All Ops & safety articles – Page 1365
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Flying into the future
Communications, navigation and surveillance in European airspace will be substantially different in the next decade - but how different? Kieran Daly/LONDON AROUND THE WORLD, air-traffic-services (ATS) providers are coming to terms with how the advent of the future air-navigation system will affect their airspace. For dozens of nations, ...
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Gavilan flight-testing resumes
COLOMBIAN manufacturer El Gavilan has begun flight-testing the Gavilan 358 single-engined utility aircraft. The second prototype - the first crashed in 1993 after engine failure - is being flight-tested at Lock Haven, Pennsylvania, and US certification is planned for later this year. Designed and built at Lock Haven ...
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Jet finalises regional-fleet plan
Max Kingsley-Jones/LONDON JET AIRWAYS IS finalising plans for the acquisition of a fleet of regional aircraft to operate on services in north-eastern India. ,Jet Airways' chairman Naresh Goyal says that the airline is committed to initiating regional services: "We are vigorously pursuing plans to induct smaller ...
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Test of faith
NO-ONE BENEFITS when accident-investigation agencies clash over the cause of an air crash. The arguments may be based on genuine grievances, but they only serve to deflect attention from the wider issues at stake. It has happened this week because the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) has ...
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Leading the way to extinction?
Sir - A petulant strike by pilots of the world's most successful airline would be a double betrayal of the piloting profession. Besides bringing it into disrepute, it could contribute to its ultimate extinction with the advent of the unmanned airliner. The prestige and salaries enjoyed by British ...
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FAA and NTSB continue to spar over FDRS
Ramon Lopez/WASHINGTON DC US PASSENGER airlines will be required to retrofit their fleets with enhanced flight-data recorders (EFDRs) within about four years under a US Federal Aviation Administration proposal. The US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB), meanwhile, continues to criticise the FAA for acting too slowly. ...
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China nears European deal
Paul Lewis/SINGAPORE CHINA HOPES to finalise a workshare agreement with European manufacturers and Singapore Technologies (ST) before the end of the year, following the signing of a letter of intent (LoI) last week to develop a 90- to 140-seat regional jet. Signature of the LoI officially ...
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Lufthansa Cargo cuts costs and capacity
Kevin O'Toole/LONDON LUFTHANSA CARGO IS clamping down on costs and capacity, as the world's largest international freight carrier steels itself for another couple of tough years in the heavily oversubscribed international freight market. The operation ended its first year of independence in 1995, showing a DM20 ...
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The cabin challenge
Perceptions of new cabin dangers are emerging as old problems resurface. Paul Phelan/CAIRNS David Learmount/LONDON AIRLINE PASSENGERS ignore safety briefings because they believe that it is the cabin crew's responsibility to protect them, according to recent research. Professor Helen Muir, of Cranfield University in the UK, ...
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ValuJet bids to resume flying with smaller fleet
VALUJET AIRLINES hopes to win the US Federal Aviation Administration's approval to resume service as early as the first week of August. It has submitted a plan to the FAA's Atlanta, Georgia, regional office describing how the grounded low-fare carrier would resume flights with about 15 aircraft. More ...
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Kenya soars despite pilots pay award
PROFITS CONTINUE TO soar at Kenya Airways, but the newly privatised carrier has outlined a major round of cost cuts following the court award of a massive pay hike to pilots. The pay award, which virtually doubles salaries, came after the airline's 108 pilots referred a pay dispute ...
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BA tones up alliance defence
British Airways' proposed tie-up with American Airlines could be the most scrutinised partnership in airline history Kevin O'Toole and Max Kingsley-Jones/LONDON RARELY CAN AN AIRLINE alliance have whipped up such controversy. Since it was announced, the proposed tie-up between British Airways and American Airlines has been drawing unprecedented ...
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Airbus keeps pace with Boeing-
Kevin O'Toole and Max Kingsley-Jones/LONDON AFTER A POOR SHOWING of aircraft orders in 1995, Airbus Industrie appears to have held its own against Boeing in the first half of 1996, while the overall jet-airliner market continues to recover for both manufacturers. Although the headline figures show ...
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Hub crack is blamed for MD-88 fan failure
A FATIGUE crack in the fan hub is the likely cause of the uncontained failure of a Pratt & Whitney JT8D-219 powering a Delta McDonnell Douglas MD-88. Two passengers were killed and four injured when the left-engine fan disintegrated, sending debris into the cabin during the take-off run of Flight ...
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ATR 72 report drives a wedge into bilateral certification
Ramon Lopez/WASHINGTON DC David Learmount/LONDON THE TRANSATLANTIC bilateral aircraft-certification process has been thrown into turmoil following accusations by the US National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) that the French aviation authority and the ATR consortium were to blame for an ATR 72 crash in the USA in 1994 which ...
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Germany will close three radar centres by 2000
Andrzej Jeziorski/FRANKFURT T HE GERMAN AIR-traffic- services agency Deutsche Flugsicherung (DFS) is to close down three of its six radar centres by the year 2000 as part of the agency's efficiency drive. No decision has yet been made about which centres are to go, says DFS ...
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Raytheon 1900D fire threat revealed
THE THREAT OF cockpit fires has prompted the US Federal Aviation Administration to order US regional airlines to disarm windscreen anti-icing systems on their Raytheon Aircraft 1900D turboprops, pending development of a solution. Operators of the 19-passenger aircraft have now been prohibited from flying into known icing conditions. ...
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Atlas deal for GE
General Electric Engine Services has won a $300 million, ten-year contract to maintain and repair CF6-50 engines powering 15 Boeing 747-200 freighter aircraft operated by Atlas Air. The Colorado-based cargo specialist expects to have a further ten freighters enter service by mid-1997. Source: Flight International
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FAA should tidy up its own back yard
Sir - When the US Federal Aviation Administration began its programme of declaring foreign airworthiness authorities as unfit, and prevented airlines under its jurisdiction from expanding services to the USA, I regarded this as tantamount to air piracy. As recent events, surrounding the ValuJet crash investigations have revealed, ...
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Analogue systems are still worthwhile
Sir - Unlike aircraft, VHF radio systems, which use a single-unit "transceiver", air-traffic-control (ATC) ground/air radio systems use a semi-duplex arrangement. With semi-duplex, the transmitter and receiver are independent items, which, ideally (in the case of ATC), are physically separated. The rationale behind this independence and separation is ...