Aviation News

US airport officials say 20 people on two separate flights have reported being hurt during severe turbulence.

Nine people on a JetBlue flight from San Juan, Puerto Rico to Boston reported injuries on Sunday night, including at least one who spilled hot coffee on himself.

Emergency medical technicians treated four people on the ground but no one had to be taken to hospital.

Local TV stations showed some of those passengers being loaded into ambulances.

US Research Satellite UARS - launched in 1991 - broke up and hurtled towards Earth over the weekend. Photo: NASA

That dead NASA satellite fell into what might be the ideal spot — part of the southern Pacific Ocean about as far from large land masses as you can get, US space officials said.

New US Air Force calculations put the 6-tonnene satellite’s death plunge early Saturday in the US thousands of miles from northwestern North America, where there were reports of sightings. Instead, it plunged into areas where remote islands dot a vast ocean.

NASA says those new calculations show the 20-year-old satellite entered Earth’s atmosphere generally above American Samoa. But falling debris as it broke apart didn’t start hitting the water for another 300 miles (482.8 kilometres) to the northeast, southwest of Christmas Island, just after midnight EDT on Saturday.

Experts believe about two dozen metal pieces from the bus-sized satellite fell over a 500-mile (804.7-kilometre) span.

“It’s a relatively uninhabited portion of the world, very remote,” NASA orbital debris scientist Mark Matney said. “This is certainly a good spot in terms of risk.”

Scientists who track space junk couldn’t be happier with the result.

“That’s the way it should be. I think that’s perfect,” said Bill Ailor, director of the Centre for Orbital and Reentry Debris Studies at the Aerospace Corp. “It’s just as good as it gets.”

On Saturday in the US, scientists said it was possible some pieces could have reached northwestern Canada and claims of sightings in Canada spread on the internet. But NASA said on Tuesday in the US that new calculations show it landed several minutes earlier than they thought, changing the debris field to an entirely different hemisphere.

“It just shows you the difference that 10 or 15 minutes can make,” said Harvard University astrophysicist Jonathan McDowell, who tracks man-made space objects. On Saturday, he noted, “We were talking about, ‘Wow, did it hit Seattle?”

NASA won’t say how it knows the climate research satellite came in earlier, referring questions to the US Air Force space operations centre. Air Force spokeswoman Julie Ziegenhorn said better computer model reconstruction after the satellite fell helped pinpoint where the satellite — called the Upper Atmosphere Research Satellite — returned to Earth

After UARS was launched in 1991, NASA and other space agencies adopted new procedures to lessen space junk and satellites falling back to Earth. So NASA has no more satellites as large as this one that will fall back to Earth uncontrolled in the next 25 years, according to NASA orbital debris chief scientist Nicholas Johnson.

But other satellites will continue to fall. Late in October, or early in November, a German astronomy satellite is set to plunge uncontrolled back to Earth. While slightly smaller than UARS, the German satellite is expected to have more pieces survive re-entry, said McDowell, who worked on one of the instruments for it.

The German ROSAT satellite was launched in 1990, died in 1998 and weighs 2 1/2 tonnes. The German space agency figures 30 pieces weighing less than 2 tonnes will survive re-entry. Debris may include sharp mirror shards.

The German space agency puts the odds of somebody somewhere on Earth being hurt by its satellite at 1-in-2000 — a slightly higher level of risk than was calculated for the NASA satellite. But any one individual’s odds of being struck are 1-in-14 trillion, given there are 7 billion people on the planet.

Two Hong Kong-bound flights carrying more than 600 people narrowly missed each other over the Asian city, officials said on Tuesday.

A Cathay Pacific Boeing 777 arriving from New York and a Dragonair Airbus A330 from Taiwan were both told to hold off landing due to bad weather on September 18 but strayed into each other’s path.

Airline officials said they were one nautical mile (two kilometres) apart at the same altitude southwest of Hong Kong airport when the traffic collision avoidance system warning sounded.

The Dragonair pilot put his aircraft, carrying 284 passengers and 12 crew, into an immediate climb while the Cathay flight, with 299 passengers and 18 crew on board, descended to avoid a collision.

According to Hong Kong’s former civil aviation chief the two planes came within six seconds of impact, based on their distance and normal aircraft speed.

“The chance of a crash is absolutely high. The passengers really came back from hell,” Albert Lam told The Standard newspaper.

A spokesman for Cathay Pacific, which also owns Dragonair, said that there had been a “loss of separation” but said: “There was no risk of collision and at no time was the safety of the flights compromised.

“At the closest, they were one nautical mile apart when abeam from each other with increasing vertical separation.”

Both flights landed at the airport without incident, 14 minutes apart.

Cathay said the incident has been reported to civil aviation authorities and pledged to co-operate with the probe.

As if the inclement weather from Typhoon Pedring (Nesat) were not enough, passengers flying via flag carrier Philippine Airlines were further inconvenienced by a sudden work stoppage by PAL’s ground crew Tuesday.

PAL was forced to cancel its flights for the day until at least 6 p.m. Tuesday, spokesperson Cielo Villaluna said.

"We announce to the flying public we are canceling our flights for the day until 6 pm” Villaluna said in an interview on dzBB radio.

Citing initial reports reaching her, Villaluna said the work stoppage started at 6:50 a.m. when load controllers at the Ninoy Aquino International Airport Terminal 2 walked out of their posts.

The load controllers are in charge of determining a plane’s weight and balance, she said.

At 7:15 a.m., the personnel at the counter area stopped their work, she said.

"This action had to do with their protests against the outsourcing we will start on October 1,” she said.

Villaluna said PAL lawyers will talk to the workers joining the walkout.

“We want to remind them hampering airport operations is a crime,” she said, even as she apologized to passengers for the inconvenience.

For his part, PAL Employees Association (PALEA) president Gerry Rivera said they will continue the stoppage indefinitely.

"We will continue this protest against the illegal lockout by PAL management,” he said. — RSJ, GMA News

source: http://m.gmanews.tv