Flight Safety Information May 2, 2014 - No. 090 In This Issue Navy training airplane crashes in Gulf of Mexico; Coast Guard rescues pilots U.S. air safety agency urged to audit Alaska charters Smartphone sensors could give aircraft accident clues 1,600 Protected Birds Killed By JFK Airport Contractors In Five Years, Records Show Cost pressures mount as Malaysia Airlines search drags on PRISM SMS Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide Offers B.S. Aviation Security Degree Graduate Research Survey Upcoming Events Navy training airplane crashes in Gulf of Mexico; Coast Guard rescues pilots A T-34C Turbomentor similar to this one crashed in the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi, Texas, Thursday, May 1, 2014. The Coast Guard rescued the two pilots. The airplane pictured belonged to Training Air Wing 4 taxis down the flight line at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi before takeoff. The aircraft is used to provide primary flight training to Navy, Marine Corps, Coast Guard and Air Force pilots. (U.S. Navy photo by Lt. j.g. Brett Dawson) A Navy training airplane crashed into the Gulf of Mexico near Corpus Christi, Texas, on Thursday morning, the Coast Guard said. Coast Guard aviators rescued the two Navy pilots who were aboard the T-34C Turbomentor, a two-seat airplane used in aviator training. The plane was based at Naval Air Station Corpus Christi, where military pilots have been trained since 1941. The Navy reported the downed airplane about 10:20 a.m., and the Coast Guard said it immediately launched a HH-65 Dolphin helicopter and a HU-25 Falcon airplane. The Navy plane crashed about two miles off shore. The pilots were reported to be in stable condition, the Coast Guard said. "Fortunately, we were able to get on-scene quickly and get the pilots out of the water," said Petty Officer 3rd Class Jesse Weaver, a Coast Guard rescue swimmer. "It's easy to become hypothermic with the water temperatures still as cold as they are." The cause for the crash was not immediately released. A Navy T-34C Turbomentor crashed in Lake Pontchartrain in January 2010, while its pilots were preparing to land at Lakefront Airport in New Orleans. A boat crew from Coast Guard Station New Orleans rescued the Navy student aviator. The instructor pilot died, and his body was found days later near where the airplane crashed. http://www.nola.com/military/index.ssf/2014/05/navy_training_airplane_crashes.html Back to Top U.S. air safety agency urged to audit Alaska charters A Cessna 208 that crashed in southwest Alaska on November 29, 2013 is pictured in this undated photo courtesy of the Alaska State Troopers. (Reuters) - The U.S. agency that investigates airplane crashes urged the U.S. safety regulator on Thursday to audit several Alaska-based air carriers after a series of accidents over 19 months in which six people were killed. In an urgent recommendation to the Federal Aviation Administration, the National Transportation Safety Board asked for a comprehensive audit of Era Aviation, Corvus Airlines, Hageland Aviation Services, Frontier Flying Service, Ravn Alaska and Ravn Connect, all owned by HoTH Inc. It also asked for an independent review of the FAA's oversight of the carriers. Ravn Connect is the largest charter service operating in Alaska and was formerly known as Hageland, the NTSB said. It operates 1,200 flights a week with 58 airplanes. The agency said evidence of "extensive" shortcomings in oversight and compliance call for an independent review of the companies and the FAA's oversight to ensure safety. "We hope the FAA takes action," NTSB spokesman Eric Weiss said. Officials from the carriers and HoTH were not immediately available to comment. The FAA said it had no immediate comment. The NTSB cites six accidents and one incident by the carriers since September 2012, and four were in the last six months. A crash on April 8 killed two crew members and crash in November 2013 killed a pilot and three passengers. After the November accident, the companies took action to try to reduce risk of crashes, the NTSB said. But a comprehensive review is needed to address "system deficiencies." The planes involved are made by Bombardier, and by Cessna and Beechcraft, owned by Textron Inc. http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/01/us-alaska-charter- idUSBREA400SL20140501 Back to Top Smartphone sensors could give aircraft accident clues The smartphones carried by passengers on board a Malaysia Airlines flight could yield vital information about what happened to the missing plane. Almost nine weeks on, the search for flight MH370 has come up with nothing. A robotic sonar-carrying submarine is now searching the seabed 2000 kilometres off Perth, Australia, but after scanning 314 square kilometres, there is still no sign of the jet. The only hope investigators have of finding out what happened is to find the flight data recorders - often called the black boxes. But what if they have been destroyed or sunk to depths of the southern Indian Ocean that rescue teams cannot reach? There may be an alternative. If the wreckage is found, sensors and apps running on passengers' smartphones could help work out what happened to the flight. While lithium batteries wouldn't survive being under water, forensics experts can tease apart microchips and, if necessary, use scanning electron microscopes to probe the data stored in components like solid state memory chips. Indeed, some groups, such as the French air accident investigator BEA, already employ this technology. For example, earlier this month digital forensics firm 4Discovery of Chicago, Illinois placed a smartphone in a high pressure saltwater chamber at Chicago's Shedd Aquarium. After a week of immersion, memory chips recovered from the ruined phone by Gillware Data Recovery of Madison, Wisconsin, revealed email, texts, photos and video data hadn't been lost. So many sensors Even the more ordinary functions of phones - audio, picture and video capture - can reveal key accident information. An example was tragically witnessed this week when rescuers retrieved a smartphone from the body of a student who drowned in the 16 April ferry sinking off Jindo, South Korea. A video file on the phone's memory card could potentially prove what the authorities told the passengers to do as the ship began to sink. But it is the increasingly sophisticated array of sensors appearing on phones that may make them ever more useful in accident analysis. If a plane's black boxes are lost or destroyed, the data found in crew or passenger phones might give investigators clues about the history of its airspeed, its direction of flight, its orientation in space and even its cabin air pressure. That is because smartphones contain accelerometers that sense motion, gyroscopes that detect orientation, GPS position receivers, and some phones - currently only the Samsung S4 and S5 - even have air pressure sensors, intended to measure altitude for climbers and skydivers. Magnetometers - which provide positioning information by measuring Earth's local magnetic field - plus temperature and humidity sensors are beginning to appear in them, too. 'appening in the background Sampo Karjalainen, CEO of the Finnish firm Protogeo that created an activity tracking app called Moves, bought by Facebook last week, says the way apps log data could be useful to investigators. For example, acceleration and gyroscope data is collected by the iPhone 5s even when the main processor is asleep. "That data is then available when an app wants it," he says. "So sensing turns of an aircraft, or changes in g-forces, might be doable as these sensors start to collect continuous data. Wearables like wristbands and Google Glass are perfect for this continuous analysis, too," says Karjalainen. Chris Hargreaves of the Centre for Forensic Computing and Security in Bedfordshire, UK, thinks using phones in air crash forensics sounds feasible "I can certainly imagine that some data from mobile and wearable devices could be relevant to an aircraft investigation," he says. "Digital forensics is not just for cybercrimes but murders, kidnappings and burglaries too - so why not as part of aircraft investigations?" Go with what you've got Simon Steggles, a director of cellphone forensics firm Disklabs in Tamworth, UK, analyses cellphones for the police. He agrees there is a chance that some useful data may be left in a phone's memory if a passenger on a downed aircraft had been using an app. "If so, there is a good chance we could get something out of it, but we wouldn't know until it is actually here in our labs as all apps behave differently," he says. In-flight gadgets are already used as forensic tools for light aircraft, says Matthew Greaves, head of safety and accident investigation at one of the UK's major aeronautics schools, Cranfield University near Bedford. "Investigators regularly extract what they can from iPads, helmet cams and even GPS units that weren't being used. These often record data in the background that is never displayed to the user and can be recovered after an accident." One problem he foresees is that smartphones are not certified for the accuracy required in aviation. "With any sensor, its accuracy and how its measurements drift and cope with interference are the issues," he says. He suspects phones are not up to scratch in that regard, and useful data may be minimal. However, Greaves says there is a salutary lesson in the way London-based Inmarsat's engineers traced the route of the stricken flight MH370 by analysing just seven empty data packets the plane sent to a satellite. "The Inmarsat work has shown that, when the need is there, investigators can make a great deal of very little." http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn25501-smartphone-sensors-could-give-aircraft- accident-clues.html#.U2Lx2vldV8E Back to Top 1,600 Protected Birds Killed By JFK Airport Contractors In Five Years, Records Show NEW YORK - Wildlife control contractors have shot almost 26,000 birds at John F. Kennedy International Airport over the past five years to stop them interfering with passenger flights - including more than 1,600 protected birds the airport did not have express permission to kill, internal records show. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey, which runs the airport, was granted limited permission to shoot "problem" species - mainly seagulls, geese and mourning doves - named on a special kill permit issued each year by the Fish and Wildlife Service. But the authority's own records show that between 2009 and 2013, they killed 1,628 birds from 18 different species that are protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act and are not named on the permits. That list includes snowy egrets, red-winged blackbirds and American kestrels. "It appears they will kill anything they see and they don't think twice about it," said Jennifer Barnes, an attorney with animal advocacy group Friends of Animals which recently filed a federal lawsuit to suspend the killing of all migratory birds at Kennedy. The Port Authority, which contracts the job of managing airport bird hazards to the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, is able to shoot these species because its permits make allowance for "emergency situations," according to the permit. That means any migratory birds can be exterminated if they are deemed to pose a "direct threat to human safety" - with the exceptions of eagles and endangered or threatened species, under the law. Critics say the emergency clause gives airports too much discretion to slaughter migratory birds, an act that ususally carries fines of up to $15,000 or six months in prison. "If a bird they kill is not listed on the permit, they never have to explain why they needed to kill that animal, why it was an emergency," Barnes said. But while the killing of three snowy owls that were shot for being too close to runways early last December sparked a public and media outcry - and a promise by the Port Authority to stop shooting the owls in favor of trapping and relocating them - the raptors represent only a fraction of the federally protected birds that landed on the airport's hit list. The agency has also gunned down the brown-headed cowbird, boat-tailed grackle, common raven, American crow, fish crow and waterfowl and wading birds that relish the coastal wetlands neighboring Kennedy, such as the wood duck, bufflehead, American wigeon, semipalmated plover, sanderling, least sandpiper, black-crowned night heron, great egret and cattle egret, according to Port Authority records. Four American kestrels, a small type of falcon, were also killed. Carol Bannerman, a spokeswoman for the Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service, said the actions it takes to reduce wildlife hazards at airports are "in compliance with federal and state rules" and that it relied more on non-lethal measures. "More than 90 percent of the wildlife encountered at airports is chased away. Others aren't attracted to the airport due to habitat changes," she said. A spokesman for the Port Authority did not respond to calls and questions. But the authority has previously defended the practice of killing birds in the name of averting potential mid-air disasters. For airports, the biggest threat birds pose is that they will get sucked into a passenger jet's engines and disable its ability to fly, as happened to a US Airways plane famously piloted by Captain Chesley Sullenberger that splash-landed into the Hudson River in January 2009. Last year, planes landing at or ascending from Kennedy struck birds on 174 separate occasions, with only a handful of these strikes causing actual damage to aircraft, according to Federal Aviation Administration data. The number of bird strikes is down from a peak of 258 in 2011 but still marks an overall rise in the last 20 years, according to the FAA'S wildlife strike database. In one case last October, several Canada geese were sucked into one of the engines of an incoming LAN Airlines Boeing 767. The plane landed safely and the whole engine had to be removed and sent for repairs. http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/05/01/jfk-birds-shot-protected-airport-port- authority_n_5246071.html Back to Top Cost pressures mount as Malaysia Airlines search drags on The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration (MSA) vessel Hai Xin 01 is seen from a Royal New Zealand Air Force (RNZAF) P-3K2 Orion aircraft in the southern Indian Ocean, as the search continues for missing Malaysia Airlines flight MH370 in this April 13, 2014 file photo. REUTERS/Greg Wood/Pool/Files (Reuters) - With the search for missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370 entering a new, much longer phase, the countries involved must decide how much they are prepared to spend on the operation and what they stand to lose if they hold back. The search is already set to be the most costly in aviation history and spending will rise significantly as underwater drones focus on a larger area of the seabed that Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott said on Monday could take six to eight months to search. But despite U.S. President Barack Obama publicly promising to commit more assets, the United States appears keen to begin passing on the costs of providing sophisticated sonar equipment that will form the backbone of the expanded hunt. That means Australia, China and Malaysia - the countries most closely involved in the operation - look set to bear the financial and logistical burden of a potentially lengthy and expensive search. "We're already at tens of millions. Is it worth hundreds of millions?" a senior U.S. defense official told Reuters last week. "I don't know. That's for them to decide." He made it clear that Washington was intent on spending less from now on, making it the first major donor country to scale back its financial commitment to the search. "We're not going to pay to perpetually use the equipment on an indefinite basis. Basically from here on out - starting next week or so - they need to pick up the contract," he said. At least $44 million was spent on the deployment of military ships and aircraft in the Indian Ocean and South China Sea in the first month of the search, about the same as was spent on the whole underwater search for Air France's Flight AF447, which crashed into the Mid-Atlantic in 2009. The Malaysian jetliner carrying 239 people disappeared en route from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing more than seven weeks ago, and huge surface and underwater searches have failed to solve the mystery of what happened. That mystery has major implications for airline manufacturers such as Boeing, which builds the 777 model that crashed and is awaiting a verdict as to what went wrong. RESOLVING THE "WHO PAYS?" QUESTION Malaysia is leading an investigation into the crash, but Australia has a key role in coordinating the hunt since the plane is believed to have crashed in its search and rescue zone. Abbott said finding any wreckage on the ocean surface was now highly unlikely and Australia would forge ahead with the upcoming phase of the search despite it likely costing A$60 million ($55.69 million). He added that while private companies under contract to Australia would soon be taking over from the military assets dispatched in the wake of the crash, he would be "seeking some appropriate contribution from other nations." Malaysia has repeatedly said cost is not an issue, but with searchers once again facing a potentially vast stretch of ocean, it acknowledged on Wednesday that money was up for discussion. "I will be going to Australia to discuss the next phase. As we go into deep sea search it's important that cost is discussed and we'll discuss with all stakeholders," Defence Minister and Acting Transport Minister Hishammuddin Hussein told reporters. "Hopefully by next week we will announce the cost sharing. But we won't know what the cost will be until we decide where we're going to search, what assets we will use and who will deploy those assets." Some safety experts fear the financial wrangling could take longer than expected and frustrate the next phase of operations. "This risks delaying the next phase of the search. They need a new plan and they basically have to start from scratch," an international search veteran said, asking not to be named. The two-year search for Air France 447 was only completed after bitter rows over a cash crisis that saw searchers trade down to a cheaper ship, while accepting indirect contributions from planemaker Airbus and the airline. The unprecedented donations of 8 million euros each had to be handled via specially created funds to avoid seeming to tarnish the probe's independence, and experts say the delicacy of dividing up funding for the MH370 probe may be even greater. DIPLOMATIC FALLOUT At least 153 of the flight's passengers were Chinese citizens, putting pressure on authorities there to keep up the search as distraught family members demand answers. China has not addressed what portion of the funding it is prepared to take on as the search moves into the new phase. "On the specific questions you just asked (about money), we will maintain communication and coordination with the Australian and Malaysian sides," said Foreign Ministry spokesman Qin Gang. A Western diplomat based in Beijing who has closely followed the case said that there was huge domestic pressure to find the aircraft, and for China to be the country which does so. "China has made such a show of looking for the plane and so the pressure at home is enormous," the diplomat said. "They've set expectations so high." Some of that pressure is being shifted onto Malaysia, which is desperate to limit the damage the missing flight has done to its international profile as a modern, successful Asian state. "The Malaysian government will find the money for this search. The country's reputation is at stake and you don't want to risk that," a source there involved in the search said. Australia has a strong diplomatic incentive to provide funding, a former government official with foreign policy experience said, as the relationship with Malaysia is more valuable than the costs it is likely to incur. Regardless of whether the plane is found, the official said, the kind of personal relationships that are forged during a crisis of this kind are seen as diplomatically advantageous. Down the road, it could try to cash in on goodwill on issues including Malaysia's role as a transit country for asylum seekers coming to Australia by boat or getting better treatment for Australian tourists detained on drug charges in Malaysia. ($1 = 1.0774 Australian Dollars) http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/04/30/us-malaysia-airlines-search- idUSBREA3T0FG20140430 Back to Top Back to Top Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide Offers B.S. Aviation Security Degree The demand for aviation security professionals continues to outstrip the available supply of individuals with the advanced education and skills required in today's society. That's why Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Worldwide has developed the first-ever online Bachelor's Degree in Aviation Security. The Aviation Security curriculum is designed to meet the needs and demands of the aviation and aerospace industry, as well as the security profession as a whole. Students will be introduced to both the science and practical application of aviation security with courses of study in airport security, airline security, general aviation security, corporate security, physical security, aviation legislation, airport management, and national security issues. http://worldwide.erau.edu/degrees-programs/programs/bachelors/aviation- security/index.html Back to Top Graduate Research Survey I am doing a MSc course at Cranfield University (England) in "Human Factors & Safety Assessment in Aeronautics." As part of my Thesis I am doing a survey related to the degradation of manual flying skills and looking at pilot attitudes towards manual flight. I am trying to get as large and varied background of airline/biz jet pilots from all over the world to take part in it. The main aim of my research is to get data from current line pilots about the issues they face regarding manual flying. Issues such as airline policies, fatigue, workload, training and display design. I am looking to gather data from pilots in many countries. The survey should only take about 10-15 minutes hopefully and it is totally anonymous. Here is the link to the survey https://cranfielduniversity.eu.qualtrics.com/SE/?SID=SV_1Tf2GY6mkpyR8Il Many thanks Pete Wilson MSc Student and Airline Training Captain Back to Top Upcoming Events: Airport Show Dubai May 11-13, 2014 Dubai International Convention and Exhibition Centre (DICEC) www.theairportshow.com/portal/home.aspx International Humanitarian Aviation Summit 12-14MAY Toledo, Spain www.wfp.org 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/ Embry-Riddle to offer Aviation SMS Workshop Daytona Beach, FL May 20-22, 2014 www.erau.edu/case ICAO Loss of Control In-Flight Symposium 20-22 May 2014 - Montreal www.icao.int/meetings/loci Asia Pacific Aviation Safety Seminar 21-22 May 2014, Bangkok, Thailand http://bit.ly/APASS2014 SMS & Risk Management Training Tampa, FL June 4-5, 2014 http://atcvantage.com 6th Annual Aviation Human Factors & SMS Seminar June 24th & 25th 2014 Dallas, TX www.regonline.com/builder/site/Default.aspx?EventID=1384474 21st Century Pilot Reliability Certification Workshop June 30th and July 1st, 2014 Hasbrouck Heights, NJ 07605 Please contact Kacy Schwartz kacy@convergentperformance.com 719-481-0530 International System Safety Society Annual Symposium 04-08AUG2014 - St. Louis, MO http://issc2014.system-safety.org Curt Lewis