Airline executives meeting at the industry confab in Miami were pleased to be talking about a new app that coordinates with health monitoring programs for iPad, Android and Apple watch devices. The SkyZen wristband will “offer passengers personalized insights on their flight activity and strategies to minimize jet lag before and after flight,” said Tom Windmuller, Senior Vice President of lots of stuff including the passenger experience with the International Air Transport Association. At this point the SkyZen is in the experimental phase. No one is sure if travelers already keeping track of their steps, their heart rate andtheir stress levels want to elevate the… Read More…

Tyler addresses the executives Photo by IATA Writing from Miami – It seems strange to me that under the guidance of the soft spoken and urbane Tony Tyler, the airline industry should be experiencing its strongest growth and profitability but there you have it. Just four years after the former chief of the International Air Transport Association, Giovanni Bisignani nominated himself the best director general of the association ever in the pages of his book, Shaking the Skies, in waltzes his polar opposite and actually sees much of  Bisignani’s big wish list getting accomplished. Yes, it’s a happy group of global airline bosses here in Miami… Read More…

Writing from Miami — If you want to see the down-to-earth impact of world events there’s no better place to be than Miami this week where the leaders of aviation are assembled for the International Air Transport Association‘s annual meeting. Like the wheels of an airliner touching down on the runway, the rubber meets the road on issues like civil war, international monetary policy and the technology boom. Each news event adds another multi-pronged piece to the 3 dimensional puzzle that one airline might incorporate and use to grow while another struggles to find a way to work around it. Executives arrive at a Boeing… Read More…

What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross the same terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheit discovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missing Boeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014?  Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related. River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit was hiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when the group came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. The aircraft was “smashed, so compressed that it was really… Read More…

I made the one hour drive on the beautiful back roads of New England, rounding the curves and ascending the hills. Distracted by spring in full bloom, I struggled to concentrate on the road ahead. By the time I arrived at Westfield Municipal Airport and introduced myself to acrobatic pilot Rob Holland I was exhausted and we had yet to fly. That’s what sustained focus will do to you. I’d been invited to go up with Rob during a practice session for this weekend’s Great New England Air Show in Western Massachusetts and to write about the experience for a chain of Connecticut newspapers. We… 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…

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…

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…

The news coming from French prosecutor Brice Robin regarding Monday’s crash of Germanwings Flight 9295 is shocking, but on what is it based? Surely Mr. Robin knows something he’s not sharing with the rest of us, or how could he possibly come to the conclusion that “the co pilot wanted to destroy the aircraft”? And yet that is what he is saying based on facts that still suggest other possibilities. The evidence so far shows first officer Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the plane to a lower altitude winding up flying the plane into a mountain, the question Mr. Robin has not answered is how he knows the pilot… Read More…