See updated post on this subject here. Nadia Marcinko, a popular figure in the online community of pilots and a role model for women interested in aviation seems to have had a less-than-model-perfect past as an acquaintance and possible enabler of convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, two British newspapers are reporting. If they are accurate, it is not clear whether the blonde aviatrix was victim or co-conspirator. A civil lawsuit filed in Florida is breathing new life into the long-known pedophile inclinations of American hedge fund manager Epstein because of new allegations that Prince Andrew was a participant in Epstein’s organized trysts and orgies with teenagers. In… Read More…

The lawsuit filed by the husband of a woman who disappeared on Malaysian Airlines 370, may be headed back to court. An appeals court in Illinois has ruled that the request for discovery filed against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines on behalf of Lee Kim Fatt was improperly dismissed by a judge in Chicago. The much-publicized filing by Monica Kelly of Ribbeck Law Chartered came just 20 days after the plane disappeared. Cook County Judge Kathy Flanagan considered it for two weeks then tossed the claim as she had done to three previously filed by Ribbeck Law. In the process, the judge threatened to sanction the… 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…

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…

Masnoor in his studio in April 2014 One night in Spain, I took a walk down to the edge of the Mediterranean where a brilliant white moon seemed to turn the water into a sea of graphite. I had no camera and so I challenged myself to recreate the scene with words. In his 2012 trip across the Atlantic in a Pilatus PC 12, Malaysian painter Masnoor Ramli Mahmud was asked to do the opposite, tell the story of trans-oceanic flight in pictures.  The result is the one-man show, PATHFINDER#PC12, which will open in Kuala Lumpur on November 27th. Riza Johari while at ABC News… 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…

A disciplinary commission in Chicago has upheld a censure decision against a lawyer who just last week came under its scrutiny for her behavior  related to Malaysia Flight 370. Monica Ribbeck Kelly, who made worldwide headlines when she filed the first case against Boeing and Malaysia Airlines following the mysterious disappearance of the flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March, has been battling the ethics board of the Illinois Supreme Court since 2011 when she mishandled her representation of the victim of another crash. In the earlier case, Kelly continued to file papers on behalf of Mustafa Gumus, who was injured when Turkish Flight… Read More…