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Certification Requirements for Commercial Airplanes
I was browsing the invited lectures given under Martin Abadi’s College de France lecture series and came across this elegant, simple explanation of so-called Byzantine failures by the gentleman who invented the term, Leslie Lamport. Leslie’s two papers on the subject with Rob Shostak and Marshall Pease in the early 1980’s, Reaching Agreement in the…
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Concorde, Ten Years On, Part 2
The Concorde accident to F-BTSC on 25 July 2000 is about as well understood as to causes as any accident can be. There is also, unusually, a more or less linear connection of causes from an exceptionally rare event: the deposition of a particularly hard and sharp strip of metal, which shouldn’t have been mounted…
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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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Risk Assessment of Volcanic Ash to Commercial Aviation
Paul Marks of the New Scientist has a couple of good recent articles on the volcanic-ash problem for commercial aviation, one from today and one from last week. I talked about a simple calculation of this risk in my Risk course this morning, since it is topical, it shows practical issues well, and it fits…
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The Political Economy of Volcanic Ash
The Economist has of course a Briefing on the Effects of the Ash Cloud from Eyjafjallajökull on the political economy of flight, which informs its lead commentary in the April 24th 2010 edition, about this incident, entitled Earthly Powers. Both articles recount that the “safe level” of ash was determined by the CAA (in Britain,…
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Flying in Volcanic Ash, Part 2
The ash cloud over Europe seems to have abated somewhat, and commercial air traffic is returning to the air. The German DLR organisation (equivalent to the US NASA) sent up test flights of a Falcon 20E on Monday and Tuesday 19-20 April, to measure what was up there. The report, in English, makes interesting reading…