Flying? The safest form of transport!!

WASHINGTON — At one time, airline safety generally meant one thing: avoiding a crash. But safety regulators are increasingly focusing on surviving one.

Starting this Autumn, all new airplanes will be required to have seats that will stay in place when subjected to stresses up to 16 times the force of gravity. The old seats had to meet stresses of only nine times the force of gravity. And, in a safety measure borrowed from automobiles, some seats will be equipped with air bags.

The combination of sturdy seats and air bags means that if a plane touches down short of the runway or rolls off the end of the runway and hits an obstruction, “You’re going to be conscious. You’re going to have the opportunity to survive,” said Bill Hagan, president of AmSafe, which makes the air bags.

In some airline crashes, the strength of the seats is irrelevant because the crash is not what the engineers call “survivable.” In other crashes, still violent but not as much so as exploding in midair or breaking up in flight, the passengers’ survival depends on suffering little or no injury in the first phase of the accident, as when a plane runs off the runway, and then getting out of the plane quickly to avoid a postcrash fire.

The new rules have taken effect gradually. Airplane models introduced after 1988 were required to have the new seats, known as “16g” seats. So planes like the Boeing 777 and the swarm of new regional jets all have them. But older models that were still in production were not required to have the seats.

The air bags borrow technology from automobiles. They are set off by a shock meter that comes directly from cars. And like the systems used in cars and trucks, the seat belt air bags in planes are designed not to deploy inappropriately — in cases of air turbulence, for example.

In fact, said Mr. Hagan, this is simple, because the air bag sensor system watches for shocks on the axis on which the plane is traveling; it does not monitor up-and-down or side-to-side movements of the kind produced by turbulence, he said.

The air bags are widely used in first- or business-class cabins, where the seat in front is too far away or angled in such a way that it cannot function as a cushion. In coach class, the air bag has started out for use in front rows, exit rows and bulkhead seats, near galleys or toilets. In other seats, the passenger gets some protection from the seat back directly ahead, which is designed to break in a controlled fashion, providing a cushion.

Singapore Airlines flies 777s with wide intervals between seats and uses the air bag, JAL, Cathay Pacific and Virgin also use them.

This time a Yemenia aircraft in the waters off Madagascar.  No idea yet as to cause as it is still early days but this "Fly By Wire" system is starting to worry me. Seems to me it was much better in the good old days when the pilot flew the plane and had a feel for what was happening and did not have to rely on a computer to tell him.

The Chinese-made A320 aircraft successfully completed a four-hour test flight earlier this year and was officially delivered at a ceremony on Tuesday delivered to Sichuan Airlines, a regional carrier based in southwestern China.  "We will build a strong future with the China aviation industry and for the China aviation industry," Airbus CEO Thomas Enders said. "(Airbus) will be working increasingly with our partners in China, setting new standards."

The Tianjin plant, which opened in September 2008, is modelled after a state-of-the-art Airbus factory in Hamburg and is a joint venture between Airbus and a Chinese aviation consortium and cost some 10 billion yuan ($1.47 billion).

China has been an Airbus customer since 1985. Since then, Chinese orders have exceeded 700 aircraft and will be supplemented by a further 10 models, scheduled to leave the Tianjin plant by the end of the year. Come 2011, the factory is expected to be turning out 4 aircraft per month. 

The Chinese aircraft market is the second largest in the world and already accounts for 15 percent of the European manufacturer's total sales. Chinese carriers are expected to purchase as many as 3,400 new aircraft in the coming two decades, and Airbus hopes to cash in on this by capturing half the Chinese market by 2012.

It's early days yet for news but according to Sky News there are 216 passengers and 12 crew on board the Airbus. A Paris airport official is quoted as saying "The plane disappeared from radar several hours ago. It could be a transponder problem but this kind of fault is very rare and the plane did not land when expected."

Now excuse me, is it common practice that when a plane falls off radar you just wait to see if it still arrives on time?  I for one would be getting other aircraft and ships on the area to look for it!!

A Qantas airliner was grounded after four snakes went missing from the cargo hold on a passenger flight from Alice Springs to Melbourne, according to officials. Twelve baby pythons were packed on the Boeing 737-800 in the outback town on Tuesday, but when it arrived in Australia's second biggest city there were only eight, Qantas said in a statement. Corporate manager David Epstein told public radio the snakes' escape was a mystery because the consignment had been properly packaged in a tied calico bag inside a Styrofoam box with air holes punched in it. "Our people called in a reptile expert and there was a suggestion that some of the baby pythons had eaten the other pythons because apparently it is not uncommon for baby pythons to eat each other," he said. Qantas staff then weighed the remaining snakes to determine if they were heavier, but they were not. "The only conclusion we could draw was four of them had broken free of the packaging," Epstein said. "We thought the best thing to do was to call in a wildlife expert and determine if they're endangered or not." "They're not endangered, so a decision was made to take the plane out of service and fumigate it, so if these snakes ever turn up on one of our aircraft, they will be very much dead snakes," he said. The Stimson's pythons, which the Qantas statement was at pains to point out were "non-venomous infants" about 15 centimetres (six inches) long, can grow up to a metre.

A faulty altimeter shut down the engine of the Turkish Airlines flight before it crashed last week near Amsterdam's Schipol airport killing nine people. They said similar shutdowns had occurred twice before on the same plane and were overruled by the pilots, and warned its maker Boeing and any airlines using 737 models to be vigilant. When flying at about 1950 feet (594 metres) the plane's left radio altimeter indicated the Boeing 737-800 was flying at minus 8 feet, prompting the automatic pilot to shut down the engines, the Dutch Safety Board said on Wednesday. "The crew initially did not react to these events," Dutch Safety Board head Pieter van Vollenhoven told reporters. When an alarm went off that the plane's speed would drop below the minimum, the pilots reacted and reignited the engines. "But the plane was too low at 150 metres. As a consequence the plane crashed 1 kilometre before the runway," said Van Vollenhoven. "The reason to go public now already is to warn Boeing and all users of this plane type that vigilance is required with regards to the altimeter," he said. Boeing said in an statement it was "issuing a reminder to all 737 operators to carefully monitor primary flight instruments during critical phases of flight". The plane's black box -- which can register 25 hours of flying time and in this case had covered 8 flights-- showed the problem had occurred twice previously during landings. In the first instances the pilot had overruled the automatic pilot and restarted the engines, a spokesman for the Safety Board said. Investigations were underway as to why more action had not been taken after the problem was detected. Five Turks and four Americans were killed when the plane plunged into a boggy field while trying to land last week at Amsterdam's Schiphol, Europe's fifth-largest airport by passenger numbers and third largest by freight volume. Passengers said the plane suddenly dropped to the ground during landing.  Braking caused when the plane hit the ground meant that the aircraft broke into two pieces and the tail broke off.  Most of the fatally wounded were near the rupture, in business class, and the three crew members in the cockpit died as a result of the enormous braking forces.

Well as I said in my posting yesterday aeroplanes are designed for flying and getting them down the streets of New Jersey is not such an easy task. Here are a few shots of the now famous Hudson River Airbus on it’s way to the breakers yard.

Preliminary news coming through says just the one fatality from this crash which occured just an hour ago. The Boeing 737-800 is very similar to those operated by Ryanair and will be fairly new.

From an outsiders view, no fire which is good, but fuel should have been almost down to reserves at that point of the flight anyway. Also I would suggest a tail first quite heavy impact causing the splits in the usual places. All emergency doors are open.
Unfortunately for passengers, planes are not designed like cars to withstand an impact, they are designed to fly and coming down in the wrong place at the wrong time is not something the manufacturers cater for.
Possible but remote causes? Bird strike, no fuel, serious system failure.

 Michael O’Leary says passengers don’t find much peace on Ryanair flights as crews sell scratchcards, sandwiches and cigarettes and his planes are about to get louder as the carrier introduces a mobile-phone service. Passengers can call, e-mail and send text messages from 20 planes, expanding to 50 aircraft in the next six months and the Dublin-based carrier’s entire fleet if the service is popular.

O’Leary, Ryanair’s chief executive officer who charges passengers to check in hold baggage or be first to board, predicts “enormous demand” for in-flight calls. “Nobody is flying on Ryanair because it is a bastion of solitude where you can contemplate life,” said O’Leary, who arrived at a press conference in Dublin wearing a mobile-phone outfit covered with a “Now Use Your Mobile on Board” sign. Ryanair wants the OnAir NV service to boost so-called ancillary revenue, the money the airline makes aside from ticket sales. That accounted for more than a fifth of revenue in the quarter ended Dec. 31, rising 19 percent to 132 million euros ($167 million).

Passengers will make and receive voice calls at non-European Union international roaming rates of 2 euros to 3 euros a minute. Text messages will cost about 50 cents and e-mails using phones and other devices will cost as much as 2 euros per message. “It is expensive but it’s your choice whether you want to use it or not,” the CEO said.

O’Leary said Ryanair is the first all-economy carrier to let travelers make calls. Air France-KLM Group tested a phone service on one plane last April in Europe’s first trial of airborne mobile-phone voice service. New York-based JetBlue Airways Corp. agreed to buy Verizon Communications Inc.’s Airfone business in June to expand its e-mail and messaging services aboard planes, but U.S. regulations don’t permit voice calls. In-flight calls are connected via a miniature cellular network inside the aircraft. A modem transmits data and calls to a satellite that routes them to a ground station and then onward to the passenger’s network, which can cause some delays.

O’Leary, who says airports estimate about 60 percent to 70 percent of Ryanair’s customers may be traveling for leisure, doesn’t expect the service to put other travelers off. “We’ve no interest in quiet zones,” the CEO told journalists “It will make a break from the in-flight announcements on a Ryanair aircraft.”

Ryanair operates an all-Boeing fleet of 737s that is now up to 181 planes, but may now be considering Airbus also as once an airline's fleet has reached about 200 planes, the cost advantages of operating only one type of plane are not as significant. "We're large enough now to run two fleets," Michael Cawley, deputy chief executive of Ryanair, told reporters Monday at a news briefing in London. "We see no cost handicaps that can't be overcome by running two fleets." He said Ryanair, which could place the order for up to 400 planes in the next 18 months to two years, wants to take advantage of any decline in aircraft prices should the current industry downturn continue and passenger traffic continue to fall.
In the past, O'Leary has placed some of the industry's biggest single orders, for 100 or more planes at a time. By doing do, Ryanair has been able to lock in very good prices, including options. Just this month, Ryanair exercised 12 of its options, adding to the 143 planes that it still had on firm order with Boeing at the end of last year. That brought to 337 the number of 737s that Ryanair has ordered directly from Boeing. Its fleet includes some 737s that have been leased.
Ryanair carried 58 million passengers last year, up 18 percent from 2007. Cawley said that in the "very long term," he can envision Ryanair hauling 200 million people a year.