Chinese authorities say they have found a piece of the China Eastern airliner, six miles from the area where the Boeing 737 NG crashed on Monday. While the main debris field is concentrated as a result of the plane’s near-vertical plummet from the sky, this separate piece, a distance away, indicates that prior to the crash the airplane was shedding parts. Whether the piece coming free of the plane triggered the disaster or if it was a consequence of the high-speed dive is not known but is certainly a question the investigators will try to answer. An airliner dropping nose down so dramatically and rapidly… Read More…

December 21st, the darkest day of the year in the northern hemisphere, has been a day of grief for 32 years for the people who lost loved ones  in the bombing of Pan Am flight 103 on this day in 1988. While there were terror attacks on airliners before 1988 and there would be again, the loss of 270 people in the air and on the ground in Lockerbie, Scotland holds a unique place in aviation history. Today, US Attorney General William Barr announced that criminal charges will be brought against a third man, Abu Agila Muhammad Mas’ud Kheir Al-Marimi, referred to as Mas’ud.  Law… Read More…

As new reports emerge about the various ways the late convicted pedophile Jeff Epstein procured and pimped young women to some of the most influential men in the world, the public has heard little from the pilots who greeted the VIPs and the underaged girls as they boarded Epstein’s private jets. Larry Visoski and David Rodgers flew for Epstein for nearly two decades. How could they be unaware of what the boss was up to? Still, Visoski and Rodgers, both of Florida, remain free to work as commercial pilots with no enforcement actions taken against them from the years Epstein pled guilty to those activities…. Read More…

Two stories with big consequences for the participants and lessons for the rest of us were in the news this week. After years of fighting their firing for expressing concern about the security of their aircraft, 13 United flight attendants have been reinstated. You may recall from a previous post on my blog, that in the summer of 2014, the cabin crew on a flight from San Francisco to Hong Kong, grew concerned about disturbing graffiti on the tail of their Boeing 747. Drawn in the grease were two faces and the words “bye bye”. The airlines operations staff dismissed the drawing as a benign prank… Read More…

The blast that took down a Russian Airbus A321 over the Sinai last month, had to be triggered by a bomb, an experienced explosives expert said today. “If the information about the plane being at 31,000 feet is reliable, it’s not a fuel air explosion,” Merritt Birky, a former safety investigator with the NTSB told me. Lacking any indication that a missile hit the airplane, Birky’s conclusion eliminates the other possible scenario, that the plane came apart mid flight due to an explosion in the plane’s center fuel tank. >Birky (L) in 1996 Birky, now retired, was the principal explosion and chemical expert in the… Read More…

>UK Prime Minister Cameron Government photo All over the news today is the story of the UK and Irish governments canceling flights out of Sharm el Sheikh. British Prime Minister David Cameron told reporters “ a bomb was more likely than not” to have brought down the Airbus A321 flown by the Russian charter airline, Metrojet. But be cautious about drawing conclusions based on the reaction of government officials concerned about protecting the lives of citizens flying out of the Egyptian resort town. It is the job of Prime Ministers and other political leaders to be prudent and investigate what could have happened to determine if a… Read More…

Andreas Lubitz from Facebook The chilling news that pilot Andreas Lubitz had already tried the controlled descent into terrain of an airliner prior to the successful crash of Germanwings Flight 9525 on March 23, threatens to overwhelm other facts that put the bizarre case into perspective. In the just released report by the French Civil Aviation Safety Investigation Authority, investigators say the flight data recorder shows that on the first leg of the round trip between Dusseldorf and Barcelona, the 27 year old first officer set the selected altitude to 100 feet several times; while the plane was at cruise at 37 thousand feet, after… Read More…

Astute readers of Flying Lessons may remember that in the fall of 2010, I published here a series of posts about the week I spent as a student at the Airline Training Center of Arizona, the flight school owned and operated by Lufthansa. (I also wrote about it for The New York Times.) This was the same flight school and at the same time that Andreas Lubitz was first learning to fly powered aircraft. Nearly all of the more than five thousand pilots who work for Lufthansa and its subsidiary Germanwings, learned to fly at the ATCA. It is the first step of a several… Read More…

Airlines got a $373 million dollar gift from the government when it eliminated the Aviation Security Infrastructure Fee last year. What with the slide in fuel prices, these 37 U.S. and 71 foreign airlines have to be feeling pretty flush right now. The fee, called ASIF was imposed after 9-11 so that airlines would contribute to the government takeover of airport security – which up until the terror attacks was the airlines’ responsibility. In exchange for getting out from under the ASIF fee, I am told, airlines agreed to drop their opposition to doubling the security fee that air travelers pay.   For each one… Read More…

OSHA photo of the graffiti How long does it take to undo years of effort to improve the way flight crews communicate and share safety-related concerns? About two and a half hours if we’re talking about United. That’s how long the airline allowed a reported safety/security issue to spiral out of control until 13 experienced flight attendants refused to fly a Boeing 747 from San Francisco to Seoul last summer losing their jobs in the process. The whole sorry episode began when Jeff Montgomery, a conscientious first officer doing a walk-around of United Flight 869 on July 14, 2014, spotted graffiti written in grime on… Read More…