Flight Safety Information February 9, 2012 - No. 029 In This Issue Indonesia Confronts Drug Use Among Pilots Pilots were warned plane could drop from sky PRISM Certification Consultants Feds Look Beyond LightSquared to Set GPS Interference Standards NTSB ISSUES NPRM TO REVISE RULES ON ENFORCEMENT APPEALS Starr Companies Introduces A Safety Manager Mentoring Program For Aviation Clients Indonesia Confronts Drug Use Among Pilots JAKARTA (NYT) - The Indonesian airline industry has made progress toward mending its reputation - amid soaring demand - after a series of spectacular crashes in recent years drew international attention to the country's poor safety record. Now it has a new problem to deal with: drug abuse among its pilots. The police arrested a pilot from the country's largest private airline, Lion Air, last Saturday on suspicion of possessing crystal methamphetamine, a psychostimulant that increases alertness and concentration and can create feelings of euphoria. It was the fourth such arrest of a Lion Air employee in seven months, raising fresh concerns about the airline industry's safety and security standards, and heightening pressure on the government to enact stricter airline regulations. Rising demand from Indonesia's growing middle class has pushed airlines to add routes and purchase more planes. The number of airline passengers increased 15 percent last year, to 66 million, according to the Transportation Ministry, which expects demand to rise further this year. To accommodate the demand, Lion Air signed a $21.7 billion deal with Boeing last November for 230 short-haul 737 jets, the biggest commercial order in the U.S. plane maker's history. Some Indonesian transportation officials say the industry is understaffed, with pilots under pressure to work long hours. Indonesia has 57 airlines, including charter services, and about 7,000 pilots. "That's not enough," Bambang Ervan, the spokesman for the Transportation Ministry, said this week. Ertata Lananggalih, Lion Air's managing director, denied that its pilots did not receive sufficient ground time, explaining that the airline was subject to bimonthly audits to ensure it adhered to regulations on health and safety. He said the airline would work with the National Narcotics Agency, known as B.N.N., to monitor pilots' activities regularly. "We will know how to more effectively prevent drug use, starting from recruitment and training," he said. Over the past year, the Transportation Ministry has withdrawn the flying licenses of the four Lion Air pilots arrested in the last seven months, including the one arrested last Saturday. The police, after an early-morning raid on a hotel in Surabaya, in the province of East Java, said the pilot, Syaiful Salam, 44, was in possession of 0.4 grams of methamphetamine. Mr. Salam was scheduled to fly later that morning. Benny Mamoto, the head of the narcotics agency's operations task force, said drug use was part of a lifestyle among some pilots who have money to buy drugs like crystal meth and ecstasy. Indonesia's civil aviation safety regulations require all flight staff members, including pilots and flight attendants, to undergo periodic health checks. Pilots must also submit to drug and alcohol tests before receiving their licenses. But carriers are not required to conduct random drug and alcohol tests, said Mr. Ervan, the Transportation Ministry spokesman. "The drug and alcohol testing program is still voluntary," he said, adding that Indonesia's civil aviation authority had drafted a new regulation, similar to rules in the United States and Australia, that would require national airlines to test air crew members regularly. "We will issue it soon," Mr. Ervan said. In the meantime, the Directorate General of Civil Aviation will continue to perform random checks. On Tuesday, officials conducted urine tests on about 100 airline crew members at Sukarno-Hatta International Airport, serving Jakarta. One co-pilot's urine tested positive for drug use. Mr. Ervan said the co-pilot would be barred from flying while narcotics agents investigated further. In September, the International Air Transport Association, a global airline industry group, issued a statement in support of Indonesia's recent efforts to improve its safety record. But Garuda, the state-owned airline, is the only Indonesian airline that has received an air safety certification from the association, which has stringent standards for safety management. The European Union has banned most of Indonesia's airlines, including Lion Air, from flying to Europe because of safety concerns. Back to Top Pilots were warned plane could drop from sky Air scare... pilots of a Qantas plane carrying more than 100 passengers had difficulty landing the plane due to malprogramming. Photo: Craig Abraham PILOTS flying a Qantas regional service with more than 100 passengers wrestled with shaking joysticks warning of an aerodynamic stall during two botched landing attempts at Kalgoorlie after they unwittingly programmed the flight computers with wrong data. A slip-up by the captain, unnoticed by the co-pilot entering the data, meant the plane's weight was calculated to be almost 9.5 tonnes lighter than it really was, investigators from the Australian Transport Safety Bureau found. That mistake meant the settings for landing angle and speed were wrong for the task, twice triggering automated ''stick shaker'' warnings to alert pilots to an impending aerodynamic stall - when the plane is no longer aerodynamically stable and in danger of dropping from the sky. Advertisement: Story continues below The first stick shaker warnings triggered at 335 metres, and again during the second landing attempt at 106 metres, before pilots managed to land on a third attempt. But during the landing attempts the pilots had not identified the underlying reason why the plane was unstable, pitching and increasingly difficult to control - mistakenly attributing the shakes to air turbulence. ''In response to the stick shaker activations, the flight crew did not follow the prescribed stall recovery procedure and did not perform an immediate go around [aborted landings],'' investigators found. Investigators examining the incident, which occurred on a Boeing 717 flight from Perth under the banner of QantasLink operated by Cobham Aviation Services on October 13, 2010, found a lack of standard cross-checking routines let the data mistake slip through. Although ''well rested'', the captain, who made the initial weight mistake, ''had been subject to numerous [roster] changes that had made it difficult to manage his level of fatigue,'' investigators said. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au/travel/pilots-were-warned-plane-could-drop-from- sky-20120209-1rx4j.html#ixzz1lttNk29k Back to Top Back to Top Feds Look Beyond LightSquared to Set GPS Interference Standards A high-ranking federal official and aviation industry leaders called on Wednesday for rules to prevent future interference with GPS, looking beyond a proposal by would-be hybrid mobile operator LightSquared that may be doomed by broad opposition. LightSquared's proposed cellular data network can't be made compatible with GPS, and the government should set interference standards to prevent future conflicts over companies trying to establish such services, Deputy Transportation Secretary John Porcari told a House Aviation Subcommittee hearing on Wednesday. Porcari, who co-signed a letter last month that ruled out solving interference issues between the two systems in the coming months or years, repeated that assertion at the hearing and gave more details of the reasoning behind it. The National Space-Based Positioning, Navigation and Timing Executive Committee (PNT ExComm), which Porcari co-chairs with a deputy secretary of defense, has effectively dismissed LightSquared's proposal. PNT ExComm represents eight federal departments and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. However, the Federal Communications Commission has the ultimate authority to squash the carrier's plan or let it go forward. LightSquared wants to build an LTE (Long-Term Evolution) network that uses frequencies next to the band assigned to GPS. It would form half of a system that would also include a satellite network, and the company would sell each to carriers at wholesale. The FCC conditionally approved the LTE network plan in January 2011 as part of its push to open up an additional 500MHz of spectrum to mobile broadband. The agency said any interference issues would need to be resolved before LightSquared could launch the network. Porcari and other speakers, including representatives from GPS vendor Garmin and the industry groups Airlines for America, called for a coordinated effort among government agencies to prevent future interference with GPS by other services. His own proposal calls for the National Telecommunications and Information Administration and PNT ExComm to set standards for what uses would be allowed in adjacent spectrum bands. The proposals would be communicated to all affected parties, including potential new users of spectrum. "Establishing those standards would give them a good sense of what kind of uses would be compatible and which would not," Porcari said. In his testimony, Porcari repeated PNT Excom's conclusion that no more tests of LightSquared's system were warranted after the last round, in November, showed that 75 percent of tested general-navigation GPS devices received harmful interference from the LTE transmissions. The federal government spent substantial funds, including US$2 million from the Federal Aviation Administration, on tests of commercial GPS gear such as phones and car navigation devices and on avionics systems, he said. "Due to the Administration's commitment to increase access to broadband, the investment was merited, but given the results we reviewed, further investment cannot be justified at this time," Porcari wrote. One critical system that was shown to suffer from interference in the FAA's tests was TAWS (terrain awareness and warning systems), designed to warn pilots of terrain ahead and prevent crashes into mountains, Porcari said. LightSquared proposed to fix interference with TAWS by adjusting the density and operations of its network where necessary. But there are too many variables involved, Porcari said. "In sum, LightSquared's proposal would require constant, individual monitoring and adjustments to over 40,000 broadcasting sites nationwide, to ensure that they could be, and would remain, consistent with air safety requirements. This is simply not practical," Porcari said. LightSquared said the Transportation Department has refused to discuss the issue directly with the company. LightSquared has alleged that the November tests were rigged by parties, including PNT ExComm, that are biased toward GPS manufacturers. On Wednesday, Porcari refuted those charges. "We worked with LightSquared. They were part of developing the testing protocols, they were part of the testing itself," he told the hearing. The test results were independently reviewed by labs with no ties to the GPS industry, he said. The hearing on Wednesday before the Aviation Subcommittee of the Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure was billed as a general discussion of protecting and improving GPS, but most of the session was focused on the LightSquared controversy. LightSquared slammed the meeting as "a one-sided trial of LightSquared in absentia." "Despite repeated requests, we were told there was no need to testify because LightSquared was not the subject of the hearing," the company said in a statement. Harbinger Capital Partners, the hedge fund that owns LightSquared, also called the hearing unfair. http://www.pcworld.com Back to Top NTSB ISSUES NPRM TO REVISE RULES ON ENFORCEMENT APPEALS WASHINGTON: The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) announced today that it has issued a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (NPRM) seeking public comment regarding amendments to 49 CFR parts 821 and 826, setting forth rules of procedure for the NTSB's review of certificate actions taken by the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and applications for fees and expenses under the Equal Access to Justice Act (EAJA). In December 2010, the NTSB issued an Advance Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (ANPRM) on these rules. The three primary reasons for undertaking that action were: (1) to respond to parties' suggestions for changing the rules; (2) to update outdated rules; and (3) to accommodate prospective electronic filing and document availability in case dockets. The NPRM responds to public comments received following publication of the ANPRM. The NTSB proposes to accept filings via electronic mail. With respect to emergency determination proceedings, the NTSB proposes modifying the rules to include explicit language permitting parties to attach evidence to these petitions for judicial review. In addition, the agency proposes requiring that the FAA provide certificate holders with the releasable portion of the Enforcement Investigative Report prior to at the time of service of an emergency order. Finally, the NPRM suggests changes and updates to outdated rules under both parts 821 and 826. The NTSB encourages public comment concerning these proposed changes. Further, the agency seeks feedback concerning whether any outdated information still exists in the proposed procedural changes. The NPRM is available at: http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/FR-2012-02-09/pdf/2012-2278.pdf The 60-day comment period for the NPRM concludes on April 9, 2012. ### NTSB Media Contact: Keith Holloway keith.holloway@ntsb.gov (202) 314-6100 Back to Top Starr Companies Introduces A Safety Manager Mentoring Program For Aviation Clients NEW YORK, Feb 09, 2012 (BUSINESS WIRE) -- Starr Companies announced the launch of a Safety Manager Mentoring Program for its Starr Aviation customers. Administered by Starr Aviation's Safety and Loss Control unit, the Safety Manager Mentoring Program utilizes a Certified Safety Professional from Starr Aviation to assist the insured's safety manager. The program is designed to identify and fill in knowledge gaps to develop an effective Safety Management System. The tailored mentoring program entails an orientation, on-site training, webinars, and self -study capability for Starr Aviation customers and is an important differentiator in the aviation insurance marketplace. Mr. Bill Eason, President of Starr Aviation, a division of Starr Indemnity & Liability Company, commented; "The goal of our Safety & Loss Control Department is to provide practical solutions that address the specific safety concerns and needs of our clients. We take a non-traditional approach to safety and loss control. We do not tell our clients how to run their safety departments or give them a long list of recommendations of things that need to be corrected. Instead, we find areas they are working on or would like to improve. We roll up our sleeves and help them do it." Starr Aviation will showcase this new service starting at the Helicopter Association International's HELI-EXPO in Dallas, Texas from February 12-14 with representatives from the Safety and Loss Control Department available to answer any questions. Please contact Greg Freeman, Vice President of Safety & Loss Control at 404-401-4532 or at greg.freeman@starrcompanies.com for more information. Starr Companies is the marketing name for C. V. Starr & Co., Inc. and Starr Insurance Holdings Inc. and is a global, privately held, insurance, financial services, and investments organization. Starr provides high-quality, customized property and casualty and accident & health insurance products, with significant access to the excess and surplus marketplace for certain lines of business. Starr also writes specialty lines covering aviation, marine, energy and excess casualty insurance, including risks with international exposures. Starr also provides a broad spectrum of services, including claims handling and settlement, reinsurance, risks assessment, loss control and travel assistance services. For more information visit us at www.starrcompanies.com SOURCE: Starr Companies Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP, FRAeS CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC