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…

A UA 787-9 photo courtesy United Passengers on United Flight 98 from Los Angeles to Melbourne, Australia on October 26, participated in small slice of aviation history; flying on the world’s longest Boeing 787 route. They not only flew the longest route, but on the first American airline to fly the new stretched version of the Dreamliner, the dash-9. Many factors contribute to the spike in international air travel, which the International Air Transport Association reports is up from 80 million in 2008 to nearly 100 million this year. But we can’t ignore the role of the 787, Boeing’s trimmer wide-body in this global trend…. 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…

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…

I spend so much time writing about the safety and economics of aviation every now and then its good to go back and remember that flying was pioneered by risk takers who were motivated by many things, convention and common sense not among them. The role of adventurers in aviation was very much on my mind while reading Dick Smith’s thrill-a-page book, The Earth Beneath Me, the story of his solo helicopter flight from Fort Worth, Texas to Sydney, Australia in 1982.   I met Smith this past June and flew with him for a not-to-be-forgotten hour. An Enya tune filled our headsets as we… Read More…

An Irish friend of mine told me many years ago to think twice before dismissing Michael O’Leary, the face and chief executive of Europe’s largest low-cost carrier, Ryanair.  At the time, O’Leary was relatively unknown outside of Ireland. And while I took that advice, I have over the years, poked him for his headline-grabbing antics and the ridiculous, combative and sometimes even vulgar comments he is wont to make. Flight attendants should learn how to land airplanes so Ryanair could eliminate the second pilot was one outrageous idea he championed. Standing seats should be installed on airplanes in order to make room for more fare-paying passengers was… 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…

The Japanese media is out today with news that the Japan Transport Safety Board is preparing a report on what caused the lithium ion batteries on three Boeing 787 Dreamliners to emit smoke (and in one case catch fire) in 2013 and 2014. The newspaper Asahi Shimbun reported that the JTSB has concluded there is deterioration of the electrolyte solution in low temperatures. All three battery events on Japanese airliners occurred in the month of January.  A translation of the articles provided to me by my correspondent in Japan, Takeo Aizawa, says  a phenomenon called deposition, or a build up of lithium metal, creates needle-like objects… 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…

Minutes after Malaysia Flight 370 disappeared from military radar in the early morning hours of March 8, the airplane experienced a total loss of power but recovered, according to information released by the Australian Transport Safety Bureau. The Boeing 777 last seen by a primary radar return at 2:22am (Malaysia time) headed north west along the Malacca Strait, was still flying in that direction when the power loss occurred.  Three minutes later the airplane sent a log-on request to the inmarsat satellite network, meaning its energy supply was back up and running.  Why the jetliner lost power is not known, but the report explains that… Read More…