Dear Mr. Babbitt,
Would you be happy with your family flying on an Airbus A330 or 340?
I ask because the most worrying safety issue to emerge since you took charge of the FAA this summer concerns these airplanes, a concern that has been heightened by a warning issued Wednesday from a European agency.
You brought a refreshing change of attitude* when you pledged that in the future the flying public and its safety would be the agency’s first “customer” and not the airlines or the plane makers.
On the first day of June, Air France Flight 447 disappeared over the South Atlantic. This has proved to be a very difficult crash for the investigators. The remains of 278 people and of the A330 involved still lie undetected somewhere at great depth. (Fifty bodies were recovered, including that of the chief pilot.) The stricken airplane did, however, speak before it died. For four minutes it transmitted twenty-four messages via satellite that its flight control systems were failing, one by one.
Would you be happy with your family flying on an Airbus A330 or 340?
I ask because the most worrying safety issue to emerge since you took charge of the FAA this summer concerns these airplanes, a concern that has been heightened by a warning issued Wednesday from a European agency.
You brought a refreshing change of attitude* when you pledged that in the future the flying public and its safety would be the agency’s first “customer” and not the airlines or the plane makers.
On the first day of June, Air France Flight 447 disappeared over the South Atlantic. This has proved to be a very difficult crash for the investigators. The remains of 278 people and of the A330 involved still lie undetected somewhere at great depth. (Fifty bodies were recovered, including that of the chief pilot.) The stricken airplane did, however, speak before it died. For four minutes it transmitted twenty-four messages via satellite that its flight control systems were failing, one by one.
This has led to a theory about what caused the crash that pilots and aviation experts believe is very credible. It all points to a failure of the instruments used to measure air speed, called pitot tubes. The crew of Flight 447 were flying through extremely turbulent weather. If they were getting false speed readings it meant that they were alerted too late to save the airplane.
If the case of Flight 447 were the only incident where faulty speed readings played a part it would be cause enough to be concerned. But it is much worse.
Airbus itself has known since at least 2002 that there was a problem with the speed sensors. In September 2007 they recommended replacing older pitot tubes with a newer design. In May 2008 Air France reported faulty speed readings on its A340 aircraft—the 330 and 340 have many common components, but different wings. At the same time, Air Caraibes, a French carrier, reported faults with its A330s.
This year—two weeks before the disappearance of Flight 447—an A330 flown by the Brazilian airline TAM experienced a serious failure of the speed sensors. It took the crew five minutes, using backup systems, to regain control.
Then, in June, an A330 flown by an American carrier, Northwest, flying between Hong Kong and Tokyo, had a similar failure. Once more, the crew regained control.
As you surely know, these last two incidents are being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, and clearly your agency is fully aware of them.
What you should also be aware of is that pilots are being called upon to be fully alert to the risk that they could lose the primary controls of the airplane and be called upon to switch to backup controls and recover. When you add to this critical situation the kind of storms that Flight 447 encountered the chances of recovering are greatly reduced. In fact, the head of a French pilots’ union has said that “piloting becomes very difficult, near impossible” under those conditions.
Eric Tahon, an Air France pilot, and one of those speaking out because of concerns with the speed sensors, said: “We are trained to deal with multiple failures of the plane. We are convinced that without the breakdown of the pitots, Air France 447 that day would have set down at Paris Roissy airport.”
You must be aware that the situation has now become more critical. On Wednesday the European Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency directive that revealed that malfunctions have been reported in pitot tubes on A330s and A340s, which until now were thought to be reliable.
On each Airbus there are three pitot tubes. They are manufactured by two companies, in Europe by Thales and in the U.S. by Goodrich. It was those made by Thales that were fitted to the A330 in the crash of Flight 447. Airbus and Air France acknowledged that the Thales speed sensors were subject to failures caused by icing and were, at a leisurely pace, replacing them before the loss of Flight 777, which had not been refitted.
Commendably, your agency recently ordered that all 43 A330s flown by U.S. carriers be refitted with Goodrich sensors by early January.
Will you now be following the European agency and order that the Goodrich pitot tubes be checked? It seems imperative to do so. Given the record of the last few years, these aircraft surely meet the definition of flying “in an unsafe condition.”
Beyond this, however, is a larger and urgent question.
Who will step up to the plate and take a leading role in looking at the safety of thousands of people around the world, including many Americans, who are flying on A330s and A340s at this moment?
With airplane types in universal use, there is no overseeing body with world-wide clout. (An Airbus executive boasted, of the A330, that “one takes off every minute somewhere around the world.”) Where does the responsibility lie, with the country in which the airplane was designed and built, with the country where an airline is domiciled, with the country in which an accident occurs (which, in the case of Flight 447, is actually not a country but an ocean) or with the country from which the flight originated? They all have an interest.
Nobody is eager to grasp the nettle. In this case, the French authorities have been evasive. (Accident litigation in France is strongly disposed in favor of victims.) Airbus itself has a record of responding slowly to the reports of false speed readings and the emergencies they cause. The French crash investigation agency, the BEA, issued a lengthy interim report on the loss of Flight 447, admitting that the performance of the pitot tubes was in question. Dealing with the error messages transmitted in the final minutes of the Airbus’s life, the report says “At least one of them corresponds to an inconsistency in the speed measurements.” The BEA, however, was not ready to say that the speed sensors alone were the cause of the crash. Without retrieval of the flight recorders it’s hard to see how conclusive evidence can be found. But its absence seems to make procrastination more permissible to bureaucrats.
The European Aviation Safety Agency, which has a good record of vigilance on safety issues did its work Wednesday. As you know, the National Transportation Safety Board here in the U.S. can only investigate. Your agency has the power to act., and potentially to influence how the other nations involved act. If you really want to reestablish the authority of the FAA, this is the time to call for an international investigation of the recurring problems with the Airbus airplanes.
Right now, there is no single, independent clearing house where reports of every systems failure experienced by the crews of A330s and A340s can be filed and examined for detecting patterns. There is no central scientific body charged with analyzing these reports and investigating the equipment’s performance, as the NTSB does for the U.S. As yet, none of the various investigations has been able even to establish that faulty speed readings can - and in the case of Flight 447 did - trigger a sequential failure of the airplane’s flight management computers. This missing piece of the forensic puzzle is vital to understanding what the continuing risks may be. Furthermore, we need to know if faulty speed readings were part of, or led to, some other kind of flaw—for example, lurking undetected in the flight control software.
In the end, this is not only about the mystery of Flight 447. The policing of air safety needs to catch up with the globalization of air travel and the complexity of the technology. Situations like this will recur.
* President Obama’s choice of Randy Babbitt, a former president of the Airline Pilots’ Association, to head the FAA, was welcomed by airline professionals as a sign that this Administration was serious about making the agency, notorious for bureaucratic sclerosis, more proactive.
Related Stories
Air France Flight 447 'may have stalled at 35,000ft (Times)
Air safety agency asks airlines to check air safety equipment on long haul Airbus planes (Daily Mail)
BEA Interim Report
Pilots Questioned Airplane's Trouble History (AP)
If the case of Flight 447 were the only incident where faulty speed readings played a part it would be cause enough to be concerned. But it is much worse.
Airbus itself has known since at least 2002 that there was a problem with the speed sensors. In September 2007 they recommended replacing older pitot tubes with a newer design. In May 2008 Air France reported faulty speed readings on its A340 aircraft—the 330 and 340 have many common components, but different wings. At the same time, Air Caraibes, a French carrier, reported faults with its A330s.
This year—two weeks before the disappearance of Flight 447—an A330 flown by the Brazilian airline TAM experienced a serious failure of the speed sensors. It took the crew five minutes, using backup systems, to regain control.
Then, in June, an A330 flown by an American carrier, Northwest, flying between Hong Kong and Tokyo, had a similar failure. Once more, the crew regained control.
As you surely know, these last two incidents are being investigated by the National Transportation Safety Board, and clearly your agency is fully aware of them.
What you should also be aware of is that pilots are being called upon to be fully alert to the risk that they could lose the primary controls of the airplane and be called upon to switch to backup controls and recover. When you add to this critical situation the kind of storms that Flight 447 encountered the chances of recovering are greatly reduced. In fact, the head of a French pilots’ union has said that “piloting becomes very difficult, near impossible” under those conditions.
Eric Tahon, an Air France pilot, and one of those speaking out because of concerns with the speed sensors, said: “We are trained to deal with multiple failures of the plane. We are convinced that without the breakdown of the pitots, Air France 447 that day would have set down at Paris Roissy airport.”
You must be aware that the situation has now become more critical. On Wednesday the European Aviation Safety Agency issued an emergency directive that revealed that malfunctions have been reported in pitot tubes on A330s and A340s, which until now were thought to be reliable.
On each Airbus there are three pitot tubes. They are manufactured by two companies, in Europe by Thales and in the U.S. by Goodrich. It was those made by Thales that were fitted to the A330 in the crash of Flight 447. Airbus and Air France acknowledged that the Thales speed sensors were subject to failures caused by icing and were, at a leisurely pace, replacing them before the loss of Flight 777, which had not been refitted.
Commendably, your agency recently ordered that all 43 A330s flown by U.S. carriers be refitted with Goodrich sensors by early January.
Will you now be following the European agency and order that the Goodrich pitot tubes be checked? It seems imperative to do so. Given the record of the last few years, these aircraft surely meet the definition of flying “in an unsafe condition.”
Beyond this, however, is a larger and urgent question.
Who will step up to the plate and take a leading role in looking at the safety of thousands of people around the world, including many Americans, who are flying on A330s and A340s at this moment?
With airplane types in universal use, there is no overseeing body with world-wide clout. (An Airbus executive boasted, of the A330, that “one takes off every minute somewhere around the world.”) Where does the responsibility lie, with the country in which the airplane was designed and built, with the country where an airline is domiciled, with the country in which an accident occurs (which, in the case of Flight 447, is actually not a country but an ocean) or with the country from which the flight originated? They all have an interest.
Nobody is eager to grasp the nettle. In this case, the French authorities have been evasive. (Accident litigation in France is strongly disposed in favor of victims.) Airbus itself has a record of responding slowly to the reports of false speed readings and the emergencies they cause. The French crash investigation agency, the BEA, issued a lengthy interim report on the loss of Flight 447, admitting that the performance of the pitot tubes was in question. Dealing with the error messages transmitted in the final minutes of the Airbus’s life, the report says “At least one of them corresponds to an inconsistency in the speed measurements.” The BEA, however, was not ready to say that the speed sensors alone were the cause of the crash. Without retrieval of the flight recorders it’s hard to see how conclusive evidence can be found. But its absence seems to make procrastination more permissible to bureaucrats.
The European Aviation Safety Agency, which has a good record of vigilance on safety issues did its work Wednesday. As you know, the National Transportation Safety Board here in the U.S. can only investigate. Your agency has the power to act., and potentially to influence how the other nations involved act. If you really want to reestablish the authority of the FAA, this is the time to call for an international investigation of the recurring problems with the Airbus airplanes.
Right now, there is no single, independent clearing house where reports of every systems failure experienced by the crews of A330s and A340s can be filed and examined for detecting patterns. There is no central scientific body charged with analyzing these reports and investigating the equipment’s performance, as the NTSB does for the U.S. As yet, none of the various investigations has been able even to establish that faulty speed readings can - and in the case of Flight 447 did - trigger a sequential failure of the airplane’s flight management computers. This missing piece of the forensic puzzle is vital to understanding what the continuing risks may be. Furthermore, we need to know if faulty speed readings were part of, or led to, some other kind of flaw—for example, lurking undetected in the flight control software.
In the end, this is not only about the mystery of Flight 447. The policing of air safety needs to catch up with the globalization of air travel and the complexity of the technology. Situations like this will recur.
* President Obama’s choice of Randy Babbitt, a former president of the Airline Pilots’ Association, to head the FAA, was welcomed by airline professionals as a sign that this Administration was serious about making the agency, notorious for bureaucratic sclerosis, more proactive.
Related Stories
Air France Flight 447 'may have stalled at 35,000ft (Times)
Air safety agency asks airlines to check air safety equipment on long haul Airbus planes (Daily Mail)
BEA Interim Report
Pilots Questioned Airplane's Trouble History (AP)
I followed the 300+ pages over at PPRUNE (Professional Pilots Rumor Network) and it seems clear that Air France Flight 447 broke apart in the air, but that was the last thing they wanted to public to hear.
The structural integrity of the honeycomb composite comprising its body is supported by baffles that direct airflow to avoid over-stress. When the flight direction degrades to chaos, those baffles are worthless, thereby allowing forces of physics to build up to failure levels.
The galley that was nearly whole would never have survived intact if the craft had gone down in one piece. The fantasy that the craft landed belly-down and that kept it from smashing into smithereens is carefully supported by the joint government-Air France team. Because who would fly in an aircraft that blows apart in mid-air?