Posted by Seth on September 24, 2010 under News | 
Ever since news came out that airline seat manufacturer Koito had been falsifying safety data for their products the industry has been waiting to learn the fate of the roughly 150,000 seats currently installed worldwide. Certainly if the seats are not up to spec they’ll need to be replaced, but just how quickly and who will be most affected?
Both the European and American certifying organizations (EASA and FAA, respectively) have released directives to all airlines detailing the next steps that must be taken by airlines currently operating with Koito seats in production. While the directives certainly pull no punches on the issue the EASA report is particularly damning:
The Japanese airworthiness authority JCAB has informed EASA that a review of the safety of passenger seats manufactured by Koito industries has disclosed discrepancies which include falsification of static, dynamic and flammability testing, as well as uncontrolled changes to production data (material and dimensional).
In addition JCAB confirmed that Koito records, showing evidence of falsification, could not be deemed complete. Examples include: fictitious dynamic test pulse plots inserted into test reports following failure to meet required certification requirements; flammability test coupons not representative of production parts, for instance by use of alternative adhesive not specified on the approved drawing; and fictitious deformation values entered in test reports when values exceeded the maximum allowed.
Based on these findings the EASA will require that all Koito seats be removed from aircraft within two years unless the airline is willing to pursue a new certification process for the seats in question. Any such plan must be first approved by EASA before going into effect.
The FAA is not taking quite as hard a line on the issue. Rather than requiring the replacement or recertification of the seats, the FAA will permit airlines to demonstrate only partial compliance in order to keep the seats currently flying legal. The FAA will also permit spares to be installed in a like for like manner where the seats are today.
So why did the FAA take a softer stance on the issue? Is it possibly because roughly 30% of the Koito install base is centered in a single company that is based in the United States, Continental? Is it because someone in Washington decided that they don’t really need to enforce all the rules so long as some of them are followed? The only comment offered up by an FAA spokesperson was this non-answer:
Clearly the FAA doesn’t operate in a vacuum, but that said what we have to do is look at the safety impact and the safety issue and the proposed solution based on our environment, not the environment that exists in Europe.
Apparently a plane crashing in Europe does so in a manner that is sufficiently different from a plane crashing in the United States such that the seats can be subject to different rules. It is certainly understandable that the two bodies might have small variations in their policies but when the FAA chooses to only partially enforce their own rules – “[T]his proposed AD will not require full compliance with every applicable regulation…” – that certainly raises other questions.
Posted by Seth on September 2, 2010 under Flying, News |
Merging two airlines together requires a lot more than just slapping a new name on all the airplanes and updating the marketing slicks. On the operational side there are a number of steps that must be undertaken, many of which are regulated by the FAA. The merging of the operational certificates is a major component of the merger process and Continental announced to its employees yesterday just what the new operating certificate situation would be following the merger with United Airlines.
The planes will say “United” on the outside, but the pilots might just be saying “Continental” when they call in to Air Traffic Control as the new combined carrier will be keeping the Continental operating certificate according to the daily internal news update sent to employees of both companies on Wednesday:
We have decided that the merged airline will retain the legacy Continental operating certificate and the legacy United repair station certificate. This was a technical decision based on a variety of factors.
In addition to this change, Continental and its Continental Micronesia subsidiary will be combining their operations under a singe certificate in the immediate future to facilitate the eventual integration with United.
From a customer perspective moves such as this don’t really make much of a difference. The same people will be doing the same work and the planes will all fly the same. It is also not an unprecedented move. When America West and US Airways merged they kept the the America West “CACTUS” call sign with their merged operating certificate.
UPDATE (12:23pm EDT) – I finally got my hands on a copy of the internal memo and got some additional details regarding the reasoning behind the certificate selections. Here’s the pertinent section:
Both the UA and CO certificates contain unique attributes that will be preserved following integration. CO’s Part 121 Certificate has enhanced technology authorizations and close conformity to current FAA standard language. UA’s Part 145 Repair Station Certificate enables increased maintenance capabilities, enhanced repair station authorizations and more maintenance volume when compared with CO’s 145 Certificate.
In other words, there are lots of details behind the scenes, but this is the best way to move forward for the new company to have the best chance at success. Not much of a surprise there at all.
Posted by Seth on August 27, 2010 under News |
One of the conditions handed down by the European and US authorities for the approval of the American Airlines – British Airways anti-trust immunity application was the ceding of slots for service between London and certain US airports. Delta has decided to take advantage of this opportunity. They have applied to the appropriate authorities to serve both Boston and Miami from London’s Heathrow airport. Based on the limited number of slots at Heathrow currently held by the SkyTeam alliance, it appears likely that the application will be approved. If awarded the new service Delta would operate 10 daily frequencies from Heathrow to 6 different US gateways:
- New York JFK: 3x daily
- Boston: 2x daily
- Miami: 1x daily
- Minneapolis: 1x daily
- Atlanta: 11x weekly
- Detroit: 10x weekly
In addition to the new London service, Delta is also looking to beef up its presence in the Raleigh Durham market. Noting a significant increase in traffic from RDU this year, the carrier is adding 14 daily frequencies, increasing service by more than 25%. Included in these additions is service to three cities not currently served by Delta from RDU of which two have never seen Delta service from RDU. Additionally, Delta has recently opened a SkyClub lounge in RDU, demonstrating their commitment to the market.
Of course, it is entirely possible that part of the traffic increase is based on the fact that Delta has been running a rather significant promotion for flights from RDU and that when the promo ends the volume will decrease as well. Then again, maybe the fact that the region is pretty stable is really what is driving the expansion. Delta will be competing against Southwest on three of the routes. A number of the new frequencies are on the somewhat miserable CRJ-100 aircraft so that might not be so great either, but who knows.
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Posted by Seth on March 24, 2010 under News |
The writing was on the wall for this one since a couple weeks ago when Delta, American Airlines and jetBlue applied for exemptions at JFK, followed by Continental applying for exemptions at Newark and LaGuardia. US Airways applied for an exemption for their operations at Philadelphia today.
The claim by US Air is actually pretty entertaining. Basically they’re saying that they pick up so much of the overflow from New York that it overwhelms their facilities. Just 11 flights diverting was enough to throw a spanner in the system.
…on March 13, 11 flights headed for New York-area airports diverted to Philadelphia because of bad weather. The extra demand caused a delay for departures from Philadelphia. This resulted in clogged taxiways and gates…"
These 11 diversions had such an impact that the airport informed the FAA that they were unable to accept any more diversions for fear of completely disrupting operations. For only 11 extra planes on the ground. Something doesn’t add up there.
The exemption applications have become a joke. I truly hope that the FAA denies all of them; doing otherwise would expose the new rule for the farce that it is and there’s no way the FAA is ready to admit that yet.
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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 News |
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.
