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…

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…

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…

Firefighters at Logan Airport NTSB photo How many ways did the company producing the lithium ion batteries on the Boeing 787 Dreamliner fail to meet safe standards? I’m still wading through the 100 page report and the exhibits in the thick docket accompanying it, but so far, the list is lengthy. On Monday, the National Transportation Safety Board released the result of its near two year investigation into the battery fire event on a Japan Airlines 787 at Boston’s Logan Airport in January 2013. The NTSB follows by three months, a similarly exhaustive probe by the JTSB, its Japanese counterpart, into another Dreamliner battery problem… Read More…

Flight 345 on the runway NTSB photo The Southwest Airlines captain who flew a Boeing 737 into the runway nose first at LaGuardia Airport last summer had been on the receiving end of multiple complaints by first officers at the airline who did not want to fly with her, according to an employee at the airline who asked not to be identified. The process, called a bid avoidance, is not unique to Southwest. Delta Air Lines, United and others also give their pilots a way to opt out of sharing the cockpit with captains they find difficult to work with. Brandy King, a spokeswoman for… Read More…

After three episodes of seats separating from the track on American Airlines flights in 2012, the Dallas-based carrier may have thought its maintenance woes were out of the public eye. Note I did not say that its woes were over, only that the spotlight was off. That changed Tuesday when American Airlines Flight 2293, a Boeing 757 en route to Dallas, returned to San Francisco after interior cabin panels separated in flight. James Wilson, a passenger on the flight from Kyle, Texas told Associated Press passengers watched in horror as the wall along Row 14 split “from the floor to the ceiling.” “It sounded like… Read More…

Nils Haupt hosts salon on MH 370 mystery Last month at the invitation of Nils Haupt, Lufthansa‘s former head of North American PR, I spoke to a small group of aviation and business writers about the book I have been contracted to write about the disappearance of MH 370 and other aviation mysteries. It was thrilling to be questioned about my theories and my experiences covering the story for ABC News from Malaysia, by people who had given the subject a lot of thought.  With me that night, was Emily Baker, the acquisitions editor at Penguin who purchased the book and who, to my delight, is… Read More…

Far from dismissing three safety events on Japanese Boeing 787 Dreamliners as mysteries that will go forever unresolved, the nation’s safety authority has issued a series of recommendations to Boeing, and the Federal Aviation Administration that suggest the two entities don’t fully understand the ways the volatile lithium ion batteries and their chargers can fail. The Japan Transport Safety Board (along with the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board) has been looking into what happened on board three Japanese airliners in 2013 and 2014 to cause the revolutionary new airplane’s lithium ion batteries to fail. This resulted in smoke, fire and a lot of panic among… 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…

Menzies Aviation, the Scotland-based, mega airport services company and hazardous workplace recidivist has been slapped with a $77 thousand dollar fine in California after the state’s labor safety authority found it discouraged the use of safety belts on the ramp of Los Angeles International Airport. But in the case of Cesar Valenzuela, the restraint on his tow tractor wasn’t even working on the night he was thrown from the truck to his death.  The 51-year old Valenzuela, was working with cargo at the airport in February when he was found dead, his head beneath a wheel of the truck. A portion of the driver’s seat belt… Read More…