Media Coverage of Airplane Crashes Focus on Sensationalism Not Truth

In a very open article about the issue of airline safety, the International Herald Tribute looks at the “Great leaps in safety beyond bounds of media”, pointing out that the media tends to report on the sensational first assumptions of an airplane crash and rarely report on the more accurate findings that come later.

Aviation safety is often covered breathlessly by the news media, sometimes to the point that the aviation industry just shakes its head and rolls its eyes. Too often, the industry cringes at coverage that is also inaccurate.

In fact, many in the industry assume that aviation safety coverage will be inaccurate.

There is another assumption that aviation professionals subscribe to with even more enthusiasm - that the solution to a safety problem will almost always be ignored by the news media. At a minimum, it will be given tiny coverage compared with that of the original crash.

If ever there was a disaster that proves the point, it is the crash of Trans World Airways Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island on July 30, 1996. For those who may have forgotten, the TWA Boeing 747 was climbing after takeoff from Kennedy International Airport on a flight to Paris when a massive explosion ripped off the front half of the plane and the huge aircraft broke into pieces and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean, killing 230 people.

The crash of Flight 800 almost a decade ago still ranks as one of the most inaccurately reported of all aviation crashes, and not just by the news media. The FBI made a number of blunders that it leaked to the news media in an effort to “prove” that terrorists had brought down the plane, something the agency believed for many weeks. That belief persisted although less than two weeks after the crash, professional investigators from the National Transportation Safety Board had discovered evidence that an accidental fuel tank explosion had caused the disaster.

Many months later, everyone except a cottage industry of conspiracy theorists understood that no one had deliberately blown Flight 800 out of the sky.

 

FAA Proposes Regulations for Space Travelers

If you are thinking of taking your camera on the road into space, you better thing again as bureaucracy raises its ugly head. The FAA has gotten into the space tourism race and here are some references on new rules and regulations the FAA is setting up for space travel.

• Contra Coasta Times - FAA Proposes Space Tourism Rules
• Yahoo News - Government Issues Space Tourism Rules
• FAA Human Space Flight Proposed Guidelines and Rules (PDF)
• Fact Sheet on Commercial Human Space Flight
• Space.com - FAA Issues Guidelines and Rules for Space Travel

Don’t like the rules, let the FAA know. After all, space travel might be in your future. All it takes is a “little” money.

 

Airplane Versus Bird - Who Wins?

With the recent news of a bird damaging Oprah Winfrey’s airplane bringing to light the common incidences of airplane meets bird, Airport Business reports “In Jet-Bird Collisions, Planes Rarely Losers”.

Two airliners were forced to make emergency landings at Bradley International Airport recently after hitting some birds on takeoff, but the problem of bird strikes in aviation didn’t start with the jet age.

It began a century ago with Orville Wright.

It was September 1905, two years after the Wright Brothers first achieved powered flight at Kitty Hawk. Orville was cruising over a cornfield near the family home in Dayton, Ohio, when he reported hitting a bird, said Richard Dolbeer, a federal official who heads a bird strike advisory committee for the Federal Aviation Administration.

Wright was doing circles, chasing the birds, and whacked one, according to his diary. It landed dead on the upper wing.

 

European Space Agency to Compete with US GPS Satellite System

Cut and Paste Aviation announces that the European Space Agency has launched the first of its satellite network designed to compete with the US GPS system.

The European Space Agency launched their first test satellite for the Galileo project, which will comprise a constellation of 30 satellites to rival the U.S. GPS system. Galileo is expected to be complete by 2010, with some services starting as soon as 2008. Its global positioning capabilities will be more accurate than the current GPS system, which is controlled by the U.S. military, and will even work indoors. Its signals should be compatible with current GPS hardware. It will have a basic signal that will be available free to everyone, and a more precise signal which will be encrypted.

 

Boeing 787-10 Looking Good with New Orders

According to ATW Online, Boeing is bullish on 787-10, Dreamliner production.

After what it called “a blockbuster year for the 787,” Boeing revealed it has outstanding offers to airlines for more than 500 Dreamliners and 787 Program VP and GM Mike Bair said the airframer hopes to turn many of those offers into firm orders.Following up on yesterday’s announcement that Boeing is looking at going ahead with the 787-10, Bair was even more bullish on the dash 10, saying, “a go-ahead is highly likely.” He told ATWOnline that the company is finalizing studies on the range/payload tradeoff and that “the business case looks very attractive.”

The dash 10 essentially would have the same capacity as the 777-200 but not the performance of the 777-200LR. Deliveries would commence in 2012. Boeing also is more optimistic about a production rate increase for the 787 after exceeding production milestones and conducting structural tests that verified the pressurization level of 6,000 ft. and the aircraft’s large window size.

 

Old Air Mechanics and Pilots Never Die…

Setting an inspirational example, the Dallas Star-Telegram reports on how old timers are restoring the history of aircraft.

At age 82, Ray Neal still goes to work at Vought Aircraft Industries twice a week.

Only now it’s a labor of love that motivates Neal to get out of the house instead of a paycheck.

Neal is one of a group of retired Vought employees who still trek to their former workplace on most Tuesdays and Thursdays to do what they love to do — work on old airplanes.

Most of the retirees worked for two decades or more for the Chance Vought Aircraft Co. or one of its later incarnations, including LTV Corp. Many were pilots, navigators or engineers, often with military experience and a love of all things aviation in their blood.

“The things that really keep us involved has more to do with aviation in general than just being Vought employees,” says Neal, one of nearly 100 members of the Vought Retirees Club who work on planes. “We would like future generations to know what we did in our generation.”

The object of Neal’s affection is the one-of-a-kind V-173 — known as the Flying Pancake — an experimental short-takeoff airplane once flown by Charles Lindbergh.

Piece by painstaking piece, Neal and other retirees have spent most of the last two years rebuilding the aircraft for the Smithsonian National Air and Space Museum. They have several more months of work left to restore the aircraft to its original appearance for museum display. They hope to show it off in Texas before returning it to the Smithsonian.

The team of old timers are sharing their passion for planes by helping not only restore the airplane’s history, but also it’s paperwork by finding or recreating drawings, manuals, and documentation about how the plane works and flies. In a way, they are recreating how it was done originally, helping to preserve the process as well as the plane. Well done!

 

Tracking the Paper Trail of a Crashed Plane

The process of determining how a plane crashed is a complex and fascinating one. You think CSI and Law and Order are riveting, think about ALL the information that has to be gone through to determine what happened to an airplane to cause it crash. Today’s planes are built with so much redundancy, and for the most part, over maintenance and monitoring within FAA regulations make most planes exceptionally safe. Safer than your car, that’s for sure.

Still, tracking the paper trail of a crashed airplane takes on a new perspective for challenge when the paper trail is gone due to a company being out of business, so explains James Bernstein of NewsDay in the article, “Plane’s old paper trail impedes probe”:

When an airplane crashes, investigators have a host of duties to perform, including one that has to be done immediately: getting a hold of the plane’s original design and specifications from the manufacturer.

But what if the manufacturer no longer exists?

Federal investigators found themselves confronted with just such a situation last week, when an amphibian - capable of operating from water as well as land-based airports - crashed off Miami Beach, killing the two pilots and 18 passengers aboard.

The 58-year-old plane - dubbed the Mallard - was built by the former Grumman Corp. in Bethpage. Fifty-nine were built, all in the late 1940s.

The plane that crashed was operated by Chalk’s Ocean Airways, which since the accident has grounded the remaining four Mallards in its fleet.

The problem for the Federal Aviation Administration is that there is no Grumman anymore, or at least, not in any form that helps the investigation. In 1994 Long Island’s largest private employer was acquired by Northrop Corp. of Los Angeles, and the combined company is now known as Northrop Grumman Corp. Since then, the Bethpage operation has all but ceased working on airframes, and its engineers, expertise and archives have all dispersed.

Eventually, they are able to track down some of the paperwork, but it is a lot of work to cover 58 years of maintenance records to help determine the cause.

 

Air Canada Sees Record Profit for 2005

Aero News reports ” What A Difference A Year Makes: Air Canada Makes $300 Million Profit” highlighting that Air Canada, fresh out of bankruptcy, was able to turn the tables and reap a tremendous profit last year.

A profit of any kind for a full-service airline like Air Canada has been nearly unheard of lately, as other North American carriers struggle with high fuel prices and either the reality — or looming threat — of bankruptcy.

In fact, having cash on hand for the year is an anomaly usually reserved only for low-cost carriers such as Southwest Airlines — so how did Air Canada do it?

According to the London Free Press, a lot of it had to do with the airline’s parent company, ACE Aviation Holding, selling off over 14 percent of its Aeroplan customer loyalty program in a June IPO — that alone raised almost $288 million.

It’s also of note that profits aren’t unheard of for Canadian carriers. One of Air Canada’s main competitors, Calgary-based WestJet Airlines, also posted healthy profits for 2005 — but that’s not unusual, as the low-cost carrier has been a consistent money-maker.

Still, a profit is a profit, especially in a year that saw soaring fuel prices and not one, but two new bankruptcies among the other major carriers.

US Airlines are struggling, mostly due to a variety of reasons including mismanagement, and US citizens are paying the penalty for their struggle with higher ticket prices, no food service or onboard paid food service, serious luggage restrictions, and other pinches that tend to make airline travel not much fun.

Still, outside of the US, the airline industry is booming. While the US blames high fuel costs, the cost of fuel is even higher outside of the states, so why are foreign airlines doing booming business?

 

Global Warming and Airline Industry

A Reuters Alert called “Global Warming and the Airline Industry examines the impact the airline industry and plane flights have on the issue of global warming from the European Union.

Aircraft taking off from airports in the European Union should join the bloc’s emissions trading scheme to cut greenhouse gases that damage the environment, the EU executive Commission proposed on Tuesday.

Here are some facts about the airline industry and its link to global warming:

- Some 16,000 commercial aircraft pump out 600 million tonnes of carbon dioxide every year, consuming some 190 billion litres of jet fuel.

- Aviation causes 3.5 percent of man-made global warming, according to the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. This could rise to 15 percent by 2050.

- Within Europe the aviation sector produces about 100 million tonnes of carbon dioxide annually. The European Union aims to halve carbon dioxide emissions from aircraft by 2020.

- Jet emissions include carbon dioxide, water vapour and nitrous oxides, at high altitude. Some experts say that flying is more damaging than driving as aircraft pollutants spewed high in the air enter the ozone layer straightaway.

The article goes on to list many more fact that may or may not be directly related to global warming. Airlines and the aircraft industry are currently working hard on minimizing fuel consumption, quieting aircraft noise, and reducing air pollution.

 

Alaska Airlines Salmon Thirty Salmon Airplane

Working on the first Boeing 777, painted colorful cartoon designs from the child who won the award to paint the first 777, I have long been a fan of dolled up airplanes. So it was fun to see pictures of the Alaska Airlines “Salmon Thirty Salmon”, a delightful play on 737.

The “Salmon-Thirty-Salmon,” sporting the glimmering image of a wild Alaska king salmon, is among the world’s most intricately painted commercial airplanes. Complete with shiny scales, a dorsal fin and gills, the livery on the Alaska Airlines 737-400 passenger aircraft is the result of a dedicated team of 30 painters working nearly nonstop for 24 days.

The airplane symbolizes the critical role Alaska Airlines plays in transporting fresh Alaska seafood to the continental United States and beyond. The paint scheme was produced in partnership with the Alaska Fisheries Marketing Board (AFMB), which promotes the export of Alaska seafood.

“This airplane celebrates Alaska Airlines’ unique relationship with the people and communities of Alaska and underscores our air transport commitment to the state’s seafood industry,” said Gregg Saretsky, Alaska Airlines’ executive vice president of marketing and planning. “Alaska seafood is more popular than ever, and Alaska Airlines is proud to play a role in getting much of it from the waters of Alaska to dinner tables across the country in record time.”

The fishy aircraft features an original design by Mark Boyle, Seattle-based wildlife artist who has gained quite a reputation as a designer of commercial aircraft art. According to the article, the project required “three times as many hours to paint as the normal livery, using Mylar paint to create an iridescent look and airbrushing techniques to make the fish painting appear three dimensional.”