Flight Safety Information April 6, 2011 - No. 070 In This Issue Emergency AD Issued For Boeing 737 -300 -400 -500 Air Charter Safety Foundation Seeks One Industry Audit Safety Standard Airbus to launch A320neo jet 6 months early Jet metal fatigue a rare risk How It Works: Air France Flight 447's Black Boxes Smell of smoke forceDelta flight back to airport Civil Aviation Ministry Reiterates Air Safety (INDIA) Brazil's President Appoints First Civil Aviation Secretary Emergency AD Issued For Boeing 737 -300 -400 -500 Move Follows Decompression Incident Involving A Southwest B737. The FAA has gone forward with an emergency AD for three series of Boeing's workhorse 737 single aisle airliners. AD 2011-08-51 has been sent to owners and operators of The Boeing Company Model 737-300, -400, and -500 series airplanes. This emergency AD was prompted by a report indicating that a Model 737-300 series airplane experienced a rapid decompression when the lap joint at stringer S-4L between body station (BS) 664 and BS 727 cracked and opened up. Investigation showed that the cracking was located in the lower skin at the lower row of fasteners. The airplane had accumulated 39,781 total flight cycles and 48,740 total flight hours. This condition, if not corrected, could result in an uncontrolled decompression of the airplane. Because the lap joint and tear strap spacing configuration is the same on Model 737-400 and -500 series airplanes, these airplanes may be subject to the identified unsafe condition. The FAA has reviewed Boeing Alert Service Bulletin 737-53A1319, dated April 4, 2011. The service bulletin describes procedures for external eddy current inspections of the lap joints at stringers S-4R and S-4L, along the entire length from body station (BS) 360 to BS 908. If a crack indication is found, the service bulletin specifies either confirming the crack by doing internal eddy current inspections, or repairing the crack. As an alternative to the external eddy current inspections, the service bulletin provides procedures for internal eddy current and detailed inspections for cracks in the lower skin at the lower row of fasteners at stringers S-4L and S-4R. The service bulletin specifies contacting Boeing for crack repair instructions. The emergency AD was issued after the FAA evaluated all the relevant information and determined the unsafe condition described previously is likely to exist or develop in other products of these same type designs. FMI: www.faa.gov Back to Top Air Charter Safety Foundation Seeks One Industry Audit Safety Standard Organization Says New EMJ Audit Standard Not Necessary The air charter industry was recently thrust into a state of audit confusion with the announcement by Executive Jet Management (EJM) that their charter support vendors will now undergo an additional audit with a new audit standard. The industry confusion stems from the fact that EJM and Net Jets are one of the largest financial supporters of the Air Charter Safety Foundation (ACSF) and strongly support its goals. EJM, a well-known aircraft management company and subsidiary of and supplier to NetJets, worked closely with many leaders from the charter industry for more than three years in an effort to create and refine one standard by which all could be measured. This industry group effort was successful, and the standard that was collaboratively developed has become known as the Air Charter Safety Foundation Industry Audit Standard (IAS). This standard puts registered charter operators on par with the leading scheduled airlines of the world that code share, since they use a similar standard. After its creation, the IAS was used by EJM for almost two years and, in fact, suppliers were told that they were expected to meet the standard over the next few years. Nearly 30 charter operators have achieved the IAS registration. "The ACSF is reaching out to all independent auditors to get back to the proverbial roundtable and figure out how to establish and agree to one safety standard. We owe it to the charter community. But most of all, we owe it to the chartering public who have the right to know to what standard their charter provider is adhering," said ACSF President Bryan Burns in a statement. "There is no question that comprehensive third- party auditing of air charter companies is a good idea. Remember, the FAA regulates to a minimum standard. The question is, what standard will show consumers that some operators have invested in and obtained a higher standard thereby reducing risk? "The reality now is that some charter operators are faced with 10 to 15 audits per year, all of which have different undisclosed standards. Some operators literally have to re- write manuals from one week to the next in order to appease these different standards. Obviously, this is an industry in chaos. The ultimate downside of this confusion is a reduction in safety, and not one that the industry can risk. This situation should not be allowed to continue. And yes, looming over the horizon will be yet another standard when the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) determines what their Safety Management System requirements are going to be. It is not a rosy picture for the air charter industry, charter customers, safety in general and, ultimately, the national air transportation system. "The FAA sets the minimum standard for both scheduled and on-demand air carriers," the statement continues. "With the development of best practices, quality management systems and now safety management systems, there are ways to reduce risk continually. The scheduled air carriers of the world recognized this and developed a way to measure one's ability to achieve a world-class status. The FAA recognized this and allowed this standard to be used to meet the requirements established in the code share rules. So, what is the issue in the on-demand charter market? Are there too few operators able to reach this world-class level? Will we have to settle for some lower standard so more can get on the registry? Or, will the industry pull itself out of the old paradigm of mutable un-disclosed standards? "Charter operators are now faced with a dilemma: Do I pick an easy unpublished standard, or do I put my head down, push my organization across the finish line, and join the rest of the world-class operators that are measured by one industry standard that is published for the world to see? The ACSF created one world-class standard that did not compete with anyone in the business but was designed by leading charter operators and audit companies to promote and enhance safety throughout the entire industry. It is time we establish and agree to one standard and make it stick." FMI: www.acsf.aero Back to Top Airbus to launch A320neo jet 6 months early PARIS (Reuters) - Airbus (EAD.PA) said on Wednesday it would bring forward the entry into service of a new version of its A320 passenger jet by six months. The fuel saving model of Airbus's best selling aircraft will now be available in October 2015, Airbus said in a statement, citing spectacular market demand. Airbus said the upgraded model has generated strong sales of a Pratt & Whitney engine, the PW1100G turbofan, which Airbus said customers had established as the "lead development engine". Airbus sales chief John Leahy was quoted as saying on Tuesday the jet maker would consider putting a version of Pratt & Whitney's latest jet engines on its A350 mid-sized plane if the U.S. engine maker proposed it. The engine, developed by United Technologies (UTX.N) unit Pratt & Whitney, competes with an engine developed by General Electric (GE.N) and Safran (SAF.PA) joint venture CFM International. The move to speed up the introduction of the A320neo comes as Boeing (BA.N) mulls whether to launch a new version of its successful 737 passenger jet. Together the two aircrafts compete in the largest segment of the aircraft market worth an estimated $1.7 trillion over 20 years. Separately, Zodiac Aerospace (ZODC.PA) said on Wednesday it had won a deal to become the sole supplier of kitchen and stowage compartments for Airbus's short-to medium range narrow-body A320 fleet. Back to Top Jet metal fatigue a rare risk By Alan Levin That's what 118 passengers experienced Friday on a Southwest Airlines jet that suffered an explosive decompression at 34,000 feet. The jet landed safely, and the only injury was a relatively minor one to a flight attendant. But in several previous accidents in this country and elsewhere around the world, passengers were not so lucky. If the hole is large enough or the torrent of air rushing outward powerful enough, it can suck people out of an aircraft as if they were twigs, according to aviation accident reports. At the same time, safety experts say, the risks of a passenger dying from an accident caused by metal fatigue is minuscule - and far below the human errors that typically lead to crashes. Of the fatal accidents in recent decades involving decompression at high altitude, only one - the 1988 Aloha Airlines flight that lost a large section of its roof - occurred as a result solely of metal fatigue. In several other crashes linked to metal failure, planes disintegrated in flight, leading to high death tolls. But those cases have been the result of botched repairs, not the kind of slow metal deterioration that appears to have occurred on the Southwest jet, accident reports show. "When you look at the risk of an accident by all the airliners in the world, a hole like the Southwest incident does not really rank very high," says John Cox, a former airline pilot who operates a safety consulting firm. Failures and fatalities The accident most closely linked to Friday's Southwest flight was on April 28, 1988, when a massive section of the sides and roof on an Aloha Airlines 737-200 burst open. Flight attendant C.B. Lansing was caught in the rushing air and sucked overboard. The National Transportation Safety Board later concluded that the jet nearly broke apart, but pilots were able to nurse the plane to a safe landing. The safety board concluded that a lap joint - a section on the fuselage that joins two pieces of aluminum - failed because of metal fatigue. The accident triggered a broad review of how metal on older aircraft deteriorates. The FAA and aircraft manufacturers issued dozens of requirements for inspections to spot cracks before they became dangerous. There have been several other fatal accidents in which passengers were sucked out as planes decompressed: ·On Nov. 3, 1973, a National Airlines Douglas DC-10's engine exploded near Albuquerque, sending shards into a window on the plane. A passenger sitting next to the window was sucked out and died. ·Two passengers died on Dec. 22, 1980, on a Saudi Arabian Airlines Lockheed L-1011 flight near Qatar suffered an explosive decompression. A wheel on the landing gear exploded, ripping a hole in the bottom of the aircraft. ·Nine people died on Feb. 24, 1989, when a cargo door broke loose on a United Airlines 747 after it took off from Honolulu. The poorly designed door triggered an explosive decompression that sucked the passengers out. Disintegration is rare Even more deadly have been the handful of cases in which aircraft disintegrated when metal became weakened through the repeated bending it undergoes when a plane reaches altitude and is pressurized like a balloon. All 225 people aboard a China Airlines 747 died on May 25, 2002, when it came apart in flight over the ocean near Taiwan. After retrieving scores of chunks of wreckage from the ocean floor, investigators concluded that an improper repair had overstressed metal until it failed. As horrific as these cases are, aviation safety experts say they should not be too closely linked to the recent Southwest accident. A fatigue failure linked to a faulty repair is different from the much more rare problems that the Southwest jet encountered on Friday, says Kevin Darcy, former chief accident investigator at Boeing who is now a safety consultant at RTI Forensics, an aviation safety consulting firm. Pure fatigue cases "don't really all that often cause the loss of an airplane," Darcy says. 'Severe condition' Even if the risks are low, Darcy and others say that it's a significant failure when an aircraft's skin peels back. It's unacceptable and must be addressed immediately, they say. The size of the hole that opened up is worrisome, says Jim Wildey, a former NTSB investigator who supervised the agency's materials laboratory and helped investigate the Aloha accident. Airliners are designed with multiple layers of protection against cracking. If a crack should open up on the fuselage, the 737 and other Boeing jets have protections to limit the size of the tear. However, the preliminary evidence from the Southwest accident shows that the strips of metal added to the fuselage to prevent cracks from spreading didn't do their job. The metal strips are placed 20 inches apart and the crack ripped through two of them before it halted on a third strip, NTSB board member Robert Sumwalt says. The crack was 5 feet long. "A 5-foot crack is a very severe condition," Wildey says. He says it was "approaching the possibility of a total structural failure." Boeing chief project engineer Paul Richter said Tuesday that the strips were not sufficient to stop the cracks. http://travel.usatoday.com/flights/story/2011/04/Jet-metal-fatigue-a-rare- risk/45808638/1 Back to Top How It Works: Air France Flight 447's Black Boxes Late last week, authorities announced that the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean in June 2009, was finally found off the coast of Brazil in 13,000 feet of water. Investigators are hoping to find the airplane's black boxes, which might reveal the causes of the crash. Here's how black boxes work. On April 3, investigators announced the discovery of the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, which crashed into the Atlantic Ocean on June 1, 2009 amid mysterious circumstances after taking off from Rio de Janeiro bound for Paris. The long-awaited find brings new hope that the causes of the Airbus 300 crash will be illuminated-if the black boxes can be found. But just what does a black box do? While the National Transportation and Safety Board wouldn't comment for this story because it is not involved in the AF447 investigation, Popular Mechanics got to the bottom of the issue in a piece for our Hollywood Fact vs. Fiction series about the television show Lost, in 2008, when the show featured a recovered black box. James Cash, chief of the vehicle recorders division at the NTSB, told us that there are two major components to the black box: The cockpit voice recorder (CVR) that records dialogue and ambient noise in the cockpit, and the flight data recorder (FDR) that records parametric data such as altitude, airspeed and heading. Data from the virtually crash-proof boxes is recorded to solid-state drives-these allow the data recorders to track thousands of parameters and have increased how long the voice recorders can record audio. The circumstances of a crash determine which part of the recorder is going to be more helpful. "If it was an airplane problem, the flight recorder would give you a good idea of how it crashed," Cash said. "If it's a crew mistake or some kind of procedural mistake, the flight recorder would look perfectly normal." In a situation where a plane runs into a mountain, the FDR would show that the aircraft was operating normally and then just stopped-at which point, the data from the CVR becomes incredibly important. Honeywell manufactured Air France 447's two black boxes, which were both bolted in the tail section of the airplane, according to Bill Reavis, the director of media relations for Honeywell's Air Transport & Regional, Business and General Aviation divisions. (This isn't the only black-box setup. Some planes combine both recorders into a single unit, while others have two black boxes-one at the front of the plane and one in the back.) The plane's FDR could record several thousand parameters for up to 25 hours, while the CVR could record 2 hours of standard-quality and 30 minutes of high-quality audio. Both units were equipped with underwater locator beacons that transmitted at 37.5 kHz for over 30 days before the signal faded. The bright orange steel-armored boxes are designed to withstand fire and explosions and impacts up to 1500 g's (as a comparison, astronauts withstand a mere 3 g's on liftoff). Immersion in seawater shouldn't hurt the units, either. Cash told us that one recorder (the manufacturer is not known) survived nine years at the bottom of the Mediterranean. "The water, in general, doesn't hurt them at all," Cash told us. "It's the air that hurts them once they've been wet. It starts the corrosion and rust process." What might be a problem, though, is pressure. The wreckage of AF447 has lain at 13,000 feet below the surface for nearly two years; the pressure at that depth is about 400 times our atmospheric pressure. Honeywell's FDRs are designed to withstand depths of 20,000 feet for 30 days. "We won't know [if pressure will be a problem] until we see the units," Reavis says. "Until then, we can't knowledgeably tell you anything. We'd only be guessing, and I really don't want to do that." If the black boxes are found, they will be transferred to a lab in a water-filled cooler so the data can be retrieved and copied. The boxes will likely go back to France's Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses (BEA) for analysis. "The French investigatory authorities will be in charge of that," Reavis says. "We stand ready to help if needed, but the French will have the box." http://www.popularmechanics.com/technology/aviation/safety/air-france-flight-447s- black-box-how-it-works Back to Top Smell of smoke forces Delta flight back to airport ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) -- A Delta flight returned to Orlando International Airport after passengers reported the smell of smoke in the cabin.Officials say Flight 1905 took off for Detroit at 6:10 p.m. Tuesday and returned to the airport a short time later. The passengers were placed on another flight, which left at 9:48 p.m. Delta officials did not say how many people were on the plane or what caused the odor.No further details were available. Back to Top Civil Aviation Ministry Reiterates Air Safety (INDIA) The Civil Aviation Ministry's resolve is to have a zero tolerance approach towards safety of the aviation sector. In order to have a sustained and continuous process of monitoring and implementing safety related issues a Civil Aviation Safety Advisory Council (CASAC) has been set up under the chairmanship of Secretary, Ministry of Civil Aviation. It is a representative body of all stakeholders and safety experts of international repute. It has six working subgroups which are working continuously to formulate policies / regulations pertaining to civil aviation safety requirements. It is further clarified that at present 9 government FOIs are on the rolls of Director General of Civil Aviation (DGCA). However, these are insufficient number to carry out mandatory safety oversight functions. Therefore, there is a Civil Aviation Requirement (CAR) for taking pilots from other Airlines on secondment basis to supplement the surveillance activity undertaken by the Flight Operation Inspectors (FOI). This is an effective tool to put in place an effective safety oversight over the increasingly growing aviation industry. Accordingly, 18 FOIs on secondment basis are working in the DGCA. The regulatory authority has an effective system in place to avoid any conflict of interest while discharging their statutory duties. The oversight functions are done by a team of FOIs and not on individual basis. They have to undertake mandatory surveillance of various airlines in accordance with the annual plan as per the standard check list. DGCA has a stringent safety audit procedure in place which is undertaken by the Air Safety Directorate. This Directorate is headed by an officer of the level of Deputy Director General and adequately manned in Headquarters and all the Regions. It is brought to the notice that ICAO and FAA has conducted an elaborate safety audit of the DGCA and has put it on record that India conforms to the highest level of safety regulations. India remained category-I nation on safety parameters. It is reiterated that an effective safety oversight system is in place and is constantly being monitored, guided and upgraded to conform to the highest degree of surveillance. However, third party audit is a welcome idea and would be given due consideration. However, outsourcing of safety oversight function is neither appropriate nor desirable as it involves criticality of the operation. However, DGCA is constantly monitoring and upgrading the system of safety oversight and audit to keep pace with increasingly growing aviation industry. In order to augment shortage of manpower, government has sanctioned 552 posts so that there is no shortfall of officers and staff in DGCA. As regular appointment takes some time, it has resorted to engaging people from open market as consultants so that functioning of DGCA is not jeopardized. At the same time the process of regular selections are actively underway. Further, the Ministry is actively in the process of establishing a Civil Aviation Authority (CAA) which is going to replace the existing DGCA with additional duties and responsibilities in order to make it more effective, proactive, dynamic and consumer friendly. http://pib.nic.in/newsite/erelease.aspx?relid=71515 Back to Top Brazil's President Appoints First Civil Aviation Secretary SAO PAULO -(Dow Jones)- Brazil's President Dilma Rousseff has appointed the first head of the new civil aviation department, as the country seeks to attract private investment to overhaul airport infrastructure. Rousseff appointed Wagner Bittencourt de Oliveira as secretary of the new department, which was created in March, the president's office said in a statement. Since 2006, Oliveira has been head of the infrastructure, raw materials and project structuring at the government-run National Development Bank, or BNDES. The new secretary is expected to oversee the plans to open up airport investment to private companies, granting licenses to build new terminals and new airports. "We can grant licenses where something already exists--to build a new terminal, for example," the president said in a recent interview with the Valor Economico newspaper. "We can grant licenses were nothing exists, such as the construction of an airport, in the same way we do it for a hydroelectric dam." The government has said Brazil will need to spend about 33 billion Brazilian reais ($20 billion) to prepare its transportation, health and safety infrastructure ahead of the 2014 World Cup soccer competition, and the federal government will likely account for more than two-thirds of that spending. Investment in airports is crucial not only for the 2014 Cup and 2016 Olympic Games--to be held in Rio de Janeiro--but also to meet growing demand as the country's economy expands. Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC