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Monday, July 30, 2007

Safety News in Brief

Testifying on the tower maintenance backlog, air traffic control representatives are pointing to the FAA's $250 million to $350 million drop-short as potentially dangerous not only to them but to the flying public. Rep. John Mica, R-Fla., said, "It does not make sense for FAA to continue to maintain old, obsolete facilities." He argued that some were trying to prevent consolidation of facilities and that laudatory proselytizing about the far-distant Nextgen satellite-based radar system was no useful solution to the nation's "here and now" ATC decrepitude and manning deficiencies.
Date Incident
25 Jul Following the TAM A320 crash in Sao Paulo, a major meltdown in Brazilian Air Traffic Control and the embarrassing diversion of much international inbound and outbound air traffic pursuant to a radar system failure on 23 July, the country's President Lula da Silva sacked his Defense Minster Waldir Pires. He immediately appointed Nelson Jobim, an experienced bureaucrat and former Justice Minister, to oversee the needed reforms of Brazil's air transport system. Half the 1282 domestic flights were also held up or cancelled on 23 Jul. This led to a widespread condemnation of the government's ineptitude by frustrated air travelers and the media.
22 Jul Sandia Laboratories are conducting a trial of embedded piezo-electric sensors for detection of impending structural deterioration and failure. Structural health monitoring (or SHM) embedded sensor techniques use a monitoring philosophy similar to the nerve endings in a human body. The concept is gaining the support of airframe manufacturers, airlines, and regulators. The research by Sandia is an extension of Sandia's Airworthiness Assurance Program which is based on non-destructive inspection techniques (NDI). The most promising SHM involves a Comparative Vacuum Monitoring (CVM) sensor. It is a thin, self-adhesive rubber patch that detects cracks in the underlying material. The rubber is laser-etched with rows of tiny, interconnected channels or galleries, to which air pressure is applied. Any propagating crack under the sensor breaches the galleries and the resulting change in pressure is monitored. Areas around pressure bulkheads, doors and other stress-raiser areas (such as wing-roots) would qualify for CVM sensor insertion. It's applicable to both metals and composites.
22 Jul The UK govt has suspended flights to Manchester by Iran's Mahan Air on safety grounds. The ban relates to a number of incidents (particularly one on approach to Birmingham) that are being investigated by the AAIB. A Dept of Transport spokes-man said: "Mahan has been involved in a number of recent incidents which suggest a poor level of operational control, planning, training and safety management. We suspended the operating permit of Mahan Air on Friday night as it's not able to operate safely". Mahan's General Manager Hamd Arabnejad responded promptly that the airline's planes were safe and accused the British authority of causing a ballyhoo through groundless claims.
20 Jul Compulsory confirmation of the takeoff runway and an enhancement of the Notices to Airman (NOTAM) system are two of the major NTSB recommendations to come out of the fatal takeoff crash on a too short GA runway of a Comair CRJ-100 at Blue Grass Kentucky in August 2006. The Comair 5191 pilots were also found to have totally disregarded the sterile cockpit rule and engaged in distractingly irrelevant gossiping during their start-up, taxi-out and line-up on the incorrect runway.
20 Jul The European Civil Aviation Conference (ECAC) published their 2006 annual report on the Safety Assessment of Foreign Aircraft (SAFA) program. During 2006, 34 European member states performed 7,458 ramp inspections covering 822 different operators from 127 different states. Findings per inspection have disclosed an up- trend in infractions. An increase in the number of Category 1 (minor) findings and a relative decrease of Category 2 (significant) and 3 (major) findings may however be an encouraging indication of an overall uptick in national and individual operator compliance with ICAO standards.
19 Jul A 50 y.o. man who died while traveling from Shanghai to San Francisco in the wheel well of a United Airlines 747 likely fell victim to anoxia and hypothermia during his 11-hour ordeal. He was wearing layers of clothing, including two jackets, however this would have been no defense against the minus 40 degree Celsius temperatures he would have been exposed to. Around 4% of wheel-well stowaways survive and usually only if they've hitched a ride on short sectors. The figure is an approximation recognizing that stowaways often fall undetected from aircraft over the sea - upon gear extension for landing.
18 Jul The House aviation subcommittee is to renew its pressure on the FAA for more scrutiny of pilot health data. The Transportation Dept's inspector general told Congress that it had reviewed 40,000 pilots two years ago and found that 8 percent were getting Social Security disability benefits while medically cleared to fly. Nicholas Sabatini, the FAA's associate administrator for safety, told lawmakers, "we are very concerned about any falsification of information on our airman medical applications," and claimed to be "working with the Social Security Administration to check the medical certificate database against Social Security records".

 

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