Flight Safety Information July 17, 2013 - No. 147 In This Issue 83 Asiana plane crash survivors to sue Boeing, airline Three Dead in Brazil Airplane Crash Pilot dies in fiery experimental plane crash Sea King helicopters grounded after new accident On a Wing and a Sunbeam: Solar Plane Pilots Look to Circle the Globe New technology to measure radiation exposure in pilots 2013 Aviation Human Factors and SMS Seminar - Dallas, July 23-24, 2013 Think ARGUS PROS Skylon space plane 'will transform high-speed aviation' GRADUATE RESEARCH SURVEY 83 Asiana plane crash survivors to sue Boeing, airline CHICAGO - A Chicago law firm says it has taken steps to sue aircraft manufacturer Boeing Co. on behalf of 83 people who were aboard the Asiana Airlines flight that crash-landed in San Francisco earlier this month, claiming in a court filing that the crash might have been caused by a mechanical malfunction of the Boeing 777's auto throttle. Ribbeck Law Chartered on Monday filed a petition for discovery - a move meant to preserve evidence - in Cook County Circuit Court in Chicago, where Boeing is headquartered. The law firm said in a news release that additional pleadings will be filed against Asiana Airlines and several component parts manufacturers in coming days. Ribbeck said that in addition to potential problems with the auto throttle, some emergency slides reportedly opened inside the plane, injuring passengers and blocking their exit, and some passengers had to be cut out of their seatbelts with a knife. Three people were killed when the airplane, carrying 307 passengers and crew on a flight from South Korea to San Francisco International Airport on July 6, approached the runway too low and slow. It clipped a seawall at the end of a runway, tearing off the tail and sending the plane spinning down the runway. The impact caused the plane to catch fire. ''We must find the causes of the crash and demand that the problems with the airline and the aircraft are immediately resolved to avoid future tragedies,'' attorney Monica R. Kelly, head of Ribbeck's aviation department, said in a written statement. Boeing spokesman John Dern said the company had no comment. The petition asks a judge to order Boeing to identify the designer and manufacturer of the airplane's autothrottle and its emergency evacuation slides. It also seeks information on the systems that indicate the airplane's glide slope and that warn how close it is to the ground. Kelly said the firm wants to protect the wreckage ''from destructive testing'' and to obtain maintenance records, internal memos and other evidence. The pilots of Asiana Flight 214 have told investigators they were relying on automated cockpit equipment to control their speed. Inspectors found that the autothrottle had been ''armed,'' or made ready for activation, but investigators are still determining whether it had been engaged, the National Transportation Safety Board has said. Two of the plane's eight slides malfunctioned, opening inside the cabin and pinning two flight attendants underneath. http://www.foxnews.com/us/2013/07/17/law-firm-says-it-suing-boeing-over-asiana-crash/#ixzz2ZIn9e1hN Back to Top Three Dead in Brazil Airplane Crash RIO DE JANEIRO - Three people died and three others were seriously injured when their small plane crashed and exploded Tuesday just after taking off from the Brazilian city of Manaus, authorities said. The accident occurred about 6:20 a.m. (1020 GMT) at the international airport at Manaus, the major city in Brazil's Amazon region. The Beechcraft Baron 58 was scheduled to fly between the capital of the state of Amazonas and Apui, some 453 kilometers (about 281 miles) away. The aircraft was owned by Apui Taxi Aereo and was able to take off but just seconds later it lost power for unknown reasons, plunged to earth and exploded. The impact and/or powerful blast, which completely destroyed the plane, instantly killed three of the six occupants but the other three survived, albeit with serious injuries. The injured were taken to 28 de Julio Hospital in Manaus, where their condition is considered to be very delicate. The Manaus airport was closed to takeoffs and landings after a huge cloud of white smoke covered a large part of the runway, but normal operations resumed shortly thereafter. EFE http://www.laht.com/article.asp?ArticleId=865425&CategoryId=14090 Back to Top Pilot dies in fiery experimental plane crash A hand-built experimental airplane that crashed and burned near Pulaski, killing the pilot, was powered by a modified Volkswagen engine and had been flown only two or three times by the pilot after bringing it to Giles County in April, officials said. The pilot, identified by the Giles County Medical Examiner's Office as Cliff Joseph Rosa, 24, of Huntsville, Ala., was killed after taking off from Abernathy Field Airport about 8:10 a.m. Tuesday and nosediving into Highway 11 South about a mile south of the Highway 64 bypass. The aircraft was initially described as a single-seat experimental model, but was later identified as a two-seat Sonerai experimental aircraft sold in ready-to-assemble kits by Great Plains Aircraft of Bennington, Neb. Randy Jones, manager of Abernathy Field, said the pilot bought the plane fully-assembled from a previous owner and brought it to the Giles County airport on April 30. Rosa flew it only two or three times since, Jones continued. "He had been working on it, replacing the landing gear, and just finished all the work yesterday," Jones said Tuesday afternoon. "He ran the plane a little yesterday, just started the engine and taxied a little, and said he was coming back to fly it today." The Tennessee Highway Patrol was first to respond to a report of the crash and found the plane fully engulfed in flames when troopers arrived, a THP dispatcher said. The Federal Aviation Administration and National Transportation Safety Board are conducting an investigation into the cause. The manufacturer's website says the Sonerai is made of steel tubing and aluminum covered with fabric, and describes it as "perhaps the most versatile VW powered homebuilt ever conceived." FAA spokesperson Kathleen Bergen initially said the pilot had been crop-dusting when the crash occurred. After a Daily Herald reporter asked how an experimental plane made of metal tubing and fabric could be used for that work, Bergen checked further and said her initial report was wrong. Another plane was crop-dusting in the area at the time, but it was not the plane that crashed, she said. Glen Smith, president of the Experimental Aircraft Association Chapter 1312 in Columbia, said experimental aircraft are often powered by modified VW or Corvair auto engines. "Usually a lot more goes into it than just taking an old engine and putting it in an airplane," Smith explained. "They've become quite reliable, especially in small planes like the Sonerai." Although he cautioned that he knew nothing about the Pulaski crash, Smith did offer one possible explanation for it. "Usually when things go wrong like that, it's engine failure and the pilot not being able to keep control," he said. "Sometimes the pilot is overwhelmed with everything he has to do, the plane gets too slow, then develops aerodynamic stall and the nose pitches down real fast. "If it's close to the ground on takeoff, you can't recover fast enough," he added. http://columbiadailyherald.com/sections/news/local-news/pilot-dies-fiery-experimental-plane-crash.html Back to Top Sea King helicopters grounded after new accident Four months after the head of Canada¹s air force expressed his utmost confidence in the Sea King helicopter, the military has grounded the aircraft indefinitely. On March 25 air force chief Lt.-Gen. Yvan Blondin told senators he wasn¹t worried about ongoing delays of the arrival of the Cyclone maritime helicopter, the chopper that is to replace the Sea Kings. "It is not like I am planning to park the Sea King in July and I have a problem," he explained to the senate defence committee. "I am comfortable in flying the Sea King for the next five years." On Tuesday, the Canadian Forces did park the Sea Kings after one of them tipped forward and smashed five of its rotor blades Monday night on the tarmac at Canadian Forces Base Shearwater in Halifax. None of the four crew members on board the helicopter were injured. The aircraft had landed after a training mission and tipped forward while its rotors were spinning. The accident is under investigation. The grounding of the Sea Kings will raise further questions about the problem-plagued program to replace those helicopters. Canada has ordered 28 Cyclone helicopters from U.S. aerospace giant Sikorsky. The original contract called for the first Cyclone to be delivered in November 2008, with deliveries of all 28 helicopters completed by early 2011. But Sikorsky has yet to turn over a single helicopter to Canada under the $5.7-billion program. The Conservatives have laid blame on the Liberals for the program because Paul Martin's government awarded the contract to Sikorsky in 2004. Liberals have pointed out there the government has made changes to the original contract which have contributed to the delays. Last year, then-Defence minister Peter MacKay acknowledged the ongoing problems with the program and said he hoped "we will be back on track in the fall and taking regular delivery of Cyclone helicopters from Sikorsky." That never happened. Sikorsky is the prime contractor for the maritime helicopter project, while General Dynamics Canada Ltd. Ottawa, and L-3 MAS, Mirabel Quebec are principal sub-contractors. In its attempts to help Sikorsky along, DND officials reduced the criteria for an interim aircraft a basic Cyclone - to receive a military airworthiness certification. But even with that, Sikorsky failed to meet its delivery timetable, according to a November 2010 briefing note written for MacKay. The Citizen obtained that note through the Access to Information law. http://www.ottawacitizen.com/news/King+helicopters+grounded+after+accident/8666657/story.html Back to Top On a Wing and a Sunbeam: Solar Plane Pilots Look to Circle the Globe An airplane has flown the expanse of U.S. airspace powered by photons alone. The coast-to-coast journey was but a warm-up for an attempt at circumnavigating the globe. The transcontinental flight that didn't use a drop of fuel took 105 hours and 41 minutes to cover 5,650 kilometers-and the next one will be nearly 10 times longer. The Solar Impulse HB-SIA completed its trip across North America last week, enduring bad weather and landing early due to a tear in the wing. But that's nothing compared with the challenge of completing the transglobal electric airplane marathon scheduled for 2015. "The mission was harder than foreseen, especially because of difficult weather conditions," says co-pilot André Borschberg, CEO of the Solar Impulse team, which completed the cross-country flight with five layovers. "We had to adapt very quickly and change flight strategy in a very short time." The fabric underneath the left wing tore during the flight between Washington, D.C., and New York City on July 6 for reasons unknown, and strong headwinds made the landing in Dallas-Forth Worth on May 23 particularly challenging. (It also prompted multiple 911 calls about a possible UFO in the area.) And the aircraft, even when identified, is a strange flying object, boasting the wingspan of a 747 but weighing less than a compact car. Yet, the solar craft-and its pilots-performed flawlessly, even when damaged with a 2.5- meter-long tear. "It demonstrates that the structure is strong and totally reliable because it held on despite the wind flow into the wing," Borschberg argues. The HB-SIA crossed the country on sunshine using the electricity provided by 12,000 solar cells, soaring to more than 8,000 meters and then slowly coasting down at 15 meters per minute after sunset as low as 1,500 meters on its 90-kilowatt-hour lithium ion battery pack before resuming a climb when the sun rose anew in the morning. This superefficient aircraft travels slower than a moped, averaging just 50 kilometers per hour on most trips, with its four electrical engines capable of putting out the maximum 10-horsepower each, solely for takeoff and landing. The longest single flight-from Dallas-Forth Worth to Saint Louis-took 21 hours and 21 minutes to complete. And the solar airplane doesn't exactly have the lift capacity to start ferrying passengers. "Today we don't see how we could put 200 passengers in a solar airplane," says Bertrand Piccard, the first man to fly a balloon around the world nonstop as well as chairman and co-pilot of this effort. "This plane is more about demonstrating the incredible duration that is possible, rather than speed to destination." One key improvement to allow for longer-distance flight will be a form of computer monitoring, so that the human pilot will be able to rest during the at least five-day and five-night Pacific Ocean overflight while the autopilot keeps the airplane stable. An "electrical box," in the words of Borschberg, will also supervise the state of the airplane and will only call the pilot's attention to specific challenges, in part via a new system of human-machine interface conveyed by vibrations on the left or right side when the bank angle exceeds more than five degrees. "At the beginning we will not know this new airplane very well," he says. "The first flight through the night will be full of suspense." The pilots have already spent at least three days and nights in a flight simulator, in training. Borschberg notes that the key adaptation was changing his mental focus from what he wanted to achieve to what he was actually experiencing: "I was almost a little bit disappointed it was already over," he recalls of the training attempt. And that's nothing compared with the serene state induced by the slowly passing scenery from the hush of the cockpit disturbed only by the whistle of the air passing over it. "It is never boring to fly in the most incredible airplane existing, an airplane that burns no fuel and can fly day and night," Piccard wrote during a Reddit Ask-Me-Anything session on May 31, perhaps because the airplane's pitch, roll and yaw can all change simultaneously making it extremely challenging to fly. The Solar Impulse team will concentrate now on improving energy efficiency even further in the next version, dubbed HB-SIB, allowing for more reserve power as well as working to improve reliability to enable the around-the-world attempt. Currently, humid conditions can ground HB-SIA because the airplane's electrical circuits are not completely waterproof and it cannot handle strong winds. Critical to the success of these 21st-century would-be Phileas Foggs will be toilets integrated into the pilot's seat of the new aircraft. For this flight, the pilots made it through on bottles and will power. As Borschberg says: "What can be interesting for commercial and military aviation is how we will manage the long-duration flight in terms of sleep, rest, alertness and fitness of the pilot." http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=flying-solar-airplane-around-the-world&page=2 Back to Top New technology to measure radiation exposure in pilots (Medical Xpress)-Researchers from the University of Wollongong have developed a unique device that measures how much radiation pilots and astronauts are exposed to. The silicon-based microdosimeter assesses the radiation risk to astronauts and pilots, and radiation damage to microelectronics, during long-term space missions and high altitude flights. Exposure to too much radiation can cause cancer, damage to the foetuses of pregnant women and genetic defects that can be passed onto future generations. Professor Anatoly Rozenfeld, Director of the Centre for Medical Radiation Physics (CMRP) - the largest research body of its kind in the Asia Pacific region - has just been granted a US patent for his invention. "Silicon microdosimetry is providing a new metric for the estimation of hazards from ionizing radiation in mixed radiation fields. It is an essential contribution to radiation protection of pilots and astronauts in avionics and space, where the radiation environment is not easy to predict," Professor Rozenfeld said. Professor Rozenfeld and his multidisciplinary research team at CMRP have worked with a number of high profile international agencies, such as the National Space Biomedical Research Institute (USA), the United States Naval Academy, the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANTSO) and the Australian National Fabrication Facility at UNSW, on the invention. "We are confident that this version of 3D silicon microdosimeter after final investigation of prototype will be very attractive for commercialisation in many fields of terrestrial and space radiation protection," Professor Rozenfeld said. Professor Rozenfeld, who has dedicated his life to finding better treatments for cancer after losing both parents to the disease, said the technology could also be used in advanced radiation oncology modalities (such as proton and heavy ion therapies) for cancer treatment. Professor Rozenfeld also recently received a Chinese patent for a skin dosimetry technology that was 10 years in the making. 'Drop-in' accurately measures (in real time) the amount of radiation absorbed into a patient's skin during procedures such as radiotherapy and CT scans that can give off high levels of ionising radiation. "An accurate skin dose measurement can help prevent a patient's skin from being overdosed, and at the same time, provide a vital indication of overall radiation safety," Professor Rozenfeld said. http://medicalxpress.com/news/2013-07-technology-exposure.html Back to Top 2013 Aviation Human Factors and SMS Seminar - Dallas, July 23-24, 2013 Just under a week until the 2013 Aviation Human Factors and SMS Seminar in Dallas, July 23-24 at the Frontiers of Flight Museum, from 8-5 each day. The seminar fee is $100. Please RSVP if you plan to attend. We have a great speaker lineup, entertaining venue and a chance to share best practices with your fellow professionals. FMI: http://www.signalcharlie.net/Seminar+2013 Registration: http://www.signalcharlie.net/Seminar+Registration+2013 Kent B. Lewis (850) 449-4841 www.signalcharlie.net Back to Top Back to Top Skylon space plane 'will transform high-speed aviation' Alan Bond, chief engineer at Reaction Engines, says the ability of the Skylon plane to transform into a rocket will open up space travel for the human race. The Skylon can take off from a standard runway before accelerating to speeds of 19,000 miles per hour taking people to Earth's stratosphere in just 15 minutes. Alan Bond, chief designer of the Skylon said the breakthrough on creating a device that can cool the air entering an engine allowing it to operate normally at speeds of Mach 5 will transform high-speed aviation. "It enables an aeroplane, very much a fast aeroplane, but an aeroplane nonetheless, to take off, accelerate at up to five times the speed of sound, turn itself subtly into a rocket, fly into orbit, do a job and come back again. "The second thing it enables, is a very high speed terrestrial aircraft. For example an aircraft carrying 300 passengers could go from Europe to Australia in about four hours." He said: "We are looking at a revolution in transportation equilvent to the jet engine. "Once you've got access to space on that basis, that is the stepping stone to anywhere in the universe and a very exciting future for the human race." http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/10182080/Skylon-space-plane-will-transform-high-speed- aviation.html Back to Top GRADUATE RESEARCH SURVEY My name is Joseph Arnold. I am graduate student with Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. I am in the process of working on my Capstone project. My project is to assess the accident rates of Regional Carriers and determine the underlying cause(s). I intend on comparing Regional carriers to Major Airlines as a comparative study. I have developed a survey for this purpose. I seek to survey active FAR Part 121 pilots of Regional Carriers and Major Airlines. You were refered to me as a person whom I could contact to distribute my survey to participants. The link is below: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FSKVR8R I would appreciate your assistance greatly. Respectfully, Joseph Arnold Curt Lewis