Injured On An Airplane?

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Air France Flight 445 made it through heavy turbulence on November 29 as it flew from Rio to Paris. That was the same route, the same airline and same aircraft type - an Airbus A330-200 - as Air France Flight 447, which plunged into the Atlantic on June 1, killing all 228 people on board.

France’s accident investigation agency BEA said its probe of last month’s incident could help explain why the June flight went down.

French newspaper Le Figaro reported Thursday that pilots in November made the distress call when the plane was just 10 nautical miles from the area where the ill-fated jet went down months earlier.

Flight 447 jet was flying from Rio de Janeiro to Paris when it went down about 930 miles (1,500 kilometers) off Brazil’s mainland and out of radar coverage. Investigators have not yet solved the crash.

In a Dec. 1 statement, Air France said an internal investigation found that about four hours into the November flight, the pilots carried out a “normal descent” to avoid a zone of severe turbulence. The pilots sent an emergency radio call to indicate that the jet was leaving its flight altitude level, Air France said.

The flight, with 215 people on board, experienced moderate to heavy turbulence for half an hour then continued on normally, said the carrier.

Flight 447 was Air France’s deadliest crash. Investigators may never determine what happened because months of searches in the Atlantic did not turn up the flight recorders.

the rest here: http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/businesstechnology/2010469163_apeufranceflightinvestigation.html?prmid=obnetwork

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Written By David Learmount

Published by: FlightGlobal.com

Global airline fatal accident numbers for the first six months of 2009 provide further confirmation of a now-established trend: airline safety has stopped improving and, at best, has flattened out.

The number of fatal airline accidents between 1 January and 30 June 2009, at 13, is slightly below the average for the first half of each year in the past 10 years, which stands at 14.8.

The same comparison for the number of fatalities is less good: there were 499 to 30 June this year against an average of 344 for the first six months of each year in the last decade.

But a median line for fatal accident numbers drawn across the graph opposite would be flat, and even taking into account the growth in traffic between 2001 and 2007, the rates would not be improving at a statistically significant rate. International Civil Aviation Organisation provisional figures confirm this.

Unless there is a dramatic improvement in airline safety performance between now and the end of 2010, then 2001-10 will become the first decade since the Second World War when global airline accident rates did not show improvement.

The number of fatal airline accidents between 1 January and 30 June 2009, at 13, is slightly below the average for the first half of each year in the past 10 years, which stands at 14.8.

The same comparison for the number of fatalities is less good: there were 499 to 30 June this year against an average of 344 for the first six months of each year in the last decade.

But a median line for fatal accident numbers drawn across the graph opposite would be flat, and even taking into account the growth in traffic between 2001 and 2007, the rates would not be improving at a statistically significant rate. International Civil Aviation Organisation provisional figures confirm this.

Unless there is a dramatic improvement in airline safety performance between now and the end of 2010, then 2001-10 will become the first decade since the Second World War when global airline accident rates did not show improvement.

The number of fatalities to 30 June is the highest since 2002, mainly because two accidents involved widebodies (see accident listings P38), and between them they accounted for 381 of the total 499 deaths.

All on board the Air France Airbus A330-200 were killed, and there was only a single survivor from the Yemenia Airbus A310-300 crash.

Meanwhile, the Air France incident represents the first fatal accident involving one of the major world carriers flying a Western-built widebody since an American Airlines A300-600 crashed in Belle Harbor, New York in November 2001.

The Air France loss has caused more speculation inside and outside the industry than any other serious accident for years, but no hint as to the cause has yet emerged.

Speculation has probably been fuelled by the fact that, although the crew did not report any problem, the aircraft communicating, reporting and addressing system (ACARS) had automatically datalinked some systems information to the carrier’s maintenance base just before the A330 went missing, providing evidence of a disparity between the values sent by separate airspeed sensors to the air data computers.

According to the French investigation agency, BEA, this information on its own does not provide any causal clues, but BEA says it might turn out to be a factor in whatever occurred.

The main concern now is that the flight recorders are in deep water in a region of the Atlantic where the terrain on the oceanic floor is mountainous, which will make finding them a formidable task.

The issue of the human factors associated with operating highly automated aircraft is likely to move up the agenda once more following the February crash of a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737-800 on approach to Amsterdam Schiphol airport in February.

It stalled and hit the ground at a high rate of descent, and early statements from the Dutch investigator indicate that a faulty radio altimeter may have caused the autothrottles to reduce power to idle early in the approach by incorrectly indicating the aircraft’s height was 8ft (2.4m) below airfield elevation.

As a result, the investigators believe, the system logic reacted as if the aircraft was touching down and retarded the power levers, but the pilots did not notice the movement or the speed loss until too late.

On the other hand, highly automated - including fly-by-wire - aircraft still often survive extremely taxing situations, and both the aircraft and the crew emerge smelling of roses

The US Airways Airbus A320 successful ditching in the Hudson River, New York early this year was one such event.

The crew, having lost all engine power to a multiple birdstrike, made sound decisions, executed them well, and the aircraft floated perfectly despite damage to the underside of the rear hull.

http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2009/07/21/329793/airline-accident-review-for-first-six-months-of-2009.html

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Written by: NICOLA CLARK

Published by: The New York Times

PARIS — France’s air accident investigators are expected on Thursday to recommend new technical standards for the signal beacons attached to the “black box” recorders of commercial aircraft and to propose requiring real-time transmission of certain flight data that could aid in the search for wreckage in the event of a deep-water crash.

The recommendations are contained in a second interim report on the investigation into the fatal crash in June of an Air France jet. Details of the report, by the Bureau of Investigations and Analyses, were provided by an official who had seen the report.

In the report, the bureau’s investigators call on aviation safety regulators to require that the locator “pingers” attached to the flight data and cockpit voice recorders of any passenger jet flying over water be upgraded to emit a signal for as long as 90 days, rather than the current requirement of 30 days. The report also recommends that additional beacons with a life of at least 30 days be attached to parts of the plane’s fuselage.

The investigators also urge regulators to study the possibility of requiring equipment and software that would enable automatic, real-time transmission of a plane’s position, altitude, speed and direction to a ground station.

The investigations bureau and the European Aviation Safety Agency declined to comment on the report before its publication on Thursday. A spokeswoman for the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration did not immediately return calls seeking comment.

Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330, went down in heavy thunderstorms more than 1,000 kilometers, or 600 miles, off northern Brazil on June 1, during a flight from Rio de Janeiro to Paris. All 228 passengers and crew members were killed. A lengthy search recovered over 600 pieces of floating debris and 51 bodies from the ocean, but the black boxes and the bulk of the wreckage were not found.

Without the flight recorders, investigators have said it may never be possible to determine the definitive cause of the disaster. So far, the main source of information about what happened is a series of messages sent automatically from the plane to a maintenance base, which indicated there was a malfunction of the plane’s air speed sensors.

Investigators have said the faulty speed reading — possibly due to icing — could have contributed to the crash, but was unlikely to be the primary cause.

The report to be published Thursday will propose that new studies be done of the composition of the Earth’s atmosphere at altitudes of 35,000 to 40,000 feet, where most jets spend the cruising phase of their flight. The goal would be to determine whether the effects of climate change should be taken into account when certifying components like speed sensors, which are vulnerable to icing.

France expects to begin a renewed search for the black boxes of Flight 447 in early February. The search, which will last up to three months, will take place with the support of experts and specialized equipment from the United States, Britain, Brazil and Russia.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/17/world/europe/17crash.html

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Published by The New York Times

Written by CHRISTINE NEGRONI

Wreckage spotted by Brazilian military planes in the Atlantic Ocean is that of missing Air France Flight 447, the Brazilian minister of defense said Tuesday afternoon at a news conference. The jet, bound for Paris from Rio de Janeiro with 228 aboard, disappeared Sunday night without any distress call.

Nelson Jobim, the defense minister, said that “without a doubt” the debris was from the Air France plane. Military planes located the wreckage in a three-mile strip in the ocean, as hope of finding survivors all but vanished. The debris included “an orange life vest, an aircraft seat, a drum, kerosene and oil,” an earlier statement from the Brazilian military said.

Confirmation that the debris, floating 600 miles from the coast of Brazil, is from Flight 447 is sure to help investigators, who have few clues to go on. With no radar information from land and no distress call from the pilots, a series of data messages transmitted by satellite from the plane to Air France’s maintenance office was all the data they had.

Finding the tail of the plane is a high priority for investigators, because that is where the voice and data recorders are located.

The more critical recorder in this crash will be the cockpit voice recorder, said one investigator familiar with flight data devices. “The flight data shows how the aircraft is being operated, but the voice recorder tells you the pilots’ perceptions of what’s happening,” said the investigator, who spoke on condition of anonymity, saying he might be asked to work on the inquiry.

Evidence of a lightning strike — one theory of why the plane went down — would not be recorded on the flight data recorder, he said, but might very well be documented by the pilots’ observations in the cockpit.

The earliest indication of what may have happened on the airplane came 4 hours 11 minutes after the plane departed Rio, when a series of 10 reports transmitted from the Airbus 330 suggests that the flight encountered difficulties with stormy weather and electrical problems. Those issues could be interrelated; a loss of power could set off a catastrophic cascade of events.

The Airbus 330 is a fly-by-wire plane, in which flight controls are activated by electronics. “Very severe lightning may have caused some malfunction in the electronic control system,” said Tom Swift, a former chief scientist for fracture mechanics and metallurgy at the Federal Aviation Administration.

If lightning, turbulence or some other problem caused a malfunction in the electronic control system, pilots might have difficulty flying or the airplane might begin maneuvers without being commanded to by pilots.

Another avenue of interest to investigators may be a special emergency directive to operators of A330 and A340 models issued by European safety authorities this year.

The directive followed several troublesome events in the models’ electronic flight system. More than a dozen people were seriously injured in October on a Qantas flight to Perth, Australia, from Singapore when the heavily loaded airplane, while cruising in level flight, abruptly pitched down. The authorities said the plane had provided random and erroneous information to the pilots, including a loss of altitude readings and warnings that the plane was about to stall.

Whether Air France reported problems with any of its A330s was not clear.

Mr. Jobim said Tuesday that finding wreckage of the plane would ultimately give hope to relatives of the crash victims that they would learn what had happened to their loved ones.

Charlstie Laytin, 31, of Island Park, N.Y., whose uncle and aunt, Michael and Anne Harris, were two Americans on the flight, agreed. “We certainly do hope to see the investigation continue until we know what happened,” she said. “It’s so hard to come to the point of closure when you don’t have your loved ones in front of you to grieve over.”

Air France did not release a passenger list on Tuesday but said that in addition to 2 Americans, it included, among others, 61 French citizens, 58 Brazilians and 26 Germans.

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Reprinted from Design News

John Loughmiller

On May 31, 2009, four hours into a trip from Rio de Janeiro to Paris, Air France Flight 447, an Airbus A330-200, encountered heavy turbulence. Fifteen minutes later, an automated system began sending messages documenting a worsening situation as first one and then another of the redundant electrical systems failed until all four were gone. Among the last messages sent was one advising that the cabin pressurization system had also failed suggesting an in-flight breakup.

The circumstances surrounding this flight underscore the diabolical challenge of designing complex, automated systems for multiple contingencies and then managing the consequences of the design choices made. Since I have a couple hats in my collection, one for when I’m being an engineer and another for when I’m being a pilot, the crash brought these challenges into sharp focus. It also reminded me of 30+ years of pilot concerns about Fly-By-Wire flight control systems.

In a Fly-By-Wire system, electric motors and actuators operate the flight surfaces via wires or fiber optic strands. Multiple computers provide continual oversight of the process. Designers employ software to prevent what they consider to be dangerous or illogical user inputs from the pilot in an attempt to reduce pilot error and thereby increase safety. Unfortunately there have been accidents – some fatal – because designers didn’t adequately anticipate abnormal flight regimes.

In a fully implemented Fly-By-Wire system, there’s no reversion to manual control. Pilots are system managers, making requests of the computers, which then decide whether the requests are reasonable. They control the movement of control surfaces using a set of rules or “laws.” On an Airbus for example, four operational laws govern its operation: Normal, Normal Alternate, Abnormal Alternate and Direct Law. As systems fail, control authority changes, eventually offering the pilot control only of elevator trim, rudder and thrust of the airplane’s engines in the Direct Law mode.

With four electrical systems and multiple computers, the odds of ever getting to Direct Law are remote. But Flight 447 lost all of the electrical buses plus cabin pressurization in a thunderstorm, which was something the designers probably listed as an extremely unlikely possibility. Manual reversion in this case may not have helped, but it certainly could not have hurt. In a dire emergency, a pilot needs access to every flight control on the airplane. After all, if things are really bad, why make them worse by restricting a pilot’s options to the point that he or she is little more than a passenger?

To an aeronautical designer, there’s a tightrope to walk that’s both long and very far above the ground. Involving non-designers in the process isn’t something that’s normally high on their list of priorities since outsiders (pilots in this case) will frequently want to add features that translate to added cost. Still, most airline pilots I know who make their living in a Fly-By-Wire airplane don’t object to the software itself. They appreciate the smooth way the computers execute the flight surface movements.

What they hate is the lack of full control of the airplane in an emergency. This desire is at variance with an aircraft designer’s mindset that tries to prevent mistakes by restricting the actions a pilot can take. While these design objectives work well in normal operations, should things go horribly bad, as they did with Flight 447, the design rules may be in conflict with what’s required to extricate oneself from disaster. This is the pilot’s case in a nutshell.

John Hansman, a pilot and an Aeronautical Professor at M.I.T. specializing in aircraft design, has studied the differences in the Fly-By-Wire control philosophy and the more traditional approach to aircraft control. In his opinion, Fly-By-Wire gives more decision authority to the aircraft systems and less to the pilot, whereas traditional systems provide dynamic feedback on the operation of the aircraft but leave most of the decisions to the pilot. Hansman feels that by allowing computers to make critical decisions when operating in an abnormal flight regime, designers place a tremendous burden on themselves to anticipate all possible emergency modes and design the system to react appropriately.

But what’s appropriate? That’s at the core of the debate. Although there are budget constraints in any design, Hansman has an approach that may help. He tells his students, who may well be the next generation of Boeing or Airbus designers, that to make correct decisions, particularly when designing complex machines like airplanes, it’s critical to involve end users early in the design process. He teaches that both the designer and the end user have a mental model of how something should work. However, the two models are frequently at variance with one another.

An example: A designer working on flight dynamic issues notes there are many reports of pilots getting the airplane to assume a steep angle of attack coupled with a decay in air-speed to decay. This set of conditions is precisely what killed New York Yankee catcher Thurmond Munson as he approached an airport in his Cessna Citation business jet. The designer’s solution was to examine the amount of pitch up requested by the pilot, and as it increased, cause the engines to spool up so that the aircraft can’t slow down. This strategy worked fine until a combination of events that had not been modeled during the design phase fooled the system. Although the pilot steadily increased the pitch, the engines didn’t spool up. The pilot should have immediately lowered the nose and manually increased the thrust but, relying on the automation, he didn’t, and the airplane crashed short of the runway. It was a case of pilot and designer error.

Another example: A pilot descended below the normal Initial Approach Fix (IAF) altitude because the weather was excellent and he was flying a visual approach. Once past the IAF, he commanded the aircraft to fly the approach. He thought it would simply continue on towards the runway, capturing the glide slope from below instead of from above which is the way it works when you start at the IAF. Instead, the aircraft went into an immediate climb and attempted to reach the altitude required at the IAF even though that point was behind the aircraft by this time. The pilot decoupled the aircraft from the autopilot but placed the airplane back in the approach mode once he’d satisfied himself that the system was working properly. The aircraft once again started climbing, giving the passengers a carnival ride they didn’t expect. The designer in this case never anticipated the pilot would attempt to fly a precision approach from a point other than where the approach is normally begun.

We may never know what happened to Flight 447. But the dialogue that will emerge from this event will be invaluable to system designers, as they continue in their quest to design higher degrees of safety into their automated systems.

http://www.designnews.com/article/print/278177-Air_France_Crash_Underscores_Challenge_of_Designing_Complex_Automated_Systems.php