Tuesday 13 March 2012

Thursday 1 March 2012

European Emissions Trading Scheme. With So Many Nations Opposed to it It Is time the Scrap this Unwanted TAX


UK hands out first free aviation emission permits
Airlines with a registry account receive permits to help them comply with EU emissions trading rules
The UK has today begun issuing free carbon permits to airlines participating in the EU's Emissions Trading Scheme (ETS). The first EU Aviation Allowances (EUAAs) have been handed out to a number airlines who have fully completed the process for opening registry accounts, a statement issued by the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) said.The department was unable to immediately confirm how many permits had been issued or to which operators. Airlines joined the EU ETS at the beginning of this year after Brussels saw off a legal challenge from US carriers. However, the threat remains that some non-EU airlines will not take part after the US Congress declared its opposition to the scheme, China reportedly banned its carriers from taking part, and Russian officials signalled they could do likewise.
A meeting in Moscow last month saw 26 countries, including the US, China, Russia and India, agree to a basket of countermeasures designed to challenge the EU's inclusion of airlines in the ETS. These countries contend the scheme contravenes international aviation treaties and will increase the cost burden on an industry already struggling with rising oil prices and falling passenger numbers. Analysts Thomson Reuters Point Carbon estimate compliance will cost airlines €505m in the first year, although this falls to €360m if the sector uses its full offset quota. Separate EU estimates have suggested the scheme will add no more than around €3 a ticket for long haul flights in and out of the bloc. Around 85 per cent of the permits airlines need in 2012, roughly 183 million EUAAs, will be issued for free, with the remainder being auctioned. DECC has said it expects to auction about seven million EUAAs each year, but will hand out around 18 per cent of the UK's total 57 million allocation to BA, while Virgin and easyJet are expected to receive more than three million EUAAs in 2012.


Russians fires first shot in EU aviation emissions trade war



From Airbus flagship to Chinese pawn


The warning that Hong Kong Airlines (HKA) could scrap its 10 A380 orders in retaliation for European carbon tariffs opens an intriguing new front in the war being waged against the EU emissions trading scheme (ETS).
The threat – reported in a Chinese newspaper – might well prove to be bluster, but it does illustrate the wide political arsenal at the Chinese government’s disposal.
"We cannot do something which is against our country's interests," the newspaper quoted HKA president Yang Jianhong as saying.
In the United States, where opposition to ETS is fiercest, no such pressure can be brought to bear, though individual airlines could, of course, seek to indirectly influence the European Union through their Airbus order-books.
It would be surprising if any did so, however, as privately-run airlines operate on a commercial rather than political basis and, make no mistake, the case against the imposition of carbon trading on non-European carriers is a political rather than financial one.
This column has examined the economics of ETS before and will not repeat the exercise. Suffice to say, in its current guise the scheme will have no significant impact on ticket prices (as well as having scant effect on airline emissions).
The real concern is one of sovereignty and the projection of EU power outside its own borders. The complexity of international law in this area is only heightened by the tangled web of international and bi-lateral aviation treaties signed over the past 70 years or so.
Whatever the legal rights and wrongs of ETS, almost every nation outside Europe feels aggrieved by it, and others may follow the Chinese example, notably Russia.
No Russian carrier has ordered the A380 yet and, if he so desired, Vladimir Putin could easily ensure that situation continued. 
Airbus’ superjumbo sits on 253 orders at present, either very close or very far from making a profit, depending on an estimated break-even sales total for the programme that has ranged from 250 to 420 units delivered.
Quite what pressure European politicians feel to see it reach profitability is another question. 

The End of Silverjet

Silverjet moves from administration to dissolution.
Farewell it was fun whilst it lasted.

Tuesday 28 February 2012

Can Electronic Flight Bags Compromise Air Safety?

Answer: Yes and They Already Have!



Review of Safety Reports Involving Electronic Flight Bags
U.S. Department of Transportation Research and Special Programs Administration John A. Volpe National Transportation Systems Center

From a ground operations perspective support for and operational involvement with EFBs is growing yet the training required of them by European aviation regulators is non existent.

There has already been one incident where the assistance of ground operations staff in the computation of take off performance came close to causing an accident to an airliner. So where are all the checks and whistles as far as a piece of equipment that has air safety critical consequences is concerned? Well EASA AMC 20-25 is one place to start but does this document detail essential training for ground staff that are involved with the operational support of the EFB? No; Paragraph 7.12 details flight crew training but nothing for Ground Operations and yet they are often required to provide operational support the EFB especially out of hours and especially where the failure of the EFB could compromise on time performance.

It must be time whereby EASA rethink their regulatory policy with regards to Ground Operations (starting by changing the title - it is most confusing and most misunderstand it) and formalise the regulation of it on a similar style to that of the FAA.




Modern Cockpits Diminish Pilot Skill Levels


Could Civil Aviation Learn From Military Fly-by-Wire Pilot Training?

WASHINGTON (AP) — Pilots' "automation addiction" has eroded their flying skills to the point that they sometimes don't know how to recover from stalls and other mid-flight problems, say pilots and safety officials. The weakened skills have contributed to hundreds of deaths in airline crashes in the last five years.
Some 51 "loss of control" accidents occurred in which planes stalled in flight or got into unusual positions from which pilots were unable to recover, making it the most common type of airline accident, according to the International Air Transport Association.
"We're seeing a new breed of accident with these state-of-the art planes," said Rory Kay, an airline captain and co-chair of a Federal Aviation Administration advisory committee on pilot training. "We're forgetting how to fly."
Opportunities for airline pilots to maintain their flying proficiency by manually flying planes are increasingly limited, the FAA committee recently warned. Airlines and regulators discourage or even prohibit pilots from turning off the autopilot and flying planes themselves, the committee said.
Fatal airline accidents have decreased dramatically in the U.S. over the past decade. However, The Associated Press interviewed pilots, industry officials and aviation safety experts who expressed concern about the implications of decreased opportunities for manual flight, and reviewed more than a dozen loss-of-control accidents around the world.
Safety experts say they're seeing cases in which pilots who are suddenly confronted with a loss of computerized flight controls don't appear to know how to respond immediately, or they make errors — sometimes fatally so.
A draft FAA study found pilots sometimes "abdicate too much responsibility to automated systems." Because these systems are so integrated in today's planes, one malfunctioning piece of equipment or a single bad computer instruction can suddenly cascade into a series of other failures, unnerving pilots who have been trained to rely on the equipment.
The study examined 46 accidents and major incidents, 734 voluntary reports by pilots and others as well as data from more than 9,000 flights in which a safety official rides in the cockpit to observe pilots in action. It found that in more than 60 percent of accidents, and 30 percent of major incidents, pilots had trouble manually flying the plane or made mistakes with automated flight controls.
A typical mistake was not recognizing that either the autopilot or the auto-throttle — which controls power to the engines — had disconnected. Others failed to take the proper steps to recover from a stall in flight or to monitor and maintain airspeed.
The airline industry is suffering from "automation addiction," Kay said.
In the most recent fatal airline crash in the U.S., in 2009 near Buffalo, N.Y., the co-pilot of a regional airliner programmed incorrect information into the plane's computers, causing it to slow to an unsafe speed. That triggered a stall warning. The startled captain, who hadn't noticed the plane had slowed too much, responded by repeatedly pulling back on the control yoke, overriding two safety systems, when the correct procedure was to push forward.
An investigation later found there were no mechanical or structural problems that would have prevented the plane from flying if the captain had responded correctly. Instead, his actions caused an aerodynamic stall. The plane plummeted to earth, killing all 49 people aboard and one on the ground.
Two weeks after the New York accident, a Turkish Airlines Boeing 737 crashed into a field while trying to land in Amsterdam. Nine people were killed and 120 injured. An investigation found that one of the plane's altimeters, which measures altitude, had fed incorrect information to the plane's computers.
That, in turn, caused the auto-throttle to reduce speed to a dangerously slow level so that the plane lost lift and stalled. Dutch investigators described the flight's three pilots' "automation surprise" when they discovered the plane was about to stall. They hadn't been closely monitoring the airspeed.
Last month, French investigators recommended that all pilots get mandatory training in manual flying and handling a high-altitude stall. The recommendations were in response to the 2009 crash of an Air France jet flying from Brazil to Paris. All 228 people aboard were killed.
An investigation found that airspeed sensors fed bad information to the Airbus A330's computers. That caused the autopilot to disengage suddenly and a stall warning to activate.
The co-pilot at the controls struggled to save the plane, but because he kept pointing the plane's nose up, he actually caused the stall instead of preventing it, experts said. Despite the bad airspeed information, which lasted for less than a minute, there was nothing to prevent the plane from continuing to fly if the pilot had followed the correct procedure for such circumstances, which is to continue to fly levelly in the same direction at the same speed while trying to determine the nature of the problem, they said.
In such cases, the pilots and the technology are failing together, said former US Airways Capt. Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger, whose precision flying is credited with saving all 155 people aboard an Airbus A320 after it lost power in a collision with Canada geese shortly after takeoff from New York's LaGuardia Airport two years ago.
"If we only look at the pilots — the human factor — then we are ignoring other important factors," he said. "We have to look at how they work together."
The ability of pilots to respond to the unexpected loss or malfunction of automated aircraft systems "is the big issue that we can no longer hide from in aviation," said Bill Voss, president of the Flight Safety Foundation in Alexandria, Va. "We've been very slow to recognize the consequence of it and deal with it."
The foundation, which is industry supported, promotes aviation safety around the world.
Airlines are also seeing smaller incidents in which pilots waste precious time repeatedly trying to restart the autopilot or fix other automated systems when what they should be doing is "grasping the controls and flying the airplane," said Bob Coffman, another member of the FAA pilot training committee and an airline captain.
Paul Railsback, operations director at the Air Transport Association, which represents airlines, said, "We think the best way to handle this is through the policies and training of the airlines to ensure they stipulate that the pilots devote a fair amount of time to manually flying. We want to encourage pilots to do that and not rely 100 percent on the automation. I think many airlines are moving in that direction."
In May, the FAA proposed requiring airlines to train pilots on how to recover from a stall, as well as expose them to more realistic problem scenarios.
But other new regulations are going in the opposite direction. Today, pilots are required to use their autopilot when flying at altitudes above 24,000 feet, which is where airliners spend much of their time cruising. The required minimum vertical safety buffer between planes has been reduced from 2,000 feet to 1,000 feet. That means more planes flying closer together, necessitating the kind of precision flying more reliably produced by automation than human beings.
The same situation is increasingly common closer to the ground.
The FAA is moving from an air traffic control system based on radar technology to more precise GPS navigation. Instead of time-consuming, fuel-burning stair-step descents, planes will be able to glide in more steeply for landings with their engines idling. Aircraft will be able to land and take off closer together and more frequently, even in poor weather, because pilots will know the precise location of other aircraft and obstacles on the ground. Fewer planes will be diverted.
But the new landing procedures require pilots to cede even more control to automation.
"Those procedures have to be flown with the autopilot on," Voss said. "You can't afford a sneeze on those procedures."
Even when not using the new procedures, airlines direct their pilots to switch on the autopilot about a minute and a half after takeoff when the plane reaches about 1,000 feet, Coffman said. The autopilot generally doesn't come off until about a minute and a half before landing, he said.
Pilots still control the plane's flight path. But they are programming computers rather than flying with their hands.
Opportunities to fly manually are especially limited at commuter airlines, where pilots may fly with the autopilot off for about 80 seconds out of a typical two-hour flight, Coffman said.
But it is the less experienced first officers starting out at smaller carriers who most need manual flying experience. And, airline training programs are focused on training pilots to fly with the automation, rather than without it. Senior pilots, even if their manual flying skills are rusty, can at least draw on experience flying older generations of less automated planes.
Adding to concerns about an overreliance on automation is an expected pilot shortage in the U.S. and many other countries. U.S. airlines used to be able to draw on a pool of former military pilots with extensive manual flying experience. But more pilots now choose to stay in the armed forces, and corporate aviation competes for pilots with airlines, where salaries have dropped.
Changing training programs to include more manual flying won't be enough because pilots spend only a few days a year in training, Voss said. Airlines will have to rethink their operations fundamentally if they're going to give pilots realistic opportunities to keep their flying skills honed, he said.