Aviation News

Philippine aviation authorities shut down one of the country’s busiest airports on Monday after a passenger jet overshot the runway when landing during a rainstorm, officials said.

The Civil Aviation Authority of the Philippines (CAAP) said Davao International Airport in the south of the country would be closed until Monday evening while authorities removed the Cebu Pacific Airbus A320 plane.

The jet, with 165 people aboard, “veered off to the right of the runway” shortly after landing on Sunday night from Manila, the company said.

“All the passengers were safe,” airline spokeswoman Candice Iyog said. “We do not know exactly what caused the airplane to swerve, but we are cooperating with the accident investigators.”

However Father Joel Tabora, president of the Jesuit-run Ateneo de Davao University, charged that Cebu Pacific had endangered its passengers, including Ateneo faculty and students, during the emergency because of alleged incompetence.

“The Cebu Pacific personnel failed to give humane assistance to passengers,” Tabora said in a statement. “No instructions were given, no calming words were spoken.”

In a notice to airlines, the civil aviation office said the airport would be closed until Monday evening, when ground crew would likely be able to pull the jet from the runway.

“The nose wheel of the aircraft collapsed, but its two landing gears appear to be in order with its left engine visibly damaged,” it said.

It added that four of the passengers on board had been infants.

Cebu Pacific’s Iyog said the airline had cancelled 20 flights for the day, while rival Philippine Airlines (PAL) had cancelled 11.

Hundreds of passengers were stuck at the airport as a result of the closure, forcing PAL to offer land transfers to another airport four hours away.

Davao International Airport is the main gateway to Mindanao, the country’s main southern island.

It is designed to handle about two million passengers annually.

AFP

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/no-instructions-given-after-plane-overshoots-runway-20130604-2nn1k.html#ixzz2VGDq7Ief

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Finnair revealed the design on one of its Airbus A330 aircraft earlier this month, as part of a deal with Finnish clothing and home furnishings retailer Marimekko to provide textiles and tableware on board the airline’s flights. But last week Marimekko admitted one of its fabric patterns, which was also painted on the Finnair plane, was copied from Ukrainian folk art.

Helsingin Sanomat newspaper on Wednesday reported about almost identical similarity between Marimekko’s pattern from 2007 and a 1963 painting by the late Ukrainian folk artist Maria Primachenko.

Designer Kristina Isola and the company confessed and apologised for the plagiarism, which was viewed by the owner as a serious copyright violation.

“I didn’t think about copyright or that I took someone else’s creative work,” Isola said in a statement.

The “Metsanvaki” design, a naivistic portray of a forest, had been painted on a side of one of Finnair’s long-haul planes.

The airline said it would re-paint the aircraft as a result of the plagiarism.

“The pattern was introduced by Marimekko in 2008, and we naturally trusted its originality,” Finnair said in a statement.

The airline said it would continue to partner with Marimekko for its interior textiles and tableware.

A museum that owns the painting involved considered the incident as “very unpleasant”.

“We will seek legal advice on this matter because this is a serious copyright violation,” said Adriana Vyalets, the director of the National Museum of Ukrainian Folk Art.

Previously Marimekko has been fighting for its own copyrights. In 2007 it asked a German court to ban the sales of Dolce & Gabbana’s certain products, saying the Italian company was using its patterns without permission. The dispute was settled in 2008.

The company, known for its colourful prints which decorate many homes in Finland, earlier this month reported first-quarter loss due to a costly expansion in the United States and weaker sales in Finland.

Reuters

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-news/plane-plagiarism-design-lifted-from-folk-artist-20130604-2nn50.html#ixzz2VGDIf9QY

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British air safety regulators ordered Airbus to notify operators of its A320 jets to make specific safety checks after finding unlocked engine covers had forced a jet to make an emergency landing at London’s Heathrow airport last week.

An Air Accidents Investigation Branch (AAIB) report published on Friday said two coverings or cowls on the Airbus A319′s engines were left unlatched after maintenance and this was not noticed before the aircraft departed.

All 75 passengers and five crew were unharmed after having been evacuated via the aircraft’s emergency chutes following the Oslo-bound plane’s emergency landing

As a result of its investigation, the AAIB has formally requested Airbus notify operators of A320-family aircraft to check that the fan cowl doors are fully closed prior to flight by visually checking the position of the latches.

BA, whose own engineering team services its engines, said it would comply with the AAIB’s recommendations. BA is owned by International Airlines Group .

“We are supporting the AAIB-led investigation and will follow its recommendations,” Airbus said in a statement.

The AAIB said that prior to the BA incident there had been 32 reported fan cowl door detachment events by July 2012, 80 percent of which had occurred during takeoff.

The AAIB report said the fan doors from both engines of the BA jet detached during takeoff, puncturing a fuel pipe on the right engine and damaging the airframe and some aircraft systems. In turn this lead to a fire in the right engine on the approach to land.

It said fastening the fan cowl door latches usually required maintenance personnel to lie on the ground to reach the latches, and that the latches were difficult to see unless the person was crouching down.

BA’s A319s are powered by two IAE V2500 engines made by the International Aero Engines consortium, part-owned by Pratt & Whitney parent UTC.

The AAIB said the BA plane’s right engine was extensively fire damaged but the left engine continued to perform normally.

This contradicts findings made by America’s National Transport Safety Board (NTSB), which on Thursday said the plane was forced to land after pilots shut down one engine, while the other caught fire.

Reuters

Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/travel-incidents/engine-covers-come-off-during-british-airways-flight-20130603-2nku4.html#ixzz2V9wUvCRe

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Is there a doctor on board? Surprisingly often, there is — in half of in-flight medical emergencies — and sick airline passengers almost always survive, a new study finds.

The research is the largest look yet at what happens to people who develop a medical problem on a commercial flight — about 44,000 of the 2.75 billion passengers worldwide each year, researchers estimate.

Most cases don’t require diverting a plane as the study’s leader, Dr. Christian Martin-Gill, advised a pilot to do two years. He works for MD-STAT, a service at the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center that advises about 20 major airlines on how to handle in-flight emergencies. Another large service is based in Phoenix.

Martin-Gill handled a call when a passenger seemed to be having a heart attack on a flight from Europe to the U.S. The man’s implanted defibrillator had shocked his heart five times to try to restore normal rhythm.

“The aircraft was in the middle of its destination, flying over the Atlantic,” so he recommended landing at Newfoundland off the Canadian coast to get the man to the nearest hospital, Martin-Gill said.

The federally funded study reviewed about 12,000 cases handled by the Pittsburgh centre over nearly three years. Results are in Thursday’s New England Journal of Medicine. Researchers found:

• The odds of a medical emergency are 1 per 604 flights, or 16 per 1 million passengers.
• Planes had to be diverted for emergency help in only 7 per cent of cases.
• Doctors were on board and volunteered to help in 48 per cent of cases; nurses and other health workers were available in another 28 per cent. Only one-third of cases had to be handled by flight attendants alone.
• The most common problems: Dizziness or passing out (37 per cent of cases); trouble breathing (12 per cent) and nausea or vomiting (10 per cent).
• About one-fourth of passengers were evaluated at a hospital after landing and 9 per cent were admitted, usually with stroke, respiratory or cardiac symptoms.
• Out of nearly 12,000 cases, a defibrillator was applied 137 times, including in 24 cases of cardiac arrest, where the heart had stopped. (Sometimes defibrillators are used to analyze an irregular heart rhythm to help doctors figure out what to do, not necessarily to deliver a shock.)
• Of the cases in this study, only 36 deaths occurred, 30 of them during the flight and the others after landing.
• Pregnancy-related problems were generally rare — 61 cases, in this study — and two-thirds of them involved women less than 24 weeks along with possible miscarriages. Air travel is considered safe up to the 36th week, or the last month, of pregnancy. Only three cases of women in labour beyond 24 weeks of pregnancy led to a plane being diverted.

Dr. Lisa Rosenbaum, a University of Pennsylvania cardiologist, helped in a case like that in 2007, on a flight from Boston to Portland, Ore. The passenger was three months from her due date but was having contractions every minute — something that can often be stopped with drugs and treatment at a hospital but not in midair.

“It was clear to me that labour was imminent and that we needed to land the plane,” so, on her advice, the pilot diverted to upstate New York, Rosenbaum said. “It was one of the scariest experiences of my life. It’s not like taking care of a patient in the hospital.”

Dr. David Rogers, a pediatric surgeon at the University of Alabama at Birmingham School of Medicine, felt that fear five years ago when an elderly woman had trouble breathing during a flight to Atlanta from Toledo, Ohio.

Being a specialist at treating children rather than adults, “my first reaction was to look around and hope there would be somebody else” more qualified to help, he said.

Luckily, a flight attendant had already given the woman an oxygen mask and she seemed to be improving, so he felt the plane could continue to Atlanta, the woman’s home. Trying to determine whether to divert a plane was a tough call, he said.

“I’m making a decision that’s going to affect a plane full of people,” not just the patient, Rogers said.

Some passengers may fear liability if they help in such situations, but a Good Samaritan law protects those who do so, the study notes. And although health workers are not legally obliged to help, they have a moral obligation to do so, the authors write.

And you never know what kind of help will be requested. Martin-Gill said a partner once was consulted when a dog suffered a cardiac arrest during a flight. He didn’t know how things turned out.

Read more: http://www.ctvnews.ca/health/airline-study-finds-onboard-illnesses-are-rare-1.1303430#ixzz2UmuRyKi5

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