Two items in the news caught my eye this week. And while both are getting relatively little attention while Americans focus on Newt Gingrich's "open marriage" scandal and the rest of the world wonders what really happened when that cruise ship ran aground in Italy, these other stories are significant.


In today's International Herald Tribune, Nicola  Clark reports on the new European airworthiness directive aimed at getting to the bottom of wing cracks discovered on two of nine super jumbo Airbus A380s. Eee gads! Think Airbus customers at Singapore, Emirates and Air France/KLM are biting their nails? Uh, yeah, because those are the airlines who've been told wing installation techniques on the airplanes in their fleet could be susceptible to this problem.

Airbus dismissals that the fractures are harmless, seem not to be carrying much weight with the safety authorities in Cologne, who wrote in the directive, "This condition, if not detected and corrected, could potentially affect the structural integrity of the aeroplane."

Other operators of the A380, Lufthansa and Qantas may feel they've dodged a bullet, and that's a term I've used more than once in writing about this particular model airplane. Need I even say, uncontained engine failure? Near disaster over Indonesia? Nope, these airlines can't be too comfy right now, especially as the directive concludes with the caveat that these visual inspections of wing rib feet are "an interim action." The investigation, as they say, is ongoing, "further mandatory actions might be considered."

Would that the investigation was still ongoing into the cause of unintended acceleration on Toyota cars in 2008 and 2009. Unfortunately, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration has turned off the ignition, locked the car and walked away from further study.  But in a report by Bill Vlasic of The New York Times, we learn that the federal agency charged with insuring auto safety isn't up to the task of supervising or even understanding the risks associated with digitization. Hello?

In autos and in aviation, engineers are boldly going where we have not been before. And for years I've been fielding emails from electronics engineers convinced that electromagnetic interference, (yep, that would be Alec Baldwin's EMI) played a role in all those out-of-control Prius, RAV4s, Corollas that had drivers feeling like Keanu Reeves in a real-life version of the movie Speed.

Don't get off the exit ramp yet, I'm gonna bring this back to airplanes in a minute. 

Toyota was under pressure to address concerns that all those cases of unintended acceleration might have EMI interference as a factor. So credible were the people raising the issue that Toyota felt the need to have its engineer,  Kristin Tabar answer the charge in a video on the company website, and it hired the scientific consulting firm Exponent to do its own study.

What Vlasic's story points out, however, is that an independent review found the federal agency not competent to regulate automative electronics. Part of the problem could be the speed with which the auto industry is developing in terms of digitization. A number of recent events with flight software and cockpit systems interference leads me to believe these two industries are not too dissimilar when it comes to keeping up with and managing the risks of complicated fly-by or drive-by-wire technologies.

The argument often put forth by those who say EMI is a fantasy rather than a ghost, is that there is no evidence of problems with interference as the source. It its report, the National Academy of Sciences replies, "Some failures of software and other faults in electronics systems do not leave physical evidence of their occurrence, which can complicate assessment of the causes of unusual behaviors in the modern, electronics-intensive automobile."

Everyone who did not go on a wild ride in a Toyota may be sick to death of the subject just as many people are tired of the debate over whether portable electronic devices should be allowed on flights below ten-thousand feet. But Negroni predicts, this is not the last we are going to hear about wing cracks or crackling electrons. Nor should it be.

Scene from Lufthansa Flight 400 today

All the great aviation writers, Antoine Saint Exupery, Ernest K. Gann, William Langewiesche, even the Boeing 747 designer Joseph Sutter (a surprisingly good writer for an engineer) know that flying is an exquisite balance of science and art. There’s poetry in the skies and plenty of it. 

Nevertheless, the world of air travel we know today is reliant on the hard reality of complex and interconnected systems.  I mention this having just returned from Ethiopia, where Ethiopian Airlines, joined the Star Alliance and became - in my opinion - the perfect illustration of the yin and yang of the skies. 

Ethiopian Q400 at Lalibela Airport

To many people - even plane geeks - what airlines participate in what alliances, is of little interest.  I got that. But it is worth pausing to appreciate how an airline can connect a traveler to twelve-hundred destinations in 189 countries while serving corners of the world so remote that the local airport is one of few places in the area with electricity. 


Be astonished - because when I arrived on an Ethiopian Airlines flight at the tiny community of Lalibela last week, I was barely off the airport property before I saw farmers threshing  grain in the fields using hand tools. The finished product would be hauled in sacks, uphill on a donkey if they’re lucky, on the back of a person if they are not.

Villagers walking home from Lalibela

That airline services can reach previously unreachable communities is a thrilling evolution and it only occurs because of the love it/hate it progress of communications technology. 

These alliances; Star, One World and SkyTeam, it doesn’t really matter, all require their members to  speak to each other, across many departments  from ticket sales to baggage tracking to frequent flyer programs. 
Yep, it’s the decidedly unglamorous, down-to-earth reality of modern aviation.  But you can’t have that thrilling product, the ability to travel to and from formerly remote corners of our globe without it. 

If you want to get a good debate going ask your friends, "What has had the largest effect on modern civilization; advances in communication or aviation?" Until a few years ago I would have said, "aviation". These days, though, aviation seems ever more reliant on following the innovations that have their origins in communication.

This was reinforced on Saturday when I boarded Lufthansa Flight 400 on my way home from Africa and discovered wifi was available during the eight-hour flight. While waiting for my computer to boot up, I looked out the window and  saw an amazing sight, the sun was casting the shadow of our A340 on the cloud layer below. Surrounding it was a perfect circle of refracted light.

Meteorology may explain the phenomenon. Engineering got the plane up there in the first place.  Never mind, we were flying through a magical halo and flying was poetry again.
 
And the fact that I could take a picture of it and upload it to my blog’s Facebook page within minutes, did not detract from the experience one teeny-tiny bit.

Sometimes romance shouldn't be discussed in the cockpit, and sometimes its vital that it is. That was the case on Wednesday when diamondback terrapins looking for romance began crossing an active runway at John F. Kennedy International Airport.

A couple of eagle-eyed American Eagle pilots blew the whistle on the amorous reptiles. Their call to the airport tower caused the temporary closing of the runway to relocate the critters on a mission to procreate. One of the pilots delayed by the closing can be heard on the radio frequency muttering, "Sufferin' succotash!" (So, so, mild, compared to what we've heard recently.)

John P.L. Kelly, a spokesman for the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey told The New York Times, the turtles were crossing the runway to get to the other side because that's where they'd find an ideal place to "lay their eggs in the sand."

Photo courtesy Port Authority of NY and NJ

The turtle story is cute and has a happy ending. When it comes to wildlife interfering with flight operations, its not turtles but birds that are most likely to cause disaster.

Unlike bouts involving land critters, airplane versus bird encounters are usually at low-altitude. And the most dangerous time for this match is during takeoff, according to Richard Dolbeer, an ornithologist and aviation consultant who spoke to me after the successful Miracle on the Hudson landing of USAirways Flight 1549.

"On takeoff you’re trying to gain altitude and you’ve got critical decisions to make in terms of turning around and lining up on the runway. This is why bird strikes on takeoff are more likely to cause significant failures on the aircraft but also they’re more difficult for a pilot to manage,"  Richard said.

Try and imagine for example what it was like to be Roger Wutkl who was flying solo over Arizona when a bird crashed through the windscreen of his airplane, knocking his headset and glasses off and making a disgusting mess of the cockpit in November of 2009.

That was a busy month for bird strikes. From India to Brazil, Venezuela to Kenya airplanes were returning to airports in a hurry after flying into birds. (International Birdstrike Committee keeps a comprehensive list of events and a covey of related information on its website.)

Earlier this week Jim Hall, former chairman of the US National Transportation Safety Board wrote an opinion piece for the Times expressing alarm over the location of garbage transfer station very near New York's LaGuardia Airport. One does not need to be an expert in aviation or wildlife to know that some very big birds are attracted to garbage and this is going to cause problems at the airport.

I mentioned Jim's article while having dinner with Andy Lester, manager of New Zealand's Christchurch International Airport on Wednesday night which prompted Andy to invite me to see how his airport is minimizing bird hazards by planting bird and bug repellant grass in some of the fields adjacent to the runway.

Ford Robertson and endophyte grass at Christchurch airport

As I understand it, in a process developed by a Kiwi agricultural scientist working in cooperation with the airport, an endophyte fungus is introduced to a certain kind of grass called fescue and the end product is given the catchy name Grasslanz Technology.

It may look like grass but birds don't like it and neither, apparently do bugs, making fields of the stuff unlikely to attract bug eaters. This is the first full year of a large field test and Andy and Ford Robertson, manager of quality and security are monitoring it closely.

This afternoon, while Ford drove me around the perimeter of the airfield and I snapped photos, we saw several large magpies and some smaller birds on or near the airport but the Grasslanz test field was bird-free.  

Magpies hangin' at the airport

Christchurch airport officials are encouraged by their biological fix and consider themselves leaders in the development of an agricultural solution to an aviation issue.

Its not a silver bullet its not even romantic but it is a creative approach and one worth keeping an eye on, even an eagle-eye, for how it might be more widely applied in the future.

Cruise pollutants?

There's good news and there's bad news in Flying Lessons today. First the bad news. The very smart folks over at Massachusetts Institute of Technology have just released the results of a study that seems to suggest that unregulated airliner pollutants cause as many as eight thousand cardiovascular, respiratory and cancer deaths each year.

Examining how airplane emissions travel through the jet stream, Steven Barrett, a professor at MIT’s Department of Aeronautics and Astronautics discovered that nitrogen oxides and sulfur oxides in jet emissions are responsible for these deaths and that the impact of the pollution is not only not restricted to the countries where airliner traffic is heaviest, countries with low levels of airliner activity are disproportionately affected.

The study, funded by British transportation agencies and some assistance from the U.S. Department of Transportation and published in the science journal, Environmental Science and Technology (read the report here) claims India and China which contribute just 10% of the aviation fuel burned worldwide, experience about half of the related deaths. These countries are particularly affected because of the interaction of the aviation-pollutants with the ammonia generated by agriculture in those countries. 

At present, regulation of airplane emissions focuses only on jet fuel emissions generated at takeoff and landing. As a result of his study Barrett says governments should consider the health effects of cruise-level flights as well.

Airplane emissions are the hot topic at the International Civil Aviation Organization 37^th Assembly going on in Montreal. Folks there are doing their share to heat up the atmosphere by arguing over aviation emissions trading scenarios. Read Aviation Week’s take on it and fill me in if you understand it, okay?

Bradley International Airport

My story in The New York Times last month about an American Airlines airliner using the first commercially-produced, publicly available RNP (GPS guided) approach at Bradley International Airport, was somewhat tongue-in-cheek. After all the hoopla - television crews recorded the B737's departure from Dallas Fort Worth International Airport and newspaper photographers greeted the flight in Hartford - Capt. Brian Will was unable to actually land using the approach. Blame tail winds, Capt.Will said.

But last minute surprises from Mother Nature aside, there's something truly spectacular about the digitization of air navigation. Somebody stop me, I think I've drunk the Kool-aid!  


Re-reading the transcript of my interview that day with Steve Fulton, the Alaska Airlines pilot-turned-daddy of RNP, I am once again struck by the potential in this technology. Here's a list of some of the benefits we can expect in the next decade as more airlines make the investment and equip their planes to fly more precise routes. 

Fuel savings (estimated at 6% by Southwest Airlines in a 2009 article for the Times, read it here)

Shorter flight times  

Fewer ground delays

Reduced air traffic control workload 

Diminished ground noise 

Safer transit through challenging terrain  

Acting on the assumption that gear-heads and techno-philes, may find it fascinating to read how Steve Fulton turned the solution to a troublesome approach route in Juneau, Alaska to create a global revolution in aviation, I've uploaded the entire transcript from our conversation last month in Hartford. Click here to see a video prepared by Naverus.

This time of evolution from radar to GPS guided flight was described to me recently as “a period of dramatic and revolutionary change” by Nancy LoBue at the Federal Aviation Administration. She is not alone in this characterization.

Using global positioning information, airliners can fly shorter more direct routes to their destinations, engage in continuous descent approaches and narrow the space between planes as they fly. It’s a whole new world and its long overdue according to Ken Shapero, of Naverus an advanced navigation company that is part of GE Aviation.

“Today, we allow aircraft to navigate up to the boundaries of the terminal area, where controllers essentially take control, sequencing the aircraft by issuing specific headings, speeds and altitudes. This is not the most efficient way to handle traffic in the terminal area,” he told me.

With this in mind, one would think the airline industry would be thrilled with the Federal Aviation Administration, which on Thursday issued a new rule mandating that all airliners be equipped with Automatic Dependent Surveillance–Broadcast (ADS–B) technology by 2020. But one would be wrong.

I’m not going to get into the details of ADS-B, RNAV, RNP or any other part of the alphabet soup that makes up the much-touted, long-anticipated Next Generation Aviation System. What’s important here is that the kind of technology that lets parents know where their cell-phone equipped teenagers are, is coming soon to an airplane near you. And then it will improve efficiency, accuracy and performance.

Last year Bob Smith, the vice president of advanced technologies for Honeywell Aerospace described to me some of the capabilities of these satellite-based GPS systems, “The ultimate goal is to be able to push back, roll to the runway, take off and land and go to the gate all without ever having to hit the brakes.”

But to turn those capabilities into reality, airlines must install the equipment on their airplanes and the FAA must modify the nation's aviation infrastructure. This is big money talk. Did I say big? I meant to say humongous. And now we are getting to the nub of the problem.

The Air Transport Association, said in a statement Thursday that it would carefully review the rule and its effects on the industry. But off the record, they complain the FAA is sloughing off to the airlines the entire cost of updating the system without sharing any of the savings that will result from shifting from radar to satellite-based systems.

Let me be clear, there’s no big resistance to adapting to the technology, the dispute is over who will pay for it and whether airlines will see a return on their investment anytime soon. An estimated 80% of U.S. airliners already have the equipment necessary to fly satellite navigation flights. See my article from last year on this subject in The New York Times.

USAirways, Continental, American and Southwest Airlines are using some aspects of satellite navigation. But the FAA has resisted requests by these operators that they be allowed to use their advanced capabilities to the fullest. Take the case of Southwest Airlines. The airline invested significantly so that it could fly continuous descent approaches at every airport it serves. But despite the fuel and time saving advantages, the FAA would not allow Southwest specially designed landings. So Southwest is dressed for the party but has no way to get there.

“There is a real distrust in the FAA’s ability to get this done and to do it in a reasonable time frame,” someone familiar with the Southwest situation told me.

Notably, this kind of criticism of the FAA stops short of the administrator, Randy Babbitt. Perhaps because he was the chairman of the task force overseeing the implementation of next-gen technology, several people say the decision to mandate ADS-B within the next 10 years is due largely to his perseverance and advocacy

At a news conference in Washington, D.C., Babbitt said, "We can appreciate the difficult economic times airlines have been through. It's been a tough economic two or three years for them, and the capital expenditure is going to be difficult, and I think that's the core of their concern."

"Tough economic two or three years" may be a bit of an understatement considering the industry claims of losing $65 billion since September 11, 2001. One can anticipate Capitol Hill lobbying will begin in earnest as airlines seek financial help for these expensive upgrades.

Considering how quickly after his appointment, Babbitt was able to calm the agency's years-long contract dispute with its air traffic controllers, my bet is that he will find a compromise and make peace with the airline industry on this subject. After all, when it comes to beneficiaries, there are no losers in next-gen.

One wonders if we are not already at the age of Big Brother, in light of the most recent, albeit, welcome news that the airplane crash that killed three executives of Tesla Motors was caught on audio tape and is now providing assistance to air safety investigators.


On Wednesday, February 17th, Douglas Bourn a senior engineer at the electric car company Tesla Motors, flew his 33 year old Cessna 310 into a high power transmission line shortly after taking off from Palo Alto Municipal Airport in California. Mr. Bourn, an experienced pilot, multi-engine, instrument rated and a certified flight instructor failed to make the required departure turn out over the bay and instead flew the plane into the tower killing himself and the other two executives who were passengers on the flight.

The limited visibility conditions on Wednesday morning may have been an added complication. A pilot who arrived at the airport shortly after Mr. Bourn took off told a reporter visibility was terrible. The NTSB puts it at 1/8^th of a mile. Either way, Wallace Moran, a retired airline captain and F.A.A. pilot examiner who has frequently flown from Palo Alto airports told me, he suspects something else went wrong and limited visibility might have just compounded the problem.

“There are other things that could cause him to go in the wrong direction either instrument issues with the airplane or a medical condition with the pilot, so the NTSB will look at those possibilities.”

What the NTSB has to work with, and this is really a fascinating wrinkle to the investigation, is a series of five audio tapes made from a city wide acoustic surveillance system in East Palo Alto, California. I’ve posted one of them here.

As Police Department Capt. Curt Estelle explained it to me, eighteen months ago the city installed the ShotSpotter recording system. The recording triggers when the sensors detect the kinds of sound associated with gunfire and a report and location information is sent to the police department. “It allows us to respond a lot faster and with a lot more precise location information rather than waiting for citizens to call,” Capt. Estelle told me.

I don’t know what kind of crime problem they have in East Palo Alto, but Capt. Estelle says the department gets about 100 triggering events a month including fireworks which are illegal there. Plane crashes? Capt. Estelle says this is the first.

It was quick thinking on the part of ShotSpotter president James Beldock that resulted in capturing the sound of the crash and putting it together for NTSB investigator in charge Josh Cawthra. Within minutes of learning about the accident, Mr. Beldock checked to see if the system picked up either the engine or impact noise. It had.

This gives Mr. Cawthra an unexpected clue, five recordings of the sound of the airplane as it approached impact and several seconds following, recorded at distances ranging from 600 to 1500 feet. As dramatic as it might be to the lay listener, these recordings should prove illuminating to the specialists in the NTSB sound lab, where Mr. Cawthra said they are now headed.

I was curious to know how a recording system that triggers on certain sound frequencies actually catches the sounds preceding initiation. Mr. Beldock explained it to me yesterday, while I was interviewing him for The New York Times Wheels blog. As it turns out, the system has a “trailing buffer,” which from what I can tell means it is actually always recording.

“You often hear noises right before a shooting and that’s important,” Mr. Beldock explained. A sound determined by the system to be significant, prompts the memory to store the sounds immediately beforehand. Otherwise that memory is constantly recording over itself.

In the midst of the tragedy for Tesla and for the dozens of people in the community who were certainly traumatized by the event, this technological “who’duh thunk it?” provides a tiny bright spot.