SkyWest Jet, Mx Truck Collide At O’Hare
Federal investigators are looking into the cause of a collision last Saturday between a SkyWest Airlines aircraft and a pick up truck at O’Hare as the aircraft was moving on a closed runway from a maintenance hangar to Terminal 2. The incident occurred at 4:49 a.m., according to FAA Spokesperson Elizabeth Isham Cory, who said two maintenance workers were taxiing the aircraft to the gate. There were no passengers on board but the driver of the truck and the two maintenance workers were treated at a local hospitals. SkyWest indicated there was surveillance footage of the incident but visibility was impaired leaving the responsibility for the accident in question. Investigators expect it will take several weeks to determine what happened.

More Electronic Flight Bags Funded
The FAA reached agreements with three additional U.S. airlines to fund in-cockpit runway safety systems in exchange for critical operational data. In September, the FAA provided $600,000 each to SkyWest, Piedmont, US Airways and Southwest Airlines to install the cockpit safety equipment. Related Story The data will help the FAA evaluate the safety impact of this technology and is expected to accelerate key safety capabilities necessary for the transition to the Next Generation Air Transportation System (NextGen). The safety technology provides greater situational awareness for pilots to help them avoid unsafe operations on the airport surface
Atlas Air Inc. received $510,000 to equip 17 aircraft with electronic flight bags (EFBs), CommutAir received $544,000 to equip 16 aircraft with EFBs and Aural Alerting Systems, and Shuttle America received $680,000 to equip 20 aircraft with EFBs and Aural Alerting Systems. The surface moving maps with own-ship position and aural alert systems will be used on flights to or from 21 test bed airports with histories of runway safety issues. These include: Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago (O’Hare), Newark, Cleveland, Ft. Lauderdale, Houston (Hobby), Anchorage, San Francisco, Las Vegas McCarran, Charlotte, Miami, Philadelphia, Albuquerque, Daytona Beach, Phoenix, Dallas-Ft. Worth, New York (JFK and LaGuardia), Atlanta and Seattle.
“This technology is on every pilot’s wish list,” said Robert A. Sturgell, the FAA’s acting administrator. “It’s going to be a big boost for runway safety. As a former airline pilot myself, I can tell you putting these systems in the cockpit will raise situational awareness considerably.”
The technology will be installed in aircraft at each airline by September 2009. By that time the agency also expects initial results from the data analysis. Each agreement will remain in effect through September 2011.

NTSB Finds FDR Rules Lacking
While saying that new rules for aircraft flight data records meet some of its recommendations, the National Transportation Safety Board indicated that the new rules lacked others such as a requirement that regional and corporate aircraft be retrofitted with two-hour cockpit voice recorders. However, such recorders will be required on all newly constructed regional aircraft.
Improvements in flight recorders have been on the Board's list of Most Wanted Transportation Safety Improvements since 1999. The new rule calls for increased flight control position sampling rates on flight recorders, which should improve the quality of data available to investigators.
The new rule – Revisions to Cockpit Voice Recorder and Digital Flight Data Recorder Regulations – issued earlier this year, prompted the Board to close two important items on that Most Wanted list classifying them as acceptable actions. However, it also closed as unacceptable action A-96-89, calling for certain configurations of microphones and dedicated channels in airliner cockpits, and A-99-17, which called for dual combination recorders, one in the front and one in the back of the plane.
The Board said it was pleased to see that all larger passenger airliners will be required to carry two-hour cockpit voice recorders (CVRs), greatly expanding the current 30-minute requirement. But the rule stopped short by not requiring that older 30-minute CVRs be replaced on existing commuter and corporate jet aircraft. The FAA did require that newly manufactured commuter and corporate jets come equipped with two-hour CVRs. Recommendation A-96-171 was closed "Acceptable Action."
The Board had asked that airliners be retrofitted with CVRs that had an emergency 10-minute power supply in case of an electrical interruption, such as occurred on ValuJet flight 592 in 1996 and Swiss Air flight 111 in 1998. The FAA agreed that newly manufactured airliners be so equipped but declined to require retrofits. The Board acknowledged that a retrofit rule might have posed a roadblock for regulatory approval for the rule, so classified recommendation A-99-16 "Closed - Acceptable Alternative Action."
"Flight recorders have proven themselves invaluable in providing crucial information during accident and incident investigations," NTSB Acting Chair Mark V. Rosenker said. "While I am happy to see that some of the enhancements we've been advocating for years are being adopted by the FAA, I again urge the FAA to act on the Board's recommendations for cockpit image recorders, which were not addressed in the new rule."

FAA Launches ‘Lessons Learned’ Online Database
Those who fail to take heed of the past are doomed to repeat it, or so the saying goes, but the Federal Aviation Administration is determined that will not happen with aviation accidents. It has created a one-of-a-kind, online safety library that teaches "lessons learned" from some of the world's most historically significant accidents and how those lessons can improve on today’s aviation safety record. The library can be reached here http://accidents-ll.faa.gov/
"The FAA's Lessons Learned library, in its initial release, lists 11 major airplane accidents that made an impact on the way the aviation industry and the FAA conduct business today,” said the agency in its announcement of the new program. “The FAA's goal is to stock the library with 40 more historically significant accidents by the end of 2009. The FAA believes many of the lessons learned from these tragedies are timeless, and are relevant to today's aviation community. By learning from the past, aviation professionals can use that knowledge to recognize key factors, and potentially prevent another accident from occurring under similar circumstances, or for similar reasons, in the future.”
The accidents date back to 1959 and include:
Braniff L-188 (Electra) in Texas (September 29, 1959)
Northwest L-188 (Electra) in Indiana (March 17, 1960)
United Viscount 745D in Maryland (November 23, 1962)
United 727 near Los Angeles (January 18, 1969)
Eastern L-1011 in Florida (December 29, 1972)
Continental DC-10 at LAX (March 1, 1978)
Air Florida 737 at Washington, D.C. (January 13, 1982)
British Airtours B737 at Manchester, UK (August 22, 1985)
USAir 737 in Pennsylvania (September 8, 1994)
ValuJet DC-9 in Florida (May 11, 1996)
China Airlines 747 near Taipei (May 25, 2002)

Each accident entry features the accident investigation findings, resulting safety recommendations and subsequent regulatory and policy changes, if any. The entry also includes sections on the unsafe conditions that existed, precursors that pointed to an impending accident, and the basic safety assumptions made during the airplanes' design, or that led to the airplanes'
continued operation.
Most important, the lessons learned from the investigation are explained in detail, and grouped into relevant technical areas and common themes, such as organizational lapses, human error, flawed assumptions, preexisting failures and unintended consequences of design choices.