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Concorde, Ten Years On
I understand that Simon Foreman observed at a meeting of the RAeS Law Group on 28 April this year on the criminalisation of aviation accidents, reported here in Flight International by David Learmount, that the French legal system does not have a mechanism of the English legal system, the inquest, to determine what went on…
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Simulators and Veridicality in Airline Training and Pilot Currency Checks
In his note in RISKS-26.15, Peter Wayner refers to the article Simulator training flaws tied to airline crashes in USA Today, 31 August 2010 (WWW version), which claims to have shown that «Flaws in flight simulator training helped trigger some of the worst airline accidents in the past decade» and that «More than half of…
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Fully-Automatic Execution of Critical Manoeuvres in Airline Flying
David Learmount’s semi-annual review of commercial air accidents has just appeared in Flight International (3-9 August, p34). There were three accidents to high-performance large commercial passenger jets: (1) a Ethiopian Airways Boeing 737-800 took off from Beirut over the sea at night and ended up in the ocean (25 January); (2) an Afriqiyah Airways Airbus…
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Malware and the August 2008 Madrid Spanair Take-Off Accident
On 20 August 2008, a MD-82 aircraft of the airline Spanair crashed on takeoff (TO) from Madrid-Barajas airport. The high-lift devices on the wing had not been properly configured to give the necessary lift on takeoff, and the aircraft was unable properly to lift off as planned. See Aviation Safety Net’s report of this accident…
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Understanding Aerodynamics of Stalls
Recently, most commercial transport airplane manufacturers have been revisiting their FCOM procedures for “stall recovery” (actually, procedures avoiding that an approach to stall turns into a stall). This may be related to the spate of recent accidents in which commercial airplanes have been stalled: Colgan Air in Buffalo, Turkish Airlines in Amsterdam, XL Airways in…
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Screwy Reasoning and Its Study
Those of us interested in commercial aviation accidents have to deal with a lot of what I shall call screwy reasoning. Last week, I read a September 2 article in The Times on the crash of AF447 and its aftermath which I felt was somewhat screwy. It suggested that Air France’s attempt to introduce specialised…
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Thoughts on Engineering Communication (with a bit on Ice Particle Icing and AF447)
I have been thinking recently about professional engineering communication. I was reminded once again of the lack of consensus by Nancy Leveson’s comment that “[t]he type of limited interaction that is possible by email is just not conducive to communication” as well as her regret at being “… pulled into one of these web debates…
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AF447: Issues Clarified by the BEA Report
There are some significant issues which are clarified by the BEA’s preliminary factual report, issued at the beginning of July: specifically the uncertainties and certainties in the meaning and partial interpretation of the maintenance messages received by ACARS; the question of structural integrity; the attitude and flight path of the aircraft on impact with the…
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Avoiding Disaster on Takeoff
It happened again! On 13 December 2008, a Boeing 767-39H suffered a tailstrike on takeoff at Manchester Airport. A tailstrike can occur on takeoff when the pilots pitch the nose of the aircraft too high in the air before it has lifted off the ground. This can occur when the aircraft is “rotated”, that is,…
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Software Engineering Ethics – The Sequel
Further to the Gotterbarn/Miller study of software engineering ethics in the June 2009 edition of IEEE Computer, and my letter to the editors which I published here on 27 June, Professors Gotterbarn and Miller have replied to my letter. Both letter and reply will appear in the August 2009 edition of IEEE Computer. Professors Gotterbarn…