Flight Safety Information March 31, 2014 - No. 066 In This Issue Long search looms for Malaysia jet, families renew protests Seabed of jet hunt zone mostly flat with 1 trench US aviation team in Nigeria for safety inspection PRISM SMS Cathay Pacific Pilots Receive IFALPA's Polaris Award Upcoming Events Long search looms for Malaysia jet, families renew protests (Reuters) - The search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 could take years, U.S. Navy officials suggested on Sunday, as search and rescue officials raced to locate the plane's black box recorder days before its batteries are set to die. Ten ships and as many aircraft are searching a massive area in the Indian Ocean west of Perth, trying to find some trace of the aircraft, which went missing more than three weeks ago and is presumed to have crashed. The chief of the China Maritime Search and Rescue Center, He Jianzhong, told the Xinhua state news agency no objects linked to the plane had been found on Sunday, and that Chinese vessels would expand their search area. Numerous objects have been spotted in the two days since Australian authorities moved the search 1,100 km (685 miles) after new analysis of radar and satellite data concluded the Boeing 777 travelled faster and for a shorter distance after vanishing from civilian radar screens on March 8. None has been confirmed as coming from Flight MH370. U.S. Navy Captain Mark Matthews, who is in charge of the U.S. Towed Pinger Locator (TPL), told journalists at Stirling Naval Base near Perth that the lack of information about where the plane went down seriously hampers the ability to find it. "Right now the search area is basically the size of the Indian Ocean, which would take an untenable amount of time to search," he said. "If you compare this to Air France flight 447, we had much better positional information of where that aircraft went into the water," he said, referring to a plane that crashed in 2009 near Brazil and which took more than two years to find. The U.S. Navy cannot use the pinger locator and other sonar used to listen for the beacons on the aircraft's flight data and cockpit voice recorders until "conclusive visual evidence" of debris is found, U.S. Navy spokesman Commander William Marks told CBS' "Face the Nation" program. If no location is found, searchers would have to use sonar to slowly and methodically map the bottom of the ocean, he said. "That is an incredibly long process to go through. It is possible, but it could take quite a while," he said. Among the vessels to join the search is an Australian defense force ship, the Ocean Shield, that has been fitted with a sophisticated U.S. black box locator and an underwater drone. Australia, which is coordinating the search in the southern Indian Ocean, said it had established a new body to oversee the investigation and issued countries involved in the search a set of protocols to abide by should any wreckage be found. Malaysia says the plane, which disappeared less than an hour into a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing, was likely diverted deliberately. Investigators have determined no apparent motive or other red flags among the 227 passengers or the 12 crew. WEATHER THREATENS EXPANDED SEARCH The Australian Maritime Safety Authority (AMSA) said aircraft from China, Australia, Japan, South Korea, Malaysia and the United States were involved in the search on Sunday. The search has involved unprecedented cooperation between more than two dozen countries and 60 aircraft and ships but has also been hampered by regional rivalries and an apparent reluctance to share potentially crucial information due to security concerns. Asked if more resources could added to the international effort, U.S. Navy spokesman Marks told CBS, "We have about as many assets out there as we can. You have to wonder if the debris is even out there. If we fly over something, we will see it." This week, Australia issued a set of rules and guidelines to all parties involved in the search, giving Malaysia authority over the investigation of any debris to be conducted on Australian soil, a spokeswoman at the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade told Reuters. "Australia intends to bring the wreckage ashore at Perth and hold it securely for the purposes of the Malaysian investigation," the spokeswoman said. Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott on Sunday appointed a former chief of Australia's defense forces, Air Chief Marshal Angus Houston, to lead a new Joint Agency Coordination Centre (JACC). The JACC will coordinate communication between all international partners as well as with the families of passengers, many of whom are expected to travel to Perth. FAMILY PROTESTS The Malaysian government has come under strong criticism from China, home to more than 150 of the passengers, where relatives of the missing have accused the government of "delays and deception". On Sunday, dozens of angry relatives of Chinese passengers from Beijing met with Chinese embassy officials in Kuala Lumpur, piling more pressure on the Malaysian government over its handling of the case. "We arrived here this morning with sorrow and anxiety, because the special envoy from Malaysia, the so called high-level tech team, did not give us any effective information in meetings that took place in three consecutive days," said Jiang Hui, a relative of one of the victims. "We want the Malaysian government to apologize for giving out confusing information in the past week which caused the delay in the search and rescue effort." http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/03/30/us-malaysiaairlines-flight-idUSBREA2701720140330 Back to Top Seabed of jet hunt zone mostly flat with 1 trench (Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia/ Associated Press ) - This undated graphic provided by Commonwealth of Australia (Geoscience Australia) Dr. Robin Beaman, James Cook University, shows the North-westerly view of the search area for the missing Malaysian Airlines Flight 370 at Broken Ridge, south-eastern Indian Ocean, which shows the Diamantina Escarpment dropping from about 800 meters to over 5000 meters in depth. Two miles under the sea where satellites and planes are looking for debris from the missing Malaysian jet, the ocean floor is cold, dark, covered in a squishy muck of dead plankton and - in a potential break for the search - mostly flat. The troubling exception is a steep, rocky drop ending in a deep trench. The sea floor in this swath of the Indian Ocean is dominated by a substantial underwater plateau known as Broken Ridge, where the geography would probably not hinder efforts to find the main body of the jet that disappeared with 239 people on board three weeks ago, according to seabed experts who have studied the area. WELLINGTON, New Zealand - Two miles beneath the sea surface where satellites and planes are looking for debris from the missing Malaysian jet, the ocean floor is cold, dark, covered in a squishy muck of dead plankton and - in a potential break for the search - mostly flat. The troubling exception is a steep, rocky drop ending in a deep trench. The seafloor in this swath of the Indian Ocean is dominated by a substantial underwater plateau known as Broken Ridge, where the geography would probably not hinder efforts to find the main body of the jet that disappeared with 239 people on board three weeks ago, according to seabed experts who have studied the area. Australian officials on Friday moved the search to an area 1,100 kilometers (680 miles) to the northeast of a previous zone as the mystery of Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 continued to confound. There is no guarantee that the jet crashed into the new search area. Planes that have searched it for two days have spotted objects of various colors and sizes, but none of the items scooped by ships has been confirmed to be related to the plane. The zone is huge: about 319,000 square kilometers (123,000 square miles), roughly the size of Poland or New Mexico. But it is closer to land than the previous search zone, its weather is much more hospitable - and Broken Ridge sounds a lot craggier than it really is. And the deepest part is believed to be 5,800 meters (19,000 feet), within the range of American black box ping locators on an Australian ship leaving Sunday for the area and expected to arrive in three or four days. Formed about 100 million years ago by volcanic activity, the ridge was once above water. Pulled under by the spreading of the ocean floor, now it is more like a large underwater plain, gently sloping from as shallow as about 800 meters (2,625 feet) to about 3,000 meters (9,843 feet) deep. It got its name because long ago the movement of the Earth's tectonic plates separated it from another plateau, which now sits about 2,500 kilometers (1,550 miles) to the southwest. Much of Broken Ridge is covered in a sediment called foraminiferal ooze, made of plankton that died, settled and was compacted by the tremendous pressure from the water above. "Think like it's been snowing there for tens of millions of years," said William Sager, a professor of marine geophysics at the University of Houston in Texas. Like snow, the layer of microscopic plankton shells tends to smooth out any rises or falls in the underlying rock. In places, the layer is up to 1 kilometer (half a mile) deep. But if the fuselage of the Boeing 777 did fall on to Broken Ridge, it would not sink much into the muck. "The surface would be soft, it would squeeze between your toes, but it's not so soft that you would disappear like snow," Sager said. "Something big like pieces of an airplane, it's going to be sitting on the surface." Searchers will be hoping that if the latest area turns out to be where the plane crashed - and that remains educated guesswork until searchers can put their hands on aerial debris sightings and check what it is - the fuselage did not go down on the southern edge of Broken Ridge. That's where the ocean floor drops precipitously - more than 4 kilometers (2 1/2 miles) in places, according to Robin Beaman, a marine geologist at Australia's James Cook University. It's not a sheer cliff, more like a very steep hill that a car would struggle to drive up. At the bottom of this escarpment is the narrow Diamantina trench, which measurements put as deep at 5,800 meters (19,000 feet), though no one is sure of its greatest depth because it has never been precisely mapped. "Let's hope the wreck debris has not landed over this escarpment - it's a long way to the bottom," Beaman said. The Diamantina trench, named after an Australian navy vessel, is one of the deeper sections of the parts of the oceans that surround Antarctica, according to Mike Coffin, the executive director of the Institute for Marine and Antarctic Studies at Australia's University of Tasmania. The trench's rocky crags and crannies would make it difficult for ships using instruments like side-scanning sonar or multi-beam echo sounders to distinguish any debris from the crevices. Searchers will especially be hoping to locate the jet's two "black boxes," which recorded sounds in the cockpit and data on the plane's performance and flight path that could help reconstruct why it diverted sharply west from its overnight flight from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, to Beijing on March 8. The black boxes were designed to emit locator pings for at least 30 days, and are projected to lose battery power - and thus their pings - by mid-April. The pinger can be heard as far as 2 1/2 miles away, but the distance can vary widely, depending on the state of the sea and the wreckage location, said Joseph Kolly, director of research and engineering for the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board. Black boxes can get buried or muffled by other wreckage, and thermoclines, which are layers of water with great variations in temperature, can refract the signal, he said. The sediment on Broken Ridge is unlikely to inhibit the ping - but on the escarpment or in the trench, rocks could scatter the sound, making it harder to detect, according to Mike Haberman, a research scientist specializing in acoustics at the University of Texas, Austin. To pinpoint the ping they hear from the surface, searchers likely will run a submersible equipped with sonar several hundred feet above the ocean floor. The unmanned underwater vehicle will putter along at a slow jog, able to "see" objects on the floor that may seem out of place. But its vision is limited - in a day it could cover an area only about the size of Manhattan, Sager said. The observations stored in the vehicle's memory can be accessed only by bringing it to the surface. Under the best conditions, to survey the entire new search area could take between three months and up to nearly two years, depending on the quality of data needed to identify the debris, according to calculations by David T. Sandwell, a professor of geophysics who specializes in seafloor mapping at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego. Because it is such a painstaking - and expensive - process, most mapping has been focused on things that people consider useful, like underwater shipping hazards and potential oil deposits. With nothing much to interest people in the this part of the Indian Ocean, the maps tend to follow features like the volcanically active mid-ocean ridges, leaving big blank spaces in between. There are 80-kilometer (50-mile) -wide strips of the search area where no shipboard measurements have been taken and scientists use less detailed satellite measurements and educated guesswork to depict what the floor actually looks like. Precisely what the seafloor looks like in detail in the area of the new search is another in a long line of Flight 370 mysteries. http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/asia_pacific/seabed-of-jet-hunt-zone-mostly-flat-with-1- trench/2014/03/30/cb447cc4-b86b-11e3-80de-2ff8801f27af_story.html Back to Top US aviation team in Nigeria for safety inspection A delegation of the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) is in Nigeria for the reassessment of Category 1 status, the West African country's aviation authority said on Sunday. The four-man team would on Monday begin a five-day inspection of facilities in the West African country, Benedict Adeyileka, the acting director-general of Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) , told reporters in Lagos, Nigeria's commercial hub. The team will carry out assessment of NCAA's compliance with the applicable sections of the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) Standards contained in Annexes 1, 6 and 8, he said. According to him, it was in line with the eight critical elements of a state safety oversight as described in the ICAO document 9734 A. The director general told reporters that the team will use the current International Aviation Safety Assessment (IASA) checklist and ICAO guidance material during the assessment. He listed the eight critical elements to include primary aviation legislation, specific operating regulations, state civil aviation system, safety oversight functions and technical personnel qualification and training. Others are technical guidance and tools, incensing and certification obligations as well as surveillance obligations and resolution of safety concerns. Adeyileka said NCAA had provided responses to the checklist and forwarded them to the FAA team leader in preparation for the visit. He said the team would also inspect Nigeria's Arik Air and its facilities. Nigeria attained the FAA Category 1 air safety rating from the US government under FAA's IASA program on Aug. 23, 2010. The status deals with Nigeria's compliance with international air safety standards set by the ICAO which establishes international standards and recommended practices for aircraft operations and maintenance. http://www.globaltimes.cn/content/851758.shtml#.UzliNPldWWE Back to Top Back to Top Cathay Pacific Pilots Receive IFALPA's Polaris Award PANAMA CITY, Panama--(BUSINESS WIRE)--The Hong Kong Airline Pilots Association (HKALPA), in conjunction with the International Federation of Air Line Pilots' Associations, is proud to announce that IFALPA's Polaris Award was presented to two of its members, Captain Malcolm Waters and First Officer David Hayhoe, at the IFALPA Annual Conference in Panama on 29 March 2014. The Polaris Award is the highest honor associated with civil aviation awarded by IFALPA. It is presented to airline crews in recognition for acts of exceptional airmanship, heroic action, or a combination of these two attributes. On 13 April 2010, Captain Waters and First Officer Hayhoe, in a twin engine A330, were faced with a totally unexpected inflight emergency involving loss of power on one engine and degraded power on the other. In addition, they had no control over the amount of thrust produced by the operating engine and indications on the flight deck gave no clue as to what the problem was or how to resolve it. Since this was a completely unexpected situation, they had little guidance from existing procedures or checklists. Instead, drawing on their piloting experience, skill, and judgment, they safely landed their aircraft and its 322 passengers and crew. This was accomplished in spite of an approach and landing in Hong Kong that, by necessity, was 110 miles per hour above the normal landing speed. The cause of the loss of power in both engines was discovered to be fuel, contaminated with seawater, that had been uploaded from the airport's fuel hydrant system at Surabaya, the flight's departure point. Throughout the emergency, they acted with calmness and professionalism, keeping the cabin crew, passengers, and ATC aware of their situation whilst handling a complex and unforeseen emergency, and piloting the aircraft in a critical situation. As a direct result of Captain Waters' and First Officer Hayhoe's professionalism and skill, the flight ended with a safe landing from a situation which could easily have produced a far worse outcome. Presenting the award, IFALPA President Captain Don Wykoff praised Malcolm and Dave in undoubtedly saving many lives and acting in a manner to which all professional pilots could aspire. HKALPA was proud to sponsor the attendance of these two officers at the awards ceremony in Panama City. HKALPA, representing more than 2,500 pilots at 4 airlines in Hong Kong, is the representative body to the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Association (IFALPA) for pilots employed by Hong Kong based airlines. It is a professional, non-commercial association with the mandate to promote flight safety, professionalism and the interests of its members. HKALPA represents members in both professional and technical matters within Hong Kong and internationally through our membership of the International Federation of Air Line Pilots Associations (IFALPA). Our Technical & Safety Committee (TASC) monitors and acts, both at local and international level, on technical matters that could affect pilots in the safe execution of their professional duties. http://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20140330005079/en/Cathay-Pacific-Pilots-Receive- IFALPA%E2%80%99s-Polaris-Award#.UzlgdPldWWE Back to Top Upcoming Events: WATS 2014 April 1-3, 2014 Orlando, FL http://halldale.com/wats#.UymQ_vldWSo North Texas Business Aviation Safety Show-Down is set for April 3rd http://www.aviationpros.com/press_release/11327425/north-texas-business-aviation-safety-show-down- is-set-for-april-3rd Middle East Air Cargo and Logistics Exhibition & Conference 2014 April 9-10, 2014 Abu Dhabi National Exhibition Centre (ADNEC) http://cargomiddleeast.com Airport Show Dubai May 11-13, 2014 Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC) www.theairportshow.com/portal/home.aspx National Safety Council Aviation Safety Committee Annual Conference Savanah, GA - May 14-15, 2014 Contact: tammy.washington@nsc.org http://cwp.marriott.com/savdt/artexmeeting/ Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar 21-22 May 2014, Bangkok, Thailand http://bit.ly/APASS2014 Curt Lewis