06 JAN 2009 _______________________________________ *Regional jet out of D/FW lands safely despite smoke in cockpit *Some Airlines Fight Proposals on Crew Rest Article *Basler BT-67 (Tuboprop DC-3) Accident (Antarctica) *Cessna Citation II Gear Up Landing (Wilmington) *100 years of flight safety advances *Safety audit: US officials to inspect Nigerian airlines, NCAA *************************************** Regional jet out of D/FW lands safely despite smoke in cockpit An American Eagle flight out of D/FW Airport landed safely in Killeen this afternoon after the crew reported smoke in the cockpit. John Sutton with Killeen-Fort Hood Regional Airport says nobody was injured and there apparently was no fire, The Associated Press reports. The 47 passengers on board deplaned as normal. Flight 3505 departed D/FW about 10:50 and landed at the Killeen airport about 12:30 p.m., about an hour past schedule. Sutton says an in-flight emergency was declared, but the smoke dissipated shortly before the plane landed in Killeen. Those on board deplaned as normal. American Airlines spokeswoman Andrea Huguely says the Embraer 145 jet has been taken out of service for an inspection. http://crimeblog.dallasnews.com/archives/2009/01/regional-jet-out-of-dfw-lan ds.html ************** Some Airlines Fight Proposals on Crew Rest Article By ANDY PASZTOR Continental Airlines Inc. and AMR Corp.'s American Airlines have filed a joint lawsuit opposing enhanced crew-rest and other safety requirements imposed by U.S. regulators on the longest international flights. The litigation highlights the difficulties the Federal Aviation Administration faces in devising measures to combat pilot fatigue, particularly on nonstop runs lasting 16 hours or longer. As airlines seek greater productivity from flight crews across the board, tired and sleepy pilots are considered one of the major safety issues confronting U.S. commercial aviation. That's particularly true on nonstop transoceanic runs or over desolate polar regions. With airlines relying increasingly on such extended global routes, they have been reluctant to raise labor costs by keeping pilots at certain foreign destinations for longer rest periods than currently mandated. Long before the current tussle, regulations controlling pilot duty times were among the most controversial topics handled by the FAA. Since the 1990s, agency officials have discussed updating rules based on the latest scientific findings about the hazards of sleep deprivation or marathon workdays. Various foreign carriers and regulators have managed to reduce such risks but U.S. airlines and their unions have remained at loggerheads, and the FAA has made only marginal changes over the years. Continental and American, along with five other U.S. carriers, are challenging both the legality and the safety benefits of enhanced crew rest for so-called ultralong-range flights. The lawsuit seeks to overturn enhanced crew-rest restrictions and other safety measures the agency placed on the flights last fall. These include American's route between Chicago and Delhi, and Continental's flights connecting Newark with Hong Kong and Mumbai. A lawyer for the carriers didn't have immediate comment. FAA spokeswomen couldn't be reached Sunday and Continental declined to comment beyond the arguments contained in the suit. In the past, Continental officials said they were gathering data and were optimistic a court battle could be avoided over ultralong-range rules. An American spokesman said the agency should have "followed the accepted and required process" of getting comments from industry officials and others, because that produces the safest and best rules. Three months ago, American said it planned to protest some of the FAA's measures. Delta Air Lines Inc., which negotiated special operating restrictions on similar flights in late 2006, isn't among the plaintiffs. Delta's arrangement allows some of its pilots to be behind the controls for a total of more than the current eight-hour limit during a single workday. In return, Delta agreed to extra-long crew rest periods before takeoff, use of various fatigue-prevention techniques during trips and up to two full days of rest for pilots after arriving overseas. Pilots also are guaranteed extra rest at home to recuperate before starting another trip. Pilot-union leaders and outside safety experts, who saw the pact with Delta as an important precedent, contend such measures are necessary to maintain the margin of safety so crews aren't too tired to cope with unusual situations or in-flight emergencies. The FAA sought to apply the same types of extra safeguards across the industry. In announcing the Delta agreement, Peggy Gilligan, a senior FAA official, called it "a good example of what we are going to do" with other carriers. In Delta's case, the agency said total time on duty for some pilots on twin-engine, extended-range Boeing 777 jets could stretch to more than 20 hours -- well beyond today's normal limits. Ground delays, bad weather or other problems can lengthen workdays of pilots on both short-range and long-range trips. Delta's current longest flight is from Atlanta to Mumbai, which the company says can take about 18 hours. But the latest court filing indicates the drive to get voluntary agreements on the longest routes has stalled. Filed before Christmas Eve in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia, the suit asks for a review of "new and different regulatory requirements" which entail "substantial burdens and costs" on carriers. On flights lasting longer than eight hours, additional pilots typically are assigned to relieve crew members. But when nonstop flights are scheduled for 16 hours or more, even four-person cockpit crews work beyond that traditional eight-hour per day limit. The agency's decision to bypass formal public comment and federal rulemaking procedures, according to the complaint, illegally deprived airlines and other "stakeholders" of the opportunity to make sure that the additional requirements "promote, and do not unintentionally degrade, safety standards." In addition, the suit contends the agency lacks authority to impose the extra requirements on carriers, partly because broader proposed regulation on pilot scheduling have been pending since 1995. Continental and American are the lead plaintiffs because they are most affected by the FAA requirements at this point. United Airlines parent UAL Corp., JetBlue Airways Corp., US Airways Group. and two midsize cargo carriers also joined in the suit. Before releasing its requirements in October, the FAA sought to quell opposition by compromising on some elements. But in the end, the agency opted to require enhanced rest periods similar to those adopted by some foreign carriers -- even when only 10% of the flights on some routes exceed 16 hours. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123111541032752579.html?mod=googlenews_wsj ************** Basler BT-67 (Tuboprop DC-3) Accident (Antarctica) Status: Preliminary Date: 05 JAN 2009 Type: Basler BT-67 Turbo-67 Operator: Kenn Borek Air Registration: C/n / msn: First flight: Crew: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 3 Passengers: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 1 Total: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 4 Airplane damage: Substantial Location: Antarctica (Antarctica) Phase: Landing (LDG) Nature: Cargo Departure airport: Novolazarevskaya Station, Antarctica Destination airport: ? Narrative: A BT-67 (Basler turboprop-conversion of a DC-3) was transporting spare parts for the cross-country vehicles of a British expedition in Antarctica. According to a Russian official the aircraft encountered poor visibility and crash-landed on a mountain at 3200 meters. The Canadian crew of three and a Russian polar explorer survived the accident. (aviation-safety.net) *************** Cessna Citation II Gear Up Landing (Wilmington) Status: Preliminary Date: 04 JAN 2009 Time: ca 01:55 Type: Cessna 550 Citation II Operator: JODA LLC Registration: N815MA C/n / msn: 550-0406 First flight: 1987 Engines: 2 Pratt & Whitney JT15D-4 Crew: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 2 Passengers: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 5 Total: Fatalities: 0 / Occupants: 7 Airplane damage: Substantial Location: Wilmington-New Hanover County International Airport, NC (ILM) (United States of America) Phase: Landing (LDG) Nature: Executive Departure airport: Higuero/La Isabela-Dr. Joaquín Balaguer Airport (JBQ/MDJB), Dominican Republic Destination airport: Wilmington-New Hanover County International Airport, NC (ILM/KILM), United States of America Narrative: Aircraft was on approach to Wilmington International Airport, gear failed to respond. Aircraft made a successful gear up landing, and slid off the runway into the grass. Two crew and a family of 5 were uninjured. (aviation-safety.net) ************* 100 years of flight safety advances In the 1930s the relationship between flying and safety was summarised cryptically by a First World War pilot who became an aviation insurer, Capt A G Lamplugh. He provided the industry with what is still recognised as the definitive description of the risks faced by those who would fly: "Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect." Somewhat earlier, Wilbur Wright had written to his father: "In flying I have learned that carelessness and overconfidence are usually far more dangerous than deliberately accepted risks." Wright's assessment of the safety issue is more or less synonymous with the well-established concept of "calculated risk", and pre-dates by about 90 years today's increasingly precise science of "risk management". This science is based on a tacit acceptance that no activity, including flying, can be completely risk-free, but that risk should be managed so as to remain within acceptable bounds. What is deemed acceptable is subjective and varies according to societal perceptions. Flight International regularly analyses the industry's safety record In the hope of globalising the approach to risk in aviation, the International Civil Aviation Organisation and the world's leading aviation regulators have, in recent years, required that a closed-loop "safety management system" (SMS) should be a part of every commercial flying organisation. But the SMS concept took 100 years of aviation to emerge, and it will be years before it has been globally implemented. No aviation safety expert today could add anything of substance to the wisdom contained in Lamplugh's and Wright's observations. Aviation is, however, clearly far safer than it used to be in the early 1900s. So what other factors have brought about the improvement? The accumulation of knowledge naturally plays its part. Here is a classic example: the father of the Flight Safety Foundation Jerry Lederer said in 1939 that "strange as it may seem, a very light coating of snow or ice, light enough to be hardly visible, will have a tremendous effect on reducing the performance of a modern airplane". As Lederer observed, some phenomena and their consequences - especially pertaining to meteorological factors like icing, windshear and microbursts - can only be learned from experience or experiment. After the experience has been documented, however, to become useful, the knowledge has to be disseminated to, and then learned and applied by, every individual aviator. But knowledge and wisdom often gets lost or goes unheeded. Lederer's icing advice did. In 2005 the US Federal Aviation Administration echoed the essentials of his statement on icing in an airworthiness directive issued 70 years after he drew attention to the problem. The agency said: "Even small amounts of frost, ice, snow or slush on the wing leading edges or forward upper wing surfaces can cause loss of control at take-off." The stimulus for the AD was an accident report about the crash on take-off of a Bombardier Challenger 604 business jet at Birmingham, UK in January 2002. It had been left on the ramp overnight and not de-iced before take-off was attempted. An obvious factor in safety improvement is the progressive gain in the robustness and reliability of airframes, engines and systems, including avionics, navigation equipment and techniques. But in parallel with these advances, aircraft were designed to fly much faster, perform a greater variety of tasks, and operate in worse weather conditions. As the equipment's capabilities advanced, so did aviators' aspirations to get more from it. The arrival of the turbine engine, in the form of both turboprop and turbojet, brought a huge increase in power, speed and range to aircraft, at the same time delivering significantly improved reliability compared with the big piston engines that were reaching their development limits in the late 1950s. As the machinery became more reliable, and therefore the causes of accidents were less often technically caused, the role of the human became the focus of those who would improve aviation safety, and the study of human factors in aviation got seriously under way in the 1970s. This covered not only the on-board crew, but human factors in maintenance. Cockpit or flightdeck design was slowly improved in ergonomic terms during the 1960s, and when - at the dawn of the 1980s - cathode ray tube instrument displays (later replaced by liquid crystal displays), digital avionics and flight management computers became ascendant, a new piece of human factors terminology was born: crew situational awareness. The need for crew situational awareness had always existed, but the new potential for integrating all the flight, performance and navigational information graphically on large displays provided an opportunity to feed the pilots with intuitive information, rather than disparate pieces of data from which the pilots had to create a situational picture in their heads. This not only reduced the potential for individual confusion, but provided both pilots with the same picture of what was going on, rather than allowing each to develop a picture of what the situation was, which might not be identical to that of the other pilot. Any difference could not be assessed unless the non-flying pilot noticed a trajectory or performance divergence from what he was expecting to see. In the 1970s KLM had invented the concept of crew resource management (CRM) with the objective of improving the way crew communicated and worked together, and that concept has, at least officially, been accepted globally as a critical part of multi-crew pilot training. Technology alone has rarely eliminated a serious risk, but since the mid-1990s it looks as if it has achieved that, virtually wiping out what had been the worst killer accident category - controlled flight into terrain. Flying a serviceable aircraft into terrain without realising that is what is happening until too late is the result of loss of situational awareness. When Honeywell upgraded the ground proximity warning system (GPWS) to the Enhanced GPWS (EGPWS), pilots were provided with a graphic picture of their position and height relative to terrain, plus audio alerts. Since the EGPWS (generically know as a terrain awareness and warning system - TAWS) has been introduced there have been no CFIT accidents involving aircraft fitted with it - but CFIT disasters continue in the remaining 5% of the world's big jet airline fleet that do not have it. WINDSHEAR ALERT Another piece of equipment, developed since the late 1980s, which has had a major impact on safety is the windshear alert. This emerged as meteorologists came to a fuller understanding of phenomena such as windshear and micro­bursts associated with storm cells, and how these can affect aircraft close to the ground just after take-off and on approach. This knowledge did two things: it changed pilots' awareness of the risk represented by storm clouds close to their approach or departure paths, and led to the development of windshear alert systems. This has not eliminated accidents caused by windshear, but it has reduced the numbers and severity. With the arrival of information technology, not only did the potential for creating individual operators safety information databases arise, but also the potential for industry-wide sharing of the derived knowledge of occurrence trends (see historical perspectives). The ability conferred on airlines to download operational and technical diagnostic data from aircraft through digital flight data recorders or quick access recorders enabled them to recognise where operational best practise was breached - intentionally or otherwise - and to spot the technical signs of impending equipment failure. This has pushed the aviation world into an era where risk management has become a data-driven science rather than an experience-driven art. From the 1970s, more of the world's emerging economies - some of which did not have a long aviation tradition - developed airlines with spreading international networks, so the need arose for more effective systems to police global aviation standards. To this end the ICAO was given a mandate for its Universal Safety Oversight Audit Programme in 1999, under which it carries out a review of each state's aviation safety oversight system and makes a synopsis of the results available on its website. At operator level, the International Air Transport Association announced in 2006 that its biennial operational safety audit (IOSA) would become compulsory for all its member airlines. Any member carrier that fails the IOSA, or does not arrange to undergo one, loses its membership, and some have done. But apart from these direct pressures on the aviation industry to raise its safety standards, the airlines became subject to another powerful incentive to improve: since the 1980s, the business of international commercial aviation has been gradually liberalised, allowing greater competition and therefore greater passenger choice. Where there is a choice of another airline to fly with, a carrier that has suffered an accident also suffers commercially. In the 105 years of powered flight the world has moved from fragile, failure-prone machines to robust, reliable ones, and from cerebral risk awareness to data-driven risk management, but the people who operate and regulate the system remain its greatest variable. http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/01/05/320625/100-years-of-flight-s afety-advances.html ************** Safety audit: US officials to inspect Nigerian airlines, NCAA A team of experts from the United States of America’s Federal Aviation Administration is due to arrive in Nigeria on Wednesday (tomorrow). The US officials are coming to carry out another round of a comprehensive audit of the Nigerian aviation industry, which it started last year. They will also determine if the country qualifies to be upgraded to the coveted Category One status. Nigeria is currently rated Category Two by the US FAA, and an upgrade means Nigerian carriers can operate direct flights to US destinations. Only three countries in Africa – South Africa, Ethiopia and Egypt, are presently certified as Category One. Arik, Virgin Nigeria and Bellview Airlines have been designated on US routes to reciprocate the Bilateral Open Skies Agreement signed with the US in 2000. An American airline, Delta, is already flying into Nigeria. It was formerly two until North American Airlines pulled out last May, citing record high oil prices as its reason. The audit, also known as the International Aviation Safety Assessment, is expected to measure the extent of Nigeria’s compliance with the safety and security standards of the International Civil Aviation Organisation, the global regulator, and that of the US FAA. The US initiated the IASA programme to ensure that country’s aviation sector with which it has direct links, meet the ICAO and US safety standards. The Media Assistant to the Director-General, Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority, Mr. Sam Adurogboye, told our correspondent on Monday that the team, this time around, would be looking at the three designated Nigerian airlines as well as the NCAA. He explained that the US FAA officials would be examining some “eight critical elements and the corrective action plans as per identified open items.” Adurogboye assured that that whole exercise would be over this year, and that the country was on the verge of attaining the prized status. He said, “We are confident, we will come out shining. The NCAA is fully prepared for the audit. We have prepared the designated airlines also-Arik, Virgin Nigeria and Bellview.” Direct flights to US and other regions should help the Murtala Mohammed International, Lagos move a step further towards becoming a regional hub and also to grow both passenger and cargo traffic. Presently, Kenya, one of the fastest growing aviation hubs on the continent, is also putting a lot of measures in place to attain the US Category One certification. Countries that meet up with the US FAA conditions would have met up with ICAO safety standards as the Category One is rated higher than standard. The establishment of ICAO after the Second World War included a commitment by signatories to abide by common safety measures in international air transportation. The organisation, however, has limited powers of enforcement. http://h2.punchng.com/Articl.aspx?theartic=Art200901062571075 ***************