Aviation News

China's four major airlines – national flag-carrier Air China, China Eastern Airlines, China southern Airlines and Hainan Airlines – are represented by the CATA Photo: Doug Kanter/Bloomberg

Beijing said it has deep concerns over the EU’s Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS), which came into force on New year’s Day and demands all airlines pay a green duty to offset carbon emissions.

Seven injured as turbulence hits Qantas A380

Seven passengers were injured when a Qantas A380 superjumbo with 450 passengers was rattled by severe turbulence over Indian airspace . The Qantas flight QF32 from London to Sydney had departed London on Friday night and was three hours out of Singapore on Saturday morning when it was hit by turbulence caused by bad storms in the Indian airspace, a spokeswoman of the Australian airline said.

Etihad’s first-class feasts

Chefs are in first-class kitchens on Etihad Airways flights to Sydney, Melbourne, London and Paris, and alongside the staff is a new menu from the airline’s Mezoon Grille.

The menu includes rib-eye steak, hammour and beef tenderloin. There’s a choice of desserts (warm cheese souffle, lemongrass panna cotta, triple chocolate cake, pandan sago with passionfruit coulis) or warm Middle Eastern semolina pudding with saffron lemon syrup.

The degustation menu available to first-class passengers has been replaced with a Taste of Arabia theme that includes a mixed grill with aromatic rice, harissa and yoghurt sauce.

The airline won the Skytrax award for first-class catering last year and will introduce chefs on its Dusseldorf, Frankfurt, Geneva, Narita, Seoul, Brussels, Milan, Munich, Casablanca and New York flights this year. First-class fares from Sydney to Abu Dhabi cost from $10,970 and Melbourne from $10,951.

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The damage to the tail of the Emirates aircraft after it scraped along the runway during take-off.

A pilot’s typing mistake on a computer was central to a botched take-off of an Emirates’ Airbus from Melbourne that saw the plane scrape along the tarmac, smashing runway lights and navigation equipment, a two-and-a-half-year air safety investigation has found.

But the definitive report into the incident by Australian Transport Safety Bureau investigators remains open-ended on ways to prevent a reoccurrence.

Technical innovations of new software programs to alert pilots to data errors or to raise cockpit alerts about abnormal take-off performance appear mired in bureaucratic slowness or a lack of interest by overseas safety regulators, the report reveals.

The Emirates Airbus A340, which was bound for Dubai and was carrying 257 passengers and 18 crew, struggled to make it into the air on the evening of March 20, 2009.

It ran out of runway and scraped its tail, striking navigational equipment and lights at the end of the runway.

The cabin crew told the captain the rear of the cabin was filling with smoke. The plane had to dump its load of fuel, circle, and, an hour later, made an emergency landing to be met by fire crews on the ground.

No one was injured, but the jet’s tail assembly was extensively damaged.

During pre-flight calculations, the co-pilot entered a wrong number in a laptop computer that replaces paper pre-flight plans.

The co-pilot had entered “262.9″ tonnes for the aircraft’s weight, instead of the correct weight of 362.9 tonnes — a 100 tonne mistake.

“It was, however, considered most likely that the first officer made a typing slip, where the ’2′ key was accidentally pressed instead of the adjacent ’3′ key, and that he did not detect the error,” investigators said.

That wrong figure was, in turn, used to program engine thrust settings and flap positions for take-off.

A breakdown of pre-flight procedures and cross-checks, and distractions in the cockpit with a relief crew on board, meant the captain did not pick up the error. The error was entered into the flight computer.

The engines were programmed for only enough thrust for a much lighter aircraft and the flaps weren’t set correctly.

The result was that as the Airbus gathered speed down the runway, it was not moving nearly fast enough to generate enough lift under the wings.

“It was not until the aircraft approached the end of the runway, without lifting-off as expected, that the captain realised there was a problem,” investigators said.

The captain called for the co-pilot to pull up again, and applied full thrust.

But the plane scraped its tail along the end of the tarmac, then along the grass past the end of the runway, then clobbered runway lights and navigation antennae before finally lurching into the air.

Investigators ruled out pilot fatigue but found procedural deficiencies and lapses that let mistakes slip through, as well as deficiencies in the set-up of the ergonomics of software that replaced traditional paper plans.

In response to the incident, Emirates reviewed pre-flight procedures and training, including managing the risk of distractions.

The airline introduced the duplication of laptops for pre-flight planning to ensure dual-independent data entry and flight performance calculations. It improved software on the laptops.

Emirates is cooperating with a major avionics company to develop a take-off acceleration-monitoring and alerting system.

Airbus worked up a software patch to detect erroneous data, and demonstrated it to the Australian investigators in in May last year. In October this year, Airbus announced plans to add a software program to calculate sufficient runway length.

Furthermore, an Airbus take-off monitoring system to compute required acceleration rates and to trigger an alert if a plane is accelerating too slowly “is under feasibility study for a certification targeted to be available in 2015 for A380 and between 2015-2020 for A320 and A330/A340 families,” the aircraft maker said.

But before technical innovations in aircraft can be adopted, they have to be approved by European or American aviation safety authorities.

“Such [take-off monitoring] system feasibility has not yet been demonstrated,” the European Aviation Safety Agency said. It proposes a working group to “eventually” establish a standard, and then to work with industry to devise the technical solution.

The Americans are equally lukewarm on the idea.

“[The agency] has found the idea of these systems, with all of their inherent complexity to be more problematical than reliance on adequate airmanship,” the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) said.

That worries Australia’s safety bureau, which has called on the US authority to rethink the idea.

“The ATSB is concerned that the apparent inaction in this area by the FAA is a missed opportunity to enhance the safety of scheduled transport operations throughout the world,” it concluded.