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Inquiry Suggests Chance That Mechanical Failure Had Role in Crash

July 10, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Investigators in the cockpit of the wreckage found the auto-throttle switches set to the “armed” position, meaning that the auto-throttle could have been engaged, depending on various other settings, she said. The disclosure is far from conclusive, but raises the clear possibility that there was a mechanical failure or that the crew misunderstood the automated system it was using.

The chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, also said that interviews of the three pilots who were in the cockpit at the time of impact showed that the speed indicator on the flat-panel displays in the cockpit had drifted down into a crosshatched area, meaning that the instruments were saying that the plane was moving too slowly.

At the dual controls, the pilot flying the plane was undergoing initial training as he upgraded from a smaller plane, and was supervised by a veteran pilot who was new as an instructor, Ms. Hersman said. The instructor told investigators that between 500 feet and 200 feet in altitude, the crew was also correcting from a “lateral deviation,” meaning that the plane was too far to the right or left (she did not specify which) and realized they were too low.

At 200 feet, the instructor pilot told investigators in an interview, he noticed they were too slow. “He recognized that the auto-throttles were not maintaining speed,” and began preparing the airplane to go around for another try. But it was too late.

Ms. Hersman made clear that the safety board was looking to see if there was a generic problem with the runway and the approach path. Her agency requested data from the Federal Aviation Administration, which operates the air traffic system, on other recent arrivals by Boeing 777s, and recent go-arounds, cases in which crews broke off the approach because of a problem.

As the investigation continued, others — including lawyers, passenger advocates and a pilots’ union — began jockeying for position.

The crash resulted in an unusual mix of deaths and injuries, said Robert A. Clifford, an aviation lawyer in Chicago, who pointed out that lawyers in his specialty are usually pursuing wrongful-death claims, not personal injury ones. Injured passengers will need legal help, he said.

But Hans Ephraimson-Abt, who leads the Air Crash Victims Families Group, and who frequently lobbies for passenger rights and represents the families of people killed, said that under the governing international law, those injured were covered by a no-fault provision. Under the 1999 Montreal Protocol, he said, “they are entitled to be reimbursed for all their property damages, and economic and noneconomic damages, including psychological counseling.” All that was required, he said, was to show medical bills or calculate lost earnings.

Mr. Ephraimson-Abt’s 23-year-old daughter was one of the 286 passengers on board Korean Air Lines Flight 007 when it was shot down by a Soviet fighter plane in 1983 after a crewman’s navigation error.

Mr. Clifford and other lawyers, however, have been making public statements since the crash about safety problems and stressing their expertise in pursuing claims.

On Tuesday, Mr. Clifford said that another party, not covered by the Montreal Protocol, could be vulnerable to claims: Boeing. The plane did not have an aural warning of low airspeed, he said, even though the safety board recommended 10 years ago that the Federal Aviation Administration convene a panel of experts to consider installing them. If the plane was unsafe, he said, the manufacturer could face suits.

A retired 777 captain, Chuck Hosmer, who flew for American Airlines and later Air India, said that many foreign carriers had a reluctance to land the plane manually, and thus lacked proficiency in the technique. The Asiana crew was attempting a manual landing on Saturday because an instrument landing system was out of service. And though there were four pilots on the Asiana plane, three of them very experienced in the 777, pilots in some cultures are reluctant to contradict a pilot at the controls, Mr. Hosmer said.

In fact, the safety board has investigated previous accidents in which cultural factors have reduced the effectiveness of the crew, and that is one of the areas of inquiry here, investigators said.

On Tuesday, a pilots’ union, the U.S. Airline Pilots Association, issued a statement critical of the safety board, asserting that the board’s quick release of “incomplete, out-of-context information” had “fueled rampant speculation about the cause of the accident” and created the impression that it was pilot error.

This article has been revised to reflect the following correction:

Correction: July 10, 2013

An earlier version of this article misidentified a retired 777 captain who flew for American Airlines and later Air India. His name is Chuck Hosmer, not Robert Maurer.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/07/10/us/inquiry-suggests-chance-that-mechanical-failure-had-role-in-crash.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Helicopter Crash Kills 3 TV Crew Members

February 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

A helicopter crash in Southern California on Sunday killed three men who were working on the production of a coming reality show for the Discovery Channel.

Production of the untitled series was shut down after the crash. The incident could draw new scrutiny of the production practices of reality TV shows.

“A production company was shooting a show for Discovery Channel when this tragic accident occurred,” a spokeswoman for the channel said. “We are all cooperating fully with authorities. Our thoughts and prayers go out to the families.”

The crash occurred around 3:30 a.m. Pacific time at Polsa Rosa Movie Ranch, about 30 miles north of Los Angeles. The ranch is frequently used by film and television crews.

“The helicopter, a Bell 206B Jet Ranger, crashed under unknown circumstances,” said Allen Kenitzer, a spokesman for the Federal Aviation Administration. The agency is helping the National Transportation Safety Board in an investigation of the crash.

A permit for filming at the ranch, provided by FilmL.A., described the Discovery Channel series as an “untitled military project.” The permit allowed filming from 5 p.m. Saturday to 7 a.m. Sunday. Attached to the permit was a filming plan submitted by the helicopter pilot that proposed filming from 4 p.m. to 10 p.m. Saturday.

The permit was provided to Bongo Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of the production company behind the show, Eyeworks USA.

“We can confirm that a helicopter crash occurred this morning while shooting a new series for a cable network, which resulted tragically in three fatalities,” an Eyeworks spokeswoman said. “We are cooperating fully with the authorities. We extend our deepest sympathies to the families of those involved.”

A spokeswoman for Eyeworks identified the three victims as David Gibbs, 59; Darren Rydstrom, 45, and Michael Donatelli, 45. Mr. Gibbs was the helicoper pilot, Mr. Rydstrom a crew member and Mr. Donatelli a cast member.

Eyeworks, formerly known as 3 Ball Productions, has produced a wide range of reality shows. Its credits include “Flying Wild Alaska,” a documentary series on Discovery; “Bar Rescue,” on Spike; and “Splash,” a diving competition that is scheduled to have its debut on ABC next month.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/10/helicopter-crash-kills-3-tv-crew-members/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Japanese Still Seeking Link in 787 Battery Incidents

February 9, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Akinobu Yokoyama, a spokesman for Japan’s Transport Safety Board, said it was still not clear whether a short-circuit or other malfunction occurred within one or more of the eight cells in the new lithium-ion battery.

His comments in an interview came a day after Deborah Hersman, the chairwoman of the National Transportation Safety Board, said the problems on the Boston jet seemed to have originated in the battery. She said one of the cells had a short-circuit that created a “thermal runaway” as it cascaded through the rest of the cells, heating the battery to 500 degrees.

Given that the problems on the innovative jets occurred just nine days apart, it is crucial for investigators to determine whether they started in a similar manner. If the incidents seem to parallel one another, it could be easier for Boeing and its regulators to find a fix than if they are dealing with two different problems.

The Japanese investigation started later than the American one. Mr. Yokoyama said it was “not appropriate to talk yet about whether proximity of the cells within the battery is a structural problem or a cause of the battery malfunctions.”

“By looking at the battery, it is obvious there was a thermal runaway,” he said. “But we have yet to determine with any certainty why that happened.”

Ms. Hersman said Thursday that American investigators still did not know what caused the short-circuit in the cell of the battery in the Boston jet. She also said that in certifying the lithium-ion batteries in 2007, the Federal Aviation Administration accepted test results from Boeing that seriously underestimated the risk of smoke or fire.

The 787 is the first commercial plane to use large lithium-ion batteries for major flight functions. The batteries are more volatile than conventional nickel-cadmium batteries, but they weigh less and create more power, contributing to a 20 percent gain in fuel economy over older planes.

All 50 of the 787s that have been delivered so far have been grounded since mid-January.

That has also stopped Boeing from delivering more of the planes. Two European carriers, Thomson Airways and Norwegian Air Shuttle, said Friday that Boeing had notified them that the deliveries they had expected soon would be delayed.

Boeing’s rival, Airbus, plans to use smaller — and it says safer — lithium-ion batteries in its next-generation A350 jets, which will compete with the 787. Airbus reiterated Friday that it was watching to see how the investigations of the Boeing battery turned out.

“There is nothing that prevents us from going back to a classical battery on the A350, which we’ve been studying in parallel to the lithium battery from the beginning,” said Justin Dubon, an Airbus spokesman in Toulouse, France.

Nicola Clark contributed reporting from Paris.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/09/business/japanese-still-seeking-link-in-787-battery-incidents.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Safety Board Sees Lengthy Inquiry Into 787 Dreamliner

January 25, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The National Transportation Safety Board’s chairwoman, Deborah A. P. Hersman, said that the lithium-ion battery that caught fire in a parked 787 at Logan International Airport showed signs of short-circuiting and of a “thermal runaway.” That refers to a chemical reaction that begins to overheat the battery and speeds up as the temperature increases. But investigators do not know if that was the root of the problem.

“The expectation in aviation is to never experience a fire on an aircraft,” Ms. Hersman said at a news briefing Thursday afternoon. “There are multiple systems to prevent against a battery event like this.” She added: “Those systems did not work as intended. We need to understand why.”

Boeing 787s were grounded last week when a second battery problem prompted a 787 in Japan to make an emergency landing. The pilot reported seeing smoke in the cockpit as battery alarms went off. While there were no injuries in either incident, Ms. Hersman said, “this is a very serious air safety concern.”

The safety board’s technical presentation provided the most graphic indication to date of the severity of the battery problems. Ms. Hersman highlighted the gravity of the problems more bluntly than other federal officials have done. She repeated three times that fires should never be allowed to occur on an airplane, and pointed at the failure of the safety systems that Boeing had put in place.

The battery damage was so significant, she said, that investigators were having difficulty retrieving information from the battery control system.

Unlike the Federal Aviation Administration, the safety board does not have regulatory powers but its investigations and its public recommendations can weigh heavily on air safety policy. The F.A.A. has already made clear, though, that the plane could not fly again until the cause was determined and the problem fixed.

“It means that the 787 is going to be grounded for an indefinite period — whether that’s two months, four months or six months, the 787 is not going to get back in the air soon,” said Scott Hamilton, managing director of the Leeham Company, an aviation consulting firm in Issaquah, Wash. “They made it just real clear today that they haven’t a clue as to what happened, or why.”

After the briefing, Boeing said it welcomed “progress” in the investigation. The company noted in a statement that it was working with investigators in the United States and Japan to find out what had gone wrong and had hundreds of engineers and technical experts “working around the clock with the sole focus of resolving the issue and returning the 787 fleet to flight status.”

It added, “The safety of passengers and crew members who fly aboard Boeing airplanes is our highest priority.”

Four days after the fire, the transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, and the F.A.A. administrator, Michael Huerta, announced a review of the 787s but still expressed confidence in the plane’s safety.

The 787s were grounded only a week later, after the second battery incident. While the safety board’s investigation is further along, experts say that the Japanese investigation into the second incident may be able to find out more from the battery controllers or memory system since that battery did not sustain as much damage as the first one.

Investigators in both countries said they had found no evidence of overcharging. The 787 batteries are all made by GS Yuasa, a Japanese manufacturer that has been a pioneer in the development of large lithium-ion batteries for use in trains and planes.

The investigation goes to the heart of Boeing’s battery choice. Fires involving lithium-ion batteries cannot be extinguished easily: when batteries of the type used on the 787 burn, they release oxygen, which feeds the fire, and they essentially must be allowed to burn out. For that reason, Boeing has installed four safety systems in its batteries to stop them from overheating.

Hiroko Tabuchi in Tokyo and Christopher Drew in New York contributed reporting.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/25/business/the-ntsb-sees-lengthy-inquiry-into-787-dreamliner.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Worry Grows Over Delays in F.A.A. Pay

August 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

While airline passengers are unlikely to see any immediate effects of the partial shutdown of the Federal Aviation Administration, federal officials ratcheted up pressure on Congress to break the impasse that has temporarily put 4,000 F.A.A. employees out of work. Members of Congress have mostly left for their August break, but some leaders continued to point fingers across the aisle, each party blaming the other for failing to restore funds to the agency provisionally.

The shutdown, which was in its 12th day on Wednesday, has left 40 F.A.A. airport safety inspectors working without pay and having to pay their own expenses to travel between airports. The transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, praised their dedication while personally guaranteeing that passengers had no reasons to worry about the safety of air travel in the United States.

“I can say, without equivocation, safety will never be compromised. Flying is safe. And passenger schedules should not be compromised by this issue,” Mr. LaHood told reporters at a White House briefing.

Mr. LaHood, President Obama and even members of the House and Senate urged Congress to act during its recess to pass a bill that would restore F.A.A. funds. The shutdown is costing the government $30 million a day in forgone taxes on airline tickets.

Before meeting with his cabinet to discuss the issue, Mr. Obama called it “a lose-lose-lose situation that can be easily solved if Congress gets back into town and does its job.”

“And they don’t even have to come back into town,” he added, noting that both the House and the Senate are in pro forma session this month, and each could agree to adopt a compromise bill by unanimous consent.

Not everyone agrees, however, that safety “will never be compromised,” as Mr. LaHood said. Officials of the Airports Council International, a trade group representing nearly 300 airports in North America, said in interviews that safety at some airports could be affected if airports miss the peak summer construction season.

“Passengers may not be seeing the impact immediately, but it will be felt eventually,” Deborah McElroy, executive vice president of the council’s North American branch, said. “Airports will not be able to proceed with projects that enhance safety, enhance efficiency and reduce delays for passengers.”

The F.A.A. has shut more than 200 of its projects, including new control towers, airport runway lighting projects and security enhancements. In addition, airports in 19 states are facing delays in runway construction projects, screening checkpoint expansions and aircraft parking areas.

Roughly 43,000 of the F.A.A.’s 47,000 employees, including air traffic controllers and the safety officials who inspect airplanes, are being paid and remain on the job because their salaries are covered by the agency’s general fund. That, Mr. LaHood said, has let the F.A.A. maintain near-normal operations and leave passenger schedules untouched.

The 4,000 furloughed employees, including the federal airport safety inspectors, are paid through the Airport and Airways Trust Fund, which is financed by taxes on passenger airline tickets. The F.A.A.’s authority to continue collecting those taxes expired on July 22.

The airport inspectors oversee the safe operation of taxiways and runways and certify airports for operation. Mr. LaHood said those employees were working without pay because they were deemed essential a under federal law that allows some government workers to work in the event of a government shutdown.

Democratic senators and representatives accused Republicans of “holding hostage” the legislative process by refusing to pass a “clean” bill that would permit temporary funds for the F.A.A. — that is, one not encumbered with provisions like cutting elements of subsidized air service to rural airports.

Republicans pointed out that the House had passed a bill reauthorizing the F.A.A. three days before the agency had to shut down. The Senate never voted on the bill, although the bill would most likely have failed if it had been brought to a vote. Both houses of Congress have approved long-term extensions but so far have been unable to agree on a conference to resolve their differences.

Edward Wyatt reported from Washington, and Steven Greenhouse from New York.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=efbd7f90a8d4a16aba1abd70de4adec4

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China’s Rich Try to Fly Around Red Tape

May 19, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Guan Hongsheng has three. Although, really, who’s counting?

“For us, a workweek is 80 hours or more. So you know what we need? Fast,” said Mr. Guan, a gold-necklaced, yacht-sailing titan who made a fortune as a trader. To relieve the stress of making vast sums of money, he said, there is nothing like zipping around in a copter.

“Only then can I truly relax,” he said. “It’s that simple.”

If only it were legal, too.

Mr. Guan and his friends are black fliers — part of a minuscule group of wealthy Chinese who fly, quite literally, in the face of the law. The first Chinese rich enough to own their own aircraft, they have collided in midair with the Chinese military, which controls the country’s airspace and never contemplated such a fantastic development, much less authorized it. Just asking for permission to take off can involve days of bureaucratic gantlet-running, and still end in rejection.

Getting permission to land can be another hassle altogether.

So black fliers take to the air clandestinely, flitting where the authorities are unlikely to notice or care, occasionally causing havoc on the ground below, risking fines that would send an average Chinese to the poorhouse but which, for most of them, do not have much of a deterrent effect.

“It’s like this — your family, your wife, won’t let you go out and pick up girls. But you went out and did it anyway,” Mr. Guan said. “Secret flying is like secret love. You do it, you don’t tell people about it.”

Just how many pilots make black flights (in Chinese, hei fei) is unclear, but their number is assuredly tiny. In the United States, the Federal Aviation Administration says that nearly 237,000 general aviation aircraft were actively flying in the country in 2010. By comparison, experts say, China has perhaps 1,000 registered private aircraft.

No one knows how many of those make black flights. But Cao Wei, who runs a Beijing company that leases small aircraft and trains pilots, says there are several hundred unregistered aircraft, and all of those do. A large percentage of aircraft that make black flights, he said, are helicopters, much favored because they do not need a runway.

“You don’t need much space, and you can have a flexible flight plan,” he said. “Say your home is a few kilometers from the golf course — you just hop in your helicopter, fly low, and go there. It’s very difficult to discover.”

Perhaps so, but hei fei pilots nevertheless have gotten into more than their share of scrapes. Several have been mistaken for UFOs while aloft over major cities, including a helicopter pilot whose evening excursion last July over the airport in Hangzhou, north of Wenzhou, tied up a score of commercial jets on the ground. A rich pilot in Dongguan, a south China metropolis, made national headlines in 2006 when he used his helicopter to pursue and subdue thieves who had stolen his luxury car.

More recently, an especially unlucky pilot wandered onto air traffic controllers’ radar screens between Shanghai’s two major airports during last year’s Shanghai International Expo, which, like most Chinese spectacles, was smothered in a blanket of anti-terrorism, anti-dissident security.

Most brushes with the authorities are less dramatic. Mr. Guan was apprehended in March 2010 after he and other hobbyists flew two helicopters around Wenzhou without government approval. The penalties ranged up to 100,000 renminbi, or about $15,400, but “we were able to talk them down to 20,000,” he said.

Punished but hardly chastened, Mr. Guan keeps his American-made Robinson copter in a quasi hangar at his yacht club, on the banks of the milky Ou River some 30 minutes from downtown Wenzhou. For now, he limits his flights of fancy to the airspace over the river, where he is unlikely to draw much attention.

Theoretically, he and others can fly wherever they wish. Practically, the obstacles are daunting.

Jonathan Kaiman contributed research from Beijing.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/19/world/asia/19china.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Hole in Southwest Jet Attributed to Cracks

April 4, 2011 by Leave a Comment

In addition, Southwest Airlines said that inspections had detected subsurface cracks in the bodies of two other Boeing 737 jetliners similar to those found on that flight.

“Based on this incident and the additional findings, we expect further action from Boeing and the F.A.A. for operators of the 737-300 fleet worldwide,” Mike Van de Ven, Southwest’s executive vice president and chief operating officer, said in a statement Sunday evening.

The airline said it has retested and cleared 19 other planes and planned to finish testing 58 more by Tuesday. Southwest had canceled about 300 daily flights on Saturday and Sunday after the problem on Friday.

Robert L. Sumwalt, a member of the board, said in a telephone interview from Arizona that the fatigue would not have been apparent on a visual inspection of the lap joints in the fuselage of the Sacramento flight, and that current regulations did not require high-tech techniques like ultrasound that might have detected the hidden cracks.

A fuselage section is being flown to the board’s labs in Washington for a more comprehensive metallurgical examination.

According to Federal Aviation Administration records, the airline identified and fixed 21 cracks in the fuselage of the plane 11 months ago during a scheduled inspection that lasted more than a week. Outside airline maintenance specialists say such fatigue cracks are not uncommon in older jets.

Southwest Airlines has a history of maintenance problems. In 2008, the F.A.A. proposed a $10.2 million penalty, later reduced to $7.5 million, for Southwest’s failure to do mandatory inspections for fuselage fatigue cracking on some of its Boeing 737s.

A report that year by the inspector general of the Transportation Department agreed with a whistle-blower’s complaint that an F.A.A. supervisor had been too cozy with Southwest. The report found “serious lapses in F.A.A.’s air carrier oversight.”

The Southwest plane involved in the incident on Friday, a 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 carrying 118 passengers, had almost reached 35,000 feet when passengers were frightened by a gunshotlike explosion and the sight of a gaping hole in the cabin ceiling behind the left wing. Some people reported feeling the dizziness that occurs during a swift loss of cabin pressure. Oxygen masks were released and at least two people passed out as the pilot guided the plane to an emergency landing at Yuma Marine Corps Air Station in Arizona. No one was seriously injured.

Mr. Sumwalt, a former pilot, said the hole — through which sunlight was visible — was about two feet behind the left wing on the upper part of the fuselage. An inspection found hairline cracks emanating from each of the rivet holes in the joints on the roof.

“We have clear evidence that the skin separated along the rivet line,” he said. “The preliminary on-site inspection reveals fatigue along the entire fracture surface.”

He said that the cracks were in the underskin of the joint — where two sections of the 737’s skin overlap and are riveted together. He said that federal regulations did not require more sophisticated inspections of the joints. But the board’s finding will go to the F.A.A., which can require such inspections.

When asked about the new finding, Ian Gregor, a spokesman for the F.A.A., referred to an earlier statement that said “the F.A.A. is working closely with the N.T.S.B., Southwest Airlines and Boeing to determine what actions may be necessary.”

The airline’s own in-depth inspection of the plane in March 2010 revealed 10 cracks in parts of the frame and 11 cracks in the “stringer clips,” which help secure the aircraft skin, according to Service Difficulty Reports listed on the F.A.A. Web site.

They were all repaired, the reports said. At that time, the plane had 45,944 flight hours.

A total of 288 Boeing 737-300s are flying for airlines in the United States and 931 worldwide, according to the F.A.A. Southwest said the 737-300s were the oldest planes in its fleet. Boeing, in a statement, said it had seen no reason to take fleetwide action involving the planes. The company said it was monitoring all of its in-service planes and helping Southwest and the N.T.S.B.

Douglas Clark, an airplane maintenance specialist with Expert Aviation Consulting, an Indianapolis business not involved with the investigation, said, “It’s amazing it didn’t rip open further.” Metal fatigue, he said, “has been something that has plagued the industry for years.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=31546ea6a2c89c148ca7a4d798ee2257

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