Posted by Seth on January 18, 2010 under News | 
There are scores of stories coming out of Haiti every day. Most are tragic. The destruction is simply overwhelming and the infrastructure wasn’t really all that great to begin with. Watching the recovery efforts over the past several days has been gut-wrenching in many ways, but also incredibly cool in at least one: Air Traffic Control.
The airport in Port-au-Prince is small. It has a single runway and only space on the ground for about 10 planes to park and load or unload. That isn’t much room when it comes time to handle hundreds of relief flights each day, especially since the planes coming in are larger than most of the commercial service that the airport regularly sees. And, yet, in the past week the airport has seen more flights and bigger planes than it has seen in years, thanks in large part to to a US Air Force Special Operations forces known as the Combat Control Team.
The Combat Control Team (CCT) is made up of folks trained in just about everything that Special Ops handles, plus they are all certified as Air Traffic Controllers by the FAA. They are the first group to arrive on the scene when the armed forces need to be able to get aircraft in to a theatre, often while simultaneously defending themselves from hostile parties. They are also some of the first on the scene when a disaster strikes, showing up to manage the airspace around the crisis scene. So it should come as no surprise that on the evening after the earthquake in Haiti a group of guys showed up on the side of the runway, set up a folding table with a few radios and began transmitting words that the air traffic in the area was in desperate need of, “This is Port-au-Prince tower.”
Since that time the crew has coordinated the arrival of close to 1,000 planes carrying supplies critical to the search and recovery efforts. On Friday, January 15th United States control of the airport received the blessing of the Haitian government – there was nothing they could do any better considering the damage done to the tower in the earthquake – and so the FAA began issuing landing slots and coordinating the flow of traffic into Haiti.
There is no fuel available on the ground at the airport so inbound aircraft are required to bring enough with them to ensure that they can depart once they are unloaded. The 10 ramp positions were originally counted based on typical commercial aircraft that serve the region, not on the jumbos that are arriving on a regular basis. And there aren’t really ground control crews available to work, meaning that every now and then a CCT member hops on a motorcycle and rides across the field to lead a plane to a parking position.
They’ve even bent the rules a bit in terms of which types of planes are permitted to land. The runway is apparently not quite up to spec for the super-jumbo cargo craft such as the Anatov An-124. But the CCT guys are bringing them in anyways. They need the supplies and in critical situations the rules tend to flex.
It is one small glimmer of hope and progress in the midst of a terrible tragedy. And it is an amazing display of coordination and logistics management under horrible circumstances. But the CCT is living up to its motto of “First There” and putting on one hell of a show on the ground at the airport.
Godspeed.
Posted by Seth on February 26, 2009 under Internet |
The battles between in-flight internet service providers are rather entertaining. The two main players, Row44 and Aircell (provider of the gogo service) are after each other like a couple of rival kids on the playground, constantly asserting themselves as the better option and working behind the scenes through lawsuits to scuttle the other. But beyond that bickering, Row44 has finally taken to the skies, with planes in service for both Southwest and Alaska Airlines.
Southwest has four planes operating with the service and is very excited about it. They are offering the system to users for free while they evaluate its performance and impact on the planes flying around. At least one industry insider has been out on one of the equipped Southwest planes and has some comments about its functionality, mostly positive. Still, there is no indication as to when (or even if) Southwest will be expanding the service across their fleet. Still no in-seat power available from Southwest, so hopefully you’ve got plenty of battery life available for your trip. Oh, and on the content front, they do acknowledge that, “As is common on many other public networks, we will attempt to filter indecent content.” Giving it the old college try, I see.
Among other in-flight internet providers out there, Aircell has also been making great progress. They are turning out one Delta plane a day, which is pretty impressive. Of course, Delta has a sizable fleet to work through, but this has been their plan for a while now, so good for them getting the service deployed.
LiveTV, on the other hand, hasn’t been making such great progress. The jetBlue subsidiary has a pretty stable and reliable product for their TV systems in North America, but everything else they are working on seems to be significantly delayed. They are going to be the provider of in-flight TV systems for Azul, the Brazilian carrier founded by jetBlue founder David Neeleman. But they are apparently having some trouble tuning the antennae just right for working in Brazil, slowing their deployment down there.
LiveTV is also running a bit delayed on getting the Continental LiveTV system up and running. This is a next-gen system (LiveTV3) and has some pretty amazing features, including on-screen guide and 80 channels to choose from. And it is a couple weeks delayed now in getting activated on the initial test plane that Continental gave to the LiveTV folks to work on. The good news is that a Continental maintenance engineer in Orlando is reporting that he’s seen the new plane and that it appears to finally be ready to go. Of course, now that the innards are all set they have to apply to the FAA for a certification of the modifications and that will allow them to deploy on additional 737-900ERs. That certification is expected to take about 30 days, so we’re looking at late March before these really start flying. The other interesting thing about the FAA certification process is that it is required for each plane type. As Continental intends to provide this service on several different types (757-300, 737-700, 737-800, 737-900, 737-900ER) they will have to undergo the certification process for each type, including having the plane out of service for the 30-60 days that the install and FAA processing takes. They’ve got the spare capacity, but it will be a bit of time before they can really start popping these out for the fleet. They announced that they expect to have it fully deployed by May 2010 or so; hopefully they can still hold to that date.
And one last bit on the LiveTV front. Their in-flight “internet” offering, known as Project KiteLine, is also running a bit slowly. Continental has committed to having this service on all their planes as part of the LiveTV deployment, but it now appears that it isn’t going to happen, at least not in a timely manner. The schedule now appears to have KiteLine available late this year. And it is still going to be a very limited subset of the Internet available. At least Continental acknowledges that it isn’t necessarily the best solution for their customers. They negotiated the contract with LiveTV such that they can add a true internet provider to their planes at a later time if they desire and the demand is really there.
Phew…that’s a lot of Internet to keep track of.
Posted by Seth on April 10, 2008 under Uncategorized |
The details are trickling out on the AA re-grounding of their MD-80 aircraft, and it looks like a quarter of an inch is the cause for all the cancellations over the past few days. See, the spec from the FAA apparently requires cable ties to be spaced every inch along the cable bundle. American’s bundles were apparently spaced every 1.25 inches. And this resulted in thousands of flights being cancelled over the past few days.
A few questions come up from this report. First, was there an allowable margin of error in the one in ch measurement or was it a not to exceed? That could be significant to the maintenance guys. Second, what are the chances that someone in maintenance did a little bit of math and determined that cutting 20% of the ties would save some large amount of weight and fuel on the hundreds of thousands of flights that these planes fly each year. It may sound far-fetched, but AA famously didn’t paint their planes to keep the weight down, and Continental is no longer brewing coffee pre-departure on its oldest 737 models to the tune of ~$7/flight, or $1MM per year. Third, does the quarter inch matter enough to justify cancelling all the flights? I’m guessing that none of these planes would fall out of the sky if they weren’t fixed immediately, but at the same time, AA has had plenty of time to fix things, including the groundings a couple weeks ago, and they didn’t do things correctly then, so maybe this is nececssary to get it done correctly.
No matter what the reasoning, I’m still amazed that the AA maintenance guys didn’t get it all correct a couple weeks ago. With the FAA under such scrutiny it isn’t unreasonable to see that they are going to be insanely over-aggressive in enforcement right now. The real question is who’s next.
Posted by Seth on April 8, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Less than a month after grounding all their MD-80 planes to ensure compliance with FAA-mandated inspections, American Airlines is grounding all their MD-80 planes to ensure compliance with FAA-mandated inspections. Is there an echo in here?
An estimated 500 flights are cancelled, and once again the issue is wiring bundles. I’m sure more info will be forthcoming once someone figures out how to find a responsible party at either the FAA or the airlines to explain how the hell things like this have slipped through the cracks and/or been purposefully obfuscated for so long.
From a different news source:
The Allied Pilots Association said the Federal Aviation Administration randomly inspected 10 MD-80s on Monday to make sure the jets had been properly inspected and modified. Of the 10, nine did not pass the audit, the union said.
I guess that explains why they needed to ground them all again. Too bad they didn’t get it right the first time.
Posted by Seth on April 2, 2008 under Uncategorized |
This time, it is United Airlines and the plane type in question is the Boeing 777. UA has grounded their entire fleet of 777s as of Tuesday to inspect fire suppression systems in the cargo area. The inspections are happening relatively quickly, and the planes are cycling back into service, but the service interruptions are huge. UA operates ~50 of the 777s, using them on a bunch of their international routes and some of their service to Hawaii.
This appears to be a follow-on to the FAA check-ups on their maintenance history from the past few years, where apparently they didn’t actually bother to do most of the inspections, but they still signed off on them. There was a pattern of deferred maintenance, as well, where the carriers just delayed the work instead of actually doing it, and the FAA didn’t seem to mind. Not surprisingly the FAA’s director recently departed to take a job in the industry.
A lot of airlines operate the 777s, unlike the recent MD80/90 groundings, so if this turns out to be a problem with the plane’s maintenance rather than United’s handling of their maintenance obligation then the impact of this issue will be rather catastrophic for the industry. Then again, UA recently had some issues with the wiring of the brakes in some of their Airbus A320s that noone else had, so it might just be them.
It is bad when the agency entrusted to ensure the safety of aviation completely ignores their primary mission. Whoopsie.
Posted by Seth on March 27, 2008 under Uncategorized |
Following on AA’s need to ground and inspect their MD80s yesterday, Delta announced that they were performing a similar set of checks, and similarly taking a number of planes out of service in order to do so. The Delta action affects about 130 planes and there were a number of cancelled flights as a result. All these inspections are apparently to verify that the cable ties holding some wires in place are correctly spaced. Who knew that cable tie spacing was so important??
Particularly interesting to me are the Delta Shuttle flights between New York’s LaGuardia and Wasington’s National and Boston’s Logan airports. These flights are cash cows for Delta, with fares often higher than a dollar and a half per mile for a walk-up ticket. And these flights are operated with a dedicated sub-fleet of MD-88 airplanes, the type included in the grounding. Somewhat amazingly, Delta has managed to control the damage on this route, cancelling only a couple of the flights so far, while keeping the vast majority of them flying (2 cancelled to DCA and 3 to BOS, out of 16-18 for each city). Other routes are not so lucky, but at least Delta’s keeping the money route operating.
UPDATE (5:11pm EDT): Apparently Delta can’t even keep the money route going full speed – they cancelled four more DCA flights and three more BOS flights. Not a good day to be flying on Delta or AA, though Amtrak is probably doing brisk business on their Acela routes between NYC and Boston/Washington.
Posted by Seth on March 26, 2008 under Uncategorized |
This just in…
American Airlines has reportedly grounded all their MD-80 airplanes. The grounding was ordered to give the carrier time to follow up on an airworthiness directive, according to a spokesperson. This is the same sort of thing that got Southwest in a lot of trouble a couple weeks ago.
The action affects 171 flights, according to the report. I was always under the impression that the carrier had a ton of the MD-80s, so if it only affects 171 flights I’m not sure that all of the MD-80s have been grounded, but I also haven’t seen their fleet plan lately. Time to go look in to that.
What worries me is that it sounds like the lack of FAA oversight/enforcement may be more pervasive in the industry. That would be very bad.
UPDATE (9:46a): AA has over 300 MD-82/83 planes in their fleet (~50% of their total fleet), so if it is a complete grounding of the type then there will be many, many more flights cancelled. Or this is just related to a few specific planes. Or the inspection takes almost no time and they can get it done very quickly as the planes cycle through the hubs. Still not enough details to know for sure.
Update (10:21a): I updated the title of the post to reflect the fact that they aren’t grounding the entire fleet. It does seem that they are just cycling through the checks pretty quickly and getting the planes back into the air.
Update (12:16p): It turns out that they “grounded” and inspected all the planes, mostly overnight, and some were taking a bit longer to finish up, hence the few cancelled flights today. My initial conclusions about the FAA oversight are still troubling to me. If the FAA is doing things correctly why are there situations like this??
