame the twitter-sphere. It should examine its own inability to adapt to a changing environment and ask, "Who really gets wet when pissing in the wind?"

Regardless of whether this pilot was a perpetrator or a victim like everyone else on the plane, it is important to know what really happened. That's in serious danger now as prosecutors, in a race to prove their initial hunch, go out to find the evidence to support their theory.

Air Methods helicopter prior to crash that killed 4 in 2011

The attention of the flying public may be riveted to events like Malaysia 370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 but when it comes to hazards, helicopter ambulances are second only to combat flying. In other words, orders of magnitude riskier than traveling in an airliner.

The fine levied against America's largest operator of emergency medical helicopters exposes once again the gap between what the air ambulance industry promises and what it delivers.

On Monday the Federal Aviation Administration fined Air Methods of Colorado one and a half million dollars. Air Methods, which refers to is itself as "Defenders of Tomorrow" may have been just a little too focused on the future while ignoring the present because according to the FAA, it operated two Eurocopter EC-130 ambulances without safety equipment required by federal regulation. Air Methods air ambulances repeatedly flew over water in the Gulf Coast communities of the Florida panhandle without flotation devices or flotation gear for the people on board the aircraft.

Air Methods, has been picking up hospital contracts like mortgaged properties in a Monopoly game. Which if you are a skeptic about the air ambulance business - as I am - is disturbing enough. What makes it worse is that this mammoth for-profit medivac helicopter operator is receiving its second fine in as many years for failing to comply with safety rules.

It is probably coincidence, but this latest slap from the FAA comes less than a week after the Office of the Inspector General reported to Congress that the regulator has repeatedly failed in the Herculean task of bringing helicopter ambulances up to safety standards expected everywhere else in commercial aviation.

Matthew Hampton of the OIG

Matthew E. Hampton, an assistant IG in the aviation division summarized the work of his team by noting that despite efforts that began in 2008, with 29 fatalities, the worse year ever for helicopter ambulance services, the FAA has not enhanced "oversight or taken other actions that could reduce accidents.”

Hampton is troubled by the lopsided relationship between this billion dollar industry and the government employees charged with keeping it honest.

Rather than mandate that operators of helicopter ambulances collect and report data, the FAA "relies on voluntary annual reporting of more generic general aviation data," the report says. Unable to get a firm grip on the numbers the factors contributing to the industry's terrible safety record go unrecognized.

I'm not going to argue with a report that all is not going well here. I will note, however that some of the causal factors are as clear as the nine digit figures in black on Air Methods' bottom line. The majority of helicopter ambulances are single engine, operating under VFR conditions with a single pilot.

Proposed helicopter approach to a hospital in Chicago

"The number of things a pilot must do inside the cockpit alone certainly contributes to the high number of accidents," one insider told me when we were discussing the difficulty the industry is having in improving its safety record.

This person told me, "It just doesn't make sense - at night, using NVGs, low altitude in proximity of wires and obstacles, talking to first responders at the scene, and trying to find a landing spot where (often) they've never landed before."

I'll argue with my source about how it doesn't make sense. I've seen air ambulance companies manipulate public opinion by suggesting each of the nearly half million flights a year is critical and time sensitive, when in fact more than half are not emergency events, but hospital to hospital patient transfers. I've learned about the ethically questionable campaigns to sell helicopter transport memberships to schools, camps and fire departments.

Once you understand just how much money is made in helicopter ambulance services everything they do to put more people in choppers regardless of whether they need to go by air, or whether the aircraft is properly fitted for flight begins to make sense.

For previous posts on selling air ambulance "memberships", the fiction of the Golden Hour, why air ambulance crash victims are not heroes, and how unnecessary air transport wound up costing unsuspecting folks a bundle, follow these hyperlinks.

Andreas Lubitz from Facebook

The chilling news that pilot Andreas Lubitz had already tried the controlled descent into terrain of an airliner prior to the successful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 23, threatens to overwhelm other facts that put the bizarre case into perspective.

In the just released report by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority, investigators say the flight data recorder shows that on the first leg of the round trip between Dusseldorf and Barcelona, the 27 year old first officer set the selected altitude to 100 feet several times; while the plane was at cruise at 37 thousand feet, after it was cleared to descend to 35 thousand feet and again when controllers instructed the crew to descend to 21 thousand feet. During this four minute period, the captain was not in the cockpit.

First leg flight profile from Germanwings prepared by BEA

This seems to suggest that Lubitz was either practicing the maneuver that would send all 150 aboard the Airbus A 320 to their deaths hours later, or that he actually attempted and abandoned the plan on the first leg out of Dusseldorf at 7:00 that morning.

The report also makes clear that Lubitz's mental health was an issue for German aviation authorities. After learning of the man's mental health history and refusing to approve his medical certificate in July of 2009, Lufthansa changed its position two weeks later and approved it with a special condition. Lufthansa's medical examiner was to "contact the licence issuing authority" before extending or renewing the young pilot's medical certificate each year. The special condition was on his most recent approval but whether Lufthansa continued to notify the authority is not in the report.

With the preliminary finding resolving the question of what happened, the BEA has narrowed its work on the case to focusing on two flight safety issues: medical confidentiality and post 9-11 changes in cockpit access. In both cases, the BEA says compromises have been made. The challenge is weighing the known effect - this horrific crash - against the unknown and unknowable events that were prevented; what disasters did not happen as a result of these regulations?

It is easy to understand the upside of greater security on the flight deck. Airplane hijackings occurred with some frequency even before September 11th. Not so now. Regarding the wisdom of leaving one pilot in the cockpit, well, it didn't take long for airlines and countries without a mandatory two-at-all-times rule to enact one after Germanwings.

Whether medical privacy trumps an employer's and a regulator's interest in determining if pilots are fit to fly is a more difficult issue. Mental health is abstract, variable and sometimes transitory. Will pilots fail to get treatment or hide their medical conditions fearing a loss of their livelihood? That seems to be what happened with Andreas Lubitz. Faced with a doctor who told him not to fly, he apparently kept that information from his employer and kept on working, right up to the point where he flew the airliner into the mountain.

Today's news collides with the chapter of my book that I am writing now which deals with the puzzle of unintended consequences. From the Comet, the world's first airliner to the Dreamliner, the world's latest revolutionary airplane, great minds seek to make a design that prevents or makes extremely remote catastrophic failures. Still, it is an impossible task. When the unknown unknowns become known, people die.

It is wise to consider another fact in the BEA's preliminary report. Since 1980 there have been six airline accidents that came to a bad end due to intentional acts by pilots. Out of billions of flights that minuscule figure means purposeful crashes do not belong on a list of significant safety issues in aviation.

Weaknesses exposed by the Germanwings crash will prompt changes. Those changes will have their unexpected consequences. But one result we can anticipate is that spending too much time on the remote threat of suicidal/homicidal pilots will take attention away from far more common problems in air safety.

What are some of the troublesome areas you think need more attention? Write your thoughts in the comments section below.

The full BEA report can be found by clicking here.

I made the one hour drive on the beautiful back roads of New England, rounding the curves and ascending the hills. Distracted by spring in full bloom, I struggled to concentrate on the road ahead.

By the time I arrived at Westfield Municipal Airport and introduced myself to acrobatic pilot Rob Holland I was exhausted and we had yet to fly.

That’s what sustained focus will do to you.

I’d been invited to go up with Rob during a practice session for this weekend’s Great New England Air Show in Western Massachusetts and to write about the experience for a chain of Connecticut newspapers. We would do barrel rolls, hammerheads and tumbles.

That 30 minutes of being tossed around in a plane 3000 feet above the Berkshire foothills should seem more relaxing than a drive in the country is notable for this reason.

I know that being in an airplane with a professional acrobatic pilot at the controls, a pilot who sees every performance as an opportunity to refine his skill provides me with a safer environment than my own car when I am driving on 45 miles of two-lane highway.

Rob, aged 41, is a four time winner of the National Aerobatic Championships and a winner twice of the World Freestyle Championships. He is a pilot for whom a barrel roll is no more difficult than rolling out of bed. So before we took off, I asked him how he had safely achieved 11 thousand flight hours.

He said that he uses a combination of behavioral tools that focus his concentration. Simple things like eliminating distractions and pressure. That’s why he does not listen to the music that accompanies his show.

“I don’t want to listen to music. If I listen to the music I find myself flying to the beat instead of flying to the ground.”

To make a show that entertains means flying outside of what the audience perceives to be safe though Rob insists that’s an illusion.

“You try to make it look wild and crazy and out of control. That’s the showmanship of it. The reality is the show is 100% choreographed.”

There is comfort in the familiar, of course. With as many as four performances at each show and 20 shows on the schedule this season. Rob will have flown the same 12 minute flight more than 80 times between now and November. To prevent complacency he thinks about the unique characteristics of each flight.

“Every air show is different and I’m always striving to improve,” he told me. “It’s a lot of work and even if at the end of the year I've done the same routine, each one is different.”

Courtesy Rob Holland by Steven Serdikoff

Rob Holland's flying lesson for the weary airline pilot and the enthusiastic weekend general aviation pilot is the same; “Never take anything for granted. You can have 1000 hours or you can have 1000 of the same hour. If you find yourself having the same hour, then something needs to change. Find a way to challenge yourself on every flight.”

Holland secures my safety harness. Photo by Steven Serdikoff

During my thirty minutes in the front seat of Rob’s Extra (named after German pilot Walter Extra, how cool is that for a name?) Rob explained each heart-stopping step, each push or pull of the stick and he warned me when I needed to prepare for the big G loads we would encounter next.

We flew inverted. We flew above, below and then off the left wing of the Geico Skytypers performance team. We rolled and flipped and when I asked for the trick most representative of the Rob Holland loved by air show audiences across the country, he put the plane into a tumble and the plane went nose over tail.

After my flight with Rob, I sat on the pavement outside the airport fence with 8 year old Josh Maciolek and his mom Sherri. The boy had heard the Blue Angels fly by while still in school that afternoon and wanted to see them up close. His mother, a long time air show enthusiast was happy to indulge him.

The three of us were not alone in the parking lot. It was filled with spectators getting a preview of this weekend’s show. The FA-18s roared through their rehearsal while Sherri kept her hands clamped over Josh’s ears and we all grinned like idiots.

Air shows exist to demonstrate the never-ending technological achievements in aviation and the proficiency and daring of the pilots. Audiences of all ages and even those who care not at all about airplanes thrill just the same.

By now, I had collected my things along with my wits, and was ready to head back to Connecticut. With Rob’s words in my mind, I turned off the car radio and concentrated on the journey ahead committed to making the drive home not just another hour on the road, but a different and safer one as well.

That’s what an air show can do for you.

Holland and Sean Tucker prepare for the Great New Engand Air Show

See Rob Holland in action here.

What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross the same terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheit discovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missing Boeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014? Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related.

River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit was hiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when the group came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. The aircraft was "smashed, so compressed that it was really hard to find an actual skeleton," Weisheit told the Associated Press, because seeing something like that really does beg the question, “Is anybody inside?” The answer was yes.

"We did notice vertebrae in the cockpit."

If it is the airplane officials think it is, a homebuilt RV6 experimental aircraft, then the remains of the sole occupant in the wreckage should be the plane’s owner, Joseph Radford, of Glendale, Arizona who took off from Grand Canyon National Park Airport on March 11, 2011 and was never seen again.

Radford was a Pilots 'N Paws volunteer. Pilots 'N Paws photo

Without plane or pilot the National Transportation Safety Board was unable to conclude much more than that the airplane was missing and so three and a half years ago it concluded "the cause of the crash is unknown." Though in interviews the NTSB did learn that the pilot told his girlfriend he was going to use the plane to commit suicide.

In the weeks that followed Radford’s disappearance, the National Park Service and the Sheriff of Coconino County, flew a helicopter and a fixed wing airplane to search a 600 square mile area based on three pieces of information; where an emergency locator was heard transmitting, radar information from the airport and location data drawn from Radford's cell phone.

CAP plane with Surrogate Predator National Park Service Photo

The final search flight was a last ditch effort in which the Civil Air Patrol participated with some fancy new technology. To the underside of the Cessna 182’s wing, a Surrogate Predator sensor ball was attached. This high definition camera is normally used with unmanned aircraft. But even slung below the prop plane, the intent was the same, collect images of the fly over zones that could be reviewed and analyzed for clues. The video would allow the search flight to be repeated without limit. The imagery from the Surrogate Predator would be used “in a continued effort to locate the missing plane,” according to a press release from the U.S. Park Service.

Whether the video was useful isn't clear, but the image-gathering trip seems to have been the last aerial effort to find Radford. High technology may be useful but it was the observant Weisheit and his companions who seem to have solved the mystery.

So low-tech was their find, that it took Weisheit four days in the wilderness to find a park service ranger to whom he could report the discovery.

All of which brings me to the still missing flight of Malaysia 370 and the just published story by Reuters journalists Swati Pandey and Jane Wardell reporting a rising chorus of criticism of the Dutch company handling the search for the missing jet.

Within the small universe of companies that do underwater search and recovery of aircraft, a few are claiming publicly that inexperienced personnel and inappropriate technology are being used by the Fugro NV, the Dutch company with the multi-million dollar contract with Australia to find the missing plane. It could give a false sense of completion, according to the chief executive of Williamson & Associates, an American underwater recovery company that bid, but did not get, the contract to search for the plane.

"I have serious concerns that the MH370 search operation may not be able to convincingly demonstrate that 100 percent sea floor coverage is being achieved," Mike Williamson told the reporters.

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo courtesy Jay Davis

The Boeing 777 is a big airplane much bigger than Radford’s tiny red homebuilt, which took 4 years to find amid the mountains, valleys and rivers of the vast Grand Canyon. And yet even the Grand Canyon pales in size compared to the South Indian Ocean.

Describing to readers how rarely people appreciate the nature of the sea floor Alan Huffman of the International Business Times described, “miles of flaming rifts, weird pinnacles and gaping chasms that make the Grand Canyon look like a gully.”

People who know I am writing a book about the MH 370 to be published by Penguin Books in 2016, nearly always ask me this question, “Where is it?” And I also try to describe the challenges of finding something so relatively small in so enormous and deep and dark an ocean as the one where Malaysia 370 now certainly resides.

Whether the Australians have hired the best search team for the job, I cannot say. I have my ideas about what happened to the flight and I am writing about some of the many other airliners lost without a trace since commercial air travel began 100 years ago.

The surprising find in the middle of John Weisheit’s walk in the wilderness is a reminder that over the years, many airplanes have been lost and left the world confounded. Sometimes these planes are found. Not all of them, though and often not in the way we expect.

Writing from Miami -- If you want to see the down-to-earth impact of world events there's no better place to be than Miami this week where the leaders of aviation are assembled for the International Air Transport Association's annual meeting. Like the wheels of an airliner touching down on the runway, the rubber meets the road on issues like civil war, international monetary policy and the technology boom.

Each news event adds another multi-pronged piece to the 3 dimensional puzzle that one airline might incorporate and use to grow while another struggles to find a way to work around it.

Executives arrive at a Boeing reception in Miami

As the executives gather for this, the 71st annual meeting of the century-old industry, here are some of the challenges they will be facing;

Government policy and sponsorship Legacy airlines in Europe and the Americas continue to fume over competition from airlines that have government support. Qatar, Etihad and Emirates have grown with unprecedented speed, capturing market share in developing regions of the world like India, China, Southeast Asia. This they have accomplished because their governments see aviation as a tool for economic growth.

Delta, United and American airlines call this unfair and want the American government to intervene. Some European carriers have similar complaints while others, like Qantas have made a sort of peace. At a news conference yesterday, Lufthansa's new chief executive provided the higher altitude perspective.

Carsten Spohr photo from Lufthansa

"Is the industry best off with government-owned entities that are tools for the government and the countries? I have all respect for what has been done in Abu Dhabi and Dubai." Carsten Spohr said in a round table with reporters. "The other extreme in the US, is privately-owned airlines with healthy market share. These are two models. Anything in between in a global industry is going to be difficult. This is the question of our industry."

Infrastructure and development The global appetite for gadgets and the internet of things may seem removed from aviation but it has been fuel for the economies of South America along with the resolution of civil strife and growth of tourism in Colombia.

Cerda (L) speaking to reporters in Miami

Latin America is one of the fastest growing aviation markets in the world, a $2.4 trillion dollar industry responsible for 4.9 million jobs according to Peter Cerda, IATA's regional vice president for the Americas. At the same time, most of the continent's major airports are too choked to handle growth and only two; Panama and Barbados have airport infrastructure ranked as appropriate for their size.

Economics and Politics Which takes us to Cuba and the re-opening of the country to American travel and commerce. After decades of economic isolation who can say what will be the impact of its reintroduction to its closest neighbor?

Certainly it will be positive, Cerda said. But the waiting game is from the "diplomatic side." Cerda was speaking specifically to questions posed about Cuba but he just as easily could have be talking about the theme of entire meeting.

From the role of airlines in protecting passengers passing over hostile airspace, to the failure to release airline revenues earned in places like Venezuela and Argentina, to embargoes on the sale of products in Russia, to the issues touched on above on the eve of the industry's get-together, politics, diplomacy and economic policy play out in aviation.

So love, hate or merely tolerate the airlines but you must appreciate they way they navigate through complicated, interconnected and high-stakes skies.

Tyler addresses the executives Photo by IATA

Writing from Miami - It seems strange to me that under the guidance of the soft spoken and urbane Tony Tyler, the airline industry should be experiencing its strongest growth and profitability but there you have it. Just four years after the former chief of the International Air Transport Association, Giovanni Bisignani nominated himself the best director general of the association ever in the pages of his book, Shaking the Skies, in waltzes his polar opposite and actually sees much of Bisignani's big wish list getting accomplished.

Yes, it’s a happy group of global airline bosses here in Miami and why not?

The industry is growing
The industry is profitable
The industry is seizing control of its future

Tyler may be steering a wise course, but there's a happy confluence of factors leading to the accomplishment of first two items on the list. The emerging economic strength of developing regions of the world like Asia Pacific and South America is a large part of the booming demand for air travel.

Akbar Al Baker of Qatar with journalist Scott Hamilton

The Gulf carriers with their jumbo jets and sparkling new airports, who are grabbing bigger slices of this pie also claim to be making a bigger pie and not just in their turf. This is how many New Yorkers now find themselves flying Emirates to Milan for a 3 day weekend. Credit too, to the low cost carriers, Norwegian, EasyJet, JetStar, among them for creating new flyers with their too-low-to-say-no fares.

Ethiopian gets the 787 and joins Star Alliance

And as I reported a few years ago for The New York Times, export credit loan guarantees for new airplane purchases have turned many airlines in less affluent nations from hangers-on flying American cast offs into airlines with young fuel-efficient planes to rival any first world country; Copa, Royal Air Maroc and Ethiopian being just three examples.

Leveraging the power of the public’s increased appetite for air travel (and yes, I realize this is a 2 edged sword) airlines are getting smarter about how they sell seats and other services. Travelers may grumble but gosh almighty, they do want to fly. So baggage fees, change penalties and higher fares aren’t pushing down demand just raising airline profitability.

At a briefing on airline economics at IATA’s annual general meeting yesterday, Brian Pearce told us for the first time since the trade association started keeping track, the industry’s return on investment was higher than its cost of capital. This is common in other industries, he said, but not in aviation.

Which leads to the next notable development here at the IATA’s 71’s annual meeting. Airlines seem to be grasping with both hands and a new zeal to regain control of their industry from all the players who feed at its trough. Government restrictions and taxes, sure, but another example is the new campaign by Lufthansa, Delta and others to re-direct travelers to the airline’s own ticket sale venue rather than online travel agents.

Here in Miami, where Pam Am ruled the skies for years, I am reminded of its legendary boss Juan Trippe, who like other aviation executives of his era swaggered through the halls of power calling the shots and telling governments how it was gonna be. That’s a distant memory for today’s beleaguered airline chief who answers to many masters.

But as profits rise and newer, fuller planes take to the skies, success seems to be in the wind. If Tyler’s message isn’t significantly different from Bisignani's, his methods and the lucky convergence of world events are providing a more effective route to achieving airline goals.

IATA boss Tony Tyler with the SkyZen app

Airline executives meeting at the industry confab in Miami were pleased to be talking about a new app that coordinates with health monitoring programs for iPad, Android and Apple watch devices. The SkyZen wristband will “offer passengers personalized insights on their flight activity and strategies to minimize jet lag before and after flight,” said Tom Windmuller, Senior Vice President of lots of stuff including the passenger experience with the International Air Transport Association.

At this point the SkyZen is in the experimental phase. No one is sure if travelers already keeping track of their steps, their heart rate and their stress levels want to elevate the self-exam to include how long they sleep and how many times the get up to go to the bathroom while traveling from A to B.

But even as Windmuller was explaining the latest elevation in passenger coddling at the plush Loews Hotel on Miami Beach, outside the hotel, airline workers who create the meals and deliver the sodas to airplanes were agitating for an enhanced work experience. With airlines in the United States making record profits, these hourly wage employees are asking that some additional money end up in their paychecks.

Garvey with petitions outside the IATA meeting

Winston Garvey, an customer service rep for LSG SkyChefs is a member of a labor union UniteHere, part of AFL-CIO. He makes $12.5 an hour even after 23 years on the job. He was among several dozen union workers trying to get inside the hotel to deliver a petition for better wages for people who work for vendors to U.S. carriers.

“We are just asking, let us have some, a nickel a ticket off each ticket,” Garvey told me, as he reviewed for me the cost of living in Miami and explained why a $500 weekly paycheck is not enough to make ends meet. Garvey, and his fellow demonstrators don't work for the airlines directly but for sub contractors. “They say the airlines will take care of us, but its not true,” Garvey said and he’s right.

American Airlines Parker

“It’s a much more difficult question,” admitted Doug Parker, American’s CEO when I asked him about the dilemma on Tuesday afternoon. When it comes to vendors, “those are always competitively bid.”

“Look, I have some sympathy for those same issues and we are very conscious that when we make vendor choices we make choices that employ people and are good to people,” Parker said. Still, this attenuated relationship with the people who work airside provides the airlines with a way to avoid responsibility for the salaries and working conditions. Yet Parker correctly reminds me they are represented by a union.

It was UniteNow that brought Garvey and the others to the hotel where the world's airline executives are gathered. And inside those executives were toasting their recent, happy financial situation. The have every reason to be magnanimous though its anyone’s guess whether they will be.

For his part, the CEO of the world’s largest airline suggests the issues raised by the low level workers of airline subcontractors' deserve attention. “I have some compassion and I believe those people will be seeing the higher pay because of the work they’re doing," Parker said. "They need to look to their own labor contracts to look through that to their union contracts. Our obligation at American Airlines is to our employees.”

When I travel I am often on my own so compact is best, especially since my Lenovo laptop and assorted techie accoutrement is one entire (albeit small) backpack unto itself. So I was delighted to find that the portable, lightweight travel clothes washing machine sent to me by The Scrubba Wash Bag worked as billed. This product gets a free ride in my suitcase and starting position in my latest wrap up of travel products for the aviation crowd.

World's First Packable Washing Machine

The secret to packing spare is wearing things multiple times which means hand-washing, a manicure-wrecking, floor-soaking experience that I frankly don't like. The Scrubba Wash Bag is a thermoplastic polyurethane knapsack that the company claims can "rub out a machine quality wash in minutes."

One week into a Mexico vacation, I gave it a try and chucked my Royal Robbins shorts, a knit dress, Polo shirt, tee shirt, socks and unmentionables into the bag, added a little soap, filled it with water and rolled down the top. I sloshed everything around, dumped the wash water, added fresh water and two or three rinses later, I was done.

I’ve often found hand-washed clothes to be stiff when dry, probably because it is so hard to get all the soap out in a tiny sink. The Scrubba gives a much more thorough rinse. That, plus it's foldable and lightweight. And if that isn’t enough, the bag doubles as a waterproof carry-all I can use while kayaking.

Scrubba is produced by Calibre8 an Australian company and is sold online.

Shorts for the Long Haul

It goes without saying, (okay, so it doesn't) that no article of clothing goes in the suitcase if it can't be laundered easily on the road. So I gravitate to the pants and shorts made by Royal Robbins, an American outdoor clothier. Made of ultra-light weight Supplex nylon it doesn't matter how tightly these pants are rolled or folded, they emerge from the suitcase wrinkle-free. I especially like the many large zip and Velcro-close pockets that by some engineering miracle do not add bulk in the hip. Add the belt loops and button adjustable waistbands and the fact that they are stain-resistant and easy to wash on the road and that explains why these are the go-to travel pants. Now, you won’t be wearing these to a business meeting but for casual and sporting activities, they’re great.

Both men and women’s garments are sold in their online store.

Clear-sighting on Wings or Wheels

When flying often my pilot friends will try to give me control of the airplane, but I’m quick to remind them, I’m a professional passenger. So when Dual Eyewear asked me to test-fly their aviation sunglasses, I thought it best to let a real live pilot take over. Below, pilot and plane builder David Paqua’s pirep on Dual's shades.

"Having flown for the past 10 years using various sunglasses I had the opportunity to try the Dual Eyewear – AV2 glasses recently and I have to say I’m very impressed with them. The frames fit well and are very light when compared to my trusty Ray ban Aviators. They also fit well beneath my headset so I still get a good tight fit that prevents sound from coming in.

The frames feel strong and stood up to some fumbling and stretching when I put them on single-handed while flying. They definitely are not delicate. The bifocal lenses took a little getting used to; however I soon found them helpful in reading the tiny frequency notations on the av-charts. Doing light aerobatics was not a problem and the glasses stayed in place under the G’s.

All in all I liked these glasses very much!"

David Paqua - Norwalk, Connecticut

While I ought to give David the last word, I can’t resist chiming in since I received a pair too, for wearing while riding my bike. Like David I find them extremely light and comfortable with no sliding even when sweating and no glare. The magnification in the lower lens is great. I didn’t notice it until I needed it and then I was glad to have it. No drama, just performance; that’s the mark of all great travel products.

Photo by Brian Walker

Armchair airline pilots may be asking why the crew of Delta Air Lines Flight 159 from Detroit to Seoul opted to fly through a hail storm on June 16th, rather than insist on an altitude deviation from air traffic control in China.

The decision to maintain flight at 36,000 feet resulted in some dramatic looking damage to various parts of Delta's Boeing 747 registration N664US and some shaken passengers - none of whom was injured.

The answer seems to be that the crew was more concerned about possibly of flying into another aircraft having been told by Chinese controllers of traffic. Further complicating the situation was static on the radio due to the storm.

"It's a judgment call," I was told by a pilot familiar with the incident.

Hail at that altitude seems to have caught the pilots by surprise. It lasted for about 90 seconds accompanied by turbulence that passengers described as severe according to the Aviation Herald.

Photo by Brian Walker

Two and a half hours out of Seoul, they were told to buckle up and the severe turbulence started shortly after that, "causing the aircraft to oscillate in roll, yaw and pitch, anything loose in the cabin went flying within the cabin." During the storm, three of the airplane's four engines gave status messages but seemed to be undamaged.

After inspecting the plane in Korea, Boeing told Delta the plane could not fly - even a ferry flight - without all wings panels removed and replaced, a process that will take nearly two weeks.

The outside of the airplane is a mess and more than a dozen maintenance people at Korean Air's Incheon Airport hangar are working on patching up the three foot hole punched in the nose cone and smaller punctures elsewhere. I have been told, however, that the airline is ferrying a filler called Bondo by the pound to Korea.

Another 747 has been pulled from storage in Marana in the hope that it can replace the loss of N664US during the heavy summer travel season. Whether the damaged widebody will be saved or scraped has not been decided and probably won't be until it is back in the USA. But it is worth noting that there wasn't much life left in this 26-year old plane. It was headed for Marana in November of this year as Delta continues its plan to retire the Queen of the Sky.

N671US in Shannon Photo courtesy Kevin Corry

The Boeing 747 taken out of the desert in Arizona to replace the Delta jumbo jet pelted by hail over China, has itself gone out of service, at least temporarily after an emergency landing in Ireland on Friday. Flightaware.com shows N671US back on the ground in Shannon after departing Amsterdam for New York. The St. Paul Business Journal reported a smoke alarm triggered the emergency landing. There were 376 passengers on board.

"Wow, just wow," was the response I received from a Delta 747 pilot who has been watching the events unfold. He then turned his attention to me, the first post I wrote on this subject, Can This Airliner Be Saved, and my unfortunate choice of words in discussing the situation faced by the crew of that hail-damaged aircraft.

To recap, Delta Flight 159 flew through a hail storm on June 16th, rattling the passengers and riddling the Queen of the Sky. That airplane has been on the ground in Seoul since then while maintenance technicians see if they can repair the damage. To the question; "Can this airliner be saved?" the answer right now seems to be, "Mebeee."

Flying Lessons readers you know that I often opine that judging events based on hindsight can mislead. The pilot with whom the paraphrased conversation below was held, has rightly busted me for doing just that.

Pilot: Christine, you write that the pilots flying from Detroit to Seoul opted to fly through a hail storm. The way it is worded it makes it sound like they knew one of their options was to fly through a hail storm and I am 100% certain that they did not expect to encounter hail.

Me: Busted, unless Delta is training its pilots to see into the future, you are right, that was not the choice facing the crew. They did, however, see fast-building thunderstorms and their radar confirmed it. Another Flying Lessons reader tells me, " if you want to reliably find hail, fly through a thunderstorm at altitude."

Pilot: To be clear, they did not fly THROUGH the thunderstorm. Their judgment when denied an altitude and course change was that they could top the storm. As the report says, they entered cirrus clouds above the storm.

Me: So can we talk about that emergency authority? Since the pilots are in the sky looking at the weather and the controllers are just looking at green dots, why not go back to the controller and have another go at the request?

Pilot: Well you have to understand there are other challenges when flying in China. Language is a big problem. The amount of English they speak is limited to controller lingo. Even the basics can be hard to understand and if you stray too far out of the very rudimentary ATC language box they will not know what you are talking about.

If I were to ask for a "ride report at FL360" or if there are any "tops reports on the thunderstorm at 12 o'clock and 100 miles", I'm going to hear, "Say again?" ATC in the United States is generally quite aware of weather conditions but in my experience in China they are solely concerned with maintaining separation. Full stop.

Me: Hmmm, well I've heard about the language issue, but it's intriguing to have the implications explained to me in this way. Still, there are conditions under which it would be worth it to have that more difficult conversation with the controller right? In this case the crew decided not to do that.

Pilot: How many goes did they have to begin with? How many times did they ask for a deviation? How congested was the radio frequency and how often when they wanted to call, were they actually able to break into the radio traffic to make their request?

With the radio static and language difficulties, how effectively were they able to communicate with the controller? How wide was the area of weather and how much of a deviation would they have needed to avoid it completely? Was it a matter of just 5 miles left or right of course or would it have taken an off-course deviation of 50 miles? I don't know the answers to those questions and they all factor in to the decision these guys made. And this is happening at a speed of probably 7 miles a minute over the ground.

Christine, our preference amounts to a request that is either granted or not by the controller based on traffic conditions. I wasn't there but I can see how climbing over the top of a thunderstorm seemed a better choice than climbing without clearance or turning without clearance and risking losing separation with another aircraft.

Me: We don't know what the crew avoided by staying at the assigned altitude. The coulda happened coulda been worse and I'd be writing an entirely different blog post.

Pilot: Bingo. It ain't easy and sometimes it is a choice between two bad options but that's why pilots make the big bucks. (Winks here.)

N671US in Shannon days ago. Photo courtesy Kevin Corry

This just in: The Delta Air Lines Boeing 747 N664US which was heavily damaged by hail on a flight to Seoul Korea last month will return to the United States late this week but it appears her flying days are over. This Queen of the Sky, I am told, is headed for Marana Aerospace Solutions, a enormous boneyard for retired airliners north of Tucson, Arizona. For more on this story, read on.

This post has been updated with more information about the process of taking an airliner out of desert storage.

First its Arizona retirement was interrupted when it was called back to work to replace a hail-damaged sister ship during the busy summer travel season. Then the Boeing 747 N671US had to make an emergency landing in Shannon, Ireland.
Today I learned through a passenger scheduled to fly on this same jumbo, that his flight from Detroit to Narita was delayed due to problems with pressurization and air conditioning. The plane, you guessed it, N671US. Two hours late, travelers did finally depart for Narita, but not on N671US, it was swapped out for another aircraft, presumably one in better shape.

I've been following the near-constant news being generated by this 16-year old jetliner since it was flown to New York on June 28th from Arizona where it had been resting in the dry preservative heat at Marana Aerospace Solutions. (For my New York Times story on this boneyard, click here.) After 10 months at rest and five days of prepping in Minneapolis and New York, N671US began flying on the New York to Amsterdam route.

An experienced airline mechanic for a different carrier tells me this is a curiously short time to get an airliner back into fly-ready condition.

"I'm sure the ferry pilots filled the logbook with squawks of inoperative systems. Imagine turning the key of a car after 6 months in the garage," he told me, explaining that when planes are put into what is called "light preservation," fluids are drained and moving parts lubricated with preservatives. "Batteries, oxygen cylinders and fire bottles are removed. Openings are sealed," he said. All of this has to be undone. "And they did this in three days?"

N671US is filling in for N664US, another 747 that became Delta's when the airline acquired Northwest in December 2009. N664US flew through a high altitude hail storm while crossing the border from Russia to China. The crew observed weather ahead, but was denied clearance to fly around the weather by Chinese controllers.

That 25-year airplane (now dubbed Hail Mary Two) is being patched by Korean mechanics in Seoul. Not a bad place for it to be considering how much experience Korean Airlines has with the Queen of the Skies. But whether she will ever fly again, remains an open question.

Read more of what I've written about the end of the line for the Boeing 747 in many airline fleets in this story from The New York Times, here.

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