In the past I’ve referred to them as the kids who couldn’t get a date for the prom. Now, I bet the engineers at the British satellite communication company inmarsat will be the coolest kids of summer if the portion of an airplane found in Reunion Island in the Indian Ocean turns out to be from Malaysia Flight 370. Jonathan Sinnatt, director of corporate communications for inmarsat said the company is not making any comment – certainly not before a determination is made about whether the 6-foot long piece of what appears to be part of a wing, is actually from the missing Malaysia Boeing… Read More…

>F-WWCF the Airbus A350 MSN #2 in Newark on Thursday The Airbus A350 XWB that flew into Newark Liberty International Airport this week on another stop on its tour of the Americas looked awfully pretty parked out on the ramp by Signature Aviation Services. But like many of us gals in the prep stage of a special event, one should not look too closely or the hairclips and Spanx might be visible.   That’s because this plane MSN #2, just one of two prototypes with a full cabin configuration, is still running a variety of tests. Is the cabin too humid? How are the structure… Read More…

The attention of the flying public may be riveted to events like Malaysia 370 and Germanwings Flight 9525 but when it comes to hazards, helicopter ambulances are second only to combat flying. In other words, orders of magnitude riskier than traveling in an airliner. The fine levied against America’s largest operator of emergency medical helicopters exposes once again the gap between what the air ambulance industry promises and what it delivers. On Monday the Federal Aviation Administration fined Air Methods of Colorado one and a half million dollars. Air Methods, which refers to is itself as “Defenders of Tomorrow” may have been just a little too… Read More…

BEA’s chief Remi Jouty As if awaking from a stunned stupor, (incapacitation with breathing perhaps?) the Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses, the French air safety investigatory authority, has suddenly spoken. After six days in which French law enforcement has all but wrapped up the case of the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the spokeswoman for the BEA has told The New York Times, her agency’s ire was focused on the shocking leak of the content of the cockpit voice recorder, but had no statement about the appropriateness of concluding the cause of the accident without recovering crucial pieces of evidence. That wise disclaimer was left for Jean-Pierre… Read More…

CVR as recovered from Germanwings flight BEA photo Investigators looking to discover why Germanwings Flight 4U 9525 flew into a mountain in the French Alps yesterday were handed one very good clue when the cockpit voice recorder was located and brought to the headquarters of the French Bureau d’Enquêtes et d’Analyses. At a news conference in Paris today, Remi Jouty explained “We just succeeded in getting an audio file which contains usable sounds and voices. We have not yet fully understood and worked on it to say ‘It starts at this point and ends at this point’ and ‘We hear this person saying that etcetera.’… Read More…

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis The adage that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it, can be appropriately applied to the search for answers to the disappearance of Malaysia 370, now approaching its first anniversary.  Oh no, I’m not talking about the theories that the plane was flown to Diego Garcia. I’m talking about the breast-beating accompanying the reports that the deep sea search for the missing airplane may come to an end and with it dies all possibility of knowing what really happened and why. That’s not true. While having the airplane would be nice,… Read More…

Writing a book is not all about writing. This weekend, I’ve added  Boeing Versus Airbus, the 2007 John Newhouse book about, yeah, that’s right and Kenny Kemp’s Flight of the Titans Airbus A380 vs. Boeing 787 Dreamliners, which I just downloaded on my Kindle, to my reading list. This will fill my Saturday and Sunday and both books may end up in the bibliography of The Crash Detectives. That’s a lot of reading even for a snowy weekend, so in order to get started, I’m leaving the Flying Lessons wordsmithing to my Aussie friend Stephen Tomkins, a former Boeing pilot who now flies the Airbus…. Read More…

When Air Asia first learned it had lost flight 8501, en route from Surabaya to Singapore on December 28th, the airline was somewhat prepared; its communications department had recently attended an IATA event focused entirely on handling crises in the digital age.  It would not be the first airline to lose an airplane, or even the first to have one mysteriously disappear in some vast expanse of ocean. Why not learn from the experience of others? The benefits seem clear, at least as far as the airline is concerned. The same cannot be said for Indonesia’s government. This is a country with more than its… Read More…

Bookending the aviation news for the year 2014 is the Dreamliner battery; the sizzling lithium ion-flavored power source that I suggested in January was already being reviewed by the eggheads and pocket protector-wearing engineers at Boeing. The end of the year arrives and the Japan Transport Safety Board is asking for the same thing.  I’m not bragging about being prescient here because any reasonable person can see that the risks outweigh the benefits of using this high-density battery chemistry. It’s the recipe used more than a decade ago for laptops and handheld devices that started to spontaneously combust prompting the world’s largest industrial recall.  In a report… Read More…

The Air Asia communication executives sat at a round table with chaos all around, trying to concentrate on banging out a press release, twitter updates and Facebook posts while absorbing, processing and regurgitating each bit of new information about the disaster that had just befallen their airline. They faced a gaping maw; an unfulfillable appetite for information and not just from reporters and family members, but from the dozens of agencies that would also be involved. The minutes clicked by like milliseconds. This was just two months ago, but the disaster was not real. They and dozens of other communication professionals, journalists and air safety… Read More…