More information than previously reported was transmitted in real time

As additional details about the crash of Air France 447 are released, we now know that more information than was previously reported was being transmitted in real time including speed and altitude excursions, g-forces and all system read-outs, including computer faults.

Prior to the crash, Airbus had issued a bulletin instructing all crews to be certain, by comparing to global positioning systems that their airspeeds were being properly read by the computers from the Pitot-static Tubes on the nose of the aircraft.

The suggestion is that these tubes can ice up in severe weather in spite of being heated. Here’s the reality – the reason for the odd airspeed differences is that in situations of severe turbulence the airspeed variations can be large because the wind direction and velocity are rapidly changing as is the flight altitude of the aircraft. In short, severe wind shear causes rapid changes in wind direction and velocity.

The bulletin makes sense but as the information trickles in, it begins to appear that severe turbulence and a breakup is more likely the culprit – a very bad ride indeed. The aircraft must be found in order to determine just what broke first – the tail, parts of the tail or the main wing box, the wing or parts of the wing. Only then will we know if the testing to ultimate load required for transport category airplanes is both realistic and stringent enough.

This never should have happened.

Lastly, there are serious limitations on weather radar on-board, as well as on those people who must interpret it. With all of the computing power on the A-330, much weather data was available to be downloaded, not only from the on-board radar but also from ground and space-based facilities as well because the computers can make a better decision on whether and how to proceed in the face of severe weather. We need to go there.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

Air France Flight 447 is down. Sadly, it is expected that all 228 aboard are lost. The earmarks are all too familiar. Severe weather and a loss of radar contact usually mean in-flight break-up and rapid descent. This would, of course, explain the lack of a distress call and automatic reporting of electrical failure and significant turbulence by the onboard real time condition reporting system.

The aircraft went down in an area called the Intertropical Convergence Zone. This is an area where the Northern and Southern hemisphere winds and weather collide to make a perfect condition for severe convective weather. That means severe thunderstorms frequently exceeding 50,000 feet with damaging turbulence, hail, intense rainfall and lightning. On the night of the crash, this area was especially hot with thousands of miles of severe weather making circumnavigation impractical.

Therefore, the only way to get from Rio to Paris was to penetrate this band of severe weather, a daunting task for even the best aircrews flying the most sophisticated airliner. There is no coincidence that shortly after entering this area of severe weather the aircraft was lost. Whether it was due to an encounter with severe turbulence or a lightning strike that exploded a fuel tank can best be determined when the wreckage is found, and surely it will be one day.

The cockpit voice and flight data recorders will also be very helpful but the automatically transmitted data already portends the turbulence, electrical anomalies and tragic end. This is why cockpit voice and flight data recorder information should be transmitted real time to home base.

Coincidentally, an Airworthiness Directive had been issued in 2005 by the French authorities requiring float valve changes in the trim fuel tanks of this aircraft model’s horizontal stabilizers. The purpose was to avoid lightning or static electricity setting off an explosion in those tanks. The compliance time was quite lengthy and, while this aircraft was built in 2005, it is not clear whether it had the benefit of the improved floats. If it didn’t, or the fix was ineffective, a lightning strike on the trim tanks could have been a catastrophe that even the best crew would have been unable to avoid.

It is, therefore, quite possible that the old problem of airliner exploding fuel tanks has reared its ugly head again. While better fuel tank standards have been published and bantered about the industry and governments since TWA 800 exploded in 1996, none of the legacy airplanes have benefited from the new standards and this Airworthiness Directive, which aimed to chip away at the problem.

Aircraft radars have come a long way, providing flight crews with far better weather avoidance information than ever before. Unfortunately, weather avoidance is not weather penetration, but the demands of airline flying and schedules often blur the difference.

Avoidance means not going there, penetration means getting into it and avoiding the damaging weather by skillful use of the radar. The letter works most of the time but not always. Aircraft and human graveyards are full of the results of severe weather penetrations because there are limits on even the best radars. Intense rainfall absorbs signal strength and confuses returns, intense cells hide others just behind and give a false sense of security that safety is just a few miles away, when the worst may be yet to come.

Last year a computer failure pitched an identical aircraft so violently, the crew thought there was a clear air turbulence encounter. The manufacturer said it was impossible and could not have occurred. Later it appeared that indeed the impossible could happen. One out of many computers could cause a dangerous and sudden pitch excursion that might have led to structural failure. That must be ruled out in this case. While turbulence may have been the initiator, computer failure may have increased its lethality.

No one wants an accident. No one deliberately tempts an accident with a planeload of families in the back and pilots who likewise want to get home alive up front. Indeed, they are the first to go. But whether this accident is the result of mechanical failure, the failure to simply remain on the ground in the face of impassable weather or the unlikely act of a saboteur, it is nonetheless the worst of nightmares come true.

Weather. Mechnical failure. Equipment malfunction. It looks like any one of these may have played a role. Whatever the ultimate cause, with today’s technology there is no reason for an airliner accident. With the prospect that this single field of human endeavor may one day be accident free, these deaths must not be in vain.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

HAWKER 800 CRASH IN MINNESOTA
Cockpit voice recorder transcript released

The NTSB just released a transcript of the cockpit conversations of the captain and first officer of a crash that took their lives and six others in Minnesota last summer. There were no surprises here. The flight crew flew into an area of very severe weather with the airport literally surrounded by thunderstorms that reached as high as fifty thousand feet and had spawned at least one tornado. They experienced turbulence and heavy rain as they approached the airport, which had a wet runway from a recent very heavy shower.

The crew violated the sterile cockpit rule – no non-pertinent conversation below ten thousand feet, distracted themselves by fooling with the radar tilt when they had the runway in sight, and failed to properly conduct both the approach checklist and the pre-landing checklist. Worse yet, they failed to extend full flaps, dooming their flight. Without full flaps deployed they could not activate the lift dump feature in the Hawker jet, an absolutely mandatory condition if they ever hoped to luck out and stop on a runway that was too short for this aircraft under those conditions.

The lift dump system extends spoilers both above and below the wing. Without it, the airplane doesn’t place enough weight on the wheels early enough to spin them up and allow the anti-skid equipment to work. In fact, with the engines at idle thrust, an attempted go-around was futile given the normal time it takes for a crew to react and change the aircraft configuration.

As in most aircraft accidents, there is more than one cause. Anxiety over the weather, the rough ride, the short runway, the non-pertinent conversation, and the failure to complete the checklist all combined to doom this flight. The failure to anticipate the heavy weather, the effect of water on the short runway, the inability of the aircraft to safely operate within the available runway contributed to poor decision-making by this crew. Sadly, even a crew that is well trained, skillful and has the best of intentions also becomes the victim of a combination of events that only they could avoid – a chain that must be broken if they and their passengers are to survive. It didn’t happen, and they too paid with their lives.

Every pilot talks about the near accident he has had with the bravado that only a hero (in his own mind) can bring to the discussion. The problem is that if the stars line up and the events build in an inexorable combination of troubles, one day those pilots won’t be able to tell their story. No doubt these pilots were careful, decent, well-intentioned men. Unfortunately this disaster began with faulty pre-flight planning, faulty appreciation of the heavy weather that would be at the destination, faulty cockpit crew coordination that led to the careless skipping of what for this airplane was critical to a successful landing, full flaps.

This accident will mean nothing if it doesn’t serve as a lesson to all pilots that the Federal Aviation Regulations, known as operating rules, are minimum standards. That means that even if they are complied with to the letter, they may not be enough to successfully complete a flight. The failure to meet those minimum requirements, however, is a virtual guarantee of an accident.

Regardless of what position The Wolk Law Firm must take in the litigation for the deaths of the passengers that follows this accident, all of us, including the families of those passengers who have suffered unspeakable losses, lament the unnecessary deaths of everyone aboard.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

CRIMINALIZATION OF AIR DISASTERS
–

While such proceedings may satisfy the public’s zeal to punish those responsible, the result is that the flow of information necessary to correct aviation problems dries up over the long term because of the fear that such information will be used for criminal prosecution in the event of accidents.

It is bad enough that manufacturers and airlines now hide what they do, or more importantly what they don’t do, in an effort to escape civil liability for accidents. Criminalization has always been fraught with the specter of witnesses using their Fifth Amendment rights not to incriminate themselves (which has the effect of impeding investigations that might result in safety improvements).

Moreover, public authorities, whether prosecutors or public investigators, do a terrible job at investigating aircraft accidents and are too often the tools of manufacturers and airlines. Plaintiffs’ lawyers do the majority of aircraft accident investigations in the United States and spend far more, examine more intensively and extensively, and take sworn testimony more often to get to the bottom of these accidents. Criminalization will impede, not enhance, these efforts. What we need is more zealous sanctions when airlines and manufacturers hide information from the certifying authorities, distort warnings received from the field and flat out lie during civil proceedings. We need fewer judges who are selected for their promise to deter plaintiffs’ lawsuits; we should go back to hiring judges based on their demonstrated lack of bias and predilection.

This issue has been around for years and is most often discussed in countries where civil litigation does not exist the way it does in the United States. Where there is no suitable vehicle to get to the truth civilly, criminalization is the fall-back position taken out of frustration. The real solution is to expand civil litigation systems in countries that don’t currently have them so that safety is enhanced rather than deterred by the regressive effects of criminalization.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

At this stage of aviation history, there is no reason for this disaster and both the horror and pain it has caused to so many families

One hundred fifty-three people were killed when a fully-loaded Spanair MD-82 crashed on takeoff from the Madrid airport on August 20, 2008. Witnesses describe an explosion in the left engine and the aircraft falling to the runway, veering off and then exploding into an inferno.

About one hour before the crash, the crew was reported to have aborted a takeoff because of a high temperature warning, known as an overtemp, from the left engine. Troubleshooting took place and the aircraft was again dispatched for a three-hour flight to the Canary Islands. The aircraft was full of fuel and the outside temperature was a warm 86 degrees Fahrenheit.

It is inexplicable and horrendous that an aircraft such as this was cleared for service without an engine change when they couldn’t possibly have known what damage resulted from the overtemp. This situation in a jet engine is a serious matter requiring extensive investigation, not merely an hour’s worth of troubleshooting. It does not happen without good, and usually serious, cause including imminent failure of hot section components, failure of compressor and fan assemblies or likely turbine disintegration.

Jet engines nearly always telegraph their imminent failure and this one surely did. It was ignored. The Pratt and Whitney JT8D engine has had a long and satisfactory service history starting with the Boeing 727, 737, DC-9 and all the MD-80’s. While generally reliable, it has exploded all too frequently and is the subject of numerous service bulletins and airworthiness directives by the Federal Aviation Administration as well as aviation safety agencies in other countries. Some have exploded so violently that the containment rings that are designed to prevent penetration of debris into other critical aircraft components have proved to be insufficient.

When the MD-82 was built and certified, it was supposed to be able to safely fly with one engine if the other failed after reaching V1 (the speed at which it becomes safe to continue the takeoff in spite of the failure of an engine). However, the claim was substantiated by test pilots who know the engine will be simulated to fail, and not by flight crews who are totally surprised by the event on a hot day while fully loaded.

It is not surprising that the airplane didn’t fly because expecting humans to perform to perfection is unreasonable, and the temperature and weight were likely well beyond the test parameters. At the controls were Spanair test pilots who were also victims of a cascade of events that came together to create this tragedy.

At this stage of aviation history, there is no reason for this disaster and both the horror and pain it has caused to so many families. Airline travel can and ought to be 100 percent safe if people do their jobs. This was an unnecessary accident.

– Arthur Alan Wolk

NASA DEEP SIXES IMPORTANT AVIATION SAFETY INFORMATION
By Arthur Alan Wolk

(October 22, 2007) NASA spent $8,500,000 of our money to study aviation safety the right way: interview pilots in strict confidence so they would feel free to disclose what they see as critical safety failures in our aviation transportation system without fear of retaliation.

Now NASA, instead of releasing the information which shows that the FAA is totally inept at gathering safety information, has ordered the contractor to destroy it because it would be embarrassing to government and the airlines.

This stonewalling of public information obtained in the ordinary course of its duties is unforgivable and a disgrace. The data shows that the FAA is totally in the dark about aviation safety and could benefit from this NASA data because it would demonstrate how and why the FAA doesn’t have a clue what’s going on in the National Airspace System.

The reason no one talks to the FAA is obvious. The FAA will prosecute anyone from whom it receives information that relates to safety of flight even if the purpose of the disclosure is to improve safety. Moreover the FAA totally discounts information from the field about safety defects in aircraft so mechanics and pilots are loathe to report troubling problems as no action is ever taken. In addition, the FAA rats out the whistleblowers and gives them no protection, hanging them out to dry, to lose their jobs and to go it alone. Therefore, they have absolutely no incentive whatsoever to help the FAA.

NASA, on the other hand, gives a “get out of jail free card” with the report of sensitive safety information so there is an incentive to provide timely and helpful information that can be useful in preventing accidents. What is troubling about this revelation, however, is that a serious effort was made by NASA due to a perceived aviation safety need to get up close and personal so it could acquire the most useful data and now it will “deep six” it because it would embarrass another agency of government – the FAA – that agency being solely responsible for the safety of flight!

In short, instead of using this information as a tool to improve the FAA, the most ineffective agency of government, NASA sees fit to destroy the information instead. Hide critical information that might be embarrassing to the government? Never!

– Arthur Alan Wolk

Composite Structures For Aircraft Not All They Are “Cracked Up” To Be
Recent NTSB safety recommendation concerning

A recent NTSB Safety Recommendation should be of great concern to aircraft manufacturers, airlines and their passengers. It concerns the “disbonding” of the composite rudders on some A300 Airbus airliners. It seems hydraulic fluid delaminates the bonding agent and allows the plies of composite material to separate. The danger is that strength of the composite structure is compromised, such that it is no longer useful as an aircraft structure and can result in a catastrophic separation in flight.

Everyone loves composites these days. Why? Because they are light, rigid, strong and increasingly easy to build. They are stronger than their steel and aluminum counterparts and are infinitely lighter. Aircraft manufacturers, ever mindful of the needs of their airline customers, especially fuel costs, are trying to make structures lighter so less power and less fuel will carry the same number of passengers less expensively. Also, since large composite panels can now be made efficiently, small aluminum panels can be substituted with huge sheets of composite structure, cutting manufacturing costs and the price of the finished aircraft.

The rush to larger and more complex structures, however, must be tempered with the very high risk of in flight break-up and a deadly crash caused by unforeseen structural failure or disbonding from the ever present leakage of hydraulic fluid from the myriad of hydraulically operated systems in aircraft, like landing gear, flaps and flight controls. These systems, operating at thousands of pounds per square inch pressure, leak frequently, and a leak where fluid accumulates and remains for long periods can be deadly.

What’s needed is a substitute for the highly toxic, corrosive and composite destroying hydraulic fluid now in use, one that will not disbond composite structures. If this step is not taken at once, we are asking for trouble — and it will be big trouble. New aircraft are increasingly large, carrying more and more people. An Airbus 380 carrying 800 people cannot shed a major structure with impunity. Already the wing failed a critical ultimate load test, and the less than optimal results were double talked away by engineers. No amount of double talk will adequately explain to hundreds of families the industry’s failure in the face of this knowledge to make absolutely certain that hydraulic fluid doesn’t cause an airplane to crash.

Hopefully, and I am not optimistic, the pressures of competition will cause aircraft manufacturers in both hemispheres to address this deadly problem. They have been forewarned!

-Arthur Alan Wolk