BA B747- 400 three engine promenade put in context by a non American nor Brit.
Civil aviation versus military:
Military aircraft are used to be deliberately exposed to dangerous situations and then try to get out of it unharmed. Civil aviation is about the transport of passengers and the very essence of its operation is to stay out of trouble at all times. This is the essential reason why they are designed with so much redundancy.
The probability law:
Many decisions are made based on probability calculations. ETOPS, AWO, autopilot architecture etcetera. All this to assure that in case of failures there remains enough redundancy to bring the ship safe on the ground. These redundacies are not there for commercial reasons but for Safety only.
Airliners are built for efficiency when all goes normal only.
Civil aviation is a commercial activity and has inherent commercial risks. Out of the thousands of flights every day, some flights are lost due to technical reasons.
This is something we have to accept. The build in redundancy is not to be used to cover commercial risk and that’s exactly how British Airways has used it.
Therefore, in its very essence this incident is not to be put in the context of twin versus four engine powered aircraft, this has nothing to do with it. A failed weather radar shortly after take off over Africa with the ITCZ ahead of you is the same kind of problem. The potential of serious trouble ahead is a fact.
Those that claim this is not so are missing the real meaning of what happened.
The MEL covers all that is needed to cover minor technical failures and that’s the bottom line as far as it’s commercial benefit is concerned, for whitch the MEL was not even designed.
Many lessons have been learned from errors and lost lives in the past. Are we are now throwing all that away for non relevant reasons?
Aircraft design has evolved in a way that they are easier to operate and reduced crew error has resulted from it, however this is no argument to reduce crew training or training culture.
It’s not because routine tasks have been delegated to hard and software that crews should no longer be required to handle their malfunctions since this is the prerequisite to proper monitoring the function of these systems in the first place. The way we used to fly the old stuff gives the exact mindset needed to do this.
We all know that if the flying skills that were needed to fly the old generation non glass Airliners are combined with today’s technology, the new kind of automation related errors that are emerging would not be allowed to develop beyond an acceptable level. We all know that what happened to the Virgin A 340 fuel problem would have been picked up by a crew that had the experience of flying the old B 747 or DC 10 with flight engineers.Situation awareness was more a fact in those times, today it's hidden in the bits and bytes of computers and crews that blindly trust those systems are waking up to reality when it's too late.
It does not matter if the FAA wins or not, its BA that was wrong and as such the UK CAA is no different than the Egyptian CAA.
Neither British Airways nor any other airline can be compared to the RAF and that’s why the FAA is right but they probably have chosen the wrong battlefield, basically because they do not think with a military strategy and that’s why they are right.
What we need is common sense and not heroes.
Remember Concord.
Last edited by AIMS by IBM; 16th Apr 2006 at 21:21.