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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…
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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…
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Supersonic Concorde legal saga not over yet.
Criminal proceedings into the deadly Concorde crash opened in early 2010, more than 10 years after the event. The resulting trial judgment issued on December 6, 2010, which laid criminal liability on one Continental Airlines mechanic and consequently on his employer, is doubtful. In fact, most of the defendants, as well as the prosecution, are appealing the ruling. What possibly went wrong – not in the crash itself –…
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Judge’s Decision on the July 2000 Crash of Concorde
Tomorrow Monday, December 6, the judge presiding over the trial of persons prosecuted for their alleged involvement in the crash of an Air France Concorde in Paris in July 2000 is expected to issue her decision months after the public hearings of the criminal proceedings ended. Determining where, if any, personal and corporate liability lay in such a…
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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…
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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…
CivAv
A blog about civil aviation