Flight Safety Information March 13, 2013 - No. 055 In This Issue Air safety chiefs give go-ahead for Dreamliner test flights NTSB Issues Five Safety Alerts For GA...Pilots...And Mechanics... Airport Closed After Plane Skidded in Poland Maui-Phoenix US Airways flight diverts to Honolulu PROS IOSA Audit Experts FSI on TWITTER Air safety chiefs give go-ahead for Dreamliner test flights Boeing is to begin test flights for the 787 Dreamliner after safety regulators in the US approved an upgrade to the aircraft's lithium-ion battery, which is believed to have been the cause of two onboard fires. If the flights are successful, the Dreamliner could return to service within three to four weeks, according to a report in the Financial Times. The aircraft have been grounded worldwide since mid-January after two incidents where the lithium-ion batteries overheated. The Federal Aviation Administration is now understood to have approved Boeing's solution to the problem, which involved placing a layer of insulation between battery cells and placing the battery in a fire-resistant box. However, Boeing has not confirmed how soon the aircraft will return to service. Thomson has already been forced to cancel its first Dreamliner flights planned for May as it hasn't yet been told when to expect delivery of its first 787. http://www.travelmole.com/news_feature.php?news_id=2005559&c=setreg®ion=2 Back to Top NTSB Issues Five Safety Alerts For GA Pilots And Mechanics Putting Safety Into Context Flying over the Santa Monica Mountains in a Piper Warrior. If there is a drawback to the Internet, it is the overwhelming amount of information being created and disseminated. Anyone interested in anything can find more articles, blogs, e-newsletters, YouTube videos, Facebook posts, Twitter tweets, Instagram photos, Pinterest pins etc. about any subject, more than one person could possibly consume in a lifetime. For those who work on aviation safety issues, this presents a problem. The easy solution in safety circles is to offer more information to those who might cause an accident. The hope, presumably, is that education and information dissemination will prevent accidents. Add more training to the mix and we should be able to lower the number of accidents dramatically. This does, incidentally, work for the airlines, which generally are a closed system that is somewhat easier to manage than individual pilots flying on their own. Unfortunately, that doesn't work in the general aviation (GA) arena. GA accident rates in the U.S. average "about 1,500 a year, in which about 475 pilots and passengers are killed and hundreds more are seriously injured," according to the National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). Were it a simple matter of disseminating more information, the rate would have dropped by now. The Internet has been around and growing rapidly since the early 1990s. And pilots are early adopters of technology and voracious consumers of information in all of the above forms. Yet the accidents keep happening. The NTSB is taking one step in the right direction, a meeting on March 12 in Washington, DC "to consider five Safety Alerts aimed at reducing the number of general aviation accidents." This meeting can be viewed online, too. Here are the subjects: ?Reduced-visual-reference accidents, including controlled flight into terrain and uncontrolled descent to the ground due to spatial disorientation ?Aerodynamic stalls at low altitude in daylight visual weather conditions ?Pilot inattention to indications of mechanical problems ?Risk management for aviation maintenance technicians ?Risk management for pilots But the problem is that these Safety Alerts are just going to be added to the deep pile of information available to pilots. Many pilots will read these Safety Alerts and take them to heart. The likely outcome is that pilots who need this information will ignore it. And many pilots will not even dig this far down in their piles of info-glut in time to read these before they do something stupid and kill someone. NTSB researchers have their hands on a vast treasure trove of data, and this data should be turned into useful products like the proposed Safety Alerts. But the NTSB needs to go a step further and figure out a way to improve the dissemination and consumption of safety information by everyone involved in aviation. Instead of just piling another information product onto pilots, mechanics and others, how about designing a system that makes the information useful in context? Here's my idea: you're preparing for an IFR flight. The conditions are: night, nearby mountainous terrain, marginal VFR to IMC weather over most of the route. When you submit your flight plan into Duats for a weather briefing, the Duats software automatically consolidates some relevant safety information for you. This information can be part of your risk-assessment process during preflight planning. So, for the above flight, Duats provides not only a weather briefing but also the following information: a suggestion to determine a departure procedure that will keep you from hitting a mountain after takeoff; a summary of added risks of flying at night in marginal weather; and links to pertinent safety information that will help you not only understand the risks but know how to avoid them. This could include a small number of example accidents. A similar tool could be created for mechanics. A mechanic about to do an annual inspection on a Cessna 310 would have a system to consolidate safety information that resides in various databases. Instead of hoping that this mechanic stumbles across, say, the FAA's Maintenance Alerts, which might have a submission about the 310, the mechanic would review key 310 problems identified in the FAA's Service Difficulty Reporting System database before starting the inspection. These reports could be combined with information provided by type clubs, which know a lot more than most mechanics about particular aircraft. The NTSB does wonderful safety work; so does the FAA and organizations like the aviation alphabet groups and their foundations, type clubs and other groups. There is no shortage of safety-related publications (including the AINsafety e-newsletter). But there is a shortage of any way to make all this information meaningful, useful and useable. Anyone who can crack this nut will go down in aviation history as the solver of aviation's greatest problem. http://www.ainonline.com/aviation-news/blogs/ain-blog-putting-safety-context Back to Top Airport Closed After Plane Skidded in Poland WARSAW, Poland March 13, 2013 (AP) - Teams of experts were working to free a Boeing 737 airplane from a muddy field after it skidded off the runway while landing in Katowice, southern Poland, an airport spokesman said Wednesday. The plane from the Czech airline Travel Service skidded late Tuesday and went some 20 meters (22 yards) off the Pyrzowice airport runway and ran into wet ground, where its front landing gear sank. None of the 176 passengers and six crew members was hurt. They had arrived from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. Airport spokesman Cezary Orzech said that the airport remained closed while Czech experts were working with Polish airport staff to pull the plane out. In low temperatures and under falling snow they placed and inflated airbags under the fuselage to lift the plane. All flights have been redirected to nearby Krakow. Orzech said that the pilot had been informed that the runway was slippery but decided to land anyway. Travel Service pilots are familiar with the airport, which serves as base for the airline's aircraft, he said. Back to Top Maui-Phoenix US Airways flight diverts to Honolulu HONOLULU -A US Airways flight from Maui to Phoenix diverted to Honolulu after crew members noticed a problem with one of the plane's pressurization and air conditioning kits. Airline spokesman Todd Lehmacher said the redeye flight was less than halfway to Phoenix when its crew decided to be cautious and turn the plane around. It landed in Honolulu early Tuesday without incident. Nobody was hurt. Lehmacher said the Boeing 757 had two kits, and one was malfunctioning. Lehmacher says about half the plane's 166 passengers will depart Tuesday night, while the other half were rebooked on other airlines. http://www.kitv.com/news/hawaii/Maui-Phoenix-US-Airways-flight-diverts-to-Honolulu/- /8905354/19291418/-/5ic7gkz/-/index.html#ixzz2NPpsqji9 Back to Top Curt Lewis