All Ops & safety articles – Page 1373
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FAA improves US fire and rescue services
Technology designed to assist airport rescue and firefighting crews at night and in bad weather has been deployed by the US Federal Aviation Administration. The Driver's Enhanced Vision System (DEVS), developed at the FAA's research-and-development centre, combines satellite navigation, digital datalink and infra-red (IR) technologies. Using the DEVS, ...
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Hunting new pastures
Max Kingsley-Jones/Coventry On 17 October, Hunting Cargo Airlines retired its remaining Vickers "VC9" Merchantman (Vanguard) freighter when the last operational example was flown to the Brooklands Museum in Surrey, south-west of London, for preservation. This marked the end of a 20-year association with the four-engined turboprop for the ...
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Pedigree preserved
Peter Henley/LUTON By the time British Aerospace sold its corporate-jets business to Raytheon in 1993, the BAe 125 8-14 passenger twinjet had gained a formidable reputation. Since 1962, when the original de Havilland DH 125 was first flown, 850 customers from more than 40 countries had purchased various ...
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Vanguard Variations
The Merchantman's origins lay with the 100- to 140-seat Vickers Vanguard of the early 1960s. The four-engined turboprop was first flown from the Vickers-Armstrongs factory at Brooklands on 20 January 1959, and entered service with British European Airways (BEA) in December 1960. Although very economical to operate, the design was ...
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Chinese Allies
AlliedSignal Aerospace has as signed a series of preliminary agreements with Aviation Industries of China (AVIC) and Shanghai Avionics (SAVIC) to expand its activities in China. It is discussing co-producing systems, including a traffic-alert and collision-avoidance system, enhanced ground-proximity-warning system, ACARS and general-aviation avionics. AlliedSignal is also discussing the possibility ...
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Ansett A330-200 order decision imminent
Max Kingsley-Jones/London Ansett Australia says that it will decide by the end of the year whether to become the Australasian launch customer for the Airbus Industrie A330-200, which would see it placing orders for up to 14 aircraft for delivery starting in mid-1998. According to the ...
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Boeing ups 777-200X weights
Boeing's studies of a heavyweight, very-long-range "-200X" derivative of the standard-body 777 are now focusing on an even heavier maximum take-off-weight design which has a strengthened wing, increased fuel capacity and a new wingtip design. "We're getting feedback from the airlines on these models", says 777 product development ...
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Fairchild Dornier nears engine selection on 328 jet
Guy Norris/Palm Springs Fairchild Dornier expects to select a turbofan for its proposed 30-seat 328-300 "later this month", according to vice-president for sales, Andrew Jampoler, and is targeting an entry- into-service date for the new aircraft of late 1998. Engines being considered include General Electric's CFE738, ...
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Boeing considers options for fixing 737 rudder units
Guy Norris/SEATTLE Boeing is sifting through the data from worldwide inspections of almost 2,700, 737 rudder power-control units (PCUs) and will make recommendations on possible design changes to the US Federal Aviation Administration by the end of the month. The action follows an alert service-bulletin from ...
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Acceptable errors
The human-factors element in flight safety is now being taken seriously. David Learmount/WARSAW The world's flight-safety specialists have given up trying to eliminate human error. Now, the aim is to understand error and to control, or "manage" it. This strategy holds the key to improving airline flight ...
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Australia accepts AlliedSignal runway monitor
Air Services Australia has accepted the AlliedSignal Aerospace precision runway-monitor (PRM) installed at Sydney's Kingsford Smith Airport. Sydney is the first airport outside the USA to be equipped with the PRM, an electronically scanned, monopulse, secondary-surveillance radar which, enables simultaneous approaches to multiple parallel runways. The PRM scans ...
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Taped vents probed in Peruvian accident
David Learmount/LONDON The failure by Aero Peru maintenance employees to remove protective adhesive tape placed over an aircraft's pilot/static vents during maintenance may have caused a Boeing 757 to crash on 2 October, says a Peruvian transport ministry statement (Flight International, 9-15 October). Tape covering static ...
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Admit it
If anyone in global air-transport still believes that the legal minimum standards for airline pilot training are adequate for today's aircraft and air-traffic enviroment, they would do well to read the official report on the Birgenair Boeing 757 accident (P14). It states that the pilots involved in the accident, although ...
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Airbus completes high-altitude landing tests
Airbus has completed a series of high-altitude landing and engine-out take-off demonstrations at China's Lhasa Airport with an A340. The trials at the 11,700ft (3,600m) Tibetan airport included a take-off with a simulated No 1 engine failure at V1 and climb-out of the Lhasa valley to an altitude ...
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USAir and Emirates boost Airbus
Ramon Lopez/Washington DC and Max Kingsley-Jones/London Airbus Industrie has won two significant orders, securing agreements with USAir for up to 400 single-aisle aircraft and with Emirates for as many as 23 A330-200s. Both deals were won in the face of fierce competition from Boeing and McDonnell Douglas. ...
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GAO reports on US airline safety
New US airlines suffer higher accident rates than those of established carriers, Congressional investigators say. Start-up carriers during their first five years of operation were also shown to have higher incident- and enforcement-action rates. The US General Accounting Office says that the analysis highlights the need for better ...
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Thomson and Siemens discussions on air-traffic management venture make progress
Talks between Thomson-CSF and Siemens on a joint venture which would create the "biggest air-traffic management [ATM] enterprise in Europe and the second-biggest in the world" are expected to be concluded in "several months", says Siemens. The French and German concerns already have several joint industry programmes and ...
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German buyers thwart IPTN hopes for stake in ASL
Three anonymous German investors have emerged as buyers for the former Daimler-Benz Aerospace (DASA) maintenance subsidiary Aircraft Services Lemwerder (ASL), ending plans by Indonesia's Industri Pesawat Terbang Nusantara (IPTN) to take a 25.1% stake. Two local investors from Lower Saxony, where ASL is based, and a third from ...
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Canadian future is threatened if cost cuts are not endorsed
Brian Dunn/MONTREAL Canadian Airlines International could be forced out of business by the turn of the year if employees and shareholders fail to endorse a sweeping programme of cost-cutting being proposed by the management, warns president Kevin Benson. The cost cuts, which are planned to add ...
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Reverser suspected in TAM Fokker crash
Pilot exclamations on the cockpit voice recorder of the crashed TAM Brazilian Fokker 100 (Flight International, 6-12 November) have led investigators to suspect that the No 2 engine thrust-reverser may have operated in flight, say sources close to the investigation. This is supposed to be impossible, because the thrust-reverser actuators ...