Flight Safety Information July 18, 2012 - No. 147 In This Issue ICE plane makes emergency landing Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport Helicopter crash in Republic of Congo kills 2 Ukrainian pilots JFK jet in laser scare...Pilot's eyes injured Once a pilot, now a computer's sidekick Deadly central Utah airplane crash spread over 400 feet ARGUS PROS Aviation Auditing AU adopts Nigerian candidate for ICAO presidency Delta airlines enhancing security after needles found in sandwiches Aircraft Maintenance Firm Settles FCPA Probe, Pays $2 Million Penalty ICE plane makes emergency landing Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport A plane with 75 passengers, many of them immigrants bound for deportation or court appearances, made an emergency landing Tuesday at Phoenix-Mesa Gateway Airport after losing power to one engine. Mesa was the scheduled destination for the flight from McCarran International Airport in Las Vegas and no one was injured as the MD-80 aircraft landed safely, said Amber Cargile, public-affairs officer for U.S Immigration and Customs Enforcement. "At no point was anyone's life in danger," she said. "There were concerns it (the engine) was inoperable." She said the plane had 75 passengers, many of whom were being taken to ICE's Arizona Removal Operations and Coordination Center at the east Mesa airport. ICE uses the Mesa facility as a staging area for 4 to 5 "repatriation flights" per week to Guatemala, Honduras and El Salvador, Cargile said. The detainees were likely being prepared for deportation after they were located at West Coast cities. About 20 flights per week move detainees from Mesa to various places, although most are taken by bus to Mexico, she said. The other countries pose a more significant logistical issue because they do not share a border with Mexico. "It's a well-synchronized system," Cargile said, and "the minor in-flight mechanical issue" on Tuesday was unusual. ICE uses a contractor to arrange the flights. Captain Forrest Smith, a Mesa Fire Department spokesman, said a large number of firefighters responded to the landing as a precaution. The Mesa Fire Department has a large, state-of-the-art fire station located near the ICE facility. Phoenix- Mesa Gateway Airport is emerging as a busy suburban facility, with Allegiant Air and Spirit Airlines, offering regularly scheduled commercial flights. http://tucsoncitizen.com/arizona-news/2012/07/17/ice-plane-makes-emergency-landing-phoenix-mesa- gateway-airport/ Back to Top Helicopter crash in Republic of Congo kills 2 Ukrainian pilots BRAZZAVILLE, Republic of Congo (AP) - A local official says a police helicopter crash in the Republic of Congo killed two Ukrainian pilots. Police commissioner Patou Mascott said Tuesday that the MI-2 helicopter was carrying only the two pilots when it crashed to the ground and caught fire on Monday in Mbouambe, a town 180 kilometers north of the capital, Brazzaville. Mascott said the bodies of the two men have been recovered and sent to Brazzaville. The Republic of Congo is often overshadowed by its much larger neighbor, Congo - the scene of numerous crashes involving aging Soviet planes. Back to Top JFK jet in laser scare Pilot's eyes injured A lunatic aimed a powerful laser beam at an airliner flying over Long Island on its way into JFK - sending the pilot to the hospital and endangering the lives of the 84 people aboard. The first officer on JetBlue Flight 657 from Syracuse was treated for injuries to both eyes after the blinding flash of light lit up the cockpit Sunday night - as the FBI and Suffolk cops hunted for the person responsible. He could face federal prison time. The Embraer E190 jet landed safely, and the injured pilot - identified by sources as First Officer Robert Pemberton, 52 - was met at the gate and taken to Jamaica Hospital. Authorities believe the beam came from around West Islip, Babylon or Lindenhurst. "You wouldn't think a pen laser would go that far of a distance," said shocked West Babylon resident Cindy Konik, 50. "They should be outlawed." Flight 657 - behind schedule because of weather problems - took off from Syracuse at about 8:15 p.m. It was on its final approach to JFK - heading due west at 5,000 feet just south of West Islip, with Pemberton at the controls - when two bursts of bright green light were fired from the ground. The startled captain, who was not identified, immediately took over the controls from his temporarily blinded colleague. "We just got lasered up here - two green flashes into the cockpit," the captain radioed controllers at Ronkonkoma. "It caught the first officer's eye - two green flashes, and it caught the first officer in the eye," the captain said, according to a recording on the Web site LiveATC.net. The captain asked for medical personnel to meet the plane at its gate at JFK. Pemberton's eyesight was not permanently damaged, said the sources. He was expected to seek further treatment from an ophthalmologist. "The first officer went to the hospital, and that's pretty serious stuff," said a federal law-enforcement source. FBI agents request that anyone with information call the agency at (212) 384-1000 . Handheld lasers are used as pointers for presentations or business meetings. But they have surprising range, and from miles away can bathe an aircraft cockpit in super-bright light. Some 3,576 aircraft laser incidents were reported nationwide in 2011, a 26 percent boost over 2010. New York-area planes were lasered 141 times last year. So far this year, planes over the New York metro area have been hit 46 times. Aviation experts say no one should doubt the danger. Both pilots aboard a Southwest Airlines flight landing in Baltimore in February 2011 went to the hospital when someone fired a laser beam into their cockpit. Luckily, that plane also landed safely. Read more: http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/jfk_jet_in_laser_scare_p7mfoXb6j6TetDO6ZOYaeN#ixzz20ySmk24l Back to Top Once a pilot, now a computer's sidekick Captain Chesley Sullenberger checks the cockpit's computer switches moments before take-off. Industry analysts estimated last week that in the next 20 years, the airlines are going to need 466,000 new pilots. When I said to an airline pilot friend that such a job market would make it easy for his son to follow in his footsteps, he smiled. "I think he wants a flying job instead," he replied. I noted that this sounded odd coming from a fellow who just flew a planeload of passengers back from overseas. "I didn't fly," he replied. "The computer flew. I sat in the front office, monitoring systems." "Who flies better," I asked, "you or the computer?" "Oh, the computer," he replied. "No contest, as long as things function. When they stop functioning, it's a different story. Then the computer quits, and I go to work. Provided I still remember how." The dilemma isn't new, but it's being discussed more and more frequently. Pilots don't fly enough. They get rusty, and when they really need to call upon their flying muscles, they find them either atrophied or insufficiently developed in the first place. The symbol of the problem has become Air France's Flight 447, an Airbus dropped by its pilots into the ocean three years ago, according to a French inquiry's final report released last month. When a faulty speed sensor made the autopilot quit, two co-pilots on the flight deck would have needed to hand-fly their Airbus 330, established in cruise at 35,000 feet over the Atlantic, until the captain, who was taking his scheduled nap, returned to the cockpit. Their task was to fly straight and level for two or three minutes on instruments, with no visual reference to the horizon, without reliable airspeed indication, in light turbulence. They couldn't do it. By the time the captain came back, the Airbus had stopped flying and was about a minute from contacting the water. In 1915, Arthur Roy Brown, the flying ace credited with bringing down Manfred von Richthofen, the Red Baron, had his pilot's license issued with six hours of flight time. By comparison, even the least experienced pilot on AF447 had 2,800 hours in his logbook. It isn't that today's pilots train fewer hours; it's that the study of increasingly complex systems and regulations compete for time and emphasis with flying skills. Airmanship and command authority are being boxed in by petty rules, for the comfort of lawyers and bureaucrats rather than to enhance operational efficiency and flight safety. Before leaving the flight deck for his scheduled rest, the captain of Air France's ill-fated Flight 447 was obliged, as part of his briefing, to ask his relief pilot if he had a commercial pilot's license. Why would anyone weigh down the captain's workload with such a query? Would an unlicensed impostor say to the captain: "Crikey, skipper, I didn't know you needed a license for this gig" or would he just lie and say: "Yes, sir." The crew whose fate it was to be flying Flight 447 had the necessary qualifications. The problem was that they had them in their wallets, rather than in their heads. Qualifications in wallets satisfy bureaucracies, but only qualifications in heads ensure the safety of a flight. It was a "Thales"-type speed sensor that iced up as the Airbus was skirting a thunderstorm high above the South Atlantic. Air France, aware of the limitations of the device, had just begun to replace the $3,500 units. It hadn't gotten around to changing it in the ill-fated airplane before it departed Rio de Janeiro for Paris on the night of June 1, 2009. Grounding the entire Airbus fleet until all units were replaced may have cost only a fraction of what the accident, investigation and lawsuits will end up costing Air France, to say nothing of the tragic loss of 228 lives. Some analysts argue, though, that turning all potential flaws into mandatory "no go" items would make air transportation unaffordable. The "Thales" sensors were more susceptible to icing than other designs, but they didn't all ice up, and the planes carrying those that did remained flyable and were landed safely by their Air France crews. So were two other Airbus 330s belonging to Paris-based Air Caraibes Atlantique. Only Flight 447 fell into the ocean. One disaster is one too many, of course, but it was no more an inevitable consequence than it would be for a blown tire to flip a car. Airspeed is crucial to flight. Too fast and the plane can break up; too slow and it can fall out of the sky. When airspeed indicators become unreliable, the computerized systems - autopilot and auto-throttles - quit. On the Airbus, this is announced by the aural warning of a cavalry charge, the computer's way of calling the human pilot to the rescue. Aviation is full of pithy sayings. One is that an airspeed sensor has no backup except airmanship. Losing airspeed readings can range from a non-event to a dire emergency depending on the pilot's skill and additional circumstances. The autopilot quitting on AF447, as it was designed to do after losing reliable airspeed indication, could and should have been a non-event. It left an airworthy aircraft flying straight and level in light turbulence. All Flight 447 needed was a pilot to fly it - or just let the plane fly itself, which is what planes trimmed for cruise flight tend to do in stable air, especially if their wings are kept level - but, as the cockpit voice recorder revealed, there were no pilots on the flight deck. There were two systems managers being confronted by a system that suddenly had become unmanageable. Real pilots would have disregarded the rebellious computers going viral with flashing lights, cavalry charges, buzzers and bells, huffily announcing all the things they stopped doing for the humans aboard or required the humans to do for them. They would have let the computers crash and concentrated on flying the plane. The systems managers stopped flying and crashed with their computers. This isn't how the French inquiry puts it, needless to say. I wouldn't put it this way in an inquiry myself. I'm exaggerating to make the point that our technology may be getting ahead of itself. If so, we may hire 466,000 systems managers of an unmanageable system in the next 20 years. http://fullcomment.nationalpost.com/2012/07/18/george-jonas-once-a-pilot-now-a-computers-sidekick/ Back to Top Deadly central Utah airplane crash spread over 400 feet Sevier County officers found remains they believe to be those of a California couple killed in a plane crash Saturday. "All evidence leads us to believe that this is the plane and the missing party," Sevier County Sheriff Nathan Curtis said Tuesday evening after spending the day searching through the site. California Bank of Commerce Director Peter Branagh and his wife, Mona, on Saturday were flying in a four-seat Cirrus SR22 single-engine aircraft from Northern California to Aspen, Colo. They never reached their destination, The Contra Costa Times reported Monday. Upon encountering the scene early Tuesday, Curtis said he was shocked by the wreckage. "Basically the plane was just broken up and spread over 400 feet in distance," Curtis said. "To put it simply, it was a big mess." Curtis said his crew located pieces of the plane's emergency locator transmitter, which had been shattered into pieces and scattered among the debris. From some of the electronic devices he found, Curtis determined the couple flew at 14,000 feet before they crashed into a mountainside 7,000 feet below. He said the plane's manufacturer may be able to determine what caused the crash based on the equipment the team located. Though they have not yet determined the cause of the crash, Curtis guessed the rainy weather that night may have been a contributing factor. Personnel from Sevier County Search and Rescue located the debris Sunday north of Interstate 70, about 27 miles southeast of Salina. Both of the Branagh's employers, Branagh Development company and Pacific Bay Interiors were out of the office Monday through Wednesday. A voice message from both companies said, "Please bear with us as we mourn the tragic loss of Peter and Mona Branagh, who passed away this weekend in an airplane crash." http://www.sltrib.com/sltrib/news/54506659-78/curtis-plane-crash-california.html.csp Back to Top Back to Top AU adopts Nigerian candidate for ICAO presidency THE African heads of government under the African Union (AU) have unanimously nominated a Nigerian representative at the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Council, Mr Benard Aliyu for ICAO Council's presidency. The Federal Government has said it would make compliance to International Air Transportation Association (IATA) Operational Safety Audit (IOSA) mandatory for all airlines in Nigeria. Director of Infrastructure, African Union Commission, Mr Baba Musa, made known the position of AU on ICAO presidency in Abuja, on Tuesday, at the opening ceremony of the technical session of the ministerial ccnference on aviation safety in Africa. He said Mr Aliyu would be presented as a consensus candidate from the African continent for the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Council's general election in 2013. About 33 African countries, 28 director generals and 12 international organisations were represented at the meeting of director generals of civil aviation authorities and other aviation safety experts. President Goodluck Jonathan is expected to declare the ministerial session of the meeting open on Thursday. Meanwhile, the Director-General of Nigeria Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), Dr Harold Demuren, has said that, Nigeria was considering mandatory IOSA compliance for its airlines. IOSA programme is an internationally recognised and accepted evaluation system designed to assess the operational management and control systems of an airline. It uses internationally-recognised quality audit principles, and is designed so that audits are conducted in a standardised and consistent manner. He, however, described the two aircraft accidents in quick succession, on June 2 and 3, 2012, as major setback to the reform agenda the government is pursuing in the aviation industry. Demuren said, "Alas! 4 months from celebrating 6 uninterrupted years of zero fatalities in domestic scheduled flight operations, disaster struck on June 2nd, Allied Air, a Nigerian Registered Cargo aircraft overran the runway in heavy rain killing 10 commuters in a bus beyond the perimeter fence of the airport in Accra, Ghana. "Less than 24 hours later, Dana Air's flight 0992 crashed in a densely populated area of Lagos, killing 153 people on board and others on ground. "These accidents occurred after we have successfully carried 50 million passengers, operated more than 1 million flights and grown our traffic by almost 40% in last 5½ years. "This has been a devastating blow to us and indeed, a major setback to the reform agenda that we are pursuing," he stated. Minister of Aviation, Prince Stella Odua, said Nigeria in the last five years, has worked hard to reposition the nation's aviation industry through comprehensive safety reform agenda, which focused on re- certification of the industry and resuscitation of aviation infrastructure. She challenged the experts to come up with far-reaching recommendations that would not only enhance safety, but will make Africa, "the irresistible hub of global air transport business in the next few decades". http://tribune.com.ng/index.php/news/44391-au-adopts-nigerian-candidate-for-icao-presidency Back to Top Delta airlines enhancing security after needles found in sandwiches ATLANTA - Channel 2 Action News has confirmed Delta Airlines is enhancing security at all its catering facilities around the world. The move follows the discovery of sewing needles in several sandwiches. The needles turned up on flights from Amsterdam to Atlanta, Minneapolis and Seattle. Air safety experts told Channel 2 investigative reporter Aaron Diamant it all comes down to access. U.S. and Dutch investigators are now searching for gaps in Gate Gourmet's facility in Amsterdam that let the needles into those sandwiches. Diamant confirmed FBI agents are now working in the U.S. and alongside counterparts in the Netherlands to figure out how a half dozen sewing needles ended up in turkey sandwiches aboard Delta Airlines flights from Amsterdam to three American cities Sunday, including Atlanta. "You can't check every sandwich that goes aboard a plane. This demonstrates to people who want to do bad things this is a gaping hole," former FBI agent Brad Garrett said. One needle injured a Minneapolis-bound passenger who is now on powerful meds. The sandwiches came from airline catering giant Gate Gourmet's Schipol airport facility. On Tuesday a Delta spokesperson in Atlanta told Diamant, "We've implemented heightened security at [Gate Gourmet's] facility in cooperation with them." Last November Channel 2 Action News first exposed what air safety experts called an ongoing security breach at Gate Gourmet's Atlanta airport operation. A whistleblower shot video showing how easy it is to add unauthorized items, including food onto unsealed catering carts after they were inspected, even though federal law states all catering carts must be sealed for easy visual detection of tampering. "It's intolerable, absolutely intolerable. The American people deserve better than this," Rep. Paul Broun, (R) Athens. Broun was one of several lawmakers who demanded congressional hearings on airline catering safety. Diamant spent a good part of the day Tuesday on the phone with staff members for several of the lawmakers involved in those hearings. All of them told Diamant their bosses are watching the investigation into the needles very closely, but didn't want to weigh in until after the FBI figures out where they came from. http://www.wsbtv.com/news/news/local/delta-airlines-enhancing-security-after-needles-fo/nPxJ5/ Back to Top Aircraft Maintenance Firm Settles FCPA Probe, Pays $2 Million Penalty. (WSJ) The Nordam Group Inc., an aircraft maintenance provider, entered into an agreement with the Justice Department and agreed to pay a $2 million penalty to resolve violations of the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. An employee stands next to an A320 plane under construction at the final assembly line of an Airbus factory in Tianjin municipality on June 13, 2012. Tulsa, Okla.-based Nordam, as well as its subsidiaries, paid bribes to employees of airlines created, controlled or owned by China in order to perform maintenance, repair and overhaul services for the airlines, according to the agreement. Several Nordam employees in the U.S. were aware of and approved the bribes, which were referred to internally as "commissions" or "facilitator fees," said a statement of facts issued with the case. The facilitator fees were paid through "facilitators," who were employees of customers and referred to as "our friends inside," among other things. A representative for Nordam couldn't be reached. Nordam and its affiliates and subsidiaries paid as much as $1.5 million in bribes to secure about $2.5 million in profits from state-owned and state-controlled customers in China, the statement of facts said. In addition to the $2 million penalty, the non-prosecution agreement signed by Nordam calls for the company to report periodically to the Justice Department about its compliance efforts, and to implement an enhanced compliance program. Nordam paid a reduced fine because it showed, and the Justice Department verified, that paying more than $2 million would "substantially jeapordize" the company's continued viability, a statement said. Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP, FRAeS, FISASI CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC