-
Fear of flying and how to deal with it
Four Reasons Why People Fear Plane Crashes and Why They Should Let Go of that Fear (guest author: Courtney Henderson) The fear of flying is a legitimate phobia that can ground someone for life. Despite statistics reminding us how safe airline flying is, countless people still refuse to fly or they reluctantly fly with great stress…
-
AF447 – Rio to Paris Air France Crash
The reason this blogger is not responding to the new book on AF447 released last week is that the BEA (+ EASA now?) still has to determine what instruments were in fact available to the 3 pilots in the cockpit after the autopilot disconnect at cruising altitude, and to perform as well an in-depth analysis…
-
Airline Flight Automation
Is automation or, conceivably artificial intelligence, gradually taking manual flight control away from airline pilots? This is a tough question few aviation experts are willing to face head-on. Yet, given the spate of mishaps involving highly automated airliners and resulting in in-flight incidents and, much less frequently, in aviation accidents with significant loss of life, hardly anyone involved with designing the hardware and…
-
2011 Most Important Transportation Safety Tips
A list of ten (10) major transportation safety tips was released today, June 23, 2011, by the American National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB). The NTSB’s transportation safety jurisdiction covers more than civil aviation. CivAv.com considers it equally important to pass on the NTSB’s major safety tips as a matter of public interest, with no commercial purpose. …
-
Aviation Safety Culture : Don’t shoot the piano player
Once again, in connection with the 2009 Air France AF447 Rio to Paris flight, there have been some lousy finger-pointing exercises. For some reason, each time a new possible clue or fact leaks from the ongoing analysis of the precious recovered black boxes, corporate aviation entities have been quick to suggest yet another sign of pilot error in the crash of…
-
Rio to Paris AF447 tragedy: black boxes retrieved and readable. What next?
The Cockpit Voice Recorder and the Flight Data recorder, a.k.a: “the black boxes” (so called despite their orange colour) have been recovered nearly two years after Air France flight AF447 from Rio to Paris went down for unknown reasons in the Equatorial Zone, an area of the globe known for extreme weather. However, the…
-
A Selection of Recent of Aviation News
Below are significant news items collected from various civil aviation news sources in recent days: 1) The International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO), the U.S. Department of Transport, the European Union and the International Air Transport Association (IATA) have signed an agreement in Montreal today aimed at sharing more aviation safety and security information. The new multilateral initiative…
-
787 Crosswind Testing and Update on Suborbital Flight
This post is an update of two unrelated topics: first, the recent flight testing of the Boeing 787 Dreamliner, with references to the Airbus A-380, and, second, the future of suborbital flight starting with space tourism possibly followed years later by suborbital public transport. Let’s start with the Boeing Dreamliner which is already a test pilot’s dream come true, as the…