Flight Safety Information November 14, 2011 - No. 232 In This Issue Saab 340 operators ordered to modify stall warning Fly-by-wire Software Issue Delays Embraer's Midsize Jets Mexico Helicopter Crash Caused by Foggy Weather, Government Says IN FOCUS: Mining digital avionics data for future safety American Eagle fined for tarmac delays NYC marks 10th anniversary of Flight 587 crash Helicopter wreckage recovered, sent to Maui Dubai Airshow: Dubai emerges as global aviation hub Earn a US Federal Government SMS Training Certificate Saab 340 operators ordered to modify stall warning Safety regulators have ordered modification of Saab 340 stall-warning systems after a number of incidents in which the system failed to alert the crew of possible stall situation. The European Aviation Safety Agency said "a few natural stall events" without prior warning had been experienced on the type, specifically while operating in icing conditions. It has issued an airworthiness directive covering almost the entire Saab 340A and 340B fleets, instructing operators to upgrade the stall-warning systems. EASA said the modification follows the development of "improved logic" for the aircraft's stall-warning computer. The new system includes stall-warning curves "optimised for operation in icing conditions", it added, activated during selection of engine anti-ice. While the stall warning activated on the Sol Lineas Aereas 340 which crashed during a domestic service to Comodoro Rivadavia in May, the fatal accident illustrated the risks of ice build-up on the type. Investigators found that the crew had observed the accumulation of ice as the aircraft climbed, and had chosen to descend in conditions which made the icing worse. Australian investigators sought an improvement in stall warning logic on the type back in 1999, after finding that the crew of a Kendell Airlines 340 received "very little warning" of an impending stall in icing seven months earlier. Saab manufactured almost 460 turboprops in the 340 series. The modifications must be carried out within two years. Source: Air Transport Intelligence news Back to Top Fly-by-wire Software Issue Delays Embraer's Midsize Jets While the first Embraer Legacy 500 prototype continues to near the end of the production line, the midsize business jet will not make its maiden flight by year-end as originally scheduled. According to the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer, the delay stems from the Parker remote electronic unit software in the aircraft's fly-by- wire (FBW) flight-control system. Embraer president and CEO Frederico Curado revealed the problem earlier this month during the company's third-quarter investor conference, describing the issue as "softness of flight control." He also noted that Embraer is considering bringing this work in-house to resolve the software issue. FBW applications on the $18.4 million jet include rudder, spoilers, elevators, flaps, ailerons and horizontal stabilizer, providing closed-loop control on all three axes and allowing maximum maneuvering capability in the aircraft's normal flight envelope. Yesterday here in Dubai, Embraer executive jet market and product strategy vice president Claudio Camelier confirmed that the Legacy 500 will not fly until the third quarter of next year due to the software problem. Certification of the aircraft will also slip to the second half of 2013, which is about a year later than the original plan, though the Brazilian aircraft manufacturer could possibly meet the jet's projected 2013 service entry date. To minimize the impact on the Legacy 500's entry into service timeline, Embraer has reshuffled the schedule for ground testing. "We can still do a lot of things in ground testing to advance the Legacy 500 program," Camelier said, while he added that ground testing is expected to begin on December 11. The delays also have a domino effect on the Legacy 450, the 500's smaller sibling, which now won't be certified until late 2014 instead of late 2013. Entry into service for the Legacy 450 was originally planned for 2014, and this could very well still hold. http://www.ainonline.com/?q=aviation-news/dubai-air-show/2011-11-13/fly-wire-software-issue-delays- embraers-midsize-jets Back to Top Mexico Helicopter Crash Caused by Foggy Weather, Government Says Nov. 14 (Bloomberg) -- A Mexican helicopter crash that killed the country's second-highest official and seven other people was caused by foggy weather and not sabotage, the government said. The helicopter, which was carrying Interior Minister Francisco Blake Mora from Mexico City to a prosecutors' meeting in the central city of Cuernavaca on Nov. 11, crashed in one piece, Communications and Transportation Minister Dionisio Perez-Jacome said. Radar readings show the pilot didn't lose control of the chopper, he said. "The helicopter crashed while flying in a straight line and in clouds," Perez-Jacome said in a televised press conference in Mexico City yesterday. "There is no evidence of damage from explosion or fire." Perez-Jacome was making his third public comments since the incident to downplay the theory that Blake Mora, the administration's second interior minister to die in an aviation accident, may have been the victim of an assassination attempt. Initial concerns that the official's death signaled an escalation of drug-cartel violence erased gains in the Mexican peso on Nov. 11, leading the currency to its second weekly decline as it closed little changed on the day. A team of 16 experts, including members of the U.S. National Transportation Safety Board and Federal Aviation Administration, are working on the investigation, Perez-Jacome said. The Eurocopter Super Puma, built in 1984 and acquired by the government in 1985, underwent maintenance work on Nov. 4 and 5 and was "airworthy," he said. Technical Problems Helicopter co-pilot Pedro Escobar told his family prior to the crash that the chopper was having technical problems, Mexico City-based daily El Universal reported. President Felipe Calderon called Blake Mora, 45, "one of my closest collaborators and dearest friends" at the official's Nov. 12 funeral service in Mexico City. The Mexican leader praised Blake Mora's work as coordinator of his security cabinet and said he promoted dialogue between public officials and victims of Mexico's soaring drug-cartel violence. Calderon said the nation had been tested by other tragedies and that the death of Blake Mora wouldn't hold up progress in his government. Blake Mora's death comes three years after Interior Minister Juan Camilo Mourino died along with security officials when their Learjet plane crashed in a Mexico City neighborhood in 2008. Drug War Jose Luis Santiago Vasconcelos, who served as former President Vicente Fox's top prosecutor against organized crime, also died in the crash, which killed 15 people. The government blamed the incident on pilot error. The interior minister coordinates policy between Mexico's security forces and oversees the administration's relations with Congress, response to natural disasters and the monitoring of dissident groups. Forty-five thousand Mexicans have been killed since 2006 and the drug war has cost the economy $120 billion in security expenditures and lost investment, according to Bulltick Capital Markets, a Miami-based investment firm that specializes in Latin America. Back to Top IN FOCUS: Mining digital avionics data for future safety By: John Croft Washington DC Could the fatal overrun of a Southwest Airlines Boeing 737 at Chicago Midway in 2005 or the non-fatal but high- profile taxiway prang between an Air France Airbus A380 and Comair Bombardier CRJ at New York's John F Kennedy airport in April this year have been predicted? Creative new ways to analyse the reams of digital avionics data may answer those questions in the affirmative. Saab Sensis is making headway on tagging accident precursors from surveillance data at airports, part of the flight operations quality assurance (FOQA) programme that monitors flight data recorder feeds. As part of its work within the US Federal Aviation Administration's aviation safety information analysis and sharing programme, Saab Sensis has been investigating "offshoot" uses of its airport surface detection equipment (ASDE-X) surveillance system, in place at 35 major airports in the USA. ASDE-X predicts where runway incursions might happen by fusing information primarily from multilateration sensors and surface-movement radar systems. One fatality resulted from this 2005 overrun Ben Levy, manager of the operations research group at Saab Sensis, says the company took the technology a step further by analysing all aircraft movements - to and from the runway, starting and ending at the gate - at three ASDE-X airports. The initial product, called Airport Viewer, is not intended to create real-time alerts but to look at ASDE-X data from weeks, months or years of operations to spot problem areas based on taxiing or driving performance of pilots, airport tug operators, snow removal vehicles, aircraft servicers or anything else tracked by surveillance assets. AIRPORT DEVELOPMENT To get a full picture of whether potential issues are real and how serious they might be, researchers added linked-in details such as radio conversations, weather data, aircraft databases, aircraft images and facility maps. The benefits can also be applied to airport development or improvement programmes. Initially, Sensis analysed eight weeks of ASDE-X data from JFK, Miami and Memphis. "We came up with 10 to 15 types of events that we could identify, including sudden stops and large deceleration traces," says Levy. Engineers presented potential problems to air traffic controllers, who helped to select the highest-priority safety items - sudden stops, route excursions, and irregular turns. Engineers are now looking at a year's worth of data from JFK, while planning to start taking shorter-term snapshots of more airports that are equipped with ASDE- X. After studying the eight weeks of data from JFK, Airport Viewer identified 400 of what it considered "high priority" anomalies, half of which were categorised as the most consequential. "We're now working with the algorithms to catch only those," says Levy. "The 200 looked real though - slamming on brakes, pilots who appear lost or were taking a strange routing - events you would want to investigate further." TARMAC ANOMALIES Levy says the tool - which estimates a collision risk and is not dependent on human data entry - would ultimately fit into an airport's safety management system to keep a running tally of the selected tarmac anomalies. "We first search through a large set of data for the airport and identify to local experts problems in the anomalies," says Levy. "Could it be due to signage?" He adds that the tool "really comes to fruition" when there is a "rate of change" for a particular anomaly in a certain location. A new flight data recorder prognostics tool developed by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) may have prevented an airport disaster unlinked to taxiways. According to MIT graduate student Lishuai Li, a cluster analysis tool she has developed with MIT professors, including John Hansman and others in Spain, could have foreseen the fatal accident based on pilot performance captured by FOQA data. The US National Transportation Safety Board determined that the pilots of Southwest Flight 1248 - which overran by 150m (500ft) from a runway at Chicago's Midway airport in a snowstorm on a December night in 2005 - failed to use thrust reversers "in a timely manner". One person was killed when the twinjet crushed a car. Li says the anomaly detection algorithm - which uses so-called cluster analysis to find outliers in otherwise subsets of common patterns for flights - may have netted late thrust-reverser actuations in previous flights. The critical assumption is that similar delays in deploying thrust reversers had occurred enough times for a cluster analysis to have alerted the airline to the problem. MIT says the software applies a customising cluster analysis - a common statistical tool - to flight data recorder output. Flight parameters are "mapped" into a vector for each of the flights. Then, when plotted together in a common frame, the outlier flights separate from the cluster of normal flights, signalling potential problems which can then be studied. The beauty of this method is that safety officials need no prior knowledge of a particular problem as the software flags potential dangers if a flight differs from its normal pattern. The cluster analysis goes beyond FOQA, which typically calls for the monitoring of a "watch list" of 88 flight parameters on each flight, mostly linked to crew performance. These include pitch angle, take-off and landing speed, and when pilots retract the flaps. Obtaining FOQA information to analyse has been problematic in the past and remains so for MIT, as unions are protective of data for fear of crews being penalised. FLIGHT ABNORMALITIES Hansman, professor of aeronautics and astronautics and engineering systems at MIT, says the amount of data dedicated to FOQA has risen dramatically thanks to an increase in sensors and data storage capacity. This is a boon for safety analysis but can be problematic when determining which data are important. He notes that the Boeing 787 is able to record 2,000 flight parameters continuously for up to 50 hours, prompting the need for careful assessment of the threshold for defining something as potentially problematic. "If you're looking at [an] airline flying 1,000 flights a day and we flag [abnormalities in] 1% of those, that's 10 flights a day someone has to look at," says Hansman. "We want to be more discriminating. Once you get a safety analyst to say something is unusual but is safe, you may be able to count [the occurrence] but maybe not flag it in subsequent analysis." An A380's wingtip sliced into the T-tail of a Comair CRJ at JFK airport on 11 April MIT researchers tested the technique on flight data from 365 flights during one month. The airline flew Boeing 777s, but is no longer operating. Each flight included measurements taken at one-second intervals, including aircraft position, speed, acceleration, wind speed, and environmental pressure and temperature, says MIT. The work is being funded by the FAA as part of a joint air transport research programme that also includes Ohio State University and Princeton University. Results showed that several flights "stuck out from the normal cluster" for the take-off and landing portion, says Hansman. Further investigation determined that crew actions caused the apparent anomalies, including one case where a flight took off with "significantly less power than most", indicating either an incorrect thrust setting by the crew or a potential power system issue. The team found another take-off exhibited erratic pitch behaviour, indicating that the pilot had difficulty rotating on take-off. A third flight flew low on approach with a higher-than-normal flap setting, creating drag that forced the application of more thrust than usual before landing, says MIT. Hansman says he is talking to several airlines and NASA to obtain additional FOQA data to test. During the next few months, MIT will test its cluster analysis on data provided by NASA's Ames Research Center, where researchers are developing similar data-mining programs for FOQA. "We're going to run the same set of data and see how the results compare," says Hansman, noting that the work has to be carried out at Ames as the proprietary data from airlines are strictly controlled. Saab Sensis, meanwhile, is looking for additional airports to test Airport Viewer. The long-term vision for the tool includes use as an airport design aid, where airport taxi performances can be monitored to determine best practice for future airport layouts, says Levy. While Levy was not at liberty to say whether Airport Viewer had picked up on issues from taxiway M near gate 23 at JFK - where the A380's wingtip sliced into the T-tail of the Comair CRJ on 11 April - he says he has seen "anomalies that take place in the data before actual incidents that are very similar". http://www.flightglobal.com/news/articles/in-focus-mining-digital-avionics-data-for-future-safety-364329/ Back to Top American Eagle fined for tarmac delays USA TODAY - In the first penalty of its kind, the Transportation Department fined American Eagle $900,000 today for lengthy tarmac delays when thunderstorms swept Chicago's O'Hare International Airport on May 29. "We put the tarmac rule in place to protect passengers, and we take any violation very seriously," Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood said in announcing the fine. "We will work to ensure that airlines and airports coordinate their resources and plans to avoid keeping passengers delayed on the tarmac." American Eagle, the only airline with lengthy delays at O'Hare that day, agreed to the settlement it blamed on a slow-moving weather system that resulted in airport congestion. The airline offered customers an apology with vouchers for future travel or frequent-flier miles. "American Eagle is absolutely committed to the safety of our customers and employees, and regrets the inconvenience these delays caused," said airline President and CEO Dan Garton. "We take our responsibility to comply with all of the department's requirements very seriously and have already put in place processes to avoid such an occurrence in the future." The department created fines of up to $27,500 per passenger in April 2010 when travelers are stuck on planes delayed on tarmacs longer than three hours. Transportation officials credited the threat of fines with dramatically reducing the number of tarmac delays. Airlines, which blame unpredictable weather for the delays, say they're canceling more flights rather than risk fines. The 20 long tarmac delays in the 12 months after the fines were created reflected an enormous drop from the 693 such delays reported in the year before the fines. So far this year, American Eagle has had 16 tarmac delays of at least three hours, according to the department. That's twice as many as second-place Delta Air Lines. O'Hare registered 20 of the 39 the department counted so far this year. On May 29, American Eagle had 15 flights arriving at O'Hare that each had tarmac delays of at least three hours. A total of 608 passengers were aboard the affected flights. The airline must pay $650,000 of the fine within 30 days and up to $250,000 more in refunds, vouchers or frequent-flier miles for the delayed passengers. The fine comes after 23 weather diversions on Oct. 29 from New York-area airports to Bradley International Airport in Hartford, Conn. One JetBlue flight spent 7½ hours on the tarmac. The government is investigating whether fines are warranted in that case, too. Back to Top NYC marks 10th anniversary of Flight 587 crash (AP) NEW YORK - For a few anguished hours on Nov. 12, 2001, Americans still in shock over the Sept. 11 attacks watched television footage of the blazing wreckage of a jetliner bound for the Dominican Republic that had just crashed in a Queens neighborhood, and wondered: Is it happening again? It wasn't. By late afternoon, authorities were saying the crash of American Airlines Flight 587 looked like an accident, not terrorism. The country breathed a sigh of relief. The horror and grief lingered longer for the loved ones of the 265 dead, most of them Dominican. Even after a decade, sadness lives on for people like William Valentine, whose partner and lover of 20 years, Joe Lopes, a flight attendant who died in the crash. "I don't think an hour goes by," he said, suppressing a sob, "when I'm not thinking of Joe in some way." Hundreds of people gathered Saturday morning at a seaside memorial on New York's Rockaway peninsula to mark the 10th anniversary of the crash, which killed everyone aboard the aircraft and five people on the ground. The wreck remains the second deadliest aviation accident on U.S. soil. The ceremony, held on a cool but beautiful fall day, echoed the ones that have been held annually at ground zero where the World Trade Center once stood. At 9:15 a.m., a bell tolled and there was a moment of silence to mark the time the plane went down. The name of each victim was read, often tearfully, by relatives. Some lost several members of their family on the flight, from toddlers to aging patriarchs. "Ten years have gone by, but as you know all too well, every day in the wake of tragedy is a day of remembrance," said Mayor Michael Bloomberg. The accident will remain forever linked to Sept. 11 because of its proximity in both time and distance to the disaster at the World Trade Center. Belle Harbor, the suburban beach neighborhood where the plane went down, has been a longtime enclave of police officers, firefighters and financial district workers, and was still holding funerals for its Sept. 11 dead when the accident happened. The hardest blow, though, came for New York City's large community of immigrants from the Dominican Republic. Flight 587 was bound for Santo Domingo when it went down. In some city neighborhoods, like Manhattan's Washington Heights, it seemed like everyone knew someone aboard the flight. Parts of Saturday's ceremony were conducted in Spanish, including a reading of verses by the Dominican poet Pedro Mir. A line from his poetry also graces the Flight 587 memorial: "Despues no quiero mas que paz," translated as "Afterward I want only peace." Investigators ultimately determined that the plane's tail had detached in midair because of stress put on the plane's rudder as the co-pilot tried to steady the aircraft in another jet's turbulent wake. Since then, steering systems for some airliners have been redesigned so pilots can have greater awareness of movements in the tail rudder. "Before this crash, pilots probably didn't have an understanding that this kind of accident could occur," said Steve Pounian, a lawyer at the law firm Kreindler & Kreindler, which represented the families of 90 crash victims. Well over 250 lawsuits were brought because of the accident. All have since been settled, for undisclosed amounts that Pounian said totaled more than $500 million. Valentine, 57, decided to skip this year's anniversary ceremony. In an interview Friday, he said he would be gardening instead, planting flowers at his New York City co-op. But his grief remains fresh. He visited the seaside memorial privately a few weeks ago, and it reminded him of a walk he and Lopes took on a beach in San Francisco on their second date, in 1980. The two men spent the next two decades together, eventually settling in New York City. Lopes had a master's degree in social work from Columbia University, but preferred flying for a living. He wasn't a regular on Flight 587. That fall, the 46-year-old had been working a trans-Atlantic route to Paris. The flight to the Dominican, Valentine said, was an extra shift on the side. In the slowdown in air travel after the Sept. 11 attacks, Lopes had actually asked to take Nov. 12 as a vacation day, but, fatefully, he was turned down. After the crash, Valentine took the unusual step of applying for death benefits usually granted to surviving spouses under the state's worker's compensation law. At the time, though, New York didn't recognize same-sex unions. The claim was turned down, and a legal appeal ended in defeat. It was partly because of stories like that - of longtime partners being denied simple legal rights granted to other committed couples - that New York lawmakers moved to legalize gay marriage this summer. Valentine's joy over the moment was tempered by the knowledge that, for him, the change had come too late. Seeing all those photographs of other gay men and women celebrating their marriages this summer came with a touch of pain. But, he added, "I had 21 years with a wonderful man. And who I am today is very much a reflection of who he made me." Back to Top Helicopter wreckage recovered, sent to Maui A preliminary report from the National Transportation Safety Board might be issued in days A helicopter Sunday lifted the remains of the Blue Hawaiian helicopter that crashed into a hillside Thursday near Kilohana Elementary School on Molokai, killing all five on board. A Maui contractor removed the wreckage of a tour helicopter from a remote hillside in East Molokai on Sunday after Thursday's crash that killed all five people on board. The National Transportation Safety Board might issue a preliminary report at the end of this week or early next week, but it will not touch on what might have caused the crash, NTSB spokesman Keith Holloway said Sunday from Washington, D.C. "We don't draw any preliminary conclusions or state the cause," Holloway said. The identities of two of the victims, a man and a woman from Canada, remained undisclosed yesterday. Claude Rochon, spokeswoman for Canada's Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade in Ottawa, confirmed Sunday by email the deaths of two Canadian citizens but wrote that "for privacy reasons, no further information can be disclosed at this time." Maui County police Lt. Wayne Ibarra said the department followed protocol by notifying the Canadian Consulate in San Francisco of the deaths of a man and a woman from Ontario. The pilot of the Blue Hawaiian Helicopters' aircraft was identified as Nathan Cline, 30, of Maui. Newlyweds Michael and Nicole Abel, engineers from western Pennsylvania, also died in the crash. The Blue Hawaiian helicopter left Kahului Airport Thursday for a one-hour tour of West Maui and Molokai, police said. The helicopter crashed at about 12:15 p.m. at about the 1,000-foot elevation on a hillside about a quarter-mile behind Kilohana Elementary School. Witnesses said the crash happened in rain and under thick, low-hanging cloud cover. The National Weather Service had issued a high-wind advisory for Maui County for much of Thursday. An NTSB investigator spent most of Saturday and Sunday examining the aircraft and documenting the data collected, Holloway said. The preliminary report will include information gleaned from examination of the aircraft, as well as information on weather conditions and maintenance of the aircraft, he said. The wreckage was moved Sunday to a storage facility on Maui. Catherine Cluett, a photographer and editor in chief of the Molokai Dispatch newspaper, said she watched the removal work, which began in the morning and continued until about 12:30 p.m. Workers placed pieces of the wreckage in a net, which a helicopter carried away, Cluett said. The wreckage was airlifted in two loads. http://www.staradvertiser.com/news/hawaiinews/20111114_Helicopter_wreckage_recovered_sent_to_Maui.htm l Back to Top Dubai Airshow: Dubai emerges as global aviation hub (BBC) - Bigger and better have long been buzzwords in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), and nowhere more so than at the international airport where the Dubai Airshow is held this week. Vast, glass-fronted terminal buildings are fronted by palm trees and manicured lawns, their facades punctuated by massive cranes that bring testimony to the continued expansion of capacity here. The existing international airport, with its huge, air-conditioned terminal buildings, has proved that it is capable of processing a monthly throughput of between four and five million people. In July, a record 4.7 million people travelled through the airport, marking a 9.7% rise over July 2010. Then, in September, Dubai Duty Free proudly declared that its sales had topped $1bn (£625m) since 1 January and could reach almost $1.5bn by the end of the year. New hub Those may be big figures, but the traffic at the existing international airport is set to be dwarfed by the new Al Maktoum International Airport, constructed half an hour's drive outside the city. The new airport is an integral part of a 140 square kilometre transport hub, and thus essential to Dubai's grand ambition of becoming a global centre for logistics, trade and travel. On the passenger front, the airport aims to be able to handle a whopping 160 million passengers per year. That is not to say Dubai will receive that many people into the city. Instead, the vast majority will be passing through, having been flown here in enormous aircraft such as the Airbus A380 or the Boeing 777, only to switch to similarly-sized aircraft for long-haul flights or to smaller planes for trips within the region. 'Game changer' If it all goes according to plan then Dubai is set to become home to the largest airport in the world. Dubai Airport is already a major hub "Emirates, Dubai's main carrier, is expected to move its entire operation to the new airport around 2020, avoiding a fragmented operation over two facilities," says John Strickland, aviation analyst with JLS Consulting. "This is in stark contrast to the constraints for growth at airports like London Heathrow." Dubai's ability to expand both terminal and runway capacity quickly without any major constraints makes it easier for UAE's airlines to offer direct, frequent routes to destinations across the world, acknowledges Colin Matthews, chief executive of airport operator BAA, which owns Heathrow, one of Europe's main hubs. "The region's major airlines, Emirates, Etihad and Qatar, will certainly have a big impact on global aviation," he says. "Dubai is changing the game." Logistics capabilities In addition to the dramatic growth in passenger traffic, Dubai's embryonic cargo terminal is also growing at an impressive rate. "Logistics will always remain one of Dubai's key sectors and its key strength," says Ayesha Sabawala at the Economist Intelligence Unit. The region's airlines are some of the best customers for manufacturers "With the gradual shift in trade from West to East, I don't think Dubai can afford not to continue to improve on its logistics capabilities." Moreover, the air cargo terminal is linked to the world's sixth-largest container terminal, Jebel Ali Sea Port, which helps cement Dubai's role as an ultra-efficient commodities trading hub that links Africa with Asia. "As key 21st century markets like China, Africa, India and Latin America grow, Dubai's airport infrastructure allows it to maintain its centuries old status as a key trading crossroad," says Mr Strickland. Big deals For the world's aerospace companies, the UAE carriers have thus become their best clients. "Traffic is still growing in the Middle East," according to Paul Sheridan, head of risk advisory for aviation specialists Ascend. "Carriers based here will be ordering aircraft to grow their market share of traffic between Asia and Europe and the US." This is especially pertinent a time when there is "little demand from Europe or the United States" due to ongoing economic woes, observes Daniel Broby, chief investment officer at Silk Invest. Stephen Furlong, transport analyst at Davy Research, agrees. "We absolutely expect the Gulf airlines to continue on the expansion trail," he says. "They are very into having a young fleet and are determined to be super-connectors who try to hoover up traffic flows on a global basis." Already at the show, resident carrier Emirates has ordered $18bn worth of Boeing 777 aircraft, whilst signing options for a further $8bn worth of planes. And as the week progresses, Qatar and Etihad are expected to place multi-billion dollar aircraft orders of their own. The Dubai Airshow runs from 13 to 17 November 2011. Back to Top Earn a US Federal Government SMS Training Certificate Cost $1820.00 US (8-day SMS Course) Course Number 1038 Dates/Time 29 Nov - 8 Dec 2011, 6-15 Mar 2012, 15-24 May 2012, 7-16 Aug 2012 Location Transportation Safety Institute, Main Campus, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma, USA About the course and Course Description & Course Length Course # 1038 Safety Program Management is a science and like other fields of science it has advanced. It is extremely important that safety professionals remain current in their field. In fact currency is vital if your organization hopes to achieve its maximum accident prevention potential. This course provides instruction and practical application of Safety Management Systems (SMS) and Accident Prevention Program Management. Graduates receive the necessary instruction required to design, develop, implement, manage and foster an effective organizational level SMS and accident prevention program. Course topics include the theory and application of SMS program elements, SMS program development, safety policies, safety risk management, hazards identification reporting and tracking, safety assurance, safety metrics, safety assurance and monitoring, audits, surveys and internal evaluations, safety education and promotion strategies, accident causation, and safety office management techniques. Who should attend Personnel, supervisors, leaders, or managers responsible for implementation, oversight or surveillance of an SMS or organizational safety program. Open to all public, private, military and international personnel. SMS Model Instruction is based on the US Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) and the ICAO SMS model Class Size 24 Enrollment Procedures Enroll on line at www.tsi.dot.gov or Call the TSI Registrar, Ms. Lisa Colasanti at: 405.954.3614 or email at:lisa.colasanti@tsi.jccbi.gov Certificates Graduates receive the following US Federal DOT certificates: 1- SMS and Aviation Safety Program Manager 2- Risk Management "Trainer" certificate Course Manager And Point of Contact Mr. D Smith Desk: 405.954.2913 Mobile: 405.694.1644 E-mail: d.smith@dot.gov Mailing Address: RTI-20 6500 S. MacArthur Blvd Oklahoma City, OK73169 ATTN: D Smith, Room 345 Curt Lewis, P.E., CSP CURT LEWIS & ASSOCIATES, LLC