worldwide: Accidents....

Yesterday another accident happend, a russian airbus 321 crashed in Egypt.

while the cause of this latest accident is unknown at this time, every crash has an impact on my life as a professional pilot. what i do is to try and get real data on the accident because much of the news coverage is usually incorrect and very much dependent on the background of the newsreporters own education and technical understanding. a very good source for real data is the website www.avherald.com where, except for the comment sections, only confirmed hard information can be found.

in most cases it will take time for the investigators to point out an initial idea on what caused a crash.

the aviation industry handles accidents by alarming an investigator team, which every country has on standby. they will follow in their investigation the basic idea that every accident is caused by multiple factors instead of one single cause.

factors can be all sorts of influences on the particular flight like aircraft design, maintenance, training of the crew, technical malfunctions, weather, physical and mental state of the crew, external factors like terrorists or dangerous material as lithium batteries, the training and working procedures of the security staff at airports, aircraft systems and sefety features that should have prevented accidenst and are usually designed to capture and correct human errors and all alike...

the process leads to press statement with a first idea after a few days and a preliminary report usually after 1 to 6 months. still from there on it takes 1 to 5 years to finish the final accident report with detailed information and recommendations on how to prevent similar accidents in the future, especially recommendations on design, safety systems and training procedures.

the final reports are of course the most interesting and i do read all follow ups on all major accidents, the company is providing additionally once a year a safety lecture where accidents and less harmful incidents are discussed and sometimes information that is not publicly available is also shared.

the most uncomfort is felt by me during the timespan when the type of aircraft i personally fly as pilot is involved in an accident until the preliminary report is published. knowing the cause of an accident leads to the impression of beeing in control again and beeing able to prevent what happened.

while in an ideal world everything is controllable in real life that does not work.

below i'll show an example of the not always ideal thing, here it's a building site in front of my hotel window in Xiamen/China yesterday. the high pitch noise of the giant stone cutting saws was even able to penetrate my earplugs and interrupted every now and then by the pneumatic hammers on the excavators. sleeping under this conditions for two days didn't leave me fit and rested as i should have been before a flight. futhermore my copilot suffered the same problem and we had to cope with it by sleeping on the flight in the seat for a few minutes every now and then. the procedure is established in the operations manual and the controls and radio of the aircraft are handled by the one staying awake. think of it just as if the other one would have stood up to go and find something to eat in the galley.

sometimes its the only way of staying fit enough on a longer flight to handle a challenging landing in bad weather after 10 hours. fortunatly by present regulations we get a third pilot for flights longer than 10 hours and we get to enjoy our nice bunks in the back for a few hours on those enlarged flights.

since hotel contracts are long term contracts we do not change hotels if there is a new building site next door for a few months. the human factors investigation of an accident review group would find out that we were not at the best fitness and rest levels yesterday...

you could also argue that investigating after accidents is too late and the target should be to prevent an accident beforehand and that is exactly what we try to do! via air-safety reports everybody involved can file proactive reports on ideas and threats and the safety team of the company will do a review and risk assessment which may lead to different procedures or negotiations with the aircraft manufacterer, air traffic control units and authorities. a good example of the near past is the change of the approach profile into Mexico City where turns were to narrow for the 747-8 and the approch was newly calculated and coded into the flight management computers, now works much better resulting in slightly longer and more stable final approaches.

all together we try to keep flying as safe as possible!

next time more fun stuff again -

cu -nuck

so here we go, the cutting crew...