Flight Safety Information July 23, 2014 - No. 151 In This Issue Southwest Airlines Jet Makes Emergency Landing At Port Columbus Airport Australia Focuses on Both Malaysian Jet Disasters Turns Out It's Pretty Easy to Shoot Down a Passenger Jet After Malaysia Airlines Crashes, the Payments Are Piling Up for Air Insurers PRISM TO HELP PREPARE FOR E-IOSA THE ALPA 60TH AIR SAFETY FORUM Graduate Research Survey (1) Graduate Research Survey (2) Upcoming Events Employment Southwest Airlines Jet Makes Emergency Landing At Port Columbus Airport COLUMBUS, Ohio - A Southwest Airlines passenger plane made an emergency landing at Port Columbus International Airport late Tuesday night. A spokesperson from Southwest Airlines told 10TV that Flight 424 from Baltimore/Washington to Chicago-Midway diverted to Columbus after the pilots receiving a smoke indication in the forward cargo hold. The captain declared an emergency and landed safely. Emergency evacuation slides were deployed and all 49 passengers and five crew members on board escaped safely. No injuries were reported. Emergency vehicles surrounded the plane on the taxiway and found no indication of smoke or a fire. Southwest Airlines say the aircraft is out of service for further inspections and they are working to get passengers to Chicago first thing in the morning. http://www.10tv.com/content/stories/2014/07/23/columbus-airport-southwest-airlines- emergency-landing.html Back to Top Australia Focuses on Both Malaysian Jet Disasters CANBERRA, Australia - Jul 23, 2014 - The monthslong hunt for the Malaysian airliner that vanished off the Australian coast will not be interrupted by the top search official's new job in recovering bodies from the downed airliner in Ukraine, the Australian government said Wednesday. Angus Houston heads Australia's Joint Agency Coordination Center, which oversees the search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 that is believed to have crashed in the Indian Ocean on March 8 after mysteriously veering far off course during a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing. The former Australian defense chief was in the Ukrainian town of Kharkiv on Wednesday as the prime minister's special envoy to receive the bodies of Australian victims of Malaysia Airlines Flight 17. The aircraft was shot down last week by a suspected surface- to-air missile fired by Russian-backed rebels, with the loss of 298 lives. Transport Minister Warren Truss said that the search for Flight 370 "continues uninterrupted." "We remain fully committed to conducting a thorough undersea search of the likely impact zone in the Indian Ocean," Truss said in a statement. Houston's deputy Judith Zielke will oversee the coordination center and keep the families of the 239 victims updated on the search's progress, Truss said. The Australian Transport Safety Bureau is conducting seabed mapping using two survey ships covering a 60,000-square kilometer (23,000-square mile) expanse, which is a crucial final step before a sonar search for the missing Boeing 777's wreckage begins in September. An initial search of 850 square kilometers (330 square miles) of seabed to the north ended with officials concluding that they were focusing their efforts in the wrong place. Australia has search responsibility under international conventions for the area 1,800 kilometers (1,100 miles) off Australia's west coast, where Flight 370 is thought to have run out of fuel and crashed. Australia has also taken a leadership role in the latest tragedy by moving a U.N. Security Council resolution on Monday demanding that rebels who hold the crash site cooperate with an independent investigation and allow for victims' remains to be recovered. Australia has also sent accident investigation and victim identification experts to Ukraine as well as a C-17 Globemaster military transport jet to take the bodies to the Netherlands for identification. http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/australia-focuses-malaysian-jet- disasters-24672964 Back to Top Turns Out It's Pretty Easy to Shoot Down a Passenger Jet American officials believe the missile that destroyed Malaysia Airlines Flight 17 was fired by pro-Russian separatists in Ukraine, using a Russian-made system designed for bringing down fighter jets. That brings up the question: How easy is it to bring down a passenger jet with a weapon that's meant to used by trained soldiers? Turns out, it's pretty easy. As in, take a three-day course and go for it easy. The weapon in question is the SA-11, a radar-guided surface to air missile (SAM) system. It's been around since the Soviets deployed the first-generation model in 1979. The mobile system (it sits on a tank chassis) is made to serve near the front lines to protect ground forces from air attacks. Operated by a crew of four and designed to attack fighter jets, it can fire multiple missiles simultaneously. It fires high explosive proximity fuse warheads, which home in on their targets and detonate just before reaching them, to maximize damage. Targets 20 miles away and over 70,000 feet in the air are fair game. It's a "big, heavy vehicle that has big missiles," says Randal Cordes, a military intelligence analyst who has worked at the CIA and Pentagon. "To use an SA-11 against an airliner, it's brutal overkill." Inside of a Buk-SAM. The training required to properly operate the system can take weeks or months, which may explain why the Malaysia plane was destroyed in the first place. The problem with the SA-11 is that it's difficult to properly identify and track targets, but easy to fire missiles. "The skill comes in knowing what you want to shoot at," says Cordes. That's because the SA-11's radar system shows the same "blip" for all different targets. The operator sees an aircraft's altitude, air speed, and vector, but not it's size or type, says Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. Airliners broadcast a four-digit transponder known as an IFF code that identifies them as civilian aircraft, and the SA-11 system is capable of picking up that information. But the training that goes into properly identifying aircraft takes months, especially since the window for acquiring and firing on targets is just a few minutes. "You can't take a crew, stick 'em inside the cabin, and say here's the on switch, and here's the button you hit," and expect them to operate it properly, says Wesley Paul, a former intelligence research analyst for the Air Force. "Ready" and "aim" are difficult. "Fire" is easy. But say someone dropped off the SA-11 and did all the basic work of getting it up and running, another complicated task. And say you decided on a target that popped up on your radar, whether or not you knew what it was. In that case, destruction comes easy. It would take three to four days at most to teach someone to use the system well enough to shoot down a 777, Cordesman says. That's partly because passenger planes fly at steady speeds and altitudes, and have no defense systems. They cruise higher than fighter jets do, at heights where they're more easily picked up by radar. "Once the radar picks up a target, it is a matter of telling the system that it should engage the target and issuing a fire command," says Paul Huter, an aerospace engineer at Lockheed Martin. That involves following a checklist and selecting the target, either by clicking on a screen or pushing a button (or clicking with a mouse on a screen, depending on the system model). Training would consist of running through that procedure in various conditions, and would be so straightforward, Huter says, that "it is certainly possible for someone with no training to read through the checklist and successfully engage a target." Cordesman compared it to firing a gun: "Pulling the trigger is easy. Judgment is hard." And once the missile's been fired, there's no way to divert it, he says. "You press the damn button and it's gone." http://www.wired.com/2014/07/sa-11-missiles-easy-to-use/ Back to Top After Malaysia Airlines Crashes, the Payments Are Piling Up for Air Insurers A political party in Kuala Lumpur on Monday expressed support for victims' families in the Malaysia Airlines crash in Ukraine. Credit Samsul Said/Reuters KUALA LUMPUR, Malaysia - Malaysia Airlines' two crashes in less than five months are sending tremors through the aviation insurance market - not least because the carrier's $2.25 billion overall liability policy is mysteriously missing a standard phrase that usually limits insurers' payments for search-and-rescue costs. The looming payments are coming as underwriters face other claims, because of the shelling of Libya's main airport a week ago, with 20 planes damaged, and a pair of deadly Taliban attacks on Karachi's airport in Pakistan. For just one category of aviation insurance - war risk insurance on the planes - estimated claims for incidents in the last five months now total up to $600 million for a sector that collects $65 million a year in premiums. Malaysia Airlines' broader policy has a high cap by industry standards - $2.25 billion for each crash - because the carrier operates big Airbus A380s, each configured for 494 passengers, and it wanted ample coverage. But the policy is unusual in that it does not have a separate sublimit for search-and- rescue costs - it is limited only by the overall $2.25 billion cap for the policy, three people with knowledge of the policy said. It is unclear why the clause was omitted, they said. The absence of a sublimit for search-and-rescue costs means that Malaysia Airlines could seek reimbursement for tens of millions - and potentially hundreds of millions - of dollars in search costs if the Malaysian and Australian governments decide to bill the airline for even part of their considerable expenses in looking for Flight 370, which vanished on March 8. An Australian delegation has been sent to Malaysia to broach the question of sharing costs for the Flight 370 investigation and seeking insurance reimbursement, said people with knowledge of the visit and the insurance policy, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. By tradition, governments do not seek reimbursement from an airline for search-and- rescue costs. As a result, the airlines do not typically need to ask their insurers to cover these costs; the insurers cover only so-called commercial costs, though their contracts do allow governments to seek reimbursement. In the case of Flight 370, the Australian government is paying 8 million Australian dollars, or $7.5 million, to commercial contractors for a survey of the floor of the Indian Ocean, and has set aside another 60 million Australian dollars to hire a contractor to tow deep-sea submersibles across 60,000 square kilometers of the ocean floor to look for the missing plane. Australian officials, Malaysian officials and the lead underwriter of the broad liability policy, Allianz of Germany, all declined to comment, as did the broker who negotiated the insurance policy on Malaysia Airlines' behalf, the London-based Willis Group Holdings. Continue reading the main story The crash of Flight 17 appears to have caught the war risk insurance market particularly by surprise. Insurers often prohibit airlines from flying across dangerous areas, or cancel their policies, but most carriers kept flying over Ukraine until the crash. The number of flights there dropped only 12 percent in the month leading up to it. "One assumes that if the war risk underwriters thought there was any risk, they would have prohibited airlines from flying or canceled their policies," said Paul Hayes, head of accidents and insurance at Ascend, an aviation consulting firm in London. Malaysia Airlines' war risk policy has a separate, much lower limit than the overall policy for claims for search-and-rescue costs. As in most aviation insurance contracts, a provision caps claims for these costs to a small percentage of the overall value of the policy. The Atrium Underwriting Group, the lead underwriter for Malaysia Airlines' war risk insurance, said in a statement that it had immediately approved payment for the loss of the aircraft in Flight 17. Aon, a London-based company that is one of the world's largest insurance brokers, said over the weekend that the plane had been insured for $97.3 million, but Atrium did not confirm the value. The crash of Flight 370 triggered a half-payment from Atrium under the war risk policy after adjusters concluded that there was a substantial but not ironclad case that the crash may have involved pilot suicide or other criminal action. War risk policies also cover deliberate, malicious acts. The Allianz-led policy - Allianz itself has only 9 percent of the exposure, having shared the rest with other underwriters - paid the balance of the cost of that aircraft, which had been insured for $100.2 million, insurance executives said. Insurance adjusters agreed with the Malaysian government there was a strong but not fully proved possibility that Flight 370 was lost because of deliberate action, given that the plane made a series of at least four well-executed turns over the course of an hour before heading south across the Indian Ocean until it apparently ran out of fuel. The final compromise followed a precedent in other cases in which pilot suicide was suspected but not proved. "It was basically split between the two policies," said Neil Smith, the head of underwriting at the Lloyd's Market Association, a trade group composed of Lloyd's of London insurance underwriters. The crashes of Flight 370 and Flight 17 are not Malaysia Airlines' first unusual insurance claims, however. The airline had an unusual claim in 2000 for the total loss of an Airbus A330 traveling in the opposite direction on the same route as Flight 370. In that case, a canister of a mysterious Chinese shipment destined for Iran broke open near the end of a trip from Beijing to Kuala Lumpur and began leaking, producing a smell that prompted the captain to conduct an emergency evacuation upon landing of all 266 people aboard. A subsequent investigation found that the hold was contaminated beyond cleaning with mercury and other chemicals that may have been precursors for the manufacture of nerve gas. Continue reading the main storyContinue reading the main storyContinue reading the main story The Malaysian government ended up digging a large hole in the ground near the airport tarmac and burying the entire plane. Insurers paid a full settlement of $90 million. Airline insurance premiums are set through an annual process in which underwriters bid for which provider will offer the lowest premiums at the best terms. Few airlines' policies have been renewed yet; Malaysia Airlines' has not. Until this year, Malaysia Airlines paid some of the lowest insurance premiums in the global aviation market, because it had a fairly young fleet of Boeing and Airbus planes. "With a shallow premium pool fully exhausted and an expectation of an immediate review of the current hull war premium rating, MH17 and incidents recently in Pakistan and Tripoli look likely to be the events that may halt the decline in aviation premium income and usher in the reintroduction of increases once again," said Gary Moran, the head of Asia aviation brokerage for Aon. Many leases and other contracts in the airline industry require carriers to be insured. Despite recent losses, Mr. Smith said, airlines were still able to obtain insurance, though he declined to speculate on the likelihood of increases in premiums. "If it wasn't available," he said, "the airlines wouldn't be able to fly." http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/22/business/air-insurers-worry-after-malaysia- airlines-latest-crash.html?_r=0 Back to Top Back to Top THE ALPA 60TH AIR SAFETY FORUM A Celebration of Pilots Helping Get the Job Done Safely & Securely August 4-7, 2014 | Washington Hilton Washington, DC _______________________________________________________ AGENDA AT A GLANCE - Visit http://safetyforum.alpa.org for full agendas MONDAY - AUGUST 4, 2014 8:30-9:00 General Session-ALPA Air Safety Organization Update (Open to all ALPA Members Only) 9:30-6:00 ALPA ASO Group Workshops & Council Meetings - (invitation only) 9:30-4:30 Jumpseat Forum (invitation only) 12:00-5:00 Aviation Security Forum (invitation only) TUESDAY - AUGUST 5, 2014 8:00-6:00 ALPA ASO Group Workshops & Council Meetings - (invitation only) 9:00-5:00 Joint Aviation/Security Forum - (invitation only) WEDNESDAY - AUGUST 6, 2014 - 60TH AIR SAFETY FORUM 8:30-9:00 Opening Ceremony Captain Lee Moak - President, Air Line Pilots Association, Int'l General Edward Bolton - Assistant Administrator, NextGen, Federal Aviation Administration 9:00-10:30 Panel: Surviving a Main Deck Lithium Battery Fire: New Technological Solutions 11:00-12:30 Panel: Smoke In the Cockpit-Where Seconds Matter 12:30-1:45 Keynote Luncheon-100 Years of Commercial Aviation Mr. Paul Rinaldi - President, National Air Traffic Controllers Association 1:45-3:15 Panel: Responding To the Emergency - Using All the Tools 3:45-5:15 Panel: Landing A Distressed Airliner-What's Waiting at the Airport? 5:15-5:25 Presentation of the ALPA Airport Safety Liaison and ALPA Airport Awards 5:25-5:30 Closing Remarks 5:30-6:30 Hospitality Reception (Sponsored by Boeing) THURSDAY - AUGUST 7, 2014 - 60TH AIR SAFETY FORUM 8:30-10:00 Panel - Current Security Threats and Countermeasures 10:30- 11:30 Panel: A Discussion With Key Regulators 11:30- 11:40 Presentation of the ALPA Presidential Citation Awards 1:00-2:30 Panel: Pilot Health & Occupational Safety 3:00-4:30 Panel: Modernizing Our National Airspace System: The Flight Path, The Potholes and the Promise 4:30-5:00 Closing Ceremony Astronaut Garrett Reisman-Commercial Crew Program Manager, SpaceX 6:00-7:00 Awards Reception (Sponsored by Airbus) 7:00-10:00 Awards Dinner 10:00- 11:00 Post Awards Reception SPONSORSHIP & EXHIBITING OPPORTUNITIES AVAILABLE Contact Tina Long at tina.long@alpa.org for more information or click here to download the sponsorship brochure. Back to Top Graduate Research Survey Hello, Our names are Aanu Benson, Hajar Taouil, Alexandre Arnau and Vincent Oyaro. We are graduate students at Toulouse Business School and are currently conducting a project on Frequent Flyer Programs. The purpose of the project is to improve the understanding of frequent flyer programs from airlines and customers perspectives. By gathering data about preferences, perceptions and how rewards and benefits impact a passenger's choice of an air carrier, conclusions will be made about the importance of a frequent flyer program as a business model for airlines. To achieve this, we have created two surveys: One targeting Frequent Flyers and the other targeting Airlines. We are seeking your assistance in completing an anonymous online survey as appropriate. Both surveys are 14 questions long and will take approximately five to ten minutes. You can omit any question you prefer not to answer. Your responses will be greatly appreciated, and the feedback provided by your survey responses will provide valuable information that will help process findings of this study. The survey links can be accessed via: For Passengers: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FFP_Passengers For Airlines: https://www.surveymonkey.com/s/FFP_Airlines If you have any questions about this project or your participation, you can email v.oyaro@tbs-eductaion.org or a.arnau@tbs-education.org We thank you in advance for your participation. Sincerely, Aanu, Hajar, Alex, and Vincent Aerospace MBA Students, PT8 Back to Top Graduate Research Survey Hello, my name is Steve Roe and I am a graduate student at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) who is finishing my Master of Science (MAS) degree with a specialization in Educational Technology. I currently work as a Senior Training Analyst that provides training delivery support, blended learning solutions, and resident instruction for the U.S. Army TRADOC Capability Manager - Army Training Information System (TCM-ATIS). I am a retired NCO who served the U.S. Army for 20 years working primarily as an Aircraft Electrician/Avionics Mechanic first in operational units then as an Instructor training Soldiers in aviation maintenance at Fort Eustis, VA. For my masters degree capstone project I am conducting research of Part 121 air carrier training programs. The objective of my research is to gather opinions about participation in the Advanced Qualification Program (AQP), a voluntary program currently overseen by the FAA's Voluntary Safety Programs Branch (AFS-280). I need to have current Part 121 air carrier Pilots, Flight Instructors, Flight Engineers, Flight Attendants, or Dispatchers take an on line survey to give opinions about Part 121 training and how it can be changed. The survey is anonymous and should take approximately 10 minutes to complete. http://www.statcrunch.com/5.0/survey.php?surveyid=8310&code=ONOQY Thanks, Steve Back to Top Upcoming Events: International System Safety Society Annual Symposium 04-08AUG2014 - St. Louis, MO http://issc2014.system-safety.org ACI-NA Annual Conference and Exhibition Atlanta, GA September 7 - 10, 2014 http://annual.aci-na.org/ IFA - Maintaining Airworthiness Standards and Investing in the Most Important Asset 'The Human Element' 17 - 18 September, 2014 Emirates Eng Facility, Dubai www.ifairworthy.com Public Safety and Security Fall Conference Arlington, VA October 6 - 9, 2014 http://aci-na.org/event/4309 IASS 2014 Abu Dhabi, UAE November 11-13, 2014 http://flightsafety.org/meeting/iass-2014 Back to Top Employment: NTSB Position Available - Mechanical or Aerospace Engineer https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/375124300 or https://www.usajobs.gov/GetJob/ViewDetails/375127300 Curt Lewis