Note to Allegiant: Emergency Landings Are Not the Problem

Recently a friend asked me what airlines were the safest to fly. I get asked that question all the time. I find the question challenging in part because of the chasm between risk and perceived risk. 

For example, most air travelers will admit to some anxiety about the safety of their flight, but few worry much about the taxi in which they are speeding to the airport. Travelers are also treated to end-of-the-year news reports about the world’s most dangerous airlines based on fatalities. That’s a false relationship as I’ve reported before.

Sometimes, however, it is obvious what airlines to avoid. I was reminded of that today when I read the latest in the ongoing saga of America’s low cost carrier Allegiant. According to William Levesque in the Tampa Bay Times, a group of investors in the airline are calling for Allegiant to create a special safety committee after a number of emergency landings and maintenance problems that have plagued the airline.

High but Not So Mighty American Dreamliner Damage Photos

Updated Thursday August 6th with news from inspection in Dallas

Radome damage

Glass half full: This American Airlines Boeing 787 Dreamliner, returned to Beijing safely after flying into a hail storm at 26 thousand feet (ish) after takeoff on July 27. All 209 passengers and a crew of 13 were able to continue on the way to Dallas albeit on a different airplane and with a delay.

Glass half empty: Travelers had the beejeebies scared out of them during the encounter. Passenger Dallas Rueschoff told a reporter, "We were going sideways, up and down...we dropped a good few hundred feet at least."  Or as a 787 pilot I know characterized it, "I bet that was a hellava ride and I'm glad I wasn't there." Then there is the damage to the brand new $200+ million airliner.

Delta 747 Replacement Not Ready for Prime Time

N671US in Shannon days ago. Photo courtesy Kevin Corry

This just in: The Delta Air Lines Boeing 747 N664US which was heavily damaged by hail on a flight to Seoul Korea last month will return to the United States late this week but it appears her flying days are over. This Queen of the Sky, I am told, is headed for Marana Aerospace Solutions, a enormous boneyard for retired airliners north of Tucson, Arizona. For more on this story, read on.


This post has been updated with more information about the process of taking an airliner out of desert storage.

First its Arizona retirement was interrupted when it was called back to work to replace a hail-damaged sister ship during the busy summer travel season. Then the Boeing 747 N671US had to make an emergency landing in Shannon, Ireland. 
Today I learned through a passenger scheduled to fly on this same jumbo, that his flight from Detroit to Narita was delayed due to problems with pressurization and air conditioning. The plane, you guessed it, N671US.  Two hours late, travelers did finally depart for Narita, but not on N671US, it was swapped out for another aircraft, presumably one in better shape.

Pilot Punches Holes in Post on 747 Hail Damage

N671US in Shannon Photo courtesy Kevin Corry

The Boeing 747 taken out of the desert in Arizona to replace the Delta jumbo jet pelted by hail over China, has itself gone out of service, at least temporarily after an emergency landing in Ireland on Friday. Flightaware.com shows N671US back on the ground in Shannon after departing Amsterdam for New York.  The St. Paul Business Journal reported a smoke alarm triggered the emergency landing. There were 376 passengers on board. 

"Wow, just wow," was the response I received from a Delta 747 pilot who has been watching the events unfold. He then turned his attention to me, the first post I wrote on this subject, Can This Airliner Be Saved, and my unfortunate choice of words in discussing the situation faced by the crew of that hail-damaged aircraft. 

Can This Airliner be Saved?

Photo by Brian Walker

Armchair airline pilots may be asking why the crew of Delta Air Lines Flight 159 from Detroit to Seoul opted to fly through a hail storm on June 16th, rather than insist on an altitude deviation from air traffic control in China.

The decision to maintain flight at 36,000 feet resulted in some dramatic looking damage to various parts of Delta's Boeing 747 registration N664US and some shaken passengers - none of whom was injured.

Why Listening to Germanwings CVR is Not So Simple

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.' It is ongoing work we hope to have rough idea in a matter of days, and having a full understanding of it will take weeks and even months."

MH 17 Probe Divides At the Point of "Who Done It?"

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. 

MH 370 Report on Night of Errors Raises Questions About Competence

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 few miles range of the missing Boeing 777 in the first month after it disappeared.

Indonesia's Troubled Aviation Safety Past

At the Adam Air crash scene. US Navy photo

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 of Sulawasi killing all 102 people on board. Three were American, everyone else was from Indonesia. 

A Navy ship in the region, the USNS Mary Sears, pinpointed the debris field within a few weeks and provided the Indonesian National Transportation Safety Committee with the precise location for the cockpit voice and flight data recorders.What happened next still baffles. 

Air Asia Mystery, the Benefit of Seeing This Before

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.

Does Black Friday Sale on Lasers Threaten Air Travel?

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 sale of high-powered, hand held lasers. They have since fixed those deficiencies, according to Patrick Murphy of laserpointersafety.com, by installing some safety features on their products, and requiring buyers to click through an educational page before purchases are complete. Wicked Lasers sells hand held lasers with close to one thousand milliwatts (or one watt). Anything with more juice than 5 miliwatts is considered high powered and not suitable for use as a laser pointer.

Aviation's Effort Combating Laser Attacks Hashtag #Ineffective #Insane

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."

Airlines and Governments Oblivious to Warnings of MH 17 Disaster

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?

Malaysia Flight 17 May Be Victim of Geopolitical Turbulence

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

Data Shifts MH370 Search Zone But Man at the Top Remains the Same

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. 

Time to Explore Failure of Malaysian Radar to Note Missing Jet

Writing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- Lost in the conversation about what could have caused Malaysia Flight 370 to go missing on March 8th during a routine flight to Beijing, is any discussion over the calamity that could have occurred, a mid air collision over one of Malaysia's populous urban centers. 

When the transponder stopped working on the Boeing 777 jetliner, it was flying in the dark of night and headed Lord knows where. 

No Reason to Suspect Criminal Intent in Missing Jet

Satellite image released by the Chinese Saturday evening

UPDATED WITH NEW INFORMATION AT THE END OF THE POST. 

Writing from Kuala Lumpur---News this afternoon that a Chinese satellite has recorded images of a large piece of what could be debris from the missing Malaysia flight 370 will provide a distraction to the otherwise newsworthy realization that official investigators hyped a theory of criminal intent by the pilots with little evidence to support it. 

Sometime in the not-too-distant future, it is my hope that this friendly little country and the people who lead it, will re examine how their minister of transport and defense handled this unprecedented event.

One Data Point a Focused Reminder in Missing Jetliner Story

The aircraft arriving at LAX in 2013 courtesy Jay Davis

Writing from Kuala Lumpur -- Regarding the quizzical disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370 and the overwhelming flow of theories from professional and arm chair investigators alike, Tom Haueter told ABC News on Monday, "All it would take is one additional data point to say, 'Wow, we were completely off base.'"

These wise words from the former director of aviation safety with the National Transportation Safety Board should serve as a mantra for everyone reading, writing and jawboning about the Boeing 777 that left Kuala Lumpur for Beijing on March 8th and never arrived.

Satellite Data Could Be Key in Unlocking Malaysia 370 Mystery

9M-MRO shot by Jay Davis at LAX last year.

Writing from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia -- The lowly satellite pinger, a humble device designed to make sure that expensive satellite communication time is not wasted, is having its day in the sun as the mobile communications company Inmarsat, gets called in to help find the missing Malaysia Flight 370.

In an announcement this afternoon at the Sama-Sama Hotel at Kuala Lumpur International Airport, Malaysian  Prime Minister Najib Tun Razak said evidence increasingly suggests that the Boeing 777 with 239 people on board has been hijacked. 

Aviation in America: How to Spoil a Good Reputation

Sometimes being a mom helps me make sense of the world, because even when the world isn’t sensible, it at least is familiar. Take, for example, spoiled children. We’ve all seen these children, pitching a fit at the grocery store because mommy and daddy won’t purchase that tempting something on display in the check out line. (Not, my kids of course.) 

This is the image that comes to mind when I read about America’s budget impasse between Democrats and Republicans.