Aviation News

American Airlines

The American Airlines flight attendant whose rants about a possible crash and the Sept. 11 attacks prompted her plane’s crew to cancel takeoff had stopped taking medication for bipolar disorder, according to a police report.

Initially restrained by passengers, the 43-year-old attendant was handcuffed and put in leg restraints by officers when she resisted being taken from the plane during the March 9 incident, according to a Dallas-Fort Worth Airport police report. American Airlines declined to comment today on the incident.

The woman was taken to a Dallas hospital for evaluation of a “mental episode” and another flight attendant was taken to a second hospital after being kicked in the abdomen, according to the report.

Flight 2332 to Chicago was preparing to take off with 144 passengers and five crew, when the attendant’s behavior prompted a return to the airport gate. Airport police said have said they wouldn’t seek state criminal charges.

The Association of Professional Flight Attendants, which represents 17,000 American employees, said today it makes mental health professionals available to help members deal with an “increasingly demanding and stressful” profession and that such instances are rare.

American and its flight attendants’ union are negotiating concessions that include 2,300 job cuts under a bankruptcy restructuring plan. The third-largest U.S. carrier wants to freeze pensions and change work rules and benefits.

Airline apologises for passenger nationality test

An Irish airline has apologised for forcing a Greek woman living in Ireland to complete a language test in her native tongue to demonstrate that her passport and nationality were genuine.

Aer Lingus says in response to Associated Press questions it has suspended the year-old language tests with immediate effect.

The Dublin airline says the UK Border Agency provided the tests to quiz any passengers suspected by check-in staff of travelling on forged Greek passports. Those unable to show fluency in Greek would be refused permission to board.

The policy became public after a telecommunications executive in Ireland, Greek-born Chryssa Dislis, complained of degrading treatment when checking in for a January 6 flight from Barcelona, Spain, to her home city of Cork.

Qantas Airbus A380

A Qantas Airbus A380 aircraft which was badly damaged when an engine exploded mid-air should be back flying by the end of April.

The superjumbo, named Nancy Bird-Walton after the Australian pioneer aviatrix, has been undergoing extensive repairs in Singapore for the past 16 months.

“All the structural repairs are done, all the wiring is done,” the head of Qantas’s integrated operations centre Alan Milne said on Tuesday.

“It is a lot of the cabin refresh that we are doing now. Because it has been locked up for so long, we are just trying to clean it all up and get it back to speed.”

On November 4, 2010, the double-decker Qantas A380 was flying over Indonesia when an engine exploded caused by what investigators said was a faulty oil pipe.

The uncontained engine failure on one of the four Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engines sent debris flying in all directions, piercing the wing, puncturing fuel tanks and damaging some wiring and hydraulics.

Parts of the engine also landed on the Indonesian island of Batam.

The pilots managed to land the plane safely back at Singapore’s Changi Airport without injury to any of the 433 passengers and 26 crew.

The repairs, which were estimated to cost $135 million, have been carried out by the manufacturer Airbus and technicians from Qantas and Singapore Airlines.

Mr Milne said the aircraft would undergo a series of flight tests in the city-state before being brought back into service.

He said Nancy Bird-Walton would be “as good as a brand new airplane” once all work was finished.

“The end of April is our plan at this point in time. That will be the fly out date from Singapore back to Sydney,” Mr Milne said.

Senior Qantas executives, including chief executive Alan Joyce, were expected to be on the flight from Singapore.

American Airlines

A distraught flight attendant disrupted an American Airlines flight with warnings that it was going to crash, references to the September 11, 2001 attacks and a rant on the carrier’s bankruptcy reorganisation.

Two flight attendants were injured in the incident on Friday, which began as the Chicago-bound flight was about to take off from Dallas, Texas.

Passengers ended up restraining the disruptive attendant until airport police arrived.