Flight Safety Information June 15, 2012 - No. 123 In This Issue Columbus Police Helicopter Makes Emergency Landing For Second Time In 2 Weeks Aircraft engineered with failure in mind may last longer Old aircraft wreckage found on Alaska glacier Two rescued from helicopter crash at Oak Island JetBlue passengers sue airline over pilot scare PRISM Certification Consultants Calhoun pilot takes off on incredible journey Cold War U-2 Pilot to Get Silver Star Final Agenda for NTSB's General Aviation Safety Forum Announced Cape Town's Airport Could Be A Booming 'Aerotropolis' Pilots race to be China's first woman in space Columbus Police Helicopter Makes Emergency Landing For Second Time In 2 Weeks A Columbus police helicopter made an emergency landing at a southeast side elementary school on Thursday afternoon. Police said that the helicopter landed as a precaution at Deshler Elementary School, located at 1234 E. Deshler Ave., shortly after 4 p.m., 10TV News reported. There were no immediate reports of injuries. According to police, a chip light came on. The same Columbus helicopter made an emergency landing on June 5 because an emergency light came on. The helicopter safely landed at the Audubon Park, located near Weber Road and Interstate 71 on the north side. http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/2012/06/14/columbus-police-helicopter-makes-emergency- landing.html Back to Top Aircraft engineered with failure in mind may last longer New design approach tailors planes to fly in the face of likely failures. Complex systems inhabit a "gray world" of partial failures, MIT's Olivier de Weck says: While a system may continue to operate as a whole, bits and pieces inevitably degrade. Over time, these small failures can add up to a single catastrophic failure, incapacitating the system. "Think about your car," says de Weck, an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems. "Most of the things are working, but maybe your right rearview mirror is cracked, and maybe one of the cylinders in your engine isn't working well, and your left taillight is out. The reality is that many, many real-world systems have partial failures." This is no less the case for aircraft. De Weck says it's not uncommon that, from time to time, a plane's sensors may short-circuit, or its rudders may fail to respond: "And then the question is, in that partially failed state, how will the system perform?" The answer to that question is often unclear - partly because of how systems are initially designed. When deciding on the configuration of aircraft, engineers typically design for the optimal condition: a scenario in which all components are working perfectly. However, de Weck notes that much of a plane's lifetime is spent in a partially failed state. What if, he reasoned, aircraft and other complex systems could be designed from the outset to operate not in the optimal scenario, but for suboptimal conditions? De Weck and his colleagues at MIT and the Draper Laboratory have created a design approach that tailors planes to fly in the face of likely failures. The method, which the authors call a "multistate design approach," determines the likelihood of various failures over an airplane's lifetime. Through simulations, the researchers changed a plane's geometry - for example, making its tail higher, or its rudder smaller - and then observed its performance under various failure scenarios. De Weck says engineers may use the approach to design safer, longer-lasting aerial vehicles. The group will publish a paper describing its approach in the Journal of Aircraft. "If you admit ahead of time that the system will spend most of its life in a degraded state, you make different design decisions," de Weck says. "You can end up with airplanes that look quite different, because you're really emphasizing robustness over optimality." De Weck collaborated with Jeremy Agte, formerly at Draper Laboratory and now an assistant professor of aeronautics and astronautics at the Air Force Institute of Technology, and Nicholas Borer, a systems design engineer at MIT. Agte says making design changes based on likely failures may be particularly useful for vehicles engineered for long-duration missions. "As our systems operate for longer and longer periods of time, these changes translate to significantly improved mission completion rates," Agte says. "For instance, an Air Force unmanned aerial vehicle that experiences a failure would have inherent stability and control designed to ensure adequate performance for continued mission operation, rather than having to turn around and come home." The weight of failure As a case study, the group analyzed the performance of a military twin-engine turboprop plane - a small, 12-seater aircraft that has been well-studied in the past. The researchers set about doing what de Weck calls "guided brainstorming": essentially drawing up a list of potential failures, starting from perfect condition and branching out to consider various possible malfunctions. "It looks kind of like a tree where initially everything is working perfectly, and then as the tree opens up, different failure trajectories can happen," de Weck says. The group then used an open-source flight simulator to model how the plane would fly - following certain branches of the tree, as it were. The researchers modified the simulator to change the shape of the plane under different failure conditions, and analyzed the plane's resulting performance. They found that for certain scenarios, changing the geometry of the plane significantly improved its safety, or robustness, following a failure. For example, the group studied the plane's operation during a maneuver called the "Dutch roll," in which the plane rocks from side to side, its wingtips rolling in a figure-eight motion. The potentially dangerous motion is much more pronounced when a plane's rudder is faulty, or one of its engines isn't responding. Using their design approach, the group found that in such partially failed conditions, if the plane's tail was larger, it could damp the motion, and steady the aircraft. Of course, a plane's shape can't morph in midflight to accommodate an engine sputter or a rudder malfunction. To arrive at a plane's final shape - a geometry that can withstand potential failures - de Weck and his researchers weighed the likelihood of each partial failure, using that data to inform their decisions on how to change the plane's shape in a way that would address the likeliest failures. Beyond perfection De Weck says that while the group's focus on failure represents a completely new approach to design, there is also a psychological element with which engineers may have to grapple. "Many engineers are perfectionists, so deliberately designing something that's not going to be fully functional is hard," de Weck says. "But we're showing that by acknowledging imperfection, you can actually make the system better." Jaroslaw Sobieski, a distinguished research associate at NASA Langley Research Center, views the new design approach as a potential improvement in the overall safety of aircraft. He says engineering future systems with failure in mind will ensure that "even if failure occurs, the flight operation will continue" - albeit with some loss in performance - "but sufficient to at least [achieve] a safe landing. In practice, that alternative may actually increase the safety level and reduce the aircraft cost," when compared with other design approaches. The team is using its approach to evaluate the performance of an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) that flies over Antarctica continuously for six months at a time, at high altitudes, to map its ice sheets. This vehicle must fly, even in the face of inevitable failures: It's on a remote mission, and grounding the UAV for repairs is impossible. Using their method, de Weck and his colleagues are finding that the vehicle's shape plays a crucial role in its long-term performance. In addition to lengthy UAV missions, de Weck says the group's approach may be used to design other systems that operate remotely, without access to regular maintenance - such as undersea sensor networks and possible colonies in space. "If we look at the space station, the air-handling system, the water-recycling system, those systems are really important, but their components also tend to fail," de Weck says. "So applying this [approach] to the design of habitats, and even long-term planetary colonies, is something we want to look at." http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2012/designing-for-failure-0615.html Back to Top Old aircraft wreckage found on Alaska glacier (Reuters) - Military officials said on Thursday they had found what is believed to be old aircraft wreckage, along with some possible bone tissue, scattered on a glacier near Anchorage. The wreckage was spotted on Sunday when Alaska Army National Guardsmen were conducting a helicopter training flight in the Knik Glacier region northeast of Anchorage, officials from Joint Base Elmendorf-Richardson said. "It looks like it is a military aircraft," said Air Force Master Sergeant Mikal Canfield, a spokesman for the Anchorage base. No other details about the wreckage were available, he said. The base called the wreck possibly "historic" and said the Federal Aviation Administration had issued a temporary flight restriction for the area, but did not elaborate. Nothing has been taken from the site, pending further investigation, Canfield said. At the request of Alaska military officials, the Hawaii-based U.S. Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command (JPAC) is trying to plan a recovery mission at the Knik Glacier site, a spokeswoman said. JPAC, which focuses on search and recovery missions for missing U.S. service members, hopes to schedule an Alaska trip and line up necessary expertise to work on the glacier, said Captain Jamie Dobson, a spokeswoman for the command. "We believe that there's a reason for JPAC to be involved," she said. http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/sns-rt-us-usa-airplane-wreck-alaskabre85e042- 20120614,0,928819.story Back to Top Two rescued from helicopter crash at Oak Island Two victims involved in a helicopter crash Thursday afternoon around 4:30 p.m. are still being evaluated in the hospital, according to a New Hanover Regional Medical Center spokeswoman. The aircraft fell 50 feet into the water off of Oak Island. The U.S. Coast Guard says the two rescued near the Yaupon Pier had taken off from ILM about an hour earlier. "All of a sudden it started going down and I didn't think anything unusual," said Cass Safrit, who witnessed the crash. "I just thought he was going to hover lower to the water." "I thought he was trying to land until he hit and I saw a big splash and he rolled over," said Warren Harrell, who also witnessed the helicopter crash. The Coast Guard's initial report says the pilot, 22-year-old Will Mistrot, was flying about 50 feet off the water when the rotor stalled, causing it to fall, crash and flip into the ocean below. "Emergency personnel were on the spot very quickly and it looks like everyone did a good job getting those folks on shore," Safrit said. A good samaritan who was in a nearby boat rescued the two victims, a man and woman. The two had minor cuts and bruises, but were taken to New Hanover Regional Medical Center for evaluation The helicopter belongs to boatpix.com, a company that takes photos of boats from the air. The Coast Guard says the National Transportation Safety Board is now investigating the crash. Ed Crump, a reporter from Raleigh WTVD, was on vacation at Caswell Beach and saw the crash. "I remarked about it going by, and then I said, 'Oh, it looks like he's gonna land,' but he went down way too hard, and the thing went under water, flipped over," Crump said. "I got the binoculars the neighbors had and watched it. It appeared two people were taken out of the helicopter by nearby boats, or at least pulled out of the water, and the rescue people we've seen go out came back for a backboard, but didn't bring anybody, and they also didn't dive by the helicopter, so we're still awaiting word on the condition and the number of people." Tommy Thoms, the owner of the pier, told WTVD he saw the chopper hit the water. He, too, said it was floating upside down, but two people in it got out OK. "I thought he was gonna land. He had pontoons," witness Warren Harrell said. "He went down pretty hard. It made a big splash." http://www.wwaytv3.com/2012/06/15/two-rescued-from-helicopter-crash-oak-island Back to Top JetBlue passengers sue airline over pilot scare (AP) - Ten passengers filed a lawsuit Wednesday against JetBlue Airways, claiming they feared for their lives when a pilot had to be physically restrained after running through the cabin yelling about Jesus and al-Qaida during a New York-to-Las Vegas flight in March. The lawsuit, filed in state Supreme Court in Queens, claims the airline was "grossly negligent" in allowing Capt. Clayton Osbon to fly. Plaintiff Michael Bedziner, 48, of Commack, N.Y., who was headed to a conference of security consultants, said that since the Sept. 11 attacks, he has often looked around airplane cabins, suspicious of who may be a terrorist. "But you always look to the airline crew and say, 'OK, this is a group I can turn to and say we're safer.' What does this tell us? Now the very people that we're supposed to turn to for that assurance are the ones we're frightened of. And the pilot, no less," he said at a news conference announcing the lawsuit. Sharon Jones, a JetBlue spokeswoman, said the airline does not comment on pending litigation. A flight attendant's ribs were bruised as passengers tried to restrain Osbon, but no one on board was seriously injured. The March 27 flight was forced to make an emergency landing in Amarillo, Texas. Osbon faces a hearing Friday morning in Amarillo to determine if he is mentally competent to stand trial. He faces federal charges of interfering with a flight crew. If convicted, he could be sentenced to up to 20 years in prison. Attorneys Jonathan Reiter and Steve Epstein, who represent the 10 plaintiffs in the lawsuit, said they intend to seek information on whether there were any indications Osbon had shown signs of mental instability before March 27. "We're going to have to delve into that," Reiter said. "That is one of the things this lawsuit is about." According to the lawsuit and a federal indictment, witnesses on Flight 191 say Osbon ran through the cabin in a wild rant. The first officer locked him out of the cockpit and passengers wrestled Osbon to the floor. The lawsuit also claims he was "yelling about September 11th, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, al-Qaida and terrorists." Other comments, according to the suit, included: "we're all going down," ''you better start praying right now," ''I'm going to show you Iraq and Iran right now," ''there's a bomb on board," and "the plane will never make it to Vegas." Neither Bedziner nor three other plaintiffs at the news conference could provide many specific details on what they heard. They said they witnessed the commotion from various venues aboard the jetliner. Richard Signoretti, 48, of Rosedale, N.Y., had his eyes closed and was listening to music when the woman next to him poked him to get his attention after the trouble started. "What I got from him was, 'You're not going to make it to Las Vegas.' It was extremely frightening, it was extremely unnerving. I still haven't gotten a good night's sleep," Signoretti said. The lawsuit claims JetBlue knew or should have known Osbon was unfit to be entrusted with the aircraft as pilot. The 10 plaintiffs, all from the metropolitan New York area, are seeking unspecified damages for emotional distress. http://www.businessweek.com/ap/2012-06-13/apnewsbreak-jetblue-fliers-sue-over-pilot-scare Back to Top Back to Top Calhoun pilot takes off on incredible journey Amelia Earhart competed in the first Air Race Classic in 1929. She came in third. Decades later, Dianna Stanger, a pilot at Calhoun County Airport, is competing in the same race and hoping to do even better. Stanger, and her co-pilot, Victoria Holt, took off from Calhoun County Airport on Thursday to participate in the 36th annual Air Race Classic, a 2,681 mile race that brings together female pilots from around the world. Stanger and Holt took off from the airport after a surprise party on Thursday morning. Stanger said it felt good to see people gathered to see them off. "As pilots, we don't get much of a crowd," she said. "It was a wonderful send off. I think we're still floating from it." The race begins Tuesday in Lake Havasu, Ariz. The pilots will travel through eight states during the race. Stanger said the race is challenging because it is four days of nonstop flight planning. The race gives them the chance to fly, seeing parts of the country and meeting people they wouldn't otherwise meet. The best part is having the chance to see so many women pilots gathered together to show their skills. Flying in a Cirrus SR-22, Stanger and Holt will be competing against 56 other teams in their state- of-the-art aircraft. This is their second time entering the competition. Stanger is passionate about encouraging girls to enter the aviation world. Any money raised from the race will go to girls aviation scholarships, she said. "Only about 7 percent of the pilots in the world are women. As females, we're used to being the only females in the airport. It's neat to see so many of us out here flying," she said. http://www.victoriaadvocate.com/news/2012/jun/14/dw_pl_pilots_061512_179470/?news&calhoun- county Back to Top Cold War U-2 Pilot to Get Silver Star (AP)-The Air Force will posthumously award the Silver Star on Friday to Francis Gary Powers, whose capture in 1960 after his spy plane was shot down over the Soviet Union became a Cold War flash point. The award represents a belated honor for Mr. Powers, who was held prisoner for nearly two years before being exchanged for a top Soviet spy. It also underscores a little-remembered fact: Even in an era of high-tech drones, the Air Force still relies on manned spy planes such as modern versions of the U-2, five decades after the famous exchange. According to the Air Force, 33 U-2s are in service today. "The U-2 is an extremely capable surveillance platform that has one key advantage: It has already been paid for," said Richard Aboulafia, an aviation analyst with Teal Group, an aerospace consultancy. "In a grim budget environment, sticking with an existing aircraft is a good way to preserve cash for other priorities," he added. Details surrounding the U-2 program were long obscured by government secrecy. But documents that were declassified in the 1990s showed Mr. Powers's flight had been a joint Central Intelligence Agency-Air Force mission, making him eligible for military medals. In a roundtable discussion with reporters this week, his son, Gary Powers Jr.-who lobbied for the award, the service's third-highest for valor after the Medal of Honor and the Air Force Cross-said the incident was the subject of "part-truths, mistruth, innuendo, some outright lies" that took decades to set straight. Only after information about the incident was declassified, he added, could the truth emerge about his father, who died in a helicopter crash in 1977. "He did not spill his guts," Mr. Powers said. "He kept back all the vital information he could." The Air Force this year canceled plans to replace the U-2 with an unmanned aircraft, the Global Hawk. The military originally had envisioned a drone that could stay in the skies hours longer than a manned aircraft. But amid Pentagon budget pressures, the Air Force moved to cancel a version of the drone known as the "Block 30," saying that the U-2 would be less expensive to operate. The cost factor was underscored this week, after one of the Navy's unmanned aircraft crashed in Maryland. The aircraft was one of five Global Hawk drones acquired from the Air Force for surveillance testing; according to the Navy, the military paid $45.9 million for the crashed drone, although Pentagon budget documents put its average unit cost much higher. The unit cost of the U-2 is classified. While the Air Force based its decision on cost, aviation experts say there are advantages to a surveillance plane with a pilot in the cockpit. The aircraft can better respond to short-notice requests from the ground to fly over a target, they say. "There is a lot of value added in having the man in the loop up there," said Maj. Neal Hinson, who flew the U-2 for about six years for the Air Force. Maj. Hinson, who has 1,300 hours of cockpit time in the aircraft, said there was an "insatiable demand" for the intelligence the high-altitude plane could provide. U-2 pilots "go to all those places that you see on CNN," he said. "And a lot of the places you don't see on CNN." In recent years, U-2s have flown reconnaissance missions over Afghanistan, Iraq and the Balkans. The aircraft, nicknamed the "Dragon Lady," has an unusual glider-like design, and is notoriously difficult to handle. The plane routinely flies at altitudes over 70,000 feet, requiring the pilot to wear a full pressure suit, much like an astronaut. Missions can drag on for over 10 hours. Landing is equally difficult; another U-2 pilot has to chase the plane in a souped-up car, talking the pilot down to the ground. The aircraft lands tail wheel first, and the cockpit has poor forward visibility. Clayton Laurie, a historian at the Center for the Study of Intelligence at the CIA, said the spy agency needed highly skilled military pilots to fly the planes over the Soviet Union. Pilots such as Mr. Powers resigned their military commissions and became CIA contract employees-a process known as "sheep dipping"-so that if a pilot was shot down, the U.S. government could deny involvement. Mr. Powers was a captain when he left the Air Force. The U-2s flown today are "far more sophisticated" than the ones piloted by Mr. Powers, Mr. Laurie said. "We kind of take for granted that we have this kind of technology, but at the time they were operating with the slide rule," he said. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303410404577466940172036420.html Back to Top Final Agenda for NTSB's General Aviation Safety Forum Announced The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) today released the final agenda including speaker names, affiliations, and biographies for the forum on General Aviation Safety: Climbing to the Next Level, scheduled for Tuesday and Wednesday, June 19 & 20. Representatives from government, industry and academia will serve as panelists during the forum and will discuss key safety topics including pilot training and performance, pilot access to and use of weather-related information, and aircraft design, certification, and maintenance. Panelists will also share information about new technologies that may be beneficial in preventing future accidents. In addition to the agenda announcement, the NTSB has released a promotional video highlighting the major issues to be discussed at the forum. The video may be viewed here: Member Earl Weener announces NTSB forum on General Aviation Safety "Climbing to the next level" The forum, being held at the NTSB Conference Center and Board Room in Washington DC, is free and open to all; no registration is required. The entire two-day event will be webcast live. An archive of the webcast will be available on our website for three months following the event. Organizations and/or individuals can submit input for consideration as part of the forum's archived materials. Submissions should directly address one or more of the forum's eight topic areas (identified by the panel titles) and should be submitted electronically as an attached document to: gasafetyforum@ntsb.gov. The deadline for receipt is September 1, 2012. Input received will be entered into the Safety Board's public docket on this forum. Follow us on twitter at @NTSB. The hashtag for the forum is #GASafety. Back to Top Cape Town's Airport Could Be A Booming 'Aerotropolis' SOUTH African Airways' (SAA's) decision to cancel its direct flights between London and Cape Town has refocused attention on the role of an airport in a city's long-term economic planning. Given that competitive airlines such as British Airways and Emirates are seeing demand for this route increase enough to add flights to their schedules, there is no doubt that - despite SAA's decision - a unique opportunity exists for Cape Town International Airport to become a thriving & aerotropolis& and a key player in Cape Town becoming a global transport hub. International trade has become more important as a factor in the global economy over the past six decades. Since 1950, world trade by value has increased by 2000%, far outstripping global population and gross domestic product growth rates. Since 1970, seaborne trade has grown 4% a year, while air cargo has increased by 9% a year. During this period, some countries have recognised the potential economic advantage of their global locations, developing themselves as transport hubs. Most notable among these is Singapore, which today has the world's largest transshipment port, handling 20% of the world's transshipment traffic and with 85% of the containers passing through its harbours being destined for somewhere else. Singapore's Changi Airport is one of the busiest in the world, with more than 6000 flights a week, handling more than 40-million passengers and 1,8- million tons of cargo a year. Others, such as Dubai, have followed a similar strategy - using their location as a crossroad for global sea and air traffic as a facilitator of stellar economic growth. Panama, long the beneficiary of east-west trade via the Panama Canal, has now recognised the growing importance of north-south trade and is building the brand new airport city of Panatropolis, which is expected to be home to 200000 people. The reason the Dutch chose to settle in Cape Town in 1652 was precisely this locational advantage. In 1871, however, the simultaneous completion of the Suez Canal and the US transcontinental railroad had a dramatic effect on world trade, ensuring that goods could circle the globe in record time without having to pass the Cape. This was worsened when the Panama Canal was opened in 1914, and it has remained a problem for as long as the vast majority of international trade and economic activity has been focused in the northern hemisphere. However, the world has changed in the past 20 years and Cape Town's location must once again be considered an economic advantage. More and more trade is taking place between the developing countries of the south and east, putting us in the middle of it. We are also able to take advantage of all major forms of transport used in international trade: sea, rail, road and air (and, increasingly, bandwidth). Air transport is the one that seems to get the least attention from national and local authorities but it is a major opportunity for Cape Town going forward. For example, flying from London to Sydney via Cape Town only takes 90 minutes longer than via Singapore. A long-haul flight from Singapore to Sao Paulo could be broken up with a stop in Cape Town. It is time for Cape Town to consider how it can put its international airport to maximum use. As Prof John Kasarda, who coined the term & aerotropolis& points out, & transportation infrastructure has historically shaped business location and urban development& Kasarda explains that airports represent the & fifth wave& of transit-oriented urban development, following from highways in the 20th century, railways in the 19th century, rivers and canals in the 18th century and ocean port cities before that. Today, more than a third of all goods traded goes by air. It is expected that, between 2010 and 2030, worldwide commercial air passenger traffic will increase from 4,9-billion to 13,3-billion and global air cargo traffic will triple. Taking this into consideration, China is planning to build 100 new airports by 2020. In the way that cities grew up around harbours or railway stations in the past, an aerotropolis develops in concentric rings around the airport. It consists of hotels, conference facilities, offices, retail outlets, residences and light manufacturing and distribution facilities for industries that rely on speed to market for their competitive advantage. It is important to make sure the development around the airport is done in a planned way to maximise the economic benefit. This requires that city and airport authorities develop a common vision for the future and a plan that enables the airport to become a driver of local economic development. Since the redevelopment leading up to the 2010 World Soccer Cup, SA's airports have increasingly become places to do much more than catch a flight. Globally, the rental of commercial and retail space at airports makes up about 60%- 70% of earnings, while in SA it is about 50% - suggesting great opportunities for further development. Cape Town International Airport is well placed to develop as an aerotropolis, becoming a hub of business activity and the source of employment opportunities for the communities based in the underdeveloped Metro South East. But we haven't even begun to scratch the surface of what is possible. There is a need to work together to get national, provincial and local government behind the idea of Cape Town International Airport as an aerotropolis, much as they have done for both OR Tambo and King Shaka airports. We also need to work jointly in convincing international airlines that Cape Town is well placed to act as a stopover point for long-haul flights, transferring passengers and breaking up bulk cargo for redistribution. The growing presence of more fuel-efficient long-distance aircraft such as the Boeing 787 Dreamliner and the Airbus A380 makes this increasingly viable. Transport access to and from the airport is key to its long-term development potential. Road access must remain as easy as it currently is, but rail access, whether for goods or people, must also be built into longer-term plans. Services provided by the city need to be advanced so that the area can handle the kind of growth that is possible. The rezoning of land owned by the Airports Company SA (Acsa) and other privately held land around the airport for mixed commercial, industrial and other use will help prevent the airport becoming redundant in case of economic changes. The development of Cape Town as a major international air transport hub needs much more focus. The airport and its role in positioning Cape Town's global locational advantage must become a central part of the long-term 2040 vision of the city and province that is currently under development. To maximise the potential of the current airport, planning should start for the optimal long-term growth in a way that it earns SA growing amounts of foreign currency and creates much- needed jobs for the people of the surrounding areas. By getting all parties behind the development of Cape Town International Airport as a busy aerotropolis, and linking this with the maximisation of our other transport hubs such as Table Bay Harbour, Cape Town can realise the dream of once again using its global location to take advantage of growing international trade. In this way, the rest of the world can help us provide a better life for more of our people. Lundy is CEO of Accelerate Cape Town. Cloete is GM, Acsa: Cape Town International Airport. 'The world has changed and Cape Town's location must once again be considered an economic advantage' http://www.aviationpros.com Back to Top Pilots race to be China's first woman in space BEIJING: One of two fighter pilots will become the first Chinese woman in space this month after the two were shortlisted for a place in the three-person team that will blast off in the Shenzhou-9 spacecraft, the state news agency Xinhua said. Chinese media described Major Liu Yang, from Henan, as a ''hero pilot'' who achieved a successful emergency landing after a dramatic birdstrike spattered the windshield of her plane with blood. Her rival, Captain Wang Yaping, from Shandong, is said to have flown rescue missions during the Sichuan earthquake and piloted a cloud-seeding plane to help clear the skies of rain for the Beijing Olympics in 2008. ''They are selected as members of the first batch of female astronauts in China because of their excellent flight skills and psychological quality,'' Xinhua said. This month's mission is regarded as an important stage in China's ambitious space program. ''The Shenzhou-9 will perform our country's first manned space docking mission with the orbiting Tiangong-1 space lab module,'' the chief designer of the manned space program, Zhou Jianping, told state media. ''It means China's spacecraft will become a genuine manned shuttle tool between space and Earth. It can send human beings to space stations or space labs. '' Valentina Tereshkova, of the Soviet Union, became the first woman to go into space in 1963. Both the women shortlisted are in their 30s and have one child. Chinese authorities have decreed that only mothers can train as astronauts, apparently because of their concern that space flight might affect fertility. Earlier this year, the deputy editor-in-chief of an official magazine said women astronauts should also have no scars - which might open and bleed in space - or body odour. ''They even must not have decayed teeth because any small flaw might cause great trouble or a disaster in space,'' said Pan Zhihao of Space International, published by the China Academy of Space Technology. Read more: http://www.smh.com.au Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP, FRAeS, FISASI CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC