Complications with the investigation into the destruction of Air France flight AF447 are set to dominate discussions on flight-data retrieval, aircraft communications and tracking at a high-level ICAO safety conference this month.

The gathering in Montreal comes a few weeks after France's Bureau d'Enquetes et d'Analyses published a technical analysis of several potential options to avoid loss of crucial flight-recorder information in the event of an aircraft accident at sea.

European representatives are to present a paper at the conference highlighting the "exceptional challenge" posed by the loss of AF447, which crashed into the South Atlantic on 1 June last year. Two attempts to find the Airbus A330's flight recorders have failed and preparations are under way for a third.
"Due to the lack of data, the precise circumstances and causes of the accident may remain unknown," says the paper.

It adds that the crash of a Yemenia Airbus A310 off the Comoros Islands in the same month presented similar recovery problems, after locator beacons separated from the flight recorders' memory modules and delayed their recovery by eight days. Owing to damage to the modules another two weeks' work was needed to retrieve data.

In the wake of AF447's loss, BEA created a flight-data recover working group which assessed three areas - flight-data transmission, new flight-recorder technology and improved wreckage-localisation technology - on the basis of technical maturity, cost and current equipage levels. The working group recently published its findings.

Installation of a lightweight recorder in aircraft vertical fins was among the options considered. But while the fin of AF447 was retrieved, tail debris was recovered in only 20% of 26 similar underwater recovery operations studied.

Deployable, free-floating recorders were also examined but while the analysis accepted development of such devices as credible they are still viewed as a longer-term solution. BEA says deployable recorders could be "difficult to install" on aircraft whose initial design did not account for such modification.

In the medium term an emergency situation could trigger a satcom-equipped aircraft to transmit a package of essential flight data. But the working group says that while related testing has already been carried out for several years, such trigger conditions are "not mature yet by industry standards". Use of ACARS operational communications for regular relay of flight parameters is also seen as a possibility.

BEA has already formally recommended that underwater locator beacons be required to transmit for 90 days, rather than 30, and that aircraft carry a beacon which transmits on a lower frequency of 8.5-9.5kHz rather than 37.5kHz.

The lower frequency would extend the range of transmission from 1nm to 4nm for the same output power, increasing the possibility of detection by military vessels.

Other ideas explored but less favoured included the use of beacons responsive to interrogation, and transmission of full flight-recorder parameters, cockpit-voice audio or cockpit images.
The ICAO conference will also hear from the European delegation that AF447 has shown that "unreliable, non-permanent" air-ground communication and "suboptimal" oceanic surveillance can "adversely impact the timely launching of search and rescue phases, and aircraft wreckage recovery".
It will request that ICAO undertakes a comprehensive review of short- and long-term methods of enhancing oceanic communications and surveillance capabilities, and look at ways of reducing reliability problems with high-frequency radio.

Despite the increasing use of datalink position-reporting in oceanic regions, the delegation will state that progress towards minimum levels of permanent flight-tracking and route-conformance monitoring is "slow", partly as a result of differing regional practices.

Cost of satellite communications "seems to be a deterrent" to aircraft operators, it will add, with data suggesting that only 40% of aircraft in the North Atlantic area are logged-in with air traffic ground systems at any given time: "That may be explained by users' uncertainty that they will secure a sufficient return on their investment, in operational and financial terms, from such applications."

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

US FAA Administrator Randy Babbitt says he will bring together airlines and human factors experts in April or possibly sooner to discuss the consequences of advanced automation as it applies to pilots, controllers and mechanics.

The basic question that will be addressed at the meeting, says Babbitt, is "Have we automated to the point where the human is out of the loop?" The FAA chief was speaking to ATI and Flightglobal in Houston on 12 January after a kick-off event for initial operations of the FAA's automatic dependent surveillance-broadcast services (ADS-B) in the Gulf of Mexico.

Autopilot use is largely determined by efficiency measures in those areas, a reality that would tend to signal increased automation and autopilot use as the FAA moves toward 4d navigation, where an aircraft must pass certain waypoints at a relatively precise time.

The role of automation and training has been in the safety spotlight after several recent high profile accidents in 2009, including the stall-related crash of a Colgan Airways Q400 in Buffalo in February, the crash of a FedEx MD-11F during an otherwise normal landing at Tokyo Narita in March and the unexplained loss of an Air France A330 over the Atlantic in June.

Flightglobal recently reported that during its Crew Management Conference in early December that experts are debating whether a seeming deterioration of pilot skills is the symptom of long term effects of operating highly automated aircraft.

Babbitt says the impact of increased automation could also affect air traffic controllers and maintenance workers. "I've asked FAA's human factors experts to look at it," he says. "We have to make sure a human is the ultimate decision maker."

A key goal of the upcoming meeting, he notes, is to get carriers to share what they've learned on the topic. "If a carrier has developed a good procedure, I want to tell others about it," says Babbitt.
Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

Russia's Air Force will develop in 2010 a civil aviation safety program that should more than halve aviation accidents, a Defense Ministry department said in a statement on Saturday.
"A federal target program is being drafted to ensure civil aviation security which we think will reduce aviation accidents by two to three times and cut damage by 15 billion to 20 billion rubles ($502 mln- $670 mln) annually," Maj.-Gen. Oleg Kolyada, the head of the Air Force flight safety department, was quoted as saying.
He said though it would take almost the whole of 2010 to revise Air Force regulations, the bulk of documents would come into force as soon as possible

2009 was the year with the lowest number of fatal accidents on record for the 31 Member States of the European Aviation Safety Agency (EASA), according to preliminary data. However this good safety record was overshadowed by the accident of an Airbus A330 over the Atlantic. This was the only fatal accident for aeroplanes registered in an EASA Member State in commercial air transport*. Despite this, the number of fatalities in 2009 (228 fatalities) is significantly above the decade average. The high number of non-fatal accidents (24) in 2009 indicates that further progress in safety is necessary. In comparison, the decade 1999-2008 had every year on average 27 non-fatal and five fatal accidents with 92 fatalities.

Further information on safety in civil aviation will be included in the “Annual Safety Review 2009” due to be published by EASA later this year.

"It wasn't a very flattering year for aviation safety because so much could easily have gone so much worse," said Bill Voss, chief executive of the Flight Safety Foundation, a nonprofit organization in Alexandria, Va.
Data from the Flight Safety Foundation, which cooperates with the Aviation Safety Network, show that while the rate of major accidents dropped sharply over the past decade, most of the improvement was accomplished by 2005. The rate of accidents per million departures has held roughly steady for the past five years, according to the foundation's data.

Other disturbing global trends, according to safety experts, stem from the steady stream of accidents since 2005 in which pilots lost control of mechanically well-functioning aircraft -- usually due a computer problem or pilot confusion involving automated flight-control systems. The period also produced an average of 30 major runway-overrun accidents per year.

New standards for pitot probes are expected to emerge from a working group being founded in the wake of June's fatal loss of an Air France Airbus A330 over the south Atlantic.
Airbus is backing creation of the working group, which is set to begin its activities in the first quarter of 2010, after criticising a proposed revision of certification standards as lacking sufficient rigour.
Investigation of the crash of Air France flight AF447 on 1 June - the latest update to which is due this week - has generated concerns over the performance of pitot tubes under icing conditions.

Pitot tube certification is based on requirements laid out in European technical standard order ETSO C16. While the European Aviation Safety Agency says it is not "presuming on the potential contribution" of pitot icing to the AF447 accident, it opened a consultation in August on revising ETSO C16 - which was based on decades-old criteria - to align it with the US FAA's more modern standard TSO C16a.
But Airbus, in its response to the EASA consultation, has expressed "significant concerns" about the adoption of the updated requirements. It claims that the icing conditions laid out in the US standard are "not sufficiently conservative" and that icing test requirements are lower than the airframer's own. Airbus says the standard does not require probes to be tested in ice-crystal or mixed-phase icing, despite their sensitivity to these conditions. "Such an omission is contrary to the objective of setting a minimum level of performance, particularly as most aircraft fly in such conditions," it says, adding that probes designed and tested only in liquid icing could "require a significant redesign" to meet the stricter criteria. Airbus also believes that the update should also take installation effects into account, and that probes should be tested at angles of attack up to 15° at least. It recommends that EASA should dispense with the update in favour of developing new icing requirements through the proposed working group.

EASA states that the update to ETSO C16 is a "first step" that "has to be done" in the interim, but adds: "In the future this ETSO will be upgraded using the outcome of the working group, which will be a new international standard for pitot probes."

Source: Air Transport Intelligence news

When a system (e.g. an aircraft) is delivered and in its pristine condition, it has an initial level of safety often justified by the designer's "Safety Assessment", which is often archived after certification. However, safety is not self-sustaining [ARP 5150] - it depends on numerous factors, including the original design; manufacturing; operating crew and maintenance actions; operational and environmental effects; quality of spare parts; modifications; configuration control; etc. 

Click on link below to view the speech which was delivered on the same day that the Hadden Cave report was published - and coincidently touched on the relationship between OEM Safety Assessment vs IPT Safety Cases.