30 JUN 2009 _______________________________________ *Yemeni plane crashes with 150 aboard *Yemen jet crashes in Indian Ocean *Child found alive after plane crashes in sea *French Continue Search for Clues to Jet's Loss *Air France Probe Complicated as Black Box Sound Emitters Fade *Air Methods Petitions NTSB for Reconsideration of Probable Cause Determination *EU to propose global airline blacklist *Parked BA 777 damaged in ground collision at Luanda **************************************** Yemeni plane crashes with 150 aboard (CNN) -- A Yemeni airliner with 150 people aboard has crashed in the Indian Ocean off the island nation of Comoros, an aviation official in Yemen's capital said Tuesday. The aircraft, from the national airline Yemenia, was en route to Comoros when it crashed about an hour from its destination, an airline official said. There was no immediate news of the fate of those on board. The Airbus A310 was en route from Yemen's capital Sanaa to Moroni, the capital of Comoros, and most of the passengers were Comoran, an official at Sanaa's international airport said. Moroni is about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) south of Yemen, off the east coast of Africa. *************** Yemen jet crashes in Indian Ocean A Yemeni airliner with 150 people on board has crashed in the Indian Ocean near the Comoros archipelago, officials there say. "We don't know if there are any survivors among the 150 people on the plane," the Comoros vice-president told Reuters news agency. The plane belonged to Yemeni state carrier Yemenia Air, he said. The three islands of Comoros are about 300km (190 miles) northwest of Madagascar in the Mozambique channel. Vice-president Idi Nadhoim, speaking from the airport at the main island's capital Moroni, said the accident happened early on Tuesday. The exact location of the plane was not immediately known. The details of the flight are also unknown, but there was a flight from Sanaa, the capital of Yemen, due about 0230 (0030 BST). That flight was a connecting flight from Paris. A resident near the airport told the BBC about 100 people were trying to get into the airport to find out more information, but without much success. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8125664.stm ************** Child found alive after plane crashes in sea (CNN) -- Rescuers were searching the wreckage of a downed Yemeni jet Tuesday after the "miracle" discovery of a young child in the Indian Ocean. The child is the only known survivor from the downed Yemenia Airways flight, which was carrying 153 people en route to the island nation of Comoros from Yemen's capital, Sanaa. The child was found in the waters and taken to a hospital, said Captain Abdulkhalek al-Kadi, chairman of Yemenia Airways. "One child is alive and we hope to find more," the chairman said. Watch as child found > A reconnaissance plane spotted traces of the Airbus A310-300 in waters off the town of Mitsamiouli early Tuesday, said Comoros Vice President Idi Nadhoim. Comoros is located off the coast of the east African nation of Tanzania. At first, Comoros officials said there were no signs of survivors among the dead bodies floating in the choppy waters. But then rescuers found the young child. Recent plane crashes > "It is a miracle. I am glad the toddler is safe," Jon Cox, an aviation expert told CNN. "I am just sad about everybody else." Cox said it reminded him of a plane crash out of Detroit, Michigan in 1980s where only a 4-year-old girl survived. Tuesday's crash is the second involving an Airbus jet in a month. On June 1, an Air France Airbus A330 crashed off Brazil while en route from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, France. All 228 aboard are presumed dead. The cause remains under investigation. The Yemeni crash occurred as the plane approached the Hahaya airport in Comoros' capital, Moroni. The plane tried to land, then U-turned before it crashed, Nadhoim said. Officials did not know why the plane could not land, he said. There were 142 passengers and 11 crew members aboard, Yemenia Air officials said. Kadi, chairman of Yemenia Airways, blamed the crash on bad weather "It was high seas and windy weather," he said. Flight 626 left Sanaa Monday at 9:30 p.m. (1830 GMT) for what was expected to be a four-and-a-half-hour flight. The airline has three regular flights a week to Moroni, off the east coast of Africa, about 2,900 km (1,800 miles) south of Yemen. The crash occurred about 1:30 a.m. local time on Tuesday, Nadhoim said. Most of the passengers aboard the Airbus A310 were Comorians, an official at Sanaa's international airport told CNN. Airbus A310-300 Launched in 1983, entered service in 1985 Widebody, twin-engine aircraft, typically carries 220 passengers Suited to medium-range routes of up to 5,200 nautical miles (9,600km) Typical cruise speed of Mach 0.8, maximum operating speed of Mach 0.84 214 A310s now in service with 41 operators Global A310 fleet, including the A310-300, has logged 11.7 million flight hours on 4.5 million flights Major sub-assemblies produced in northern France, Germany, UK and Spain. Final assembly in Toulouse, southern France (Source: Airbus) An official at Charles De Gaulle airport in Paris said there were 66 French passengers aboard. There was no indication of foul play behind the crash, the official in Yemen said. France's transport minister said Yemenia Airways was being monitored by EU authorities and that French inspectors had noted several faults on the jet that crashed, Agence France-Presse reported. "The company was not on the blacklist (of airlines banned from European airspace) but was being subjected to closer inspection by us and was due to soon be heard by the security committee of the European Union," Dominique Bussereau told French television. Bussereau said the Airbus A310 was inspected in France in 2007 by the French civil aviation authority and "a certain number of faults had been noted." "The plane had not since then reappeared in our country," he added. Yemenia Air had used the jet since 1999, on about 17,300 flights, Airbus officials said. The company said it would assist in investigating the crash. "We are extremely saddened and our thoughts are with the families, friends and loved ones affected by this accident," Airbus spokeswoman Maggie Bergsma told CNN. "We are giving our maximum support and assistance to the authorities and the airline." "This includes a team of Airbus experts that will go on site and our crisis center has been open since early this morning, where our specialists work in direct contact with the airline and the authorities," Bergsma added. "The task now is to gather as much information as possible, including retrieval of the black boxes, to help us understand what happened. This will need time and patience." ***** Status: Preliminary Date: 30 JUN 2009 Time: ca 01:50 Type: Airbus A310-324 Operator: Yemenia Airways Registration: 7O-ADJ C/n / msn: 535 First flight: 1990 Total airframe hrs: 51900 Cycles: 17300 Engines: 2 Pratt & Whitney PW4152 Crew: Fatalities: / Occupants: 11 Passengers: Fatalities: / Occupants: 142 Total: Fatalities: / Occupants: 153 Airplane damage: Written off Airplane fate: Written off (damaged beyond repair) Location: off Mitsamiouli (Comoros) Phase: Approach (APR) Nature: International Scheduled Passenger Departure airport: San'a International Airport (SAH/ODSN), Yemen Destination airport: Moroni-Prince Said Ibrahim In Airport (HAH/FMCH), Comoros Flightnumber: 626 Narrative: Yemenia Airways Flight IY626 from Sana'a to Moroni, Comoros crashed into the sea while on approach. The Airbus A310 had 142 passengers and 11 crew on board, according to a statement by Yemenia. A toddler is reported to have survived the accident. (aviation-safety.net) *************** French Continue Search for Clues to Jet's Loss PARIS - For almost a month now, five French frigates have scoured the rugged ocean floor of the mid-Atlantic, using state-of-the-art listening equipment and computers to try to isolate the tell-tale tones of the two beacons attached to the "black box" voice and data recorders of Air France Flight 447. Times Topics: Air France Flight 447Soon, however, the sounds will gradually begin to weaken, complicating the quest for the recorders and the secrets locked in them: cockpit conversations and data on the plane's altitude, airspeed and heading in the flight's final moments. The plane, an Airbus A330, went down more than 600 miles off the coast of northern Brazil on June 1 during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, killing all 228 passengers and crew members. Fifty-one bodies have been recovered; Brazilian Navy teams announced Friday that they had abandoned the search for more. The black box "pingers" are certified to emit full-strength tones for only 30 days, a period that will end on Wednesday. But there are other ways to locate the recorders. In the late '80s, sonar was used to find the cockpit voice recorder from a South African Airlines Boeing 747 14 months after it crashed between Taiwan and Johannesburg. It was recovered at a depth of 14,000 feet. So the French ships, as well as a sonar-equipped nuclear submarine, continue to trawl the search zone, a circle 100 miles in diameter. France's Office of Investigations and Analyses, which is directing the accident investigation, said Monday that the search would go on for as long as such an effort was deemed "reasonable." "We are keeping up hope," said Martine Del Bono, a spokeswoman for the agency. The French authorities appear to be planning the next phase of the search, which could involve unmanned submarines that operate untethered at depths up to 15,000 feet. They can perform sonar searches and transmit high-resolution images back to the surface, according to Thomas S. Chance, the president of C & C Technologies , of Lafayette, La., which owns and leases such vessels. He said he had been contacted by the French authorities. The 20-foot-long vessels, normally used to survey the ocean floor for oil and gas companies, can stay submerged for two days and scan at four knots. For the moment, the French authorities have to rely on the 24 automated messages sent by the plane to an Air France maintenance station in its final minutes in flight. Much attention has focused on indications of inconsistencies among the jet's three airspeed indicators and the possible vulnerabilities of a part known as a Pitot tube. Autopsies of the recovered bodies and detailed analysis of more than 600 pieces of debris may also provide important clues. The French air accident investigation agency plans to publish an initial report on Thursday summarizing its findings so far. http://www.nytimes.com/2009/06/30/world/30plane.html?ref=world *************** Air France Probe Complicated as Black Box Sound Emitters Fade June 30 (Bloomberg) -- Investigators of the Air France crash in the Atlantic Ocean that killed 228 people may find it tougher to determine the cause of the accident as sound emitters from the plane's data recorders start running out of power. The Brazilian military ended its sea and air search for wreckage from Flight AF447 on June 26, potentially leaving investigators with all the evidence they will ever get. A search for the recorders, dubbed black boxes and guaranteed to transmit signals for 30 days after the June 1 crash, will continue. "If they don't find the black boxes, there's lot of sleuthing they can do that will give them a lot of indications on how the airplane broke up," said Hans Weber, chief executive officer of San Diego, California-based Tecop International Inc., who has advised the U.S. Federal Aviation Authority. Experts said the Airbus SAS A330-200's final transmissions may be enough for officials to figure out why the plane went down while flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris early June 1. The plane, which was flying over a mid-ocean area not covered by flight-control radar, transmitted automatic messages shortly before crashing that indicated that its speed sensors were malfunctioning. The flight recorders could help determine possible links between flawed measurements and the crash. "They will use all information provided by debris and corpses and I'm sure they'll run lots of simulator runs," Weber said in an interview. Submarines Searching A nuclear submarine and research mini-submarine from France and two Dutch tugboats equipped with U.S. Navy listening devices are trolling the Atlantic to detect beeps that the recorders emit every second once they're detached from data systems in a crash. The waters being searched range from 864 meters (0.5 mile) to 4,606 meters deep, according to the French Aviation Accidents Investigation Bureau, or BEA. The bureau doesn't intend to call off its search this week, said Martine Del Bono, a spokeswoman. "The black boxes are guaranteed to transmit for 30 days but that doesn't mean they may not keep going beyond that," Del Bono said. "We will keep up the search as long as there is reasonable hope." Flight data recorders can still be found long after they stop emitting sounds, Captain John Cox, a member of the flight operations group at the London-based Royal Aeronautical Society, said in an interview. "The window is getting narrower, but I believe in the high level of expertise of the French navy," Cox said. Embedded The mini-submarine involved in the Flight 447 search recovered a flight recorder of an Aerolinee Itavia DC-9 from the floor of the Mediterranean Sea in 1991, 11 years after the single-aisle plane crashed. The Flight 447 recorders, which register electronic data as well as the pilots' conversations, are probably still embedded in a chunk of the plane's fuselage, meaning the submarines can use their sonar to search for large metal pieces, Cox said. "It's unlikely that black box is lying all alone on some ocean floor," Cox said. Even without recorders, investigators will examine the plane's last automated messages, the state of the debris, where it was found and the condition of the recovered bodies, as well as previous incidents with A330s, Cox and Weber said. "You look at pieces of debris and infer what forces acted on them by way they are ripped apart or distorted," Weber said. "You look at size of debris pieces, you look at the distribution of the debris." Wreckage Spread Wreckage being spread over several fields, and bodies being found with broken bones and without clothes, point to a mid-air breakup. Only once they've determined how the plane came apart can investigators work backwards to deduce the cause. Other incidents on A330s could provide clues about failures of the plane's speed sensors, Cox said. U.S. transportation safety investigators said on June 26 that they're looking into two incidents in the past five weeks when A330s lost speed and altitude information while in flight. A Miami-to-San Paulo flight on May 21 by TAM SA, Brazil's biggest airline, and flight on June 23 by Delta Air Lines Inc.'s Northwest Airlines between Hong Kong and Tokyo momentarily lost data, according to the National Transportation Safety Board. A Qantas Airways Ltd. plane flying from Singapore to Perth, Australia, plunged mid-flight Oct. 7, injuring more than 70 passengers and crew, because of an onboard computer fault, according to the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. Brazilian Decision Brazilian officials halted their search for Flight 447 after collecting 51 bodies and 600 airplane parts. The last body was found June 11, while the debris had drifted 150 kilometers north during the four days that most of the remains were plucked from the sea, the BEA said at its last press conference June 17. Investigators have yet to find conclusive evidence on what caused the crash, Paul-Louis Arslanian, the head of the BEA, said at the time. "From the very beginning, the BEA always seemed to be working on the assumption that they would not be finding everything," said Pierre Sparaco, who has written a dozen aviation books, including histories of Airbus and the Concorde supersonic airliner. The BEA is required to make a statement within a month of an accident, and is scheduled to issue a preliminary report July 2. "I suspect that what the BEA will say won't advance our understanding of the accident even slightly," said David Learmount, a former Royal Air Force pilot and air-safety editor at Flight International magazine. "Since their last statement, they have found nothing that tells them anything that they didn't know already, and they have told us everything they know." Terrorism is a very unlikely explanation for the Air France crash, the Royal Aeronautical Society's Cox said. "Planes that explode in mid-air don't have time to send those sort of error messages for the next four minutes," he said. http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601109&sid=abcRM5fqeaco ************** Air Methods Petitions NTSB for Reconsideration of Probable Cause Determination DENVER, June 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Air Methods Corporation (NASDAQ: AIRM) , the largest air medical transportation company in the world, announced today it has filed a petition with the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) requesting the Board reconsider/modify its probable cause determination related to the June 29, 2008 mid-air collision accident in Flagstaff, Arizona. The NTSB Probable Cause Report states that "both pilots failed to see and avoid the other helicopter on approach to the helipad". Specifically, Air Methods' petition seeks the following of the NTSB [Board]: Reconsideration and deletion of the Board's finding that a contributing cause in the accident was "the failure of Air Methods' pilot to follow arrival and noise abatement guidelines;" The addition, as a contributing cause, the presence of prescription pain-killing medication in the Classic pilot's blood that could influence decisions or performance; and The addition, as a contributing cause, of the failure of the Classic communications center to communicate pertinent information to the Classic aircraft regarding the fact that Air Methods' aircraft was inbound to Flagstaff Medical Center (FMC) with the same estimated time of arrival as the Classic aircraft. Aaron Todd, CEO, stated, "Air Methods has filed a petition with the NTSB requesting that the Board reconsider/modify the probable cause/contributing cause determination of this accident. We are deeply troubled by what we consider to be critical inaccuracies in the NTSB current Probable Cause Report and the inconsistencies between the findings in this case versus previous cases." Air Methods Corporation (www.airmethods.com) is a leader in emergency air medical transportation and medical services. The Hospital-Based Services Division is the largest provider of air medical transport services for hospitals. The Community-Based Services Division is the largest community-based provider of air medical services. The Products Division specializes in the design and manufacture of aeromedical and aerospace technology. The Company's fleet of owned, leased or maintained aircraft features over 300 helicopters and fixed wing aircraft. ************ EU to propose global airline blacklist Brussels - The European Union will propose a global blacklist of airlines that do not meet minimum safety standards in the wake of the Yemen Airways accident off the Comoros Island, the EU's top transport official said Tuesday. 'If we want to increase global (air transport) safety we need a worldwide blacklist,' said EU Transport Commissioner Antonio Tajani. The commissioner said he would make his proposal during an upcoming meeting with the head of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO). 'I will propose a worldwide blacklist similar to the one used in Europe,' Tajani said. Grouping 190 nations - from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe, including Yemen - the ICAO is a United Nations agency based in Canada responsible for flight safety. It also defines the rules for air accident investigations carried out by national authorities. The EU has its own blacklist of more than 160 airlines that are deemed unfit to operate in Europe. However, this list does not currently include Yemen Airways, whose A310-300 aircraft with 153 people on board crashed in the Indian Ocean earlier on Tuesday. However, Tajani said officials in Brussels would be questioning the airline with an eye to its possible inclusion in the EU's next blacklist, which is due to be published in the coming weeks. Commission sources said the airline had been on the EU's 'watch list' between July 2007 and the end of 2008 because of 'incomplete reporting.' A total of 24 inspections on its aircraft were carried out within the space of three years, sources said. The commissioner also noted that the airline had operated a change of aircraft after the flight left Marseille, in France, on its way to Moroni following a stop in Djibouti. Tajani said that while the aircraft leaving France appeared to comply with EU safety rules, the commission could not vouch for the safety of the new aircraft. A global blacklist would address the fact that 'airlines are safe while they operate in Europe, but less safe when they leave the EU's territory,' Tajani said. As things stand, 'we can't control what happens in Africa or Asia, we can only impose rules on air companies which travel in Europe,' Tajani said. On June 1, an Air France Airbus travelling from Rio de Janeiro to Paris dived into the Atlantic, killing all 228 people on board. Bad weather has been blamed for both accidents. Meanwhile, the Cologne-based European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA) said it planned to carry out safety inspections on non-European airlines as of 2011. http://www.monstersandcritics.com/news/middleeast/news/article_1486822.php/E U_to_propose_global_airline_blacklist_#ixzz0JuqUf42T&D *************** Parked BA 777 damaged in ground collision at Luanda One of British Airways' Boeing 777-200s has suffered wing damage after being struck while parked by a taxiing aircraft in Angola. While the extent of the damage is unclear, British Airways says it was forced to cancel its BA076 service from Luanda to London Heathrow as a result of the 27 June accident. The twin-jet had been parked empty when it was "hit on its wing" by an aircraft arriving from China. While BA has not identified this aircraft, Hainan Airlines operates an Airbus A340 service to Luanda from Beijing. BA says 204 passengers had been due to travel on the weekly service. A spokeswoman for the carrier says the airline has "done everything we can" for those affected. It has not stated when the 777 will return to service. The condition of the second aircraft is unclear. Source: Air Transport Intelligence news **************