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…

Wreckage of 9M-MRD Dutch Safety Board photo  The conclusion that Malaysia Flight 17 was likely downed by a missile that penetrated the cockpit as it flew from Amsterdam to Kuala Lumpur on July 17, 2014 has a certain, no-shit-Sherlock quality to it. After all, there was plenty of evidence within hours of the plane’s breaking apart in flight and landing in pieces over an eight mile area in Eastern Ukraine that the plane was felled by a missile.  In a preliminary report released nearly six months ago, the Dutch Safety Board investigators released photos and a debris field plot that indicated the cockpit and forward… Read More…

The story making headlines on the anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 is the news that the battery for the locator beacon in the plane’s flight data recorder was not changed on schedule as it should have been. This raises the possibility that one of the plane’s two black boxes may not have been emitting an audible signal for searchers to have picked up. Failing to replace a dying battery and the consequences of such a lapse is a scenario everyone can relate to, which is why this particular revelation is big news, even though it is exceedingly unlikely that the towed pinger locator was ever within a… Read More…

If the wreckage of missing Asia Air Flight 8501 is found at the bottom of the sea, as Indonesia’s search and rescue chief, Bambang Soelistyo suggests, let’s hope that the nation of islands does more than it has in the past to thoroughly investigate the disaster. In a statement to reporters on Monday, Soelistyo admitted Indonesia does not have the equipment to search underwater for the Airbus A-320. This does not sound good, in light of how the Indonesians frittered following the New Year’s Day crash of Adam Air Flight 574 in 2007.  A Boeing 737 sunk in the Makassar Strait off the west coast… 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…

This post has been updated to include comment from the U.S. FDA and from Patrick Murphy of laserpointersafety.com.  One of the largest sellers of high powered laser pointers has done an about face, discontinuing sales of devices that are styled to look like Star Wars light saber toys but are strong enough to blind in seconds. Wicked Lasers issued a press release explaining its decision and attributed it to the sale of the company to a “government-backed optoelectronics manufacturer” in China.  Wicked Laser got cross-wise with the Food and Drug Administration several years ago because it did not comply with all of the rules governing the… Read More…

FBI video of laser illumination of an airliner cockpit No less a brainiac than Albert Einstein could have weighed in on the phenomenally ineffective efforts of American aviation and law enforcement to combat laser attacks on airplanes. The German American physicist defined insanity as “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” For the past eight years, the Federal Aviation Administration, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and other authorities have taken a blame and shame approach to miscreants who aim laser pointers into the night sky causing momentary blindness or distracting pilots during a high workload phase of flight. I’ve written about this… Read More…

It is missing the point to “blame” Malaysia Airlines for its decision to continue to fly over the conflict zone in the Ukraine despite the disastrous outcome of that choice. At the same time, Malaysia and the dozens of others who opted to continue using the route should be asking, what exactly are they paying their security advisors for? Airlines don’t bring hundred+ million dollar airplanes and the highly trained folks who operate them into countries without analysing the security status of the airport and the places where their flight crews will be housed. That’s why the kidnapping of two pilots for Turkish in Beirut… Read More…

The apparent shooting down of a Malaysian Airlines Boeing 777 in the Ukraine today is a shocker  for many reasons, not the least of which is that this is a double dose of tragedy for an airline already off-balance over the mysterious disappearance of another jumbo jet in March of this year. It is also deeply troubling to think of air travelers as casualties of geopolitical turbulence. But perhaps it should not be so shocking. Over the past decades, nearly two dozen passenger airliners have been hit by missiles. Among them Iran Air Flight 655 in 1988 hit and destroyed by the U.S. Navy Korean… Read More…

Writing from Kuala Lumpur — The case of missing Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 has taken another unexpected turn now that searchers in the South Indian Ocean have moved from the last-best guess of where the airplane might be to an area 1100 kilometers north east.  Ten airplanes and six vessels headed to the new location, off the coast of Perth, as the 30 day clock on the black box locator pingers ticks down. You may be asking, what new information prompted the moving of all this expensive hardware? I’m here to tell you. According to the Australian Maritime Safety Authority and the Australian Transport Safety… Read More…