Senior Consulting Editor and aviation expert Clive Irving was on NPR's Talk of the Nation this afternoon, discussing Southwest Airlines' emergency landing on Friday. It came at a challenging time for the airline industry, as customer complaints jumped 28 percent since last year.

Clive says:

"I don't want to sound xenophobic—it doesn't follow necessarily that if you ship maintenance overseas it will be done less well than in the U.S.—"

"What really matters here is how well those maintenance checks are supervised. In the case of Southwest, they do a lot of the major checks in the life of an airplane called heavy maintenance. We don't know if the last check on this plane was done in El Salvador—but in fact Southwest does do a lot of its heavy maintenance in El Salvador—and I believe the airline sends two people down there all the time and they work three shifts, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The problem is [that] the technology used is designed to react to known problems in the metal—not necessarily unknown problems in the metal—but that's the basic situation. Every incident of the kind that happened on Friday should be regarded as a precursor to a possible crash. I think there's far too much complacency in saying, 'Well, the plane got down there okay,' and that Southwest has an impeccable safety record—which it does—in 40 years, it's not lost one passenger."

"What matters crucially in decompression is the number of times the pressure changes each day, because that is what, in the end, adds up in a way that causes metal fatigue."

Read Clive's pieces from this past weekend in The Daily Beast, here.

Photo: Flickr/New Zealand Defence Force

There are many cities in Australia and New Zealand where you can feel that the people who built them wanted to create a piece of the England they had left, often, given the climate, incongruously. None has a stronger sense of this than Christchurch, New Zealand’s second largest city, now ravaged by an earthquake.

First, take a couple of clues: A beautiful park in the town center, Victoria Square, replete with a statue of Queen Victoria. Second, the river that flows through a large part of downtown, the Avon.

The last time I arrived in Christchurch it was Sunday afternoon. At the Copthorne Hotel in Victoria Square it was time for English afternoon tea. Many local families joined guests for the ritual—all the favorite blends of tea, finger sandwiches, plum cake, scones and cream.

Afterwards we walked along the banks of the Avon. It could have been any well-manicured English rural center, with no hint that it was, in fact, the last major populated island on the way to the South Pole. On this eastern coast of New Zealand’s South Island the climate was temperate, lacking extremes, and refreshed by ocean breezes like those of the Sussex coast.

In the evening there was a bizarre sight: A tram the circulated downtown with diners aboard—a full service restaurant on wheels with sight-seeing as a side order.

On our way out to the airport the taxi driver insisted on taking a detour to drive us through a large park in the suburbs. This was, quintessentially, a horticultural replica of the old country, all the colors and textures of the English tradition of gardening, including an impeccable lawn for bowling.

The departing impression was of a tranquil, content outpost of an imagined England, rather than the real England of the 21st century—unashamedly bourgeois, a place where Agatha Christie’s Miss Marple would have been at home, ferreting out clues to some provincial skullduggery amid the courtesies of polite society. In short, a nice place to be if what you wanted was a quiet, civilized life.

And then came the quake.

Our own Clive Irving has once again taken to The Daily Beast to sort out the current sorry state of travel affairs in Europe, crippled as they are by relatively scant amounts of snow. Writes Clive:

This is a nightmare Christmas for air travelers. Relationships between passengers and airlines are at rock bottom. Heathrow’s “showpiece” Terminal Five, from which most British Airways flights operate, has resembled a refugee camp with passengers sleeping wherever they can. Thousands of bags have been lost.

Conditions that would be effectively dealt with in Chicago or New York are overwhelming European airports. All of London’s satellite airports—Gatwick, Luton, Stansted, and London City each have only one runway, and it should have been easy to keep them operating. Yet the combination of ice and snow seemed to surprise the airport operators.

Photo of Denver's security checkpoint: Flickr/Quinn Dombrowski

The popular uprising by airline passengers against intrusive security screening demonstrates several things, not all of them consistent or coherent.

First, passengers rightly feel a lack of empowerment. A spontaneous revolt is often the beginning of a larger revolution. The TSA hierarchy had better watch out for the sound of tumbrils.

Second, issues of privacy and morality, which are inevitably provoked by images of naked travelers, are not necessarily reconcilable with national security. If there is a bomb in somebody’s crotch somebody has to find it.

Third, the louder the tumult over full-body scanning, the harder it is to suggest that this is actually the wrong argument, as heated as it is.

The whole Homeland Security policy has been delusional from the day after 9/11. It has been predicated on the idea that everybody is a potential terrorist, therefore everybody needs to be screened. And yet, repeatedly, every terrorist attempt since 9/11 has been, predictably, the work of readily identifiable terrorist cells. The one thing that has positively happened since 9/11 is that the anti-terrorist database has become wide and deep. This has so far not been used effectively because of overlapping fiefdoms and the absence of proactive leadership.

The provocative advance of full-body screening, for example, was accelerated not by an intelligent prediction of the nature of the next attack but by a familiar knee-jerk reaction to the last one, the underpants bomber. But, hey, he wouldn’t have been picked up trying to board an airplane here—he had found weak points elsewhere (Nigeria, the Netherlands) to exploit.

That’s the final point about this multi-million dollar charade called the TSA: The threat is over there, far more than it is over here. To take care of over here, you need sophisticated extrapolation from the data bases to create three distinct groups: Those who pose no threat at all (most of us); those you need to know more about; and those who are without doubt wishing us ill. (And don’t get sidetracked by hot button issues like profiling.)

Right now, we are just too dumb to make those distinctions, more than nine years after it was required of us.

Photo: Flickr/Roger Green

Those of us who have been seeking enlightenment on why such a benchmark operation as Rolls-Royce could have designed a potentially lethal flaw into one of its jet engines, the Trent 900 responsible for the Qantas A380 emergency, have been struck by the company’s unusually unresponsive public relations policy.

Not since the days of Soviet Russia’s suppression of all inconvenient truths has there been a spectacle to equal that of Rolls-Royce running for cover—and its refusal to directly answer questions about the exploding Trent.

Now a self-revealing remark explains why. The Sydney Morning Herald reports that the head spokesman for Rolls-Royce in London, Josh Rosenstock, has again refused to answer any questions, referred reporters to a public relations firm specializing in “reputation management.”

Good luck with that one.

All the classic business school scenarios on damage control agree on one thing: Get your story out early, show yourself to be socially responsible and responsive, and rebut all falsehoods.

Nearly two weeks after the near-disastrous Qantas engine failure, everyone else is writing the Rolls-Royce story except Rolls-Royce. And each day the company comes out looking worse—and elusive, evasive, and incompetent.

Our staff aviation expert, Clive Irving, has once again taken to The Daily Beast to ask some hard questions of Qantas, Airbus, and engine manufacturer Rolls-Royce in the wake of the Flight 32 incident earlier this month, in which pieces of the damaged number two Trent 900 engine of a Qantas A380 rained down on Indonesia and forced an emergency return to Singapore.

Writes Clive:

Flying shrapnel from the Rolls Royce engine penetrated two fuel tanks on the left wing immediately above the engine. (Video shot by a passenger shows the exit holes of this shrapnel in the upper wing.)

Because they were punctured, both tanks began leaking large amounts of fuel. The system used to transfer fuel to other tanks was compromised by the damage.

The engine to the left of the engine that exploded was also damaged by debris but the pilots were unable to shut it down, as required for safety, because the engine-control system failed. Because of this, the fire-control system for that engine could not be engaged and the engine presented a hazardous situation beyond the pilot’s control. (This engine continued to run until after fire crews on the ground covered it with foam.)

That video footage leads Clive to wonder if Qantas and Airbus are being fully forthcoming in their response to the potential disaster. And he cites unnamed sources who paint the pilots' response as much more than a routine reaction to an in-flight emergency:

I can reveal that the situation on the flight deck during the 45 minutes it took to land the A380 demanded the full efforts of not only the two regular pilots but also of three other pilots who, luckily, were sitting in the jump seats behind them, as both observers and as part of their training. Their performance was a feat of airmanship equal to that of Captain Sully Sullenberger’s landing on the Hudson.

Photo: Flickr/Dave Sizer

If I were superstitious, which I am not, I would suspect that Boeing’s 787 Dreamliner is jinxed. I imagine that the management of the Japanese All Nippon Airways, ANA, feel the same way, and are furious. They are the launch airline for the 787. But with the 787, launch is a relative term. The airplane is now almost three years late.

A new and potentially alarming problem emerged on a test flight this week. There were an unusually large number of technicians on board—as many as 40—and many of them were seated at computers monitoring the 787’s flight systems.

Below the floor of the main cabin, where they sat, and just behind the rear cargo hold, is a bay where the airplane’s electrical power systems are positioned. On Tuesday, a fire broke out in this bay of the test airplane. This has special significance because the 787 uses electrical power far more extensively than any airplane before it, much touted as saving energy and eliminating complexity.

The fire was serious enough to force the jet to make an emergency landing in Laredo, Texas. The pilot had to switch to a backup system to make his approach and landing because the fire took out primary flight and engine controls. For the moment, all test flights of the 787—there are eight airplanes in the program—have been suspended.

Until now, the problems plaguing the 787 have had two basic causes: Manufacturing flaws in the composite materials that make up most of the jet’s structure and continuing problems with the Rolls Royce engines used on some of the test fleet—a version of the same engine that forced an emergency landing of a Qantas Airbus A380 last week.

No new airliner ever gets delivered on time; over-promising is endemic in the industry. And, in the end, the bugs get sorted and everybody forgets the torment of testing. The Dreamliner, however, is a worst case. Boeing boldly went where none had gone before and made the plane the meeting point of many new and relatively immature technologies. They are paying the price of such hubris.

Our staff aviation expert, Clive Irving, wonders about the future of the A380 and its grounding in the wake of Qantas Flight 32, during which part of the number two Rolls-Royce Trent 900 engine failed, causing an emergency return to Singapore's Changi Airport:

When Qantas Chief Alan Joyce spoke Thursday of a “significant engine failure” he knew how close this flight had come to something much worse than an emergency landing. Losing an A380 would traumatize not only airline passengers but the aviation industry—the airplane can be configured to carry as many as 800 passengers, although current cabin layouts with first, business, premium economy and coach are limited to around 550.

This is not the first serious failure of a Rolls Royce engine this year. Early in August an engine on test at the Rolls Royce plant in England suffered an uncontained failure in which the whole engine was destroyed. This had serious consequences not only for Rolls Royce but for Boeing. The engine was destined for test flights in Boeing’s much delayed 787 Dreamliner.

What's the future hold? Qantas blames "material failure or a design issue" in the engine, but Singapore Airlines, who also operate the world's largest passenger jet, say they'll resume flights of the A380 as of today.

An Airblue plane
From: Flickr / ati977

The crash of an Airblue Airbus A321 while attempting to land at the Pakistani capital city of Islamabad is the third accident in three months involving relatively new airlines.

The others were:

May 12: An Airbus A330 of Afriqiyah Airways inexplicably crashes in fine weather on its final approach to Tripoli International Airport, Libya. 103 passengers and crew die. (For some reason the Airbus was landing on a runway with the least advanced navigation aids.)

May 23: A Boeing 737 of Air India Express overshoots the runway at Mangalore, careens over a cliff and explodes. 158 passengers and crew die. (This hilltop runway is notorious for its trickiness.)

In this latest disaster 152 passengers and crew died. The crash has characteristics that used to be common to many crashes: Extremely poor visibility, caused by fog, on final approach; instructions from the air traffic controllers to abort an approach and make several circuits before attempting another, and then “loss of contact.”

This is the monsoon season in Pakistan. Pilots familiar with the approach to Islamabad say that the combination of bad visibility and mountainous terrain can be challenging. Nonetheless, fatal crashes in Pakistan air space are rare, and the pilot of the Airblue Airbus was highly experienced, logging more than 25,000 hours in 35 years.

Many Pakistani commercial pilots are recruited from the military, which insures a high level of proficiency, and also familiarity with the demands of the climate and landscape.

All of which makes this crash odd because it just should not have happened. Much of the effort over the past decades to make flying safer has been targeted at just those conditions. A combination of highly sophisticated instrumentation in the cockpits of modern jets and a matching sophistication in ground-based navigation aids has virtually eliminated the risk of what were called “controlled flight into terrain” accidents.

All three of the airplanes in these three crashes were state-of-the-art, delivered in the last decade. Mechanical or technical failure is highly unlikely. However, all these airlines are very young, with slender track records.

The Libyan-owned Afriqiyah Airways was founded in 2001; Air India Express, the budget offshoot of Air India, was founded in 2004, as was Airblue in Pakistan.

They are harbingers of a sea change in the airline industry. This has been a decade of explosive growth as the demand for cheap air travel has exploded across the globe. Entrepreneurs in those parts of the world where demand had for years well exceeded supply spotted that there was a striking new business model in commercial aviation - the budget airline.

Pioneered first by Southwest in the U.S., then accelerated in Europe by two runaway successes, Ryanair and Easyjet, the budget model has now caught on big time in Asia. Essential to that model are the two best-selling airplanes in the world: the Boeing 737 and the Airbus A320.

At last week’s big international air show at Farnborough in England the plane makers were smacking their chops at the prospect of the sales in Asia, which Airbus and Boeing see as the world’s biggest airplane market. In the next 20 years, they say, that market alone could generate orders worth more than one trillion dollars.

Another number is striking: In 2001 budget carriers in Asia flew to 48 airports. In 2009 they served 576 airports.

This year’s run of crashes should sound a very clear warning that you can’t have this kind of growth without ensuring that the infrastructure essential to safety is in place - the most modern navigation aids on the ground, air traffic controllers trained to the highest standards, rigorous government oversight of the licensing of new airlines and the training of crews.

When it comes to the airlines themselves, there have been rising concerns about overworked and tired flight crews, a critical issue where the U.S. has itself been overly lax. If the profit-driven budget airline business has forced short cuts here at home, you can bet the same problem will show up around the world.

For travelers it has become increasingly difficult to make a judgment on the safety of an airline if it shows up in an itinerary for a connecting flight from a hub in a distant part of the world.

International regulators, particularly the International Civil Aviation Organization, need urgently to step in and press for far greater vigilance in the process of licensing and monitoring the wave of new carriers. We should remember when looking at those gleaming new jets sitting at the gate with their crowd-pleasing livery: It’s not just airplanes that have crashes, it’s airlines.

Artwork outside the Guggenheim by Louise Bourgeois
Photo: Flickr/LindaH

Spaniards are desperate for good news. The country’s economy is tanking, the construction business is a wreck, unemployment, particularly among the young, is soaring.

But it could be worse: Spain has just completed a remarkable run of triumphs in sports. Rafael Nadal won Wimbledon, again, reaffirming his domination of tennis. The Spanish soccer team, undaunted by thuggish behavior from the Dutch, won the World Cup with an exquisite last-minute goal. And now Alberto Contador has won the most grueling of bicycle races, the Tour de France, for the third time.

How can Spanish sportsmen (and women) can rise so nobly above the shambles around them?

The answer, I think, has a broader impact than just in the world of sport.

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