Federal aviation authorities said on Monday that they would order airlines to inspect some early Boeing 737 models after Southwest Airlines found subsurface cracks in three aircraft during checks that were conducted after a five-foot hole ripped through the roof of a 737-300 jetliner on Friday.

The Federal Aviation Administration said that it would issue an emergency directive on Tuesday requiring inspections for fatigue damage. The action would initially apply to about 175 aircraft worldwide, 80 of which are registered in the United States, and mostly operated by Southwest Airlines.

“Safety is our No. 1 priority,” the Transportation secretary, Ray LaHood, said in a statement. “Last Friday’s incident was very serious and could result in additional action depending on the outcome of the investigation.”

The statement came shortly after Boeing said it was preparing a service bulletin that would recommend “lap-joint” inspections on certain 737-300’s as well as the 737-400 and 737-500 models.

Friday’s incident unfolded at nearly 35,000 feet with the sound of an explosion during a flight involving a 15-year-old Boeing 737-300 carrying 118 passengers from Phoenix to Sacramento. Some passengers reported feeling dizzy during the swift loss of cabin pressure. Oxygen masks were released and at least two people passed out as the pilot guided the plane to an emergency landing at Yuma Marine Corps Air Station in Arizona. No one was seriously injured.

The F.A.A. directive would require initial inspections using electromagnetic, or eddy-current, technology in specific areas of the aircraft fuselage on Boeing 737 aircraft in the -300, -400 and -500 series that have accumulated more than 30,000 flight cycles — one takeoff and one landing. It would then require repetitive inspections at regular intervals.

Labels: air safety, corporatism, FUBAR

I can’t wait for the day terrorists try to put a bomb in a baby. Because then we won’t be allowed to bring a baby on the plane.

Labels: air safety, insanity, terrorism

Labels: air safety, personal musings

It's harrowing enough when a commercial airliner mistakenly announces an emergency landing over water -- or, for that matter, when air passengers capture footage of an actual emergency landing on their cell phones. But passengers on a recent American Airlines flight from Miami to Boston experienced a much more vivid sense of airborne peril when a 2-foot hole opened up in the plane's fuselage about 30 minutes after takeoff.

The Boeing 757 was cruising at 31,000 feet Tuesday when the cabin began to decompress rapidly -- a "super-terrifying" experience, a passenger told WSVN-TV in Miami. The flight was carrying 154 passengers and six crew members.

But soon enough, the crew established emergency procedures: The passengers donned the oxygen masks that drop down when cabin pressure decreases, and the pilots were able to reverse the flight and land the damaged plane safely at Miami International Airport.

"The crew declared an emergency and made a normal landing. There were no injuries," American Airlines said in a rather terse statement. "The aircraft has been taken out of service."

Once the plane was on the ground, inspectors discovered the problem -- not that it was exactly easy to miss. A 2-foot-by-1-foot hole had opened just above the "A" of the logo near the plane's front left cabin door. Initial reports indicate that the plane probably took off with a smaller crack in the fuselage -- and that wind pressure caused it to expand after the jet's takeoff. However, investigators say that they have yet to isolate the precise cause of the hole. Both the Federal Aviation Administration and the National Transportation Safety Board are investigating.

Labels: air safety, deregulation, FUBAR, outsourcing

A Federal Aviation Administration advisory panel dominated by airlines, companies that employ pilots to fly corporate planes and university flight schools wants to reduce by two-thirds a requirement that airline co-pilots have a minimum of 1,500 hours of flying experience — the same experience threshold that captains must meet.

The key issue is money, according to officials familiar with the panel's deliberations. Airlines worry that if the FAA raises the threshold for co-pilots — also called first officers — from the current minimum of 250 hours, airlines will be forced to raise pilot salaries and benefits in order to attract more experienced fliers, the officials said. They spoke on condition of anonymity because they weren't authorized to speak publicly.

Most airline pilots have far more experience than 1,500 hours. But industry analysts have forecast a pilot shortage if the economy starts to expand, which could create a premium for experience. The salaries of corporate and other private pilots are affected by airline salaries.

University flight schools are similarly concerned that if beginner pilots have to accrue 1,500 hours of flight experience before they can be hired by an airline, they'll skip expensive university training in favor of amassing flight time through per-hour instruction.

Using a provision in the new law that allows the FAA to give prospective pilots some credit for flight school training, the panel proposed allowing airlines to hire university-trained first officers with as little as 500 hours, according to a copy of the panel's recommendations.

The roles of airline captains and first officers have changed over the years. Today, both pilots are expected to be able to fly a plane equally well and to share duties.

The FAA formed the committee this summer just before Congress passed a far-reaching aviation safety bill, including the boost in required flight hours.

The law was prompted by a regional airline crash near Buffalo, N.Y., in February 2009 that killed 50 people. The flight's 24-year-old first officer earned about $16,000 in the year before the accident. She lived at home with her parents near Seattle but flew across the country in order to reach the airline's base in Newark, N.J., in time for the flight.

A National Transportation Safety Board investigation concluded the first officer and the flight's captain were probably suffering fatigue at the time of the accident. Neither had slept in a bed the night before — the first officer napped in a cockpit jump seat, the captain in a crew lounge where sleeping was discouraged. Pilots, particularly at regional airlines, often can't afford to live in the communities where they're based. Some share cheap apartments near their base so they can grab sleep before flights. Others simply nap wherever they can.

Labels: air safety

f you somehow missed the hoopla, there are two types of machines being installed, which have raised concerns about privacy, health risks and even their effectiveness at catching terrorists. The more controversial “backscatter” devices project an X-ray beam onto the body, creating an image displayed on a monitor viewed by a T.S.A. employee in another room. The “millimeter wave” machines, which are considered less risky because they do not use X-rays, bounce electromagnetic waves off the body to produce a similar image.

Unlike metal detectors, these machines can detect objects made with other materials, like plastic and ceramic. But they can’t see anything hidden inside your body, or detect certain explosives.

[snip]

The T.S.A. claims that the machines have been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration’s Center for Devices and Radiological Health, the Commerce Department’s National Institute for Standards and Technology and the Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory. But when I called these organizations to ask about their evaluations, I learned that they basically tested only one thing — whether the amount of radiation emitted meets guidelines established by the American National Standards Institute, a membership organization of companies and government agencies.

But guess who was on the committee that developed the guidelines for the X-ray scanners? Representatives from the companies that make the machines and the Department of Homeland Security, among others. In other words, the machines passed a test developed, in part, by the companies that manufacture them and the government agency that wants to use them.

[snip]

Mr. Kimball said passengers can choose not to go through the scanner and opt for the metal detector and a pat down instead, information that is also on the T.S.A.’s Web site. But the message travelers are getting at the airport isn’t that clear.

“It definitely didn’t feel optional at all,” said Drew Hjelm, an Army veteran who recently encountered the X-ray machine at O’Hare Airport in Chicago. After asking to go through the metal detector, being turned down and even speaking with a supervisor, he was given other choices.

“The officer said, either you go through the body scanner or you leave the airport or we’re going to call the police and they’re going to come and arrest you,” Mr. Hjelm said. “After I went through the body scanner, they still patted my pants down.”

Since other passengers have said they weren’t given a choice, or were subjected to an aggressive pat down if they declined to be X-rayed, the Electronic Privacy Information Center has created an online form for travelers to report problems.

The advocacy group has also filed a motion in court to suspend the body scanner program, saying that it violates the Fourth Amendment (and other statutes) by imposing search procedures that are more intrusive than the courts have allowed for routine screening.

Labels: 9/11, air safety, Fourth Amendment, FUBAR

American lawyer Kurt Haskell, who was standing in line with his wife Lori on Christmas morning at Amsterdam's Schiphol Airport, said Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab was with a man aged about 50 of Indian appearance in an expensive suit talking with a ticket agent.

Mr Haskell claims that the second man told the ticket agent Abdulmutallab was from Sudan and did not have a passport. The ticket agent then referred the men to her manager down the hall, and Mr Haskell did not see the suspect against until after the failed bombing attempt.

Whether under Republicans or Democrats, whether the threat is Hurricane Katrina or Umar Farouk Abdulmuttalab, America seems to be facing a general crisis of state incapacity. Money can be found by Democratic and Republican administrations alike to bail out campaign contributors on Wall Street, but not to repair our crumbling infrastructure.

The U.S. fought and won World War II in less time than it took to adequately protect U.S. soldiers against primitive weapons in Iraq. We are told that we have to stay in Iraq and Afghanistan indefinitely, because withdrawing would be admitting failure. Translation: We haven't won and are unlikely to win in the foreseeable future, if ever.

And now the narrowly averted Christmas massacre in the skies above Detroit. I don't think I'm overreacting when I say that if ever overreaction on the part of a citizenry has been justified, it is now. We the people deserve to be angry. It's not as though Abdulmutallab came up with a clever new tactic while our national security agencies were focused on the last tactic. He used more or less the same tactic as the "shoe bomber," Richard Reid, and nevertheless got through every layer of international and national security.

It's almost as though Osama bin Laden had been allowed through screening at Boston Logan, used a box cutter to hijack a jet, and would have crashed it but for the heroic intervention of other passengers defending themselves after their government failed to defend them.

Forget Democrats and Republicans for a minute. Every American should be asking the same questions: Why are we paying these people?

Our elected leaders and public servants can't do the hard stuff, and they can't do the easy stuff either. They can't provide universal, affordable healthcare, of the kind that all other advanced industrial societies have. They can't give us a system of banking that channels money from depositors to productive enterprises in our country, without being channeled into gambling with obscene profits skimmed off for the gambler-bankers. They can't win wars or avoid unwinnable ones. They can't even repair bridges and keep levees in operating condition, tasks mastered by the relatively primitive ancient Romans and ancient Chinese.

And now, after two invasions justified in the name of the "war on terror," the creation of a cumbersome Homeland Security bureaucracy and a Patriot Act, and countless studies, reports and hearings, it turns out that we Americans may have to defend ourselves against jihadists. First we were told ad nauseam that it was our job to identify possible terrorists in airports and bus terminals and train stations. What next? "Passengers are advised to be prepared to throw themselves if necessary on the flaming traveler next to them in the aircraft, in order to prevent a bomb from detonating. Please watch the demonstration by the flight attendants."

The reality as well as the perception of government incapacity threatens liberalism more than conservatism. After all, if public safety deteriorates, antisocial plutocrats can retreat into doormanned buildings and gated communities and hire their own private security forces, and rural conservatives can amass home arsenals. And if the costs of personal security reduce the room for taxes for public goods, well, then, so much the better, from the perspective of certain strains of anti-government conservatism.

In contrast, America's modest and inadequate system of social democracy rests on economic growth made possible by effective government provision of basic public goods. Economic growth in turn rests on physical security — the protection of citizens against criminals in their midst and hostile or law-breaking foreigners. Libertarians to the contrary, the indispensable preconditions for the free society are effective armed forces and police forces, be they citizen militias or professionals.

Labels: air safety, terrorism, things that make you go "hmmmmm.....", tinfoil

• Two names on the passenger list are also on highly-classified documents listing the names of radical Muslims considered a threat to the French Republic. I'm skeptical of this one. Remember when four of the supposed 9/11 hijackers turned up alive? First of all, names are often the same. The head of my department on my former job was hassled every time he flew because his name -- a common one -- was on a watch list. Second of all, this is the kind of claim that could be very self-serving on the part of a government already taking heat for setting up a military base in the Middle East. And the documents are conveniently classified. Still, file this away under "odd."


• Then, it seems that two prominent figures in the fight against the illegal arms trade and drug trafficking were on the flight. This starts to seem like a highly unlikely "two-fer," unless you want to subscribe to the Grand Unifying Theory of Criminal Villains and think that everything bad in the world is related. The problem with this, even for a sometime tinfoiler like me, is that if you keep up like this, you either end up like James Von Brunn, blaming the Jews for everything, or you end up like Alex Jones, muttering about the Trilateral Commission and the Bavarian Illuminati. Readers of this blog know that while I have my own tinfoilish theories about the 9/11 attacks, they extend solely to Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld's cold, cost-benefit ratios being calculated as to whether losing a few planes would be worth the opportunity to invade Iraq.
• 
  
• Then there's the woman who just missed getting on the flight who died in a car accident this week. Now this one just falls under "Some people have no luck at all."
  

Labels: air safety, health care, Iran, terrorism, tinfoil

Labels: air safety, things that make you go "hmmmmm....."

Shawn Nguyen bragged that he could sneak anything past airport security using his top-secret clearance as a federal air marshal. And for months, he smuggled cocaine and drug money onto flights across the country, boasting to an FBI informant that he was "the man with the golden badge."

Michael McGowan used his position as an air marshal to lure a young boy to his hotel room, where he showed him child porn, took pictures of him naked and sexually abused him.

And when Brian "Cooter" Phelps wanted his ex-wife to disappear, he called a fellow air marshal and tried to hire a hit man nicknamed "the Crucifixer."

Since 9/11, more than three dozen federal air marshals have been charged with crimes, and hundreds more have been accused of misconduct, an investigation by ProPublica has found. Cases range from drunken driving and domestic violence to aiding a human trafficking ring and trying to smuggle explosives from Afghanistan.

The Federal Air Marshal Service presents the image of an elite undercover force charged with making split-second decisions that could mean the difference between stopping a terrorist and shooting an innocent passenger.

But an examination of police reports, court records, government reports, memos and e-mails shows that 18 air marshals have been charged with felonies, including at least three who were hired despite prior criminal records or being fired from law enforcement jobs. A fourth air marshal was hired while under FBI investigation. Another stayed on the job despite alarming a flight attendant with his behavior.

Labels: air safety, Bush Administration, FUBAR, Homeland Security

"Some airlines have elected not to do what we would like to see them do, which is take care of the innocent passengers and not inconvenience them," said TSA administrator Kip Hawley.

He told the House Aviation Safety subcommittee that airlines have not made the investment needed for pre-screening passenger name lists.

[snip]

While government auditors have put the total number of names on the government's terror watch list at 400,000, TSA officials say its list of people designated for enhanced screening or prohibited from flying contains about 50,000. Of them, Hawley said, "a very small percentage" are U.S. citizens.

Labels: air safety, Department of Homeland Security, idiocy

Undercover investigators carried all the bomb components needed to cause "severe damage" to airliners and passengers through U.S. airport screening checkpoints several times this year, despite security measures adopted in August 2006 to stop such explosive devices, according to a new government report.

Agents were able to smuggle aboard a detonator, liquid explosives and liquid incendiary components costing less than $150, even though screening officers in most cases appeared to follow proper procedures and use appropriate screening technology, according to an unclassified version of a report by the Government Accountability Office, Congress's audit arm.

The report concludes that the Transportation Security Administration needs to adopt even more stringent security measures, despite "a significant challenge in balancing security concerns with efficient passenger movement."

The report provoked sharp criticism of the TSA from members of Congress just days before the start of an expected record Thanksgiving holiday travel week. The House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which requested the investigation, plans a hearing on the subject this morning.

"These findings are mind-boggling," said the committee chairman, Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.). "In spite of billions of dollars and the six years TSA has had to deploy new technology and procedures, our airlines remain vulnerable. This is unacceptable. The American public deserves better."

Two years ago, TSA officials said they needed more time, more resources and better technology to provide adequate security, Rep. Thomas M. Davis III (Va.), the panel's ranking Republican and former chairman, said in a written statement. "Unfortunately . . . TSA still cannot consistently detect or prevent prohibited items from being carried onto aircraft."

Labels: air safety

Anxious to avoid upsetting air travelers, NASA is withholding results from an unprecedented national survey of pilots that found safety problems like near collisions and runway interference occur far more frequently than the government previously recognized.

NASA gathered the information under an $8.5 million safety project, through telephone interviews with roughly 24,000 commercial and general aviation pilots over nearly four years. Since ending the interviews at the beginning of 2005 and shutting down the project completely more than one year ago, the space agency has refused to divulge the results publicly.

Just last week, NASA ordered the contractor that conducted the survey to purge all related data from its computers.

[snip]

Among other results, the pilots reported at least twice as many bird strikes, near mid-air collisions and runway incursions as other government monitoring systems show, according to a person familiar with the results who was not authorized to discuss them publicly.

The survey also revealed higher-than-expected numbers of pilots who experienced "in-close approach changes" — potentially dangerous, last-minute instructions to alter landing plans.

A senior NASA official, associate administrator Thomas S. Luedtke, said revealing the findings could damage the public's confidence in airlines and affect airline profits.

Labels: air safety, corporatism, greed