18 NOV 2008 _______________________________________ *Damaged jet in airport collision *Plane crash survivor gets out before explosion *US to Assist Nigeria on Aviation Safety Target *The FAA needs to stop endless grandfathering of old systems *China Southern grounds MD-82 fleet *Asiana gets a new president and COO *************************************** Damaged jet in airport collision A Qantas jetliner damaged by a midair explosion over the South China Sea in July has sustained more damage in a collision with another Qantas aircraft on an Australian airport Tarmac. Qantas general manager of engineering David Cox said in a statement that both Boeing 747 jets were being towed and had no passengers aboard when they collided at the Qantas maintenance base at Avalon Airport, outside Melbourne. Mr Cox said the extent of the damage to both aircraft was being assessed. On July 25, an oxygen tank exploded aboard one of the jets, ripping a gaping hole in the fuselage and causing rapid cabin decompression. A Qantas official said the jet was repaired in the Philippines and returned to Australia last week for final maintenance work. http://www.google.com/hostednews/ukpress/article/ALeqM5hPg9vEwDduNw0e-SVrotK FXEC3Kw ************** Plane crash survivor gets out before explosion VANCOUVER, British Columbia (AP) - The sole survivor of a plane crash that killed seven others told his rescuers that he scrambled away as the wreckage exploded behind him. The 35-year-old man is in stable condition at a hospital despite the "significant injuries and burns" he sustained in the crash, Royal Canadian Mounted Police spokesman Cpl. Peter Thiessen said. He declined to identify the man nor the other people on the plane. Drew McKee, 69, a spokesman for the rescue crew, said the burned and bleeding man made his way to a beach on the remote island off the British Columbia coast where the plane went down Sunday. It was there that a Coast Guard auxiliary crew in a boat saw him emerge from thick brush onto the shore wrapped in a yellow sheet. The man was waving to them and looked like he was in terrible pain. McKee said his face, chest and hands were burned and he had some gashes on his body. He said while they whisked the man from Thormanby Island to Halfmoon Bay, on British Columbia's Sunshine Coast, he told them what had happened. "He didn't have to fight his way out of the plane, because it was in pieces," McKee said. "He got out, and pretty close to after he got out, the plane went up with a whoomph." McKee said the man had been dozing before the crash and told them he thought he had been knocked out for a few minutes before waking up and scrambling to safety. "I'm not sure when he got his burns," McKee said. "Anyway he figured he was the only one left." The man told the crew it took him several hours to make his way down a creek bed to the ocean where the Coast Guard crew spotted him. The search for the plane began with a call from an area resident to the Rescue Co-ordination Centre in Victoria around 10:40 a.m. The caller reported hearing a plane nearby that sounded in distress. When an official with Pacific Coastal Airlines called to say that one of their passenger planes was missing, rescuers sprang into action. The Grumman Goose amphibious aircraft was located around 2:15 p.m. local time on the remote, sparsely populated Thormanby Island, west of the picturesque Sunshine Coast Lieut. Marguerite Dodds-Lepinski, with the Joint Rescue Co-ordination Centre, confirmed the seven deaths. Spencer Smith, vice president of the family run Pacific Coastal Airlines, said the survivor was a passenger. He was taken to hospital. He said the pilot, who was among the dead, was quite experienced. Smith said Pacific Coastal would be alerting the families of those killed in the crash. No identities were released. He said the company has voluntarily suspended its float plane operation until the company has had an opportunity to debrief with all of its employees. Investigators with Canada's Transportation Safety Board were to try to make it to the crash site Monday, said Bill Yearwood, a TSB spokesman. Sunday's crash is the second this year involving a Grumman Goose. In August, five people were killed when another Pacific Coastal Airlines' Goose crashed on Vancouver Island. The Transportation Safety Board has yet to issue its report on the earlier crash, but investigators have made progress in that probe, said Yearwood. "We didn't discover any evidence to indicate a malfunction of the aircraft," he said. http://www.usatoday.com/news/world/2008-11-17-canada-crash-survivor_N.htm *************** US to Assist Nigeria on Aviation Safety Target United States of America yesterday restated its resolve to assist Nigeria to achieve the required standards in aviation safety and infrastructure. Speaking at the opening of a workshop on aviation safety and security in Abuja, US Envoy to Nigeria, Mrs Robin Renee Sanders, said the intention of her country is to provide technical support in the area of capacity building, infrastructure, safety, security and the environment. The workshop, jointly sponsored by the US Federal Aviation Authority (FAA), Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA) and the Boeing Company, is part of the campaign by the Nigerian aviation authorities to gain American Category One Certification that will enable airlines to ply the lucrative North American route. Sanders said several US agencies such as the FAA, Immigration and Naturalisation Service (INS), the Customs Service and Department of Defence and Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), have been deployed to help Nigeria in her quest to meet the Certification one standard as stipulated in the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO). Minister of Transportation, Mrs Diezani Alison-Madueke, said Nigeria is very serious in her determination to meet requirement of the American Category One certification, which allows airlines registered in the country to operate in the lucrative north American market. According to her, the Federal Government has successfully executed several aviation projects, among which are new runways at the Lagos and Port Harcourt international airports and building of a new domestic terminal at the Lagos airport through Public-Private-Partenership initiative. Alison-Madueke lamented the dearth of indigenous manpower in the aviation industry, adding that government is presently embarking on measures to address the capacity gap.NCAA Director-General, Dr Harold Demuren, spoke of efforts by the Agency to improve operations of aviation industry in the country, saying the Agency has embarked on series of capacity-building conferences, to assist in achieving the ICAO standards and integrate the Nigerian aviation industry into the mainstream of world air transport. http://www.thisdayonline.com/nview.php?id=128464 *************** The FAA needs to stop endless grandfathering of old systems That the US Federal Aviation Administration has seen fit to write yet another airworthiness directive about the Boeing 737's cabin pressurisation control system is a symptom of the fact that not only did insufficient thought go into designing the system in the first place, but also that nothing has been done to correct the design shortcomings since. This is by no means the only example of that syndrome at the FAA. Readers could say of this comment that hindsight is a wonderful thing. Yes, it is, but the FAA has frequently failed to act according to the wisdom available from hindsight. It has issued two amendments to the 737 flightcrew operations manual so far to try to deal with repeated occurrences of crews failing to recognise that the system is wrongly set, and/or failing to respond correctly to the warning that the cabin is failing to pressurise. Both the directives papered over the cracks rather than eliminating them. The 737 series is such a good basic aircraft design that it has survived in production longer than any other jet airliner in history. That is now becoming the nature of modern aircraft designs, so permitting indefinite "grandfather rights" for onboard systems that are, frankly, outdated is a more compelling issue than it ever was before. It is no longer good enough to change the manual when repeated evidence suggests the system needs improvement or change, especially when more modern systems have been proven in other types. There are numerous options for change in this case. The first would be to change the audible warning from the same sound as the take-off configuration alert instead of a repeating horn, a voice repeating "cabin altitude"? Instead of requiring the crew to select the pressurisation control from manual to automatic when cabin altitude exceeds 10,000ft (3,050m), make the change automatic, with audio advice of its operation. Engineers could certainly come up with alternatives such as those. There are other cases in which the FAA has still not acted on required changes years after the fatal events that flagged up the need for them - such as not requiring dry-running fuel pumps to switch off automatically in 737 centre-wing fuel tanks, or not requiring spoilers to retract automatically if the crews firewall the power levers. Or when the FAA allowed the 737 to have a rudder power control unit (PCU) that did not comply with the fundamental requirement that it should fail safe, and all on board a United 737-200 and a USAir 737-300 died because of it. In that case the body count was so high that the FAA and Boeing worked to redesign the rudder PCU for all 737s. But the world has moved beyond using body count to determine safety policy. Hasn't it? http://www.flightglobal.com/articles/2008/11/18/318896/the-faa-needs-to-stop -endless-grandfathering-of-old.html **************** China Southern grounds MD-82 fleet China Southern Airlines has grounded its fleet of Boeing MD-82s and has reached an agreement to sell these aircraft to an undisclosed buyer. The SkyTeam Alliance carrier's top spokesman in Guangzhou says the 12 MD-82s have been grounded in the northeastern Chinese city of Shenyang and are to be sold. He says: "The aircraft are not yet sold but maybe in two weeks" they will be "because the selling team tell me they have reached an agreement" with a buyer. The spokesman declines to say who the buyer is and says the final contract has yet to be signed. China Southern has been looking to sell some of its older aircraft to raise cash. It has also put up for sale six Airbus A300-600s, one of which has been converted to a freighter, and is trying to sell its 13 Boeing MD-90s and four Boeing 777As. The spokesman says the MD-90s and A300-600s are still flying. Source: Air Transport Intelligence news ************* Asiana gets a new president and COO Asiana Airlines has promoted Yoon Young-doo to president and chief operating officer replacing Kang Joo-an. An Asiana spokeswoman in Seoul says Yoon as been promoted from VP to president and chief operating officer with effect from yesterday. He replaces Kang who is to serve "as a consultant to the company". There will be more management changes, adds the spokeswoman, but she was unable to say what these changes will be or when there will be an announcement. Chan Bup Park is the CEO of Asiana. The Star Alliance carrier is South Korea's second largest airline and it was profitable but in the third quarter of this year slipped into the red by reporting a net loss of 47.8 billion won ($33 million). Source: Air Transport Intelligence news **************