Credentials?

Several asked, re the last post, how do YOU qualify to comment on this topic?

Fair enough.

Amateur status, what is it they say--citizen science?

Actually, aviation and aviation 'incidents' have been an interest for most of my life.  Unable to fly when I enlisted for the Navy because of eyesight, the pilot idea went begging.  My brother Tom did join the Navy, and one tour on a carrier convinced him to shift to the submarine service due to the high number of missing planes that year.

Our neighbor when I was in high school was the VP of engineering for North American Aviation; he stimulated my college choice greatly (Caltech because of JPL).  My uncle was VP of Mfg for Northrup, his oldest son (my first cousin) worked years as a designer for Bill Lear, and then Boeing.  He was cited admiringly by the Boeing VP of Quality at his funeral as 'the man' who blew the whistle on the flawed composite wing structure for the Dreamliner.

My son and my daughter-in-law work for Boeing today.

My ergonomics team at HP was called in to 'help' Boeing when they repeated the idiotic cockpit design on the 757 that had once plagued the 727--putting the afterburner switch next to the engine switch.  The first one cost one plane from LAX to Denver, falling in the ocean in 1969, killing all aboard.  Fifteen years later, a near repeat on the 'new fly-by-wire' plane, the pilot fortunately able to restart the engines less than 1,000 feet above the ocean.  HP and Boeing had interlocking Boards of Directors for years--ergo, our team got the invite to help.

And Bill Hewlett personally got involved with microburst measurements when we had an incident with one of our corporate jets while I was HP's Corporate Engineering director.

I've co-chaired major ACM conferences with Boeing's only Computer Science Fellow, who is one of few industry ACM Fellows as well.  And we're close to Boeing's long-time Safety officer, as well as to NASA folk.

Our god-daughter's grandfather was Jim Nissen, the 5th recipient of celebrated Crystal Eagle award from the Northern Calif Aero Club.  The four who preceded him were Jimmy Doolittle, Chuck Yeager, Stan Hillis, and Bill Lear.  Pretty good company, huh?   Every American astronaut (and me) through 1990 has flown in Jim's restored "Jenny" which is now in the Air Force museum in Utah.

But the most impactful for me was the opportunity to chair the ALPA (AirLine Pilots Association) inquiry after the 9-11 tragedies.  This semi-secret committee included lots of high-level military folk, an Air Force One captain, several spook shop folk (the kind who go by only a first name like George, but at home they're known as Bill), and several security and cyber-security folk.  This led to locked cockpit doors, green light laser regulations, extensive simulator time to learn to fly an airliner with destroyed engines from SAMs (Surface-to-Air Missiles).  This latter worked for Sully Sullenberger; it failed in Ukraine (if the plane blows up, pretty hard for the best pilot to save it).

Oh, yes, and our Cub Scout den mother was Wrong Way Corrigan's sister.

So, the net is that we've been fortunate to be close to a few of the stories, and that is what fashioned the presentation.  Still, just an avocational interest.

Where is Malaysia 370?

Of course, I don't know either.

But InnovaScapes Institute (ISI) gets some strange requests, and one we got repeatedly this spring was "Where is that Malaysia 370 plane?"     This, coupled with the several conspiracy theories, and my own background (which in most circles, I don't mention) in aviation safety and 'incidents', led me to put a presentation together for 'lay audiences'

I presented this yesterday to an audience of mostly older military types in San Jose, the SIR 21 group.

The reaction was interesting, not unlike the first time I presented to a Palo Alto group a month ago.  Old pilots especially seemed to like it; discussion afterward went for hours.  One phrase, sent to me by a pilot, really resonated:
"Always in accidents the governments and companies lie and cover all this crap up until it leaks out the corners.  Pilots will always pass the true word on to each other even in communist countries it always comes out."

For this post, I'll just hit a couple of highlights

First, even in this day and age, planes get lost.  Something like 83 commercial airline planes have been "LOST" since WW II, lost as in "not found" for some time, if ever.  Amelia Earhart's and Squadron 19 (and the Bermuda Triangle) were the most famous lost planes (though not commercial flights of course), with the largest search teams, until Malaysia 370.  Five planes have been lost since 2001, in Molo Straits, Namibia, Angola, Guyana, and now Malaysia, all remote parts of the globe.

After 75 years, 'we think' we know what happened to Earhart, where the plane landed, and that she survived the wreck only to die marooned when the Navy couldn't decipher her messages.

It took 26 years before Americans learned the true source of the bomb that brought down Pan Am 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland.  It was Iranian retaliation for the U.S. Vincennes shooting down the Iranian passenger liner, not Gaddafi after all.

After 40 years of sleuthing by the lead director of the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum with a son of a dead passenger, we still don’t know why Pan Am 7 disappeared on the way to Honolulu in 1957.  Five different theories exist, three of which are engine manfunctions, none of which are mentioned in official FAA doc’s.

Its one thing to know where the plane went down, quite another (black boxes help, but not always) to know WHAT HAPPENED.  It took years, and tens of thousands of pieces of reconstructed blown-up 747,  TWA 800, that was flying out of NYC, to debunk the "Navy missile" conspiracy theory and demonstrate that the empty center fuel tank in fact blew up the plane.

And that’s the message of the presentation.  Pilot error and now terrorism are 80% of the ‘causes’ in most reports.  Our data suggests that more than half are instead plane equipment issues or shoddy instrumentation (on the plane, at the airport, or radar tracking systems).  What else would you expect from an engineer who spent half a lifetime building better instruments?

Pilots tell me that it is 'easy' to blame a dead pilot.  They say that the mistake the pilot often made was to be on that flight!

In general, almost inevitably, the airplane manufacturers and the airlines are quick to look for “pilot error” or terrorists, thus averting the blame and responsibility.  This became the thrust of the presentation, exploring four ‘causes’—weather; “intentional” acts (think Ukraine SAMs, 9-11, Lockerbie); airline folk (pilots, crew, ground support, tower control); or plane issues (ergonomics in the cockpit, mechanical, electrical).  Fires, of course, can be caused by ground crew cargo loading, lightning, or plane equipment malfunction, so these are not always independent variables.

The immediate hue and cry re Malaysia 370 was "pilot suicide" because he was despondent over a friend's court trial, he had a flight simulator on his desk at home (with southern Indian ocean landing practices), and he didn't schedule any lunches with friends the following week.

Then, when the erratic radar trackings (from seven nations, none of which would share info for fear of revealing the effectiveness of their radar  systems) indicated a zigzag path and dramatic altitude shifts, terrorism ideas became rampant.

It took days to reveal that the cargo contents included 400# of lithium batteries, cargo expressly forbidden on any U.S. carrier (although guess which nation consumes the most of these), and another two tons of unspecified goods (thought by the Tom Clancy devotees to be U.S.drone technology captured in Afghanistan by the Taliban and sold to the Chinese).

The misfired cockpit oxygen system on another 777, that burned out the entire cockpit in less than two minutes while sitting on the ground, is also suggestive.  The plane was manufactured two days after the Malaysian plane, and Boeing has now admitted that 200 planes were miswired during that timeframe.  These are more serious recall issues than broken gas feeds for General Motors, although there aren't as many units to go find and fix.

In interests of brevity here, I won’t go on, but might in future posts if anyone is interested.  Call or write—housec1839@gmail.com--or better yet, comment here.  For groups, ISI is open to future presentations.