Jet Aviation Casualties

I'm sure most of you would know by now the mysterious vanishing of that Boeing 777-200 operated by Malaysia Airlines that vanished from radar yesterday. Apparently in plunged into the South China Sea with some 239 souls aboard.

NTSB sends team to help investigate circumstances around Malaysian 777 crash

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) says it has sent a team of investigators to assist in the case of the missing Malaysia Airlines (MAS) Boeing 777-200 aircraft. The team includes investigators from the NTSB and technical advisors from Boeing and the US Federal Aviation Administration. They departed from the US on 8 March and is en route to Asia, says NTSB.

Once the location of the airplane is determined, International Civil Aviation Organisation protocols will determine which country will lead in the investigation. The NTSB team will offer US assistance. The MAS 777 aircraft, registered 9M-MR0, was performing flight MH370 from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, when it lost contact with the Subang Air Traffic Control at around 02:40 local time on 8 March. Its last reported position was over an area between Malaysia and Vietnam.

Malaysia Airlines: experts surprised at disappearance of 'very safe' Boeing 777

Aviation experts have expressed surprise at the sudden loss of contact with the missing Malaysia Airlines Boeing 777, which has an almost flawless safety record. Mohan Ranganathan, an aviation safety consultant who serves on India’s Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Committee, said it was “very, very rare” for an aircraft to lose contact completely without any previous indication of problems. “The 777 is a very safe aircraft – I’m surprised,” he said. He noted that the flight had already reached cruising altitude of 10,700 metres but that online flight data suggested it had experienced a very rapid loss of height and change in the direction it was heading. Neil Hansford, the chairman of consultancy firm Strategic Aviation Solutions and a former air freight executive, said of the Boeing 777: “It has probably been one of the safest aircraft in aviation history.”

He said more than 1000 of the aircraft had been produced and just 60 incidents had been logged, most of them minor. He said the chance of both engines failing at the same time was very low. “If you lose an engine in a cruise it doesn’t fall out of the sky,” he said. Hansford said he had seen some people speculating about sabotage or a bomb, claims he said were premature: “How could anybody know make that sort of assertion this early?”

The aircraft, popular among airlines because it is capable of flying extremely long distances thanks to two giant engines, has helped connect cities at the far ends of the globe with flights as long as 16 hours. Its safety record is impressive – the first fatal crash in its 19-year history only came in July 2013, when an Asiana Airlines jet landed short of the runway in San Francisco. Three of the 307 people aboard died, one of whom was hit by an emergency truck after surviving the crash. “It has provided a new standard in both efficiency and safety,” said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation consultant with the Teal Group. “The 777 has enjoyed one of the safest records of any jetliner built.”Besides last year’s Asiana crash, the only other serious incident with the 777 came in January 2008 when a British Airways jet landed 305 metres short of the runway at London’s Heathrow airport.

Malaysia Airlines did have an incident in August 2005 with a 777 flying from Perth to Kuala Lumpur in Malaysia. While flying 11,580 metres above the Indian Ocean, the plane’s software incorrectly measured speed and acceleration, causing the plane to suddenly shoot up 915 metres. The pilot disengaged the autopilot and descended and landed safely back in Perth. A software update was quickly made on planes around the world. Malaysia Airlines has 15 Boeing 777-200ER jets in its fleet of about 100 planes. The 777 is capable of flying 11,500km non-stop. A new model has a list price of $261.5 million, although airlines typically negotiate discounts.

The 777 was the first twin-engine plane to be immediately certified to fly over the ocean as far as 180 minutes from any emergency landing airport. Government safety regulators have determined that it could fly for nearly three hours on a single engine in the case of an emergency. Such government approval has enabled airlines to fly routes such as New York to Hong Kong non-stop on the 777. Saturday’s Malaysia Airlines flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing was scheduled to take five and a half hours, one of the shorter routes worldwide for the 777.

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/08/malaysia-airlines-experts-surprised-at-disappearance-of-very-safe-boeing-777

Blog on play-by-play events concerning the vanishing and investigation of the MAH370 flight...

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/mar/09/malaysia-airlines-missing-plane-investigation-widens-live

34 planes, 40 ships & searchers from 10 countries However, no sign of a missing Malaysia Airlines flight.

http://edition.cnn.com/2014/03/10/world/asia/malaysia-airlines-plane/index.html?sr=tw031014malaysiaairlines9aVODtop

The search now widens for the missing MAH370 flight...

Search for missing MH370 jet now focused on west Peninsular Malaysia.

More questions than answers relating to this missing MAH370

http://abcnews.go.com/International/stolen-passport-malaysia-flight-black-man-official/story?id=22842452

Suggestions now that MAH370 may have gone way off course, search broadens and relocates to investigate the Straits of Malacca area.

Chinese Satellites seem to find something giving hope of finding wreckage perhaps.

Malaysia Airlines is expected to retire flight number 370.

Cactus 1702 skids off the runway in Philadelphia...

http://savvystews.com/2014/03/13/us-airways-1702-slides-runway-philadelphia/

Flight MH370 vanished through 'deliberate action,' Malaysia's prime minister says.

Pakistan says missing Malaysia Airlines plane did not show up on its radars.

long-winded aviation piece relating to MAH370...

The ease with which a big airliner vanished from Malaysian radar illustrates an uncomfortable paradox about modern aviation: state-of-the-art aircraft rely on sometimes antiquated ground infrastructure to tell them where to go. While satellites shape almost every aspect of modern life, the use of radar and radio in the cockpit has, for many pilots, changed little since before the jet engine was first flown.

Even though Malaysia suspects someone may have hidden its tracks, the inability of 26 nations to find a 250-tonne Boeing 777 has shocked an increasingly connected world and exposed flaws in the use of radar, which fades over oceans and deserts. "It's not very accurate. The world's moved a bit further along," said Don Thoma, president of Aireon, a venture launched by US-based mobile satellite communications company Iridium and the Canadian air traffic control authority in 2012 to offer space-based tracking of planes. "We track our cars, we track our kids' cell phones, but we can't track airplanes when they are over oceans or other remote areas," he told Reuters news agency. Satellites provide the obvious answer, say experts. "The way to go is satellite-based navigation and communication. In navigation, we need to get away from ground-based radar and in communications we need to get away from radios," said radar expert and aviation consultant Hans Weber.

COSTLY OVERHAUL

Inefficiencies caused by radar are costing travellers money through increased fares and penalising economies through extra delays, according to those who back an ambitious but potentially costly overhaul of the world's major aviation routes. "Since controllers use voice communication, they have to leave more space between planes because of the risk of losing contact," said Weber, who heads TECOP International, a US-based consultancy. Two major proposals for new airspace systems in the United States and European Union could change all that, with hefty profits at stake for aerospace firms on both sides of the Atlantic, though critics say the schemes are wasteful and late.

The US aerospace industry has been pressing for years for a USD$40 billion overhaul of air traffic control systems, but the cost and complexity of the undertaking have slowed the effort and Congress has cut funding repeatedly. The Next-Generation Air Transportation System, or NextGen, is due to be fully implemented in 2025, but automatic US federal spending cuts due to resume in 2016 could delay that, the industry says.

Parts of the system are already in place, such as the ADS-B surveillance system now installed in many cockpits, but others have lagged due to funding constraints.

Europe, which has some of the world's busiest skies with an estimated 33,000 flights a day, has ambitious plans through the Single European Sky ATM Research (SESAR). This research programme aims to triple airspace capacity, halve air traffic management costs and revamp Europe's infrastructure by 2020. A 2011 McKinsey study said implementing SESAR could boost EU gross domestic product by EUR€419 billion from 2013 to 2030, create 328,000 jobs and cut flight times by 10 percent. This project, too, has been beset by delays due to friction over the control of airspace and Europe's debt crisis. Some controllers' unions oppose the plan.

Canadian company FLYHT Aerospace Solutions has developed a satellite- and Internet-based system that is used by 40 operators such as airlines and business jet operators to monitor aircraft systems, map flight paths, provide voice communications, and on-demand streaming of black box data. Richard Hayden, a company director, said the system could serve as a backup for navigational systems since it also provides GPS tracking, cockpit voice, data and text via Iridium satellites. However, he said the system would not meet all the specific navigation requirements now spelled out for next-generation air traffic control systems.

CRACKLY RADIOS

For decades air traffic controllers helped planes to thread their way through increasingly crowded airspace and maintain a low industry accident record. On some flights over stretches of ocean like the busy North Atlantic, pilots try to report at regular intervals or pass messages via other aircraft. On such routes planes equipped with satellite communications now increasingly use a messaging system called CPDLC to establish a data link with controllers, several pilots said. Using the same system, they can request changes in altitude too. But it is not yet standard and the system needs airlines to pay for satellite service, something not all are willing to do.

Indeed, Malaysia Airlines had not signed up for satellite service on the jet which disappeared on March 8, complicating efforts to track the missing aircraft. Malaysian officials have not ruled out technical problems with the jet. Simply providing the connectivity is not enough, however, and this is one reason the cockpit is moving into the digital age at a slower pace than the smart phones of their passengers. "It has got to be super-reliable and secure. You can't rely on any system that has a failure rate that would be perfectly acceptable for a cellphone: say, 1 in 100 calls. In aircraft, one in a billion is an acceptable safety factor," said Weber.

(Reuters)

According to new data analysis it is believed that the MAH370 flight ended in the Indian Ocean...

The Malaysian Prime Minister confirms in a news release that MAH370 went down in the Southern Indian Ocean killing everyone one onboard. Some 239 persons were onboard that flight that was flying from Malaysia to Beijing.

The use of text messages by Malaysia Airlines to convey the bad news to family members of those perished on MH370 is causing alot of problems for the airline however, the airline is defending its position to use such measures. Malaysia Airlines CEO: Used text message "as last resort" of informing MH370 families of news of crash.

Looks like new satellite images show an area with some 122 objects, the investigation is being focused on those to indicate whether they belonged to the doomed MH370.

Indonesian Boeing 737-900 damaged in 3.8G touchdown after four bounces on landing

A Boeing 737-900ER operated by Lion Air was damaged in a bounced landing accident at Surabaya in Indonesia, according to a preliminary report issued by the National Transportation Safety Committee (NTSC). The airplane, PK-LFH, performed the scheduled domestic service JT-361 from Balikpapan to Surabaya. During the approach the crew received the latest wind information: 270 degrees at 16 knots. They were cleared for landing on runway 28.

After the first touch down, the aircraft experienced series of four bounces and the aircraft tail skid indicator touched the runway. A preliminary Flight Data Recorder readout suggests that the spoilers and speed brakes were deployed during the third bounce. The following touchdown registered a vertical accelleration of over 3G. The airplane bounced again and the last touch down resulted in forces of 3.866 G. There were 225 persons on board. Two passengers suffered serious injuries and three passengers suffered minor injuries. An inspection found the nose wheel hub was broken, one main tire flat,tail skid damage, and wrinkling to the rear fuselage section. (ASN News)

Four people were left injured after an airliner jet engine exploded moments before take off.

http://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/london-city-airport-four-people-3294269