Russian B737 Crash at Kazan.

[porterhouse]

The Russian the good old Tu154 had a much better ratio than the Boeing 737, not to mention MD11s or FK28s.

Completely false.
The number of hull loses as a percentage of total aircraft produced is about 6.9% for Tu-154 and 6.7% for DC-10 and only about 2% for 737. So just by this statistics Tu-154 is much worse than 737 and even worse than DC-10. Of course the real utilization rate of Tu-154 (its life span was also much shorter) was much lower than in western fleet hence its true accident rate per departure would be even worse when compared to 737.

[ATC Watcher]

Porterhouse, I think you read my post too fast.
I am quoting hulls losses per million departures, which is the common standard used by people involved in safety. Never heard of percentage of hull losses per aircraft manufactured.
These are the figures commonly used :
Hull loss with fatalities (*) per million departures .
For same generation aircraft :
B727 : 0,72
DC9 0,78
T154M :0,80
B737/200 : 0,89
DC10 : 1,31
MD11:2.10
FK28 :2.35
if you want to go to the previous generation :
DC8 : 4.0
B707/720 :4,27

(*) without fatalities the rate varies but proportionally. Of course older types ( like for instance B747-100 and 200 ) get today bad stats as they do not get repaired because of they low residual value. The same apply I guess for Tu154s today. Therefore the total hull loss is not really useful for safety , especially for older types.

[porterhouse]

Using hull losses to compare safety of aircraft types is a completely misleading

True but sometimes you don't have anything else. The best aircraft accident statistics specifically exclude aircraft made in CIS/USSR because of lack of operational data. So you can take hull losses which are available and adjust for utilization which was always particularly low in CIS/USSR.

I am quoting hulls losses per million departures

I claim that whatever departures you are using for Tu-154 is a totally unreliable number.

[ATC Watcher]

Porterhouse :

I claim that whatever departures you are using for Tu-154 is a totally unreliable number.

Possibly, but they are coming from MAK. Tupolev, contrary to Boeing or Airbus do nor provide verifyable figures, you are right, especially today. . But in the days of Soviet Aeroflot, calculations were easy to verify and in those days the Tu 154M had a quite good safety record.

GobonaStick :

Using hull losses to compare safety of aircraft types is a completely misleading and totally irrelevant sport that I wouldn't expect to find on any forum claiming to be populated by professionals.

Well, we obviously have a different definition of what is a professional .No need to denigrate people, especially when you do not know .

[porterhouse]

But in the days of Soviet Aeroflot, calculations were easy to verify and in those days the Tu 154M had a quite good safety record.

I would argue just the opposite - nobody could easily verify data from that period of history since record keeping was either very shoddy or skewed by political considerations therefore what today is regarded as the gold-standard accident statistics report simply ignores it.

[JamesGBC]

Agree to work in Russia?

A- Head of the pilot union (Miroslav Boychuk): We shouldn't accept foreign captains because only the worst of them will actually agree to work in Russia.

B- Head of the pilot union: There is no actual lack of pilots in Russia. There are more pilots being trained than required by Russian airlines.

A is a very good point.

Then go to B,what makes the good ones agree to stay in Russia?

[porterhouse]

A is a very good point.

Perhaps, but is a bit humorous at the same time.
If they pay decent world-wages I bet quite a few 'good' pilots would agree to work for them. But without need to push any new laws about foreign pilots working in Russia I don't hear the obvious - send all these 'suspect' pilots from regional airlines to very reputable foreign training facilities, say FlightSafety Int., validate their competency and retrain to FlightSafety standards if necessary. How many of them would even pass a rigorous simulator check ride at FlightSafety?

[hamster3null]

These are the figures commonly used :
Hull loss with fatalities (*) per million departures .
For same generation aircraft :
B727 : 0,72
DC9 0,78
T154M :0,80

aviation-safety.net reports 17 hull losses with fatalities for Tu-154M. Wikipedia reports that 320 of those have been built. The rate of 0.8 per million departures would then translate into an average of 66,000 departures (flight cycles) for each of the 320 aircraft, which seems about 5x high for a long-range aircraft that only entered mass production in 1984.

in the days of Soviet Aeroflot, calculations were easy to verify and in those days the Tu 154M had a quite good safety record.

Tu-154M barely had a chance to fly in the days of Soviet Aeroflot. It was in production for 7 years by the time of the fall of the USSR. The first recorded hull loss of the 154M is dated 1990.

The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point (too lazy to look for production stats now), which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure.

P.S. Aviation-safety.net gives flight cycle numbers for some of the crashed 154M's and it looks like they pretty consistently average ~700 departures/year.
If we assume that the average Tu-154M is 23 years old (manufactured in 1990) and all remaining aircraft are still in regular service, we get 5 million departures and the hull loss rate of 3.4 per million.

[Sergey Tachenov]

Originally Posted by porterhouse

If they pay decent world-wages I bet quite a few 'good' pilots would agree to work for them.

Two problems. One is that only biggest carriers pay good wages, but then again they already have good enough pilots. No fatal accidents at all for Transaero with huge number of flights, for example. The small carriers such as Tatarstan probably won't be able to afford good foreign pilots.

Another problem is that with all that crazy stuff going around in Russia, it would be pretty hard for a foreigner to work for a Russian airline. So they will have to pay more than an average worldwide good salary to get them to work in these conditions. Pilots will have a hard time fighting Russian mentality and trying to 'blend in' so to speak.

[ATC Watcher]

Hamster3null " impressive calculations/deductions , thanks for taking the time. . I just took my figures from MAK ( and Boeing) papers presented a year or so back. But as we all know political considerations often enter statistics in Russia ! I will keep a copy of your post and use it to ask some questions next time I meet them!

[up_down_n_out]

These TU154 figures are complete nonsense, and some people really have to get their facts right.

"The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents** between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point,- which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure."

TU154 and variants started flying roughly the same time as Concorde and was still in production in 2009.

first hull loss:-
1973 Prague.

**I can think of 2/3 that got shot down, another couple that the pilot turned the fuel pumps off, while taking off, another one that caught fire about a year ago because of a short circuit, and another one that flew straight into a thunderstorm, and yet another downed by a terrorist, never mind the 2 they set burnt to cinders, refuelling next to each other!

I'm told one of the fatalities was down to putting one of these birds down at 5g+ and some poor chap having a heart attack. (Dagestan avia 372)

About 95% of all the other incidents were down to pilot error on what has now become one of the most rugged & reliable classic workhorses still flying.

RA-85684 actually saved the entire passengers and crew thanks to being built like the proverbial brick house lavatory.

At this rate someone is gonna start the rumour mill about the Polish president thread all over again too.

Nothing has anything to do with the safety record or even the age of the aircraft, or are we going to start suggesting Lockerbie is an everyday event too?

[DaveReidUK]

never mind the 2 they set burnt to cinders, refuelling next to each other

Hull losses, with fatalities ?

[porterhouse]

About 95% of all the other incidents were down to pilot error

So it the case with other aircraft types.
I suggest you grasp a simple fact - we are comparing Tu-154 numbers with those of other aircraft types not analyzing a cause of every single accident. Such comparison does make sense because it is done routinely in aircraft accident statistics. if you want you can sift through every single accident for Tu-154 and do the same for 737 and eliminate every single one where pilot error was involved but nobody does it - makes no sense because it is going o be a wash and you end up as if you were comparing raw numbers without all this work.

[hamster3null]

These TU154 figures are complete nonsense, and some people really have to get their facts right.

"The regular 154 came out earlier (1973) and it had 17 fatal accidents** between 1973 and 1991, probably with no more than 300 aircraft in operation at any point,- which would also point to a pretty high fatal loss rate per departure."

TU154 and variants started flying roughly the same time as Concorde and was still in production in 2009.

I stand corrected on one point: it flew in 1972, not 1973. I said "between 1973 and 1991" because the discussion above was in regard to Soviet era.

Most crashes are caused at least partially by the human factor. It's best to compare all crashes vs. all crashes. Or at least to exclude terrorist attacks only. If we get the hull loss rate of Soviet-era 154 that is several times higher than all-time hull loss rate of B737 (including all the losses in places like Indonesia, which seems to have become a veritable B737 graveyard recently), either the machine is poorly built, or its pilots and mechanics are poorly trained, or it's some combination of these, and it's really not my objective to assign blame here.

[Karel_x]

According to
Accident Database: By Manufacturer/Type > TU-154
There was only 11 air disasters with fatalities between years 1973 -1991. It may be not complete list.

First Prague disaster - not determined the cause, second Beirut - not determined too, it is still mysterious, maybe it was shot down. Nacias Nguema - not determined, Al Bayda - lack of fuel after divert....

According to
? russianplanes.net ? ???? ???????
there was 759 Tu-154 flying in 1991

[Skyjob]

Wikipedia

[hamster3null]

According to
Accident Database: By Manufacturer/Type > TU-154
There was only 11 air disasters with fatalities between years 1973 -1991. It may be not complete list.

First Prague disaster - not determined the cause, second Beirut - not determined too, it is still mysterious, maybe it was shot down. Nacias Nguema - not determined, Al Bayda - lack of fuel after divert....

According to
? russianplanes.net ? ???? ???????
there was 759 Tu-154 flying in 1991

This list does not have:
SU-AXB (1974, Egypt, training flight, 6 fatalities)
LZ-BTB (1978, Syria, 4 fatalities)
CCCP-85169 (1978, central Russia, 4 fatalities)
YR-TPH (1980, Mauritania, 1 fatality)
CCCP-85413 (1988, Russia, 8 fatalities) - OK, this one was a hijacking so let's drop this one
YR-TPJ (1989, Romania, 5 fatalities)

Good source for production numbers. By 1991 596 Tu-154's were completed, not counting M's and pre-production frames. (I seriously underestimated the degree to which aircraft production went off the cliff after 1991.) Assuming that all of those survived to 1991, I see about 7700 aircraft-years of operations (e.g. 11 aircraft made in 1971 * 20 years from 1971 to 1991 = 220 aircraft-years, etc.) At 700 departures/year, that's 5.4 million departures and 3 losses per million departures.

For M's, it says that more than 80% of Tu-154M were manufactured between 1986 and 1993, so my previous estimate stands. This family only accumulated about 500 aircraft-years by 1991, so the expected number of fatal accidents in this family by 1991 at 3 losses / million departures was only ~1.

[Clandestino]

They have found a new sandbox.

Just looking at this thread makes one realize AF447 one is closed.

[Denti]

The use of Dual A/P has lead many into problems if disconnected with back trim and not dealt with promptly.

Flew that a few days ago in the real world. Saw the lights 20 feet above minimum, disconnected and landed without a hitch. Could have let the automatics do it as well, but without protected areas in marginal weather that is not a bright idea. Flying the 737 with back trim in is a non-event for any halfway competent pilot. Keep a bit of forward pressure in while you trim off the back trim and land or go around. Yes, in a go around there is additional pitch up because of the pretty strong pitch power couple in the 737, but then again that is nothing new or challenging.

Letting the plane fly itself without autopilot is a bad idea, and was a bad idea even in that very first puddlejumper we all flew at some point.

[Karel_x]

Some facts about Russian air transport related to safety:

- there exists ca 100 carriers (there was ca 400 formerly!)
- there is ca 15% increase of air traffic in Russia per year
- first 5 carriers provides 2/3 of transport (Aeroflot, Transaero, UTAir, S7, Rossia)
- first 15 carriers provides ca 90% of trafiic
- Tatarstan had 18th place with little more than 700.000 pax per year

????????? ?????????? | ??????????

Specialists in Russia advice to decrease strongly the number of carriers, because it is very difficult to get a profit and provide all safety measures for little carriers operating at only domestic flights. Pilots of those carriers can be subsequently released to the job market and can start to work for bigger companies with lack of pilot, that are able to give them real full-time work and better productivity. They believe that lack of pilot in Russia is only due to bad structure of the air industry.