NTSB: Southwest Airlines captain in 2013 accident should have done ‘go-around’ rather than attempt LaGuardia landing.
NTSB: Southwest Airlines captain in 2013 accident should have done ‘go-around’ rather than attempt LaGuardia landing.
The captain of a Southwest Airlines flight that landed hard and badly at New York LaGuardia Airport two years ago should have aborted the landing and made another attempt, the National Transportation Board said Thursday.
The NTSB said it had “determined that the captain’s failed attempt to recover from an unstabilized approach by transferring airplane control at low altitude instead of performing a go-around, caused a hard landing” at LaGuardia on July 22, 2013.
In its release, the NTSB stated:
Contributing to the accident was the captain’s failure to comply with standard operating procedures during the approach. NTSB found that the first officer was conducting the approach, and the captain took control away from the first officer, but not until the plane was 27 feet above the ground.
This late transfer of control from the first officer to the captain resulted in neither pilot being able to effectively monitor the airplane’s altitude and pitch attitude.
According to the Southwest Airlines Flight Operations Manual, the captain should have called for a go-around well before this point in the approach instead of trying to salvage the landing.
For example, Southwest’s stabilized approach criteria require an immediate go-around if the airplane flaps are not in the final landing configuration by 1,000 feet above the ground. In this case, the flaps were not correctly set until the airplane was 500 feet above the ground.
“Southwest has fully cooperated with the National Transportation Safety Board’s investigation since the event occurred in 2013,” Southwest spokesman Brian Parrish said Thursday.
“Additionally, Southwest’s flight operations policies and training programs have been thoroughly reviewed to ensure required procedures are clear, comprehensive and directly support the safe operation of the airline’s more than 3,800 flights per day,” Parrish said. “Safety will always be the top priority at Southwest, and we thank the NTSB for their thorough investigation.”
The report said that eight of the 144 passengers suffered minor injuries. One of those passengers, Blake Arjoonsingh, filed a lawsuit Tuesday in U.S. District Court in New York seeking damages for “physical injuries, emergency hospital and other medical treatment, emotional and psychological injuries, a closed head injury and other losses.”
The airplane landed first on its front landing gear, causing it to collapse. The airplane slid for 2,175 feet before grinding to a stop on the right side of the runway. The airplane, a Boeing 737-700, was written off as a total loss.
http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/
July 24, 2015
Read MoreFedEx airplane pops wheelie while unloading
FedEx airplane pops wheelie while unloading.
FedEx said while unloading the plane, too much weight ended up in the back and not enough in the front, causing the plane to tilt backward on its wheels.
There is a video that caught the action from the ground. In the background, witnesses could be heard worrying that people were hurt, but that was luckily not the case.
“We had an aircraft being offloaded when the nose came up and the fuselage came to rest on a loader; no flight crew members were on board, and the offload crew is reported to be fine,” FedEx released in a statement.
FedEx also said it is investigating whether procedures were followed correctly when the incident happened.
http://www.kpho.com/story/29586480/fedex-airplane-pops-wheelie-while-unloading#ixzz3gWlRjWDp
July 20, 2015
Copyright 2015 WMC Action News 5
Read MoreEuropean Agency Proposes Tougher Medical & Psychological Oversight
European Agency Proposes Tougher Medical & Psychological Oversight of Pilots.
PARIS – Europe’s top air safety regulator on Friday called for a series of measures aimed at strengthening the medical and psychological oversight of the region’s commercial airline pilots, including random drug and alcohol testing of flight crews.
The report with the recommendations, which has been presented to the European transportation commissioner, Violeta Bulc, for review, follows more than two months of discussions led by the regulator, the European Aviation Safety Agency, after the March 24 crash of a Germanwings airliner. The flight’s co-pilot had a history of severe depression and had shown suicidal tendencies.
If accepted by the European Commission officials, the changes could take effect within the next year. But officials said they were prepared for delicate negotiations over the coming months with European pilots’ unions, which have until now resisted such monitoring as overly intrusive and only minimally effective in improving safety.
“If improvements are to be made in the European safety and security rules or in their implementation, in order to help prevent future accidents or incidents, we will take the necessary action at E.U. level,” Ms. Bulc said in a statement.
Aside from its new medical oversight proposals, the task force said it would maintain its recommendation that two crew members be present in the cockpit at all times. The so-called two-person rule, which was standard in the United States and other parts of the world after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, was not widely adopted in Europe before the Germanwings crash.
The Federal Aviation Administration in the United States is also conducting its own review of existing standards and procedures for pilot medical oversight and cockpit door security. Its findings are expected to be published by the end of this year.
Patrick Ky, the European Aviation Safety Agency’s executive director and chairman of the task force that issued the report, said in a telephone interview from Brussels that most of the recommendations were “common sense.”
“We will never find a magic set of tools or solutions that can prevent every kind of accident,” he said, “but let’s try to do our best to maximize our chances of preventing this kind of thing from happening again.”
French investigators say that the 27-year-old co-pilot of the Germanwings flight, Andreas Lubitz, deliberately crashed the Airbus A320 after locking the captain out of the cockpit on a flight to Düsseldorf, Germany, from Barcelona, Spain. Mr. Lubitz and the 149 other people on board were killed.
Investigators have not uncovered any evidence that Mr. Lubitz used illegal drugs or alcohol, but members of the task force identified drug and alcohol abuse as “one of the disorders potentially affecting the mental health of pilots for which screening tests are readily available,” the agency said in a statement.
The task force included a dozen representatives from airlines, pilots unions, medical advisers and regulators.
Although Mr. Lubitz was a high-profile example of pilot suicide, his was not an isolated case. Over the past two decades, at least a half-dozen fatal airline crashes have been attributed to deliberate actions by the pilot. Other episodes and close calls have been quietly played down by investigators. Until now, none have led to significant changes in the regulation of the psychological health of pilots.
The task force cited a 2013 report by the Civil Aviation Authority of Britain that found that of the 31 air accidents caused by a pilot medical issue between 1980 and 2011, 20 were “of psychiatric cause.” The highest proportion of the psychiatric causes – 60 percent – was linked to drug or alcohol use.
A number of countries, including the United States and Australia, require airline pilots to submit to random tests for the use of alcohol and certain controlled substances, including amphetamines, cocaine, marijuana and opiates. Flight attendants, aircraft mechanics, air traffic controllers and others in “safety sensitive” roles are also subject to drug testing.
Some European countries, notably in Scandinavia, routinely test pilots, but there is no uniform standard that applies to the roughly 65,000 commercial pilots based in the 28-member European Union.
“We need to have a European mandate on this, because it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have individual national laws,” Mr. Ky said.
Mr. Ky said the European requirements would be modeled on the current policy of the F.A.A., which randomly selects 25 percent of aviation industry personnel for drug testing and 10 percent for alcohol testing every year. Initially, such testing would only apply to pilots, although it could eventually be extended to other employees who are critical to maintaining safety, he said.
In the weeks after the Germanwings crash, Carsten Spohr, the chief executive of Lufthansa, the parent company of Germanwings, proposed that regulators also consider screening pilots for the presence of antidepressants or other psychiatric drugs.
That idea was rejected, and Mr. Ky said that there were no plans to test for prescription medications. “If we extend the scope, we run the risk of too many false alarms,” he said.
Random drug and alcohol testing has long been opposed by pilots’ unions, who have tended to view such policies as inefficient: less than 0.49 percent of the roughly 50,000 American airline pilots who were screened tested positive for drugs or alcohol in 2013, the most recent year for which F.A.A. statistics were available.
“It produces very few positive outcomes,” Capt. Martin Chalk, the president of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots’ Associations, said in a recent interview. “Those who want to stay below the radar can do so.”
He added: “In the case of alcohol and drugs, it is quite clear that if you look around the world, peer-support or intervention are both cheaper and more effective.”
Many pilots’ unions and large airline groups, including Lufthansa, already have programs in place where pilots with drug, alcohol or other mental health problems can confide in specially trained colleagues, who can steer them toward professional help without risking their jobs. Pilots can also confidentially report others who they suspect may have a problem, in order to encourage them to seek treatment.
The task force’s report urges airlines to augment drug testing with such “nonpunitive” support and peer-reporting programs for pilots with substance abuse or mental health problems. Mr. Ky said regulators would regularly review such programs as part of their mandatory periodic inspections of airline operations.
“We want to be given evidence that this exists and is not facing any undue constraints that make it unworkable,” Mr. Ky said.
The report also calls for the creation of a central European Union database, which would be maintained by the European Aviation Safety Agency, containing basic information about pilots’ medical certification status and contact details for the flight doctor who conducted their most recent exam.
Airline pilots are generally free to choose their own flight doctors, in the same way that most people choose their own personal physicians. The lack of a central repository for pilots’ records creates a loophole, medical experts say, and could allow a pilot to hide a previous diagnosis of a physical or mental health condition.
But bowing to the concerns from some member states with strict laws governing medical privacy, notably Germany, the task stopped short of requiring that the full details of a pilot’s medical records be included in the database.
In the case of Mr. Lubitz, who had an episode of depression in 2009, there was a note in his German medical file that required flight doctors to check for any signs of a recurrence during his regular annual exam. Under the task force’s proposal, such information would not appear in the new database.
In its report, the task force called on member states to reconsider national regulations that prevented doctors from sharing information about a pilot’s fitness to fly.
“The implementation of data protection rules should balance the need to protect patient confidentiality with the need to protect public safety,” the report said. “Unless national rules are changed, this will continue to be a risk.”
The task force acknowledged the “limitations” of the database as a tool for flight doctors, but called it a “first step” toward what could eventually develop into a “full aeromedical records system.” The task force’s report also calls for mandatory and comprehensive psychological screening by a qualified specialist of all prospective pilots either during their initial training or before they are hired. While such comprehensive tests are standard at many European flight schools and airlines – including Lufthansa, where Mr. Lubitz was trained and eventually hired – this is not a legal requirement across the European Union.
The result of that exam would form part of a pilot’s permanent medical record, Mr. Ky said.
Most airline pilots today receive only cursory mental health screening when they apply for their license, annual medical exams that are often conducted by general practitioners with no psychiatric expertise. Even in the United States, more extensive psychological checks are normally ordered at the discretion of a flight doctor.
The European task force urged national regulators to improve psychological training programs for flight doctors and to encourage the development of peer networks that would allow doctors to learn from one another.
“We want to enable medical examiners to share information – not about individual cases, but best practices and experiences,” Mr. Ky said.
www.nytimes.com/2015/07/18
Read MoreIndonesia’s Mount Raung spews ash into one of the world’s most crowded flight paths
Indonesia’s Mount Raung spews ash into one of the world’s most crowded flight paths
Drifting ash from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia shut down airports on the country’s resort islands of Bali and Lombok, causing chaos for travelers.
Drifting ash from a volcanic eruption shut down airports on two of Indonesia’s most famous resort islands for a second day Friday, stranding passengers and disrupting local businesses at the peak of the summer holiday season.
Authorities closed airports in Bali and the neighboring island of Lombok on Thursday night as Mount Raung in East Java continued to spew ash into one of the world’s most crowded flight paths. International carriers such as Singapore Airlines, Qantas, Malaysia Airlines and Etihad Airways were among the airlines affected by the airport closures.
Mount Raung, which is about 150 kilometers west of Bali, erupted on July 5, prompting authorities to require pilots nearby to fly above 24,800 feet for safety reasons.
Indonesian authorities expect the airports to reopen after wind patterns shift direction. “We will see if we can reopen the airports after the sunset,” Transportation Ministry spokesman Adravida Barata said.
Bali airport normally handles about 48,000 passengers daily, while Lombok airport serves about 3,600. The two islands’ economies are heavily dependent on tourism, which is a sector Indonesia’s government is relying on to bring foreign exchange into the country amid a slump in its commodity-heavy exports.
Indonesia is home to dozens of active volcanoes that sit along the so-called Pacific Ring of Fire. Volcanic eruptions sometimes disrupt flights in the country, but have never been linked to aviation accidents.
July 10, 2015
www.wsj.com/articles/volcanic-ash
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Human Performance & Limitations Instructor Course for Oman
The Oman Royal Flight has sent a number of their instructors to the UK to attend a private HP&L Instructor course with ITS.
The HPLI core course builds on delegates’ existing instructional experience to provide them with the specific skills required to deliver HP&L training in the classroom.
The course covers the JAA/ EASA ATPL Syllabus and Learning Objectives. It provides the knowledge and skills for instructors to teach pilots and flight attendants to appreciate the limitations of the human body within the aviation environment.
This 5-day course is a fully interactive event and delegates prepared and delivered a number of practice training sessions on the subject matter. A comprehensive course manual was provided, which delegates refered to throughout the course, and in preparing their practice sessions.
The course is suitable for both pilots, who will refresh their HP&L knowledge, and for flight attendants for whom this may be a new subject.
Read MoreEmirates aircraft in ‘minor contact’ with plane on runway.
Emirates aircraft in ‘minor contact’ with plane on runway.
Flight EK782 involved in incident while taxiing at Lagos airport
Dubai: An Emirates aircraft was involved in a minor incident while taxing at Lagos airport. An Emirates spokesperson said: “Emirates can confirm that flight EK782 from Lagos to Dubai on July 6 made minor contact with the aircraft of another carrier while taxiing.”
No one was injured in the incident, which took place on Monday. The passengers were provided with hotel accommodation.
“All passengers and crew safely disembarked the aircraft, and were transferred back to the terminal after the incident,” the spokesman added.
“Passengers were provided overnight hotel accommodation and were flown to Dubai on other Emirates services on July 7. Emirates apologises for any inconvenience caused.
July 6, 2015
http://gulfnews.com/business/aviation/
Read MoreDeadly Osprey crash spurred safety changes
The V-22 Osprey that crashed into the Arabian Sea last year was doomed on take-off because it was accidentally started in maintenance mode, Marine Corps investigators concluded. Despite a routine hover initially over ship deck, the errant mission system selection and a design flaw in the tiltrotor aircraft, since corrected, deprived the engines of enough flight power.
Cpl. Jordan Spears, a crew chief who bailed out and was lost at sea after the Osprey hit the water on Oct. 1, 2014, was the first American killed in action during Operation Inherent Resolve, the campaign against the Islamic State group of militants in Iraq and Syria.
During more than 10 minutes struggling at the controls as the Osprey dipped in and out of the water, the pilots dumped most of their fuel. They were able to fly the disabled aircraft back to the amphibious assault ship Makin Island for a safe landing. But the MV-22B, which was submerged about four feet at one point in corrosive saltwater, required replacement engines and other parts costing more than $1.5 million.
The Marine command investigation also cited the pilots and crew for not strictly following start-up procedures that could have prevented the deadly mishap, a lack of warning to them about newly discovered hazards of flying the Osprey in maintenance mode, and the potential fatigue of the sergeant who unintentionally initiated the wrong system setting, according to the report obtained by The San Diego Union-Tribune through a Freedom of Information Act request.
San Diego Union-Tribune June 30, 2015
Read MoreBangkok-bound flight from China makes emergency landing
BEIJING – A Bangkok-bound flight operated by a Chinese airline made an emergency landing Friday afternoon after an engine fire warning lit up, China Southern Airlines said.
Crew members later found no fire or smoke in the engines, and no major injuries were reported, the airline said in a statement.
Flight 3081 took off from the southern Chinese city of Guangzhou and made the emergency landing in Sanya, a city in Hainan province, the airline said.
As the passengers were evacuated down slides, 14 passengers had minor scrapes, and two others received ankle injuries. All were treated, the airline said.
The airline said it sent a plane to Sanya later Friday to fly the passengers to Bangkok.
StarTribune July 3, 2015
C130 Crash Indonesia
A C-130 Hercules aircraft had 12 military personnel on board, an Indonesian military spokesman says
Jakarta, Indonesia (CNN)Smoke rose among scorched buildings in the Indonesian city of Medan on Tuesday after a military transport plane crashed near a residential neighborhood, killing at least 43 people.
The C-130 Hercules aircraft went down with 12 military personnel on board shortly after taking off from a base in Medan, the capital of North Sumatra province, said Indonesian military spokesman Maj. Gen. Fuad Basya.
Local television broadcast images of crowds gathering around the plane’s smoldering wreckage amid damaged buildings and a charred car.
At least 43 bodies have been recovered from the crash site, said Zulkifli, an official from the Indonesian Red Cross who goes by only one name. But he said there are more bodies at the crash site.
“There are definitely more than 50 victims,” he said.
It was unclear what caused the disaster.
Video link here
CNN 2015/06/30
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Training Needs Analysis – Maldives
Following the merger of Maldivian Air Taxi and Trans Maldivian Airways, ITS is delighted to continue their 7-year relationship with the company.
Returning once again to Male, ITS have completed a Training Needs Analysis of the CRM/Human Factors requirements for the new company, Trans Maldivian Airlines.
During the visit ITS assisted in the selection process for new CRM Instructors and will return to Male in September to run another CRM Instructor course and to deliver a bespoke set of CRM courseware for the next training cycle.
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