Flight Safety Information April 12, 2013 - No. 076 In This Issue Pilot emergency lands private plane in Scottsdale, Arizona with no wheels FAA strongly denies alleged smartphone airplane hack can work on real planes NTSB: Pilot action, icing led to NJ plane crash that killed Manhattan banker, family Airplane makes emergency landing in Bucharest due to in-flight passenger conflict PROS IOSA Audit Experts Ontario rejects $474 million offer for airport Visa Targeting Affluent Consumers With Airport-Security Service NASA Mars Orbiter Images May Show 1971 Soviet Lander Pilot emergency lands private plane in Scottsdale, Arizona with no wheels, skids safely along runway 2NEWS' Phoenix affiliate caught on video an emergency landing of a small plane outside of Scottsdale Thursday afternoon, and boy, was it dramatic. The pilot was seen safely belly landing his plane without landing gear around 12:30 p.m. at Scottsdale Municipal Airport. The pilot was heard on the scanner saying, "If I don't make it, tell my wife I love her," according to station pilot Roland Rinnerberger. See video here Once the plane came to a stop, the pilot got out, slowly walked away, and turned around to stare at the plane. Fire crews were then seen covering up part of the aircraft. Very little information is available at this time. http://www.kjrh.com/dpp/news/pilot-emergency-lands-private-plane-in-scottsdale-arizona-with-no- wheels-skids-safely-along-runway#ixzz2QFUcczTB Back to Top FAA strongly denies alleged smartphone airplane hack can work on real planes The Federal Aviation Administration is strongly denying a claim made at a hacker conference in Amsterdam that airplane navigation systems can be hacked in-flight using a mobile phone application and some cheap software. Hugo Teso, a security consultant for the German information technology firm n.runs, recently told attendees at the Hack in the Box security conference that he had found a vulnerability in airplane flight computers that could be exploited using only an Android smartphone app, a radio transmitter and flight management software he purchased on eBay. Teso did not use actual flight computers, but claimed to be able to effectively emulate their software in his demonstrations of the supposed exploit. The vulnerability, Teso said, would allow a hijacker to remotely redirect an aircraft's flight path, and even send planes crashing to the ground. But when asked by The Daily Caller about the presentation, the FAA, which regulates aircraft safety standards in the U.S., said Teso's findings were inaccurate. "The FAA is aware that a German information technology consultant has alleged he has detected a security issue with the Honeywell NZ-2000 Flight Management System (FMS) using only a desktop computer," said Les Dorr, FAA spokesman, in a statement to TheDC. "The FAA has determined that the hacking technique described during a recent computer security conference does not pose a flight safety concern because it does not work on certified flight hardware," he said. "The described technique cannot engage or control the aircraft's autopilot system using the FMS or prevent a pilot from overriding the autopilot," said Dorr. "Therefore, a hacker cannot obtain 'full control of an aircraft,' as the technology consultant has claimed," said Dorr. http://dailycaller.com/2013/04/11/faa-strongly-denies-alleged-smartphone-airplane-hack-is-a-problem/#ixzz2QFOkZmzE Back to Top NTSB: Pilot action, icing led to NJ plane crash that killed Manhattan banker, family A pilot's inability or reluctance to fly quickly enough out of icing conditions led to a fiery plane crash on a New Jersey highway median that killed all five people aboard, a federal report published Thursday concluded. The December 2011 crash claimed the lives of pilot Jeffrey Buckalew, an investment banker; his wife and two children, and Rakesh Chawla, a colleague at New York's Greenhill & Co. Buckalew was the registered owner of the single-engine Socata TBM 700 and had more than 1,400 hours of flight time, according to the report. The plane had just departed Teterboro Airport en route to Georgia when it began spiraling out of control at about 17,000 feet and crashed on a wooded median on Interstate 287 near Morristown. No one on the ground was injured. Wreckage was scattered over a half-mile area, forcing the closure of the busy roadway for several hours. The National Transportation Safety Board report concluded that while Buckalew had asked air traffic controllers to fly higher and out of the icing conditions, he may have been reluctant to exercise his own authority to do so, or may have been unaware of the severity of the conditions. The NTSB attributed the cause of the accident to "the airplane's encounter with unforecasted severe icing conditions that were characterized by high ice accretion rates and the pilot's failure to use his command authority to depart the icing conditions in an expeditious manner, which resulted in a loss of airplane control." According to the report, an air traffic controller advised Buckalew of moderate icing from 15,000 to 17,000 feet, at which point Buckalew responded, "we'll let you know what happens when we get in there and if we could go straight through, it's no problem for us." The controller then directed him to climb to 17,000 feet. When the plane reached 16,800 feet Buckalew reported light icing and said "a higher altitude would be great." Seventeen seconds later, he said the plane was experiencing "a little rattle" and asked to be cleared to go to a higher altitude "as soon as possible please." The controller coordinated with a controller in an adjacent sector and, 25 seconds later, directed Buckalew to climb higher. Within about a minute the plane had reached 17,800 feet and then began an uncontrolled descent. Ice can form on airplanes when temperatures are near freezing and there is visible moisture, such as clouds or rain. The ice adds weight to an aircraft, and rough accumulations known as rime interrupt the flow of air over wings. Numerous pilots had reported icing conditions in the area around the time of the accident, including at least three flight crews that characterized the icing as severe, according to the report. One pilot told NTSB investigators his wing anti-icing system "couldn't keep up" with ice accumulation of as much as 4 inches that had developed over a span of five minutes. Pilots are required to fly under the direction of air traffic controllers but federal regulations allow for some deviation in emergency situations. The NTSB report quotes a part of the Federal Aviation Regulations that reads, "in an in-flight emergency requiring immediate action, the pilot in command may deviate from any rule of this part to the extent required to meet that emergency." http://www.nypost.com/p/news/local/family_pilot_action_icing_banker_LBgTy3UJBWxuGYld9wvPpI Back to Top Airplane makes emergency landing in Bucharest due to in-flight passenger conflict News is breaking that an airplane on a Turkey to Denmark flight has made an emergency landing at Bucharest's Henri Coanda Airport in Otopeni. The plane was forced to land due to a conflict on board, as a result of which, the crew requested permission to land in Bucharest. Romanian media reports that the airplane's pilot requested the presence of both the police and medical services. At this point, there are no reports of injuries. There is some confusion in the local media on the exact route the airplane was on; some give Istanbul to Copenhagen, others Ankara to Copenhagen. The airplane reportedly landed just before 14:00, Romanian time. The aircraft's capacity is 220 passengers, but it is unclear how many were actually on-board. It appears probable that the passengers will be put on other flights to complete their journey. No news has surfaced on whether the police have made any arrests, nor is it clear what caused the altercation in the first place. http://www.romania-insider.com/airplane-makes-emergency-landing-in-bucharest-due-to-in-flight- passenger-conflict/79663/ Back to Top Back to Top Ontario rejects $474 million offer for airport Frustrated by the slow pace of talks to get its airport back, Ontario officials on Thursday signaled their intent to sue the city of Los Angeles to dissolve the decades-old deal that gave Ontario International Airport to L.A. At the same time, Los Angeles' administrative officer questioned Ontario's timing, as negotiations for a possible transfer were still going on. Ontario officials said Los Angeles World Airports, the agency that manages L.A./Ontario International, Los Angeles International and Van Nuys airports for the city of Los Angeles, set a sale price of $474 million for ONT - nearly double the $250 million Ontario offered last year. "It was obvious that negotiations weren't going anywhere and it appears that the city of L.A. has no intent on negotiating in good faith," said Ontario Councilman Alan Wapner, who is president of the Ontario International Airport Authority. LAWA Executive Director Gina Marie Lindsey, Wapner said, "has no intention of releasing the airport and would rather wait until the airport is out of business to hand it over. " The Airport Authority board is made up of Wapner, San Bernardino County Supervisor Gary Ovitt, former Riverside Mayor Ron Loveridge, Ontario Councilman Jim Bowman, and Lucy Dunn, president and CEO of the Orange County Business Council. The authority was set up to operate ONT should a transfer occur. Ontario filed a claim with L.A. on Thursday seeking to dissolve the 1967 joint-powers agreement that rescued ONT from failure but now is blamed for strangling the airport's prospects because, Ontario officials contend, LAWA is putting its resources into LAX and mismanaging ONT. The airport was formally transferred to L.A. in 1985. Submission of a claim usually is the first step to a lawsuit. The filing comes just one day after Ontario formally rejected the multi-million dollar offer from LAWA. Los Angeles officials fired back Thursday, saying Ontario is sabotaging talks still in progress. Miguel Santana, the L.A. city administrative officer who was mediating the discussions, said he was blindsided by Ontario's decision to file the claim. "How could they file a claim when those negotiations had just started?" he said. Santana said he would have expected Ontario to file a lawsuit if the two sides had reached an impasse. Instead, Ontario is willing to "step away from the table" just as they were in the first steps of negotiations, he said. Santana said that L.A. and LAWA never received a counter-proposal. He also said Ontario was operating in "bad faith" by releasing the $474 million proposal publicly. "One of the terms we had established is confidentiality," he said. "Having this debated in the public was not going to be productive. " Santana said he felt the discussions had been straightforward and productive. He also said claims that LAWA has not done enough to improve conditions at ONT are not true. The agency has invested millions in the facility, he said, and in addition, LAWA agreed to a transfer and was willing to meet with Ontario leaders.A lawsuit will make it hard to engage in negotiations, Santana said. Wapner acknowledged that filing the claim can make negotiations difficult but added that it could be weeks before a lawsuit is filed, which can't be done until Los Angeles either rejects the claim or 45 days has passed. Until then, Wapner said he is hopeful the two can reach an amicable agreement for transfer. As for the contention that Ontario acted too quickly, Wapner said Ontario made an initial offer of $250 million and had to wait two years for a counter-offer. "The offer they made wasn't even close to anything that could be considered a reasonable offer," Wapner said. "We've been attempting to negotiate in good faith, and this is what they give us. " Wapner said the city could not stand by any longer. He said the city is losing a half-billion dollars in economic impact each year and has lost 10,100 jobs since the economic downturn. Ontario officials have been battling LAWA for nearly four years - since the decline in passenger traffic at ONT. In 2007, 7.2 million people traveled in and out of the Ontario airport. Today that figure has dropped by 40 percent, according to Ontario officials. The airport saw 4.3 million passengers in 2012 and is projected to handle fewer than 4 million in 2013. Officials say LAWA has not done enough to help ONT weather the economic storm and attract new flights. LAWA officials say that since the economic downturn, airlines have shifted and consolidated operations at medium-hub airports like ONT. In its claim against the city of Los Angeles, Ontario says LAWA has "abandoned" a "regionalization policy to focus on LAX rather than ONT." "LAWA is currently driving ONT into financial and operational ruin, constituting a material breach of written agreements between Los Angeles and Ontario," according to the claim. "LAWA overtly favors LAX to the extreme prejudice of ONT and to the detriment of each and every resident of Southern California, and those around the world seeking to fly to the area," the claim contends. Ontario officials have long hinted that they would resort to legal action if they felt not enough was being done. http://www.dailybulletin.com/ci_23003685/ontario-rejects-474m-offer-ont-airport-files-lawsuit Back to Top Visa Targeting Affluent Consumers With Airport-Security Service Visa Inc. (V) is offering users of its high-end credit cards a service that allows travelers to move to the head of the security line at a small number of airports as the world's largest payments network battles for more high spenders. The service, called CLEAR, is now available to consumers who use Visa Signature credit cards, which are typically targeted by banks to borrowers with higher household incomes than other borrowers, the card company said Friday. The perk is among several new benefits Visa expects to add to its Signature platform under a five- year plan the company embarked on six months ago to beef up its presence in the U.S. affluent market, Nick Talwar, head of North America consumer credit for Visa, said in an interview on Thursday. "Visa's strategy overall is for us to be ... the undisputed, unequivocal, obvious network of choice for issuing clients who want to cater to the needs of the affluent segment," said Mr. Talwar, a former Citigroup Inc. (C) executive who joined Visa three years ago. Affluent consumers have become a bigger focus for both payment networks and lenders who issue cards since the financial crisis, when credit losses resulting from unemployment and the housing- market crash prompted banks to retrench. Since then, banks have tightened their lending criteria, making it harder for consumers to qualify for credit cards and other loans unless they have good credit histories. The shift has nudged many lenders to more directly target a market traditionally associated with American Express Co. (AXP), which is both a payment network like Visa and MasterCard Inc. (MA) and a credit-card issuer that is known for its well-heeled customer base. Mr. Talwar said Visa is investing an "incredibly substantial amount of money" in the next five years to beef up its client programs targeted at affluent customers, but declined to specify the amount. "The affluent segment seems to have been very resilient over the last few years, both coming out of the recession and dealing" with global economic pressures, Mr. Talwar said. Visa is making CLEAR an "evergreen" benefit available to all Signature cardholders, Mr. Talwar said. The service, developed by New York City-based Alclear LLC, is currently available in airports in San Francisco, Orlando, Denver, Dallas and Westchester County, N.Y. The service normally costs $179 a year, but Visa Signature cardholders are eligible to receive six months of service for free, after which their annual rate will be $119. Some banks that issue cards on the Visa network are testing offering the service entirely free to some Signature cardholders, Mr. Talwar said. To enroll in CLEAR, a customer first signs up online and then must provide a fingerprint, iris scan, driver's license and passport information by visiting a special kiosk at a participating airport. The company also does on-site visits at companies to enroll their employees in the program. To use the service, customers visit a CLEAR kiosk set up by airport security lines to input a CLEAR card, scan their fingerprint or iris as well as their boarding pass. Once the system verifies their identity, CLEAR customers can move to the front of the security line to go through security screening. The service can allow a traveler to make it through airport security within a few minutes, said Caryn Seidman Becker, chairman and chief executive officer of CLEAR. She added that customer data is protected through encryption. "The integrity of our data is the integrity of our company," Ms. Seidman Becker said. The company plans to expand to additional airports in the next three years, but it must strike deals with individual airports or their operating authorities, she said. Visa, like its next biggest competitor MasterCard, operates a network that helps process card transactions for the banks that issue consumers their credit cards and those that work with merchants. As such, it doesn't normally interact directly with consumers, though it develops marketing programs that banks can use to entice customers to open and do their spending on Visa cards. Among those is Visa Signature, a platform Visa debuted in 2005 that gives cardholders discounts on travel-related purchases, including food vouchers at hotels, and entertainment events. Banks must issue Visa Signature cards with a minimum credit limit of $5,000, though most of its bank clients offer credit lines that are "substantially higher than that," Mr. Talwar said. The plan focuses on converting more cash and check transactions, which account for as much as a third of the purchase volume driven by affluent spenders, to electronic payments and converting more card spending to its network from competitors. http://www.foxbusiness.com/news/2013/04/12/visa-targeting-affluent-consumers-with-airport- security-service/#ixzz2QFYYFMHD Back to Top NASA Mars Orbiter Images May Show 1971 Soviet Lander Hardware from a spacecraft that the Soviet Union landed on Mars in 1971 might appear in images from NASA's Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter. While following news about Mars and NASA's Curiosity rover, Russian citizen enthusiasts found four features in a five-year-old image from Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter that resemble four pieces of hardware from the Soviet Mars 3 mission: the parachute, heat shield, terminal retrorocket and lander. A follow-up image by the orbiter from last month shows the same features. The Mars 3 lander transmitted for several seconds after landing on Dec. 2, 1971, the first spacecraft to survive a Mars landing long enough to transmit anything. Images of the possible Mars 3 features, taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) camera on Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, are available at http://uahirise.org/ESP_031036_1345 and http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/spaceimages/details.php?id=PIA16920 . "Together, this set of features and their layout on the ground provide a remarkable match to what is expected from the Mars 3 landing, but alternative explanations for the features cannot be ruled out," said HiRISE Principal Investigator Alfred McEwen of the University of Arizona, Tucson. "Further analysis of the data and future images to better understand the three-dimensional shapes may help to confirm this interpretation." In 1971, the former Soviet Union launched the Mars 2 and Mars 3 missions to Mars. Each consisted of an orbiter plus a lander. Both orbiter missions succeeded, although the surface of Mars was obscured by a planet-encircling dust storm. The Mars 2 lander crashed. Mars 3 became the first successful soft landing on the Red Planet, but stopped transmitting after just 14.5 seconds for unknown reasons. The predicted landing site was at latitude 45 degrees south, longitude 202 degrees east, in Ptolemaeus Crater. HiRISE acquired a large image at this location in November 2007. This image contains 1.8 billion pixels of data, so about 2,500 typical computer screens would be needed to view the entire image at full resolution. Promising candidates for the hardware from Mars 3 were found on Dec. 31, 2012. Vitali Egorov from St. Petersburg, Russia, heads the largest Russian Internet community about Curiosity, at http://vk.com/curiosity_live . His subscribers did the preliminary search for Mars 3 via crowdsourcing. Egorov modeled what Mars 3 hardware pieces should look like in a HiRISE image, and the group carefully searched the many small features in this large image, finding what appear to be viable candidates in the southern part of the scene. Each candidate has a size and shape consistent with the expected hardware, and they are arranged on the surface as expected from the entry, descent and landing sequence. "I wanted to attract people's attention to the fact that Mars exploration today is available to practically anyone," Egorov said. "At the same time we were able to connect with the history of our country, which we were reminded of after many years through the images from the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter." An advisor to the group, Alexander Basilevsky, of Vernadsky Institute of Geochemistry and Analytical Chemistry, Moscow, contacted McEwen suggesting a follow-up image. HiRISE acquired the follow-up on March 10, 2013. This image was targeted to cover some of the hardware candidates in color and to get a second look with different illumination angles. Meanwhile, Basilevsky and Erogov contacted Russian engineers and scientists who worked on Mars 3 for more information. The candidate parachute is the most distinctive feature in the images. It is an especially bright spot for this region, about 8.2 yards (7.5 meters) in diameter. The parachute would have a diameter of 12 yards (11 meters) if fully spread out over the surface, so this is consistent. In the second HiRISE image, the parachute appears to have brightened over much of its surface, probably due to its better illumination over the sloping surface, but it is also possible that the parachute brightened in the intervening years because dust was removed. The descent module, or retrorocket, was attached to the lander container by a chain, and the candidate feature has the right size and even shows a linear extension that could be a chain. Near the candidate descent module is a feature with the right size and shape to be the actual lander, with four open petals. The image of the candidate heat shield matches a shield-shaped object with the right size if partly buried. Philip J. Stooke from the University of West Ontario, Canada, suggested the direction of search and offered helpful advice. Arnold Selivanov (one of the creators of Mars 3) and Vladimir Molodtsov (an engineer at NPO Lavochkin, Moscow) helped with access to data archives. HiRISE is operated by the University of Arizona, Tucson. The instrument was built by Ball Aerospace & Technologies Corp., Boulder, Colo. The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter Project and Curiosity are managed by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif., for NASA's Science Mission Directorate, Washington. JPL is a division of the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena. http://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/news.php?release=2013-132 Curt Lewis