No Fooling Around on Singapore Airlines

I have to admit I never gave this a thought before I read the story in the Times Online.

Singapore Airlines, the first carrier to operate the Airbus A380, seems to have gone to great lengths to be sure that no one on board the massive aircraft is using their comfy little private areas for anything other than real sleeping, even the folks that paid enormous sums for the private double-bed berths.

Same rules about no fooling around apply on the A380 as applies to other Singapore aircraft the airlines says.

OK.

What I’m wondering about though is that if these are supposedly private staterooms with locking doors that include beds large enough to hold two people comfortably, how does anyone at Singapore Airlines know what anyone is doing on their beds?

Would regularly checking on the passenger’s behavior be the job of the junior or the senior cabin attendant? Or maybe that’s a job for the jumbo’s captain?

“Hey, what’s going on in there?”

Technorati tags: Singapore Airlines, A380, Times Online, pilots

Bombardier Q400 Grounding: Could it Happen to Business Aviation?

I wonder how surprised the people at Bombardier actually were this weekend that SAS decided to permanently ground its fleet of 27 Q400 turboprops after a third landing gear accident in a month. The decision was announced Sunday as confidence in the aircraft fell to the lowest point ever among SAS passengers according to company chief executive Mats Jansson.

A commercial aircraft grounding like this hasn’t occurred in decades (Petras Malukas/AFP/Getty Images) since the FAA grounded the McDonnell Douglas DC-10. But that, of course, was fleetwide. One DC-10 problem was design related, while another was eventually tracked back to an unorthodox maintenance procedure on the part of American Airlines.

So what in the world happened at SAS that has not occurred at Horizon here in the states, an airline that has successfully flown Q-400s for years? Notice that SAS did not call the aircraft unsafe. (more...)

NASA Safety Data Coverup Shouldn’t Surprise Anyone

The only thing I find surprising about the revelation that NASA has been sitting on a mountain of aviation safety data is that anyone is even remotely surprised about the way that agency operates.

OK, maybe the fact that NASA sat on the data - 24,000 interviews - for years because they didn’t want to scare us caught me napping a bit, but just a bit since I thought keeping people cowering in fear was considered a White House strategy these days.

In a NY Times editorial, NASA’s administrator, Michael Griffin said, “NASA should focus on how we can provide information to the public — not on how we can withhold it.” The newspaper agreed.

I feel a whole bunch better now. In fact, I’ll bet Griffin is shaking in his boots, maybe even losing a minute or two of sleep over what the White House might do if they cared as much about people here in the U.S. as they do about promoting their agenda overseas.

Twenty-four thousands individual data sets is no small amount of data and NASA, quite honestly, should be embarrassed. And FAA should be embarrassed because they knew nothing about this as well … if that is indeed the case. (more...)