Aviation News

A Jersey-bound passenger aircraft narrowly avoided colliding with a larger plane that was taking off from Zurich Airport in June last year.

The Blue Islands aircraft started its take off run at the same time as a Thai Airways Airbus which was on a different but intersecting runway.

The Blue Islands plane had not been given clearance to take off.

The potential collision was spotted by the pilot of a British Airways plane that was waiting to take off.

The Blue Islands plane stopped and taxied off its runway.

An investigation by the Aircraft Accident Investigation Bureau found problems with radio communications and the alert system.

It also said having two intersecting runways meant mistakes could occur when the airport was busy.

It also found there was construction work going on inside and outside the tower, meaning the working conditions for the air traffic controllers in the tower were different from normal.

http://www.bbc.co.uk

Air France Flight 447′s crew reacted badly to an autopilot shutdown and misread instruments including a gauge indicating how fast the plane was losing height as it plunged into the Atlantic, killing 228 people, a report says.

“I’ve lost VSI,” the junior copilot said of the Airbus’s vertical-speed indicator, according to a recording detailed in the report from court-appointed experts. In fact, the instrument was functioning normally, its analog needle immobilized at the lower limit because the plane was hurtling toward the ocean at 15,000 feet per minute, the document seen by Bloomberg says.

Flight 447 from Rio de Janeiro to Paris crashed on June 1, 2009, after ice-blocked speed sensors shut down the autopilot and the crew incorrectly reacted by pulling the jet into a steep climb until it slowed to an aerodynamic stall, France’s BEA accident investigation bureau said in May. Today’s interim report from the criminal probe broadly endorses those findings.

“The aircraft’s stall went completely unnoticed by the crew, who made no reference to it,” says the report, which was presented to victims’ families today. Faced with unusual readings, the two copilots, alone at the controls while the captain was on a rest break, “rejected them en masse,” it adds.

Interface issue

The document identifies no fault with the Airbus SAS A330, beyond the failure of Thales SA airspeed sensors that caused the autopilot shutdown. Manslaughter charges have been filed against Paris-based Air France and Toulouse, France-based Airbus as part of the criminal investigation, which could increase damages payouts if any criminal liability is established.

“This is an interim report and it’s impossible to draw any conclusions at this stage,” Air France lawyer Fernand Garnault said by telephone. “The real focus of this investigation is the man-machine interface, and why the pilots didn’t have everything they needed to understand what was happening.”

Air France had earlier suggested the stall alarm confused the A330′s pilots by shutting down when the jet slowed to a point where its computer was receiving no useful information, before sounding again when the speed picked up, misrepresenting what was actually a positive development. In reality, the junior copilot began pulling the nose up again before the alarm resumed, the criminal report suggests.

While referring to the aircraft’s artificial horizon as they struggled to keep its wings level, the copilots also disregarded indications from the same instrument that the plane was at a dangerous nose-up angle, the document says.

A QANTAS plane enroute to Perth was forced into an emergency landing in Newman after engine problems today.

Passengers reported hearing a loud bang after an engine stalled on the flight from Newman to Perth about five minutes into the journey.

The plane was carrying 75 passengers and five crew members.

A Qantas spokesperson said the plane was turned back because of an “adverse engine indicator for the aircraft’s right engine”.

One passenger told Nine News he was sitting at the back of the plane and heard a “bang” noise about five minutes into the flight.

“They didn’t tell us [for] ages, they said we’ll turn it back for … an emergency landing,” he said.

Another passenger flying to Perth for a holiday also said she heard a loud bang.
“The plane went like dead silent for about three minutes, and we hadn’t been told anything,” she said.

“We were just sitting there and then the lights down the middle started going on and off.

“We were just left there not knowing what was happening.”

A Perth man on the plane said the plane “dropped” mid-air after the loud noise.

He said they eventually got to Perth three hours after returning to Newman.

Passenger Jeff Worthington told Nine News the scariest part of the flight was the landing.

“It hit the ground that hard, and then it was just all over the runway,” he said.

(Bloomberg) — Emirates, the world’s biggest international airline, is pushing Boeing Co. to press ahead with improvements to its 777, even as it finishes work on an all-new airplane and updated designs for two others.

The planemaker needs to come up with a better version of the 777 in the next six months and have it ready to enter service by 2018, Emirates President Tim Clark said yesterday in an interview after two days of meetings with Boeing executives in Seattle.

He said he’s been asking for two years for a twin-aisle plane that will fly more passengers and freight greater distances and be at least 10 percent cheaper to operate. Those savings would be similar to what Boeing is promising for two smaller planes: the 787, entering service this month more than three years late and billions of dollars over budget, and the 737 MAX, scheduled to be ready in 2017.

“There’s no doubt that the 787 program has caused them a certain amount of angst,” Clark said. “They have other programs that need to be pushed out — the 747-8, and they’ve got the 737 MAX now. So I was concerned that the head of steam we’d been building might be lost as they deal with the problems with the other ones.”

Boeing has introduced about one new jet a decade since the 1960s, along with derivatives of the models that improve performance. New planes cost more than $10 billion to develop, even without the problems the 787 has faced with its new composite materials and manufacturing processes.

Double Duty

Boeing has said it won’t run two major programs concurrently again, after swallowing billions of dollars in charges for costs related to the 787 Dreamliner and the 747-8, the newest jumbo jet that’s two years behind schedule.

“We’re confident that when the market demands it, we’ll develop and deliver a plane that provides what our customers require,” said Karen Crabtree, a Boeing spokeswoman. “We feel comfortable with where we are in that process.”

With about a hundred 777s in the Emirates fleet now and about 40 still to come, Clark is the model’s biggest airline customer. Retirements are scheduled to start in 2017, so he’s asking for a replacement that can carry 60 tons of payload from Los Angeles to Dubai. That’s about 7,230 nautical miles (8,320 statute miles or 13,390 kilometers), and would have to factor in hot weather that hurts performance.

The 365-seat 777-300ER, which entered service in 2004, can carry roughly that same payload up to about 6,800 nautical miles, according to Boeing. The 777-200LR, the world’s longest- range commercial airliner, can fly farther. It’s smaller, though, so it carries fewer passengers and less cargo.

More Work Needed

Clark said he may be asking for too much, and he’s not yet sure whether Boeing will be able to meet his deadlines, because there’s more work to be done on propulsion and some other items.

“But I’m sure it’ll be a very attractive option,” he said. “They are making good progress.”

Boeing brought Lars Andersen, the former 777 program manager, out of retirement last year to lead a team to work on a replacement plane. Clark said Andersen knows what customers like Emirates need and will build on technological advances made with the 787 Dreamliner, the world’s first airliner made out of carbon-fiber-reinforced plastic composites.

“The composites, the wing, the flight deck, the question of the whole materials structure, aerodynamics of the airplane, a lot of that will be learned from the 787 and will cross over,” Clark said. The same will be true for Airbus SAS and its planned rival to the Dreamliner, the A350, he said.

“The eye came off the ball, because they had to get the 787 out, and that really did drain them psychologically and materially,” Clark said of Boeing management. As for the 777, “Believe me, they’re working it, they’ve got a full team of people working on this airplane, and they’ll be going as fast as they can.”

source: http://www.businessweek.com/

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