Rob Fisher

Poor old Qantas.  First the hole of horror, now the plunge of, er, horror.

On the bright side, the safe landing of these flights should provide some comfort to those experiencing future in-flight anomalies.

Update:  ATSB has released information on the preliminary investigation.  It looks like a navigation computer fed erroneous data to the flight control computer.  Pertinent questions have been raised on the Risks Digest mailing list: the primary flight computer is supposed to compare information from multiple navigation computers, so why didn’t it notice something was amiss?

Rob Fisher

Remember the Boeing 777 that crashed back in January?  Investigators are saying it was probably caused by ice crystals that formed in the fuel.

Investigators said three unique factors came together in flight BA038 that had not been found in 13,000 other flights: the length of time that fuel temperatures stayed below 0C; low fuel flow demands in cruising flight, and high fuel flow demands during landing. They added that the amount of water in the fuel supply - around five litres - was not abnormal.

No matter how carefully aircraft systems are designed, once in a while a combination of events will occur that you hadn’t tested for.  But at least it won’t happen again, and air travel will be just that little bit safer from now on:

Boeing said last night that it had devised “a number of operational changes” to prevent ice building up in 777 fuel systems that used the type of Rolls Royce engine involved in the crash.

Hat tip: The Google News Alert I set up, knowing that the follow-ups to this story probably wouldn’t make the front pages.

Update: Incidentally, in this story there’s a lot of insight into how air crash investigations are done.  13,000 normal flights were compared with this one.  That suggests that black box recordings from many flights are archived, and that statistical and data mining techniques can be used to find out what’s unusual about a given flight.  I wonder if enough computing power and clever enough software could be installed in the cockpit, comparing current data with all previous flights and warning the pilot of anything unusual.

Brian Micklethwait

Weirdness blogger deputy dog doesn’t do capital letters, but on the plus side collects strange structures and circumstances.  His latest weirdness is Funchal Airport, in Madeira, which is mostly not on the ground, but up in the air on pillars.  Lots of pillars.  It was on the ground, but was too short for comfort, and this was how they made it longer, apparently.  Underneath, there’s a big car park, which makes sense.

DD has photos of this, but the best photo of it that I found was this, on Flickr:

Whenever you find an interesting object, it’s worth looking for it on Flickr, I find.

This elaborate contraption - which looks rather like an aircraft carrier, I think – illustrates what an economic impact aviation can have on a region.  This is the trouble they are prepared to go to just to have airplanes serving them satisfactorily.  See also: Heathrow.

Patrick Crozier

Last week Michael Jennings and I sat down in a Central London café to record a podcast on low cost airlines.  Here’s my favourite bit.

We talked about how the low cost airlines operate, the lengths they go to to cuts costs, and the lengths they don’t go to, the situation before deregulation (bizarre as well as amazing) and how the low-cost way is now starting to spread to Asia.

Listeners will notice there’s quite a lot of hubub in the background.  I can only hope it’s not too distracting.

Oh, and there’s an odd bit of distortion as the microphone saturates.

Rob Fisher

On tonight’s episode of QI, after an entertaining discussion on the unlikelihood of the whistle on the lifejacket being of any use in a plane crash, Stephen Fry revealed the following fascinating information:

Between ‘83 and 2000, in the US, there were 568 plane crashes.  53,487 people aboard, 51,207 survived.  The main problem experienced is, oddly enough, getting seatbelts off.  We all get bored with the hostess reminding us how this incredibly simple buckle works, but apparently under stress people revert to trying to undo them the way that’s familiar to them in the car.  So it is very unlikely [to die in a plane crash].

The reason you’re made to open the window blinds when you’re landing and then they turn off the cabin lights to make it dark, is if there’s an accident, the emergency services can see in the windows if they need to, and also that passengers’ eyes are accustomed to low light in case they need to evacuate in the dark.

The frustrating thing about QI is that they don’t quote their sources.  A quick Google search for “53,487 51,207” revealed that their source is BBC News, who got their information from Professor Ed Galea of the University of Greenwich.  In the same article, Tom Barth of AmSafe Aviation is interviewed about the company’s air airbag.

Patrick Crozier

I have no idea if this is dangerous or not but it doesn’t look good.  Hat-tip to Rob Fisher who links to a clip of how it should be done - or rather how it should have been done - Hong Kong’s Kai Tak, the airport in question, has since been closed.