Flight Safety Information September 11, 2012 - No. 184 In This Issue Airbus Tanker Loses Refueling Boom Hose During Flight Over Spain Jet stowaway's body plunges into street Two killed in helicopter crash in northeast Harris County NASA uses text analytics to bolster aviation safety PRISM Certification Support Spain to Toughen Rules on Air Safety, Seek More Powers From EU Airbus sees demand for 1,000 aircraft in Germany Thousands rally against US deployment of Osprey aircraft on Japan's Okinawa island FAA lets American Airlines pilots replace 35 pounds of paper with iPad tablets Airbus Tanker Loses Refueling Boom Hose During Flight Over Spain Airbus Military said a refueling tanker due for delivery this month to the United Arab Emirates lost a boom in mid flight over Spain yesterday. The aircraft was performing a test flight when the boom detached at about 7:30 p.m. and landed in a forest in the province of Caceres, in central Spain. The boom was later recovered by police, and the fallen part hasn't damaged any property, spokeswoman Maggie Bergsma said today. The aircraft returned to its base near Getafe, outside Madrid, and performed a normal landing, she said. The Airbus A330 wide-body aircraft outfitted to work as a military tanker was the first of three on order with the UAE. A boom is a rigid hose that extends from the undercarriage of the plane to feed a second aircraft with extra fuel so it can continue flights without landing. Designed and built by Airbus, the boom measures 11.6 meters (38 feet) when retracted and 18 meters when fully extended. The incident is under investigation and Bergsma said she had no information on whether the delivery will be postponed. It is the second time since Airbus Military began building tankers that a plane has lost a boom, with the first occurrence during a refueling task on a plane built for Australia. http://www.businessweek.com/news/2012-09-11/airbus-tanker-loses-refueling-boom- hose-during-flight-over-spain Back to Top Jet stowaway's body plunges into street London - A stowaway fell thousands of metres from a plane on to a quiet suburban street in London after apparently hiding in the undercarriage. The body of the victim, in his 30s and from North Africa, was discovered in an affluent London neighbourhood under the Heathrow flight path. Aviation experts say he was probably dead before he hit the ground either because he had been crushed by the retracting landing gear shortly after the plane took off or because of the extreme cold at high altitude. It is thought the man's body dropped from the aircraft undercarriage as the plane came in to land. Residents on the tree-lined road in Mortlake, on the south bank of the Thames less than 16km from the airport, on Monday spoke of their shock on finding the body after hearing a loud bang. Billy Watson, 26, a security guard who lives opposite where the man fell, said he saw the body "all twisted up". He said: "It is unbelievable. The first thing I thought when I saw the body was that it must have fallen from quite a height. "Whatever he was trying to escape from must have been horrendous to make him do that." Richard Taylor, of the Civil Aviation Authority, said a stowaway in an aircraft undercarriage was unlikely to have survive as he would either be crushed by the wheels after take-off or freeze in temperatures as low as minus 40C. He said: "The chances of survival for a stowaway are very slim, particularly in the recess of the landing gear. "I don't know of anyone who has survived being stowed away on a long-haul flight. "When the landing gear comes down at the other end, a few miles from the runway and about 2,000ft in the air, if there is a person who had died they would fall out." Police said they were investigating whether the body was that of a stowaway. The discovery comes just over a fortnight after the body of a stowaway was found in the landing gear recess of a BA plane arriving at Heathrow from Cape Town. http://www.iol.co.za/news/world/jet-stowaway-s-body-plunges-into-street-1.1380174 Back to Top Two killed in helicopter crash in northeast Harris County Emergency personnel work on scene of the crash along Highway 90 near Miller Road on Monday. A small helicopter flying from Baytown to the Houston area burst into flames Monday after crashing into an industrial area in northeast Harris County, killing the pilot and a passenger. The helicopter, a single-engine Robinson R-22, went down about 3:45 p.m. near Crosby Freeway and Miller Road. Motorists said it was clear the two-seater helicopter was in danger even before the crash. It was spinning in circles, then suddenly veered over U.S. 90 and struck an industrial pipe yard along the freeway. Jose Escamilla pulled to the side of the road just before the impact. He ran toward the now-smoking helicopter behind the barbed wire fence. Escamilla made it about 30 feet when the helicopter exploded. Escamilla, 36, scrambled under the fence to join others who were attacking the growing blaze with small hand-held extinguishers. "We tried to put out the fire but we couldn't do it. It was engulfed in flames," Escamilla said. He could see the male pilot and the female passenger were still in their seats and were securely belted in. "My first instinct was to grab them and see if I could pull them out," Escamilla said. "There was nothing I could do. They were already burned up." Texas Department of Public Safety officials said the helicopter refueled about 1:30 p.m. Monday at Baytown Airport. They said it may have been returning to Hooks Airport in northwest Harris County when it crashed. DPS officials at the scene didn't know the names of the pilot and passenger. The National Transportation Safety Board and the Federal Aviation Administration are investigating the crash. http://cmf.chron.com/news/houston-texas/article/Helicopter-crashes-in-northeast- Harris-County-3854211.php Back to Top NASA uses text analytics to bolster aviation safety Airline travel has a tendency to up the stress level of most passengers because of its lack of legroom, meager food options and long lines. And then there's the waiting and hurrying and wondering if that checked bag made the connection. Travelers expect these experiences when they arrive at the departure area of a major airport. But something they may not be aware of is the amount of data generated by their flight and how it's being collected, mined and analyzed to improve aviation safety. While the majority of it is structured, some of the most important flight data exists in text form, generated through written reports, audio recordings and warning signals. "It's no secret that the national airspace is very safe," said Ashok Srivastava, principal scientist for data sciences at NASA and lead for the System-Wide Safety and Assurance Technology (SSAT) Project. He illustrated his point by presenting the annual fatal accident rate from 1959 to 2006, which shows a steady decline in the almost five decades. "[B]ut the question is," he continued, "how can it be made safer, particularly in the context of increasing the amount of flights?" Srivastava, a presenter at the eighth annual Text Analytics Summit held earlier this summer, said flight growth could be by as much as 2% to 3% per year, depending on the health of the economy. Based on reports received by its Bureau of Transportation Statistics, the U.S. Department of Transportation recorded 10 million commercial flights from national and international carriers operating within the country in 2011 alone. A 2% increase would equate to tens of thousands of additional flights annually, impacting airport traffic. "Given that context, if we can look for ways to improve safety, we can maintain this low accident rate," he said. "That's a big issue that NASA and others are working on right now. ... The whole idea here is that we would like to proactively manage risk." Text analytics helps to answer questions One of the ways Srivastava and his team dissect how unusual events lead to accidents is to map them along a continuum, which begins with a safe state of operations. The team is particularly interested in the continuum's "anomalous state," which indicates something different enough is happening to warrant attention but also marks a final fork in the road for an operation to either return to a safe state or turn into an accident. "Text," he said, "starts to play a crucial role in understanding what's going on." The team analyzes operational data to discern what happened in the anomalous state, but they also turn to flight and ground crew reports. Those documents can shed light on causal factors or why something happened, Srivastava said. It's similar to the financial industry, he explained. Numeric data can reveal what stocks are rising or falling on a second-by-second basis and by how much, but media reports push beyond the numbers and explain why those stocks are rising or falling. "Figuring out why something happened is difficult to do with numeric data alone," he said. As an example, Srivastava described an incident at JKF International Airport from a little over a year ago, when EgyptAir Flight 986 and Lufthansa Flight 411 almost collided in a "runway incursion," which could have been a catastrophic event, he said. Figuring out why something happened is difficult to do with numeric data alone. Ashok Srivastava, principal scientist for data sciences, NASA "But why did this happen? What was going on? How can we analyze the data associated with it?" he asked. A part of the investigation included analyzing the audio recordings between the pilots and the control tower, which helped reveal that EgyptAir had made a wrong turn. NASA is in the early stages of analyzing audio recordings, which it does by transcribing the recordings into text. Knowing the what and the why, Srivastava and his team aim to push beyond causal factors and into the world of prediction where they'll be able to stop similar instances from happening in the future. "This is of critical importance to the safety of today's systems," he said, "and, most importantly, for tomorrow's systems." Moving into prediction A traditional approach when performing data analysis is to analyze the numeric and text data separately, and then combine the results for a big picture perspective. "That's an approach a lot of people have taken, and I think it's valuable," Srivastava said. "But the approach we're taking is really different from that." They've rigged a system to analyze all of the data together by pushing it into one place, or what's called the kernel. That includes network data from radar and satellite systems; aircraft data from the software; engines and sensors; and text data from the ground and flight crews. The analysis is completed in a single framework using a one-class support vector machine, which is a machine learning model used to detect patterns. "[B]y putting all of the data together at once and simultaneously analyzing it," he said, "we can get very high accuracy rates as far as making predictions on real systems such as aviation systems." Data, like text, can be analyzed in different ways using a variety of methods, such as algorithms and visualizations, which enables NASA and other agencies to keep tabs on what's trending, whether certain events are increasing or decreasing, and what might lead to possible runway incursions. Srivastava compared this to the proactive stance businesses take when driving their own growth or mitigating their own risk: Like the business community, NASA and other agencies are attempting to develop hypotheses, strategies and techniques that can be implemented to help identify problems before they occur. "And this whole system is dependent on analytics," he said. http://searchbusinessanalytics.techtarget.com/feature/NASA-uses-text-analytics-to- bolster-aviation-safety Back to Top Back to Top Spain to Toughen Rules on Air Safety, Seek More Powers From EU Spain will tighten regulations to improve the safety of air travel in the country and reinforce powers to punish airlines that infringe them, the Development Ministry said. The government will require foreign companies that operate a high volume of flights in Spain to notify the authorities of incidents affecting air safety, the ministry said in an e- mailed statement today. Spain will also seek greater powers from the European Commission to supervise foreign companies with extensive operations in the country. In addition, the government will establish a new procedure in airports for dealing with aircraft that suffer emergency fuel shortages, the ministry said. The government said last month Spain's aviation safety agency was investigating three emergency landings by Ryanair Holdings Plc (RYA) planes at Valencia airport. Ryanair said at the time it would cooperate fully with the investigation and that its aircraft landed with reserve fuel for least 30 minutes flying time, in full compliance with European Aviation Safety Agency requirements. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-09-10/spain-to-toughen-rules-on-air-safety- seek-more-powers-from-eu.html Back to Top Airbus sees demand for 1,000 aircraft in Germany PARIS: Airbus sees demand from Germany for more than 1,000 new passenger aircraft and freighters over the next two decades, worth $148 billion, as German air travel is growing, the planemaker said on the opening day of the ILA Berlin Air Show on Tuesday. The figures were part of the planemaker's global market forecast which also predicted average annual traffic growth of 4.1 percent for Europe in the period while routes to the Middle East should rise 5.4 percent and Asia-Pacific, Africa and Latin America together could grow 4.6 percent. For Germany, new passenger and freight aircraft will include 690 single-aisle jetliners, more than 230 twin-aisle medium to long-range wide-body planes and close to 100 very large airliners such as the A380, Airbus said in a statement. "German airlines will take more aircraft than any other European country and globally is one the top five countries," said Chris Emerson, SVP Future Programmes and Market Strategy. "This demand is driven by Germany's position as a major aviation gateway for its own people and for globally connecting passengers." http://economictimes.indiatimes.com/news/international-business/airbus-sees-demand- for-1000-aircraft-in-germany/articleshow/16348963.cms Back to Top Thousands rally against US deployment of Osprey aircraft on Japan's Okinawa island TOKYO (AP) - Tens of thousands of people rallied Sunday against U.S. plans to deploy Osprey hybrid aircraft on a southern Japanese island amid renewed safety concerns. The protesters - as many as 100,000, according to organizers - gathered at a seaside park on Okinawa to demand that the plan to deploy 12 MV-22 Osprey aircraft on the island be scrapped, saying they are unsafe. The U.S. plans to deploy the Osprey, which takes off like a helicopter and flies like an airplane, to replace older CH-46 helicopters that are already there. Safety concerns boiled over after Osprey crashes in Morocco and Florida earlier this year. An incident in North Carolina last week that officials called a "precautionary landing" further aggravated the sentiment. "We refuse to accept a deployment of Osprey that has already proven so dangerous," said Atsushi Sakima, mayor of Okinawa's Ginowan City, home to the base where the Ospreys will be deployed. "Who is going to take responsibility if they crash onto a populated neighborhood?" Participants cheered in support, waving red banners and placards with a message saying "Osprey No!" The tilt-rotor planes have been used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan. The United States says they have a solid record and can fly faster and carry bigger loads than the CH-46, which it is replacing worldwide. Okinawa Gov. Hirokazu Nakaima has asked Japan's central government to seek a full U.S. investigation into the Osprey crashes and suspend their deployment until the aircraft's safety is verified. The Osprey deployment plan has also reignited longstanding anger over the heavy presence of American troops on Okinawa and has become a headache for officials in Tokyo and Washington hoping to calm anti-base sentiment. More than half of the roughly 50,000 U.S. troops stationed throughout Japan are based on Okinawa. Okinawans are particularly angry because the Ospreys will be deployed to Marine Corps Air Station Futenma, which the two countries decided to close more than a decade ago. The base has remained in operation because a replacement site hasn't been readied. Back to Top FAA lets American Airlines pilots replace 35 pounds of paper with iPad tablets American Airlines said Monday the Federal Aviation Administration has approved its request to let American's pilots use iPad as an "electronic flight bag," with aviation regulations, manuals and other paperwork on them. The carrier said it expects to have FAA approval for the iPad use on all its fleet types by the end of the year. As a result, American plans to issue iPads to all pilots and instructors and replace the paper they typically carry with the electronic files that contain the same information. "Removing the 35-pound kitbag from each American Airlines plane will save an estimated $1.2 million of fuel annually based on current fuel prices," the carrier said in its announcement. John Hale, vice president of flight, called the step "a very exciting and important milestone for all of us at American Airlines as we work to modernize our processes and best meet the needs of our people." "With this approval from the FAA, we will be able to use iPad to fully realize the benefits of our Electronic Flight Bag program, including improving the work environment for our pilots, reducing our dependency on paper products and increasing fuel efficiency on our planes," Hale said. "We are equipping our people with the best resources and this will allow our pilots to fly more efficiently." Maya Leibman, American's chief information officer, said American will be talking soon about handheld tablets that American's flight attendants have been trying out. Those tablets let flight attendants get up to date information about passengers on board the airplane, for example. http://aviationblog.dallasnews.com/2012/09/faa-lets-american-airlines-pilots-replace- 35-pounds-of-paper-with-ipad-tablets.html/ Curt Lewis