More Than Meets The Eye in Kenya Plane Spotter Arrests

Men from Manchester held by Kenya photo courtesy of The Star

There's something very strange about the news out of Nairobi in which four British men were arrested after taking photos of airplanes at the city's in-town airport.

According to a BBC report, the self-described plane spotters said they had permission to take photos of airplanes at Wilson Airport, but the sight of them with their cameras caused concern among some folk who noticed them, “from the airport bar,” and I’m quoting directly from the BBC report. 

After the men were picked up at Wilson Airport they were taken to Jomo Kenyatta International Airport on the far side of the city and incarcerated there for nine days. Stephen Gibson, 59, Ian Glover, 46, Edwin Swift, 47 and Paul William, 47, will have to cough up $2,000 to get out of jail and out of the country according to the Kenya Star newspaper.

During my visit to Nairobi I roamed Wilson Airport on four occasions, once after having a lovely lunch at the colonial-era-styled East African Aero Club complete with photos of famous aviatrix Beryl Markham on the walls and aviation-themed movies playing on the lobby television. I wandered around the property including the guest houses snapping away.

Florence Wilson

It is worth noting these days while we are doing so much talking about women in aviation, that Wilson Airport, was named after Florence Wilson, a British widow and heiress who invested in an airline in the twenties with her lover, the pilot Thomas Campbell Black. 

While Campbell didn’t treat Wilson like a lady, (he left her, the story goes for Beryl Markham), even after he was gone, the business thrived. In 1939, however, the British government absorbed Ms. Wilson’s fleet along with the flying school into its Kenya Auxiliary Air Unit. In 1962, shortly before becoming the independent nation of Kenya, the airfield was renamed to honor Florence Wilson.

In February I transited through Wilson airport several times as I changed planes en route to Keyna’s famed wildlife parks; Amboseli and Maasa Mara. I took photos from inside the airport and out and from inside my airplane and out and I was far from the only one with a camera.

I recorded 5Y-IHO the DeHavilland Dash-8 and ET-AMV, the Cessna Caravan, both of which are being used by the United Nations World Food Program. 5Y-FDK the Phoenix Aviation’s King Air used by the Flying Doctor Service and the arrival of a fancy business jet from which emerged several men acting important and tailed by an entourage of what seemed to be journalists. Helicopter touch-and-gos, pilot pre flights, security screenings, I shot it all without seeing a raised eyebrow.

Kenya is justifiably cautious as it faces a terrorism threat with Somali violence on its eastern border. I don’t know what about this particular band of Brits made them more threatening to the authorities than other camera-wielding travelers. But my photos show there’s more to this story than what meets the eye.

Beautiful hangar at Wilson Airport

Quest For More From CNN From MH-370

Full disclosure: The Crash Detectives, my own book on the mysterious disappearance of Malaysia Flight 370, will be published by Penguin in September. This may have colored my perception of Richard Quest's new book, The Vanishing of Flight 370. Then again, maybe it really is a rehash of CNN's original undisciplined coverage.

Quest, CNN's business correspondent, is well known for his out-sized personality and his "say anything" interview style. But in the book he has produced for Penguin Berkley and timed to the second anniversary of the disappearance of Malaysia 370, all his insouciant charm is gone. Without that, Quest's demonstrated ego wears thin long before the reader gets to the book's vanity snapshots section.

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.

Aviation Year in Review Has a Star Wars Sci-Fi Feel

Harrison Ford and cast Disney handout photo 

Star Wars dominated the end-of-the-year entertainment news. Harrison Ford, the ageless superstar most associated with the ageless film franchise also arrives on my list of top aviation news stories as I wrap up the year with a look back at 2015. 

Happy Birthday from Syria and Other Places in a Troubled World

One of my Facebook messages today

Not long after my eyes opened this morning I enjoyed reading some of the early birthday greetings posted on my Facebook page. (Don't judge me.) It is heartwarming to be remembered by friends and family of course. Then I noticed something else; the remarkable number of countries from which those greetings came. I counted eleven even before 9:00 o'clock. 

My host family during my 2006 stay in Syria, my daughter’s former boyfriend in New Zealand, an au pair from Spain, a tour guide from Morocco, a pre-teen acquaintance from Australia, an a septuagenarian from Japan, business associates from Norway, Italy and India and fellow aviation enthusiasts from Holland, Sweden and France.

Science Shows Metrojet Crash Triggered by a Bomb

The blast that took down a Russian Airbus A321 over the Sinai last month, had to be triggered by a bomb, an experienced explosives expert said today. "If the information about the plane being at 31,000 feet is reliable, it's not a fuel air explosion," Merritt Birky, a former safety investigator with the NTSB told me. Lacking any indication that a missile hit the airplane, Birky's conclusion eliminates the other possible scenario, that the plane came apart mid flight due to an explosion in the plane's center fuel tank.

A Soprano-Like Shakedown Squeezes Smisek out of United

Jeff Smisek in happier days

United's boss Jeff Smisek resigned from the airline today, as a probe continues into whether he and other top executives agreed to provide favors for a government official in New Jersey.

In a statement, United says it has been cooperating with a federal investigation and in fact, that the airline had conducted its own probe into whether David Samson of the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey demanded the airline reopen a route to Columbia, South Carolina in exchange for the go-ahead on several airport projects at Newark Liberty International Airport.

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. 

Lost and Confounded Until Hiker Finds Missing Plane

What forces of fate allow thousands of people to cross the same terrain without seeing the crashed airplane that John Weisheit discovered on May 20th? And what does his find tell us about the still-missing Boeing 777 that disappeared on a flight from Kuala Lumpur to Beijing in March 2014?  Stay with me because I believe these two stories are related.

River guide and Colorado River advocate John Weisheit was hiking in the Grand Canyon National Park with several others last week when the group came across the wreckage of a plane wedged between two boulders. The aircraft was "smashed, so compressed that it was really hard to find an actual skeleton," Weisheit told the Associated Press, because seeing something like that really does beg the question, “Is anybody inside?” The answer was yes.

Germanwings "No Right to Rule Out Other Hypotheses"

BEA's chief Remi Jouty

As if awaking from a stunned stupor, (incapacitation with breathing perhaps?) the Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses, the French air safety investigatory authority, has suddenly spoken. After six days in which French law enforcement has all but wrapped up the case of the crash of Germanwings Flight 9525, the spokeswoman for the BEA has told The New York Times, her agency's ire was focused on the shocking leak of the content of the cockpit voice recorder, but had no statement about the appropriateness of concluding the cause of the accident without recovering crucial pieces of evidence.

That wise disclaimer was left for Jean-Pierre Michel an official with the judicial police who, in one of the only moderate statements to emerge from this fiasco told the Times, “we have no right today to rule out other hypotheses including the mechanical hypotheses, as long as we haven’t proved that the plane had no problems.”

Attending the Flight School of Andreas Lubitz

Astute readers of Flying Lessons may remember that in the fall of 2010, I published here a series of posts about the week I spent as a student at the Airline Training Center of Arizona, the flight school owned and operated by Lufthansa. (I also wrote about it for The New York Times.) This was the same flight school and at the same time that Andreas Lubitz was first learning to fly powered aircraft.

You Call this an Investigation? Germanwings So Far Anything But Conclusive

The news coming from French prosecutor Brice Robin regarding Monday's crash of Germanwings Flight 9295 is shocking, but on what is it based? Surely Mr. Robin knows something he's not sharing with the rest of us, or how could he possibly come to the conclusion that "the co pilot wanted to destroy the aircraft"? And yet that is what he is saying based on facts that still suggest other possibilities. 

The evidence so far shows first officer Andreas Lubitz deliberately flew the plane to a lower altitude winding up flying the plane into a mountain, the question Mr. Robin has not answered is how he knows the pilot had that end in mind.  

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.

Ocean Search for MH 370 Lets Malaysia Overlook Clues on the Ground

9M-MRO in Los Angeles photo by Jay Davis

The adage that if you repeat a lie often enough people will start to believe it, can be appropriately applied to the search for answers to the disappearance of Malaysia 370, now approaching its first anniversary. 

Oh no, I'm not talking about the theories that the plane was flown to Diego Garcia. I'm talking about the breast-beating accompanying the reports that the deep sea search for the missing airplane may come to an end and with it dies all possibility of knowing what really happened and why.

That's not true. While having the airplane would be nice, not all investigations are tied with a bow and presented to crash detectives. Public pressure should be put on the Malaysians who have used a lack of progress in finding 9M-MRO to absolve themselves of any responsibility to conduct a probe right there in Malaysia, where many clues inevitably reside. 

Global Girl & Girlfriend of Sex Offender Epstein Same Person Flight School Says

The Facebook page of Global Girl

See previous post on this subject here.

The owner of the flight school where popular online aviatrix Nadia Marcinko received her private and commercial pilots licenses says Marcinko also used the name Nada Marcinkova while attending the school in Palm Beach, Florida, linking the Gulfstream Girl / turned-Global Girl to the Jeffrey Epstein sex scandal.

Did Popular Aviatrix Right-Seat for Epstein in Royal Sex Scandal?

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. 

Reversal of Bad Fortune for Lawyer in Malaysia 370 Claim

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 law firm if it brought any more "frivolous" cases before her.

Agonizing and Awe-Inspiring; Another Year in Aviation Flies By

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. 

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.