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Atlas Air 767 down/Texas

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Atlas Air 767 down/Texas

Old 3rd Mar 2019, 19:21
  #261 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by DaveReidUK
I don't see any reason why a team looking specifically for the FDR shouldn't have the (simple) means to remove the pinger, given that that's SOP.

Maybe they didn't need it, maybe they did.
Does the pinger keep on ticking after they retrieve the CVR, maybe that's why the remove it to save their ears when they pack it in water
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 19:43
  #262 (permalink)  
 
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If they show the end of the unit that had the pinger attached, you can look to see if the sheared off tips of the bolts are still there.
Considering the relatively high pinger frequency, I doubt that people in the vicinity will find it very disturbing, particularly if they have been around jet engines any amount of time.
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 19:43
  #263 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by lomapaseo
Does the pinger keep on ticking after they retrieve the CVR, maybe that's why the remove it to save their ears when they pack it in water
At 37.5 kHz most of us wouldn't have to worry about hearing the pinger. But, it does have a lithium battery which may be damaged.

From the NTSB FDR Handbook:

3.5. If there is any visible damage to the underwater locator beacon (ULB or “pinger”), it should be removed prior to shipping. Use caution when handling damaged beacons.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...R_Handbook.pdf
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 20:03
  #264 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by Airbubba
At 37.5 kHz most of us wouldn't have to worry about hearing the pinger. But, it does have a lithium battery which may be damaged.
Wouldn't it helpful to have the pinger at a frequency where it could be easily heard? (Or quite possibly at both a high and low frequency.) Wouldn't an audible ping help divers/searchers to quickly locate the box under certain conditions?

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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 20:28
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Originally Posted by jugofpropwash
Wouldn't it helpful to have the pinger at a frequency where it could be easily heard? (Or quite possibly at both a high and low frequency.) Wouldn't an audible ping help divers/searchers to quickly locate the box under certain conditions?
Hydroacoustics are best left to dolphins and submarines. Humans can hear sound under water but determining direction and distance is not possible without help. Additionally, the higher the frequency, the more ‘directional’ it becomes.

Last edited by FIRESYSOK; 3rd Mar 2019 at 20:39.
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 21:57
  #266 (permalink)  
 
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The NTSB is urging the FAA to require 25-hour CVR recorders after incidents like the one with Air Canada at SFO in 2017 where pertinent CVR data was overwritten.

The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) is providing the following information to urge the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) to take action on the safety recommendations issued in this report. These recommendations address the need to install cockpit voice recorders (CVR) with a minimum 25-hour recording capability on all newly manufactured airplanes required to have a CVR and retrofit these CVRs on existing aircraft required to have flight recorders. These recommendations are derived from the NTSB’s experiences with investigations that lacked access to relevant CVR data. Information supporting these recommendations is discussed below.
https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/...ts/ASR1804.pdf
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 23:19
  #267 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by lomapaseo
Does the pinger keep on ticking after they retrieve the CVR, maybe that's why the remove it to save their ears when they pack it in water
It stops after it has been pulled from the water. Even when I was young, I couldn't hear the ultrasonic pinging. We (maintenance engineers) had a special test box which converted the sound to audible clicks.
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Old 3rd Mar 2019, 23:51
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Salute!
@Bubba!! PLZ keep those tweets coming as I refuse to have a tweet or face account.

Gums whines...
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Old 4th Mar 2019, 01:18
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Originally Posted by DaveReidUK
I don't see any reason why a team looking specifically for the FDR shouldn't have the (simple) means to remove the pinger, given that that's SOP.

Maybe they didn't need it, maybe they did.
Getting pedantic here- As someone else mentioned, you can see the tabs are damaged, almost identically with bent and sheared tabs(for a moment I thought they were the same recorder but there is some difference in the damage to the labels) If you think it likely they removed the pinger from a bent tab(assuming it stayed connected to the one that is still attached to the recorder), well, then, ok.

Here's a picture of an undamaged one that looks more similar to what was recovered - photovault.com/data/comps/IAC/IACV01P05_17.jpg
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Old 4th Mar 2019, 07:01
  #270 (permalink)  
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Originally Posted by jugofpropwash
Wouldn't it helpful to have the pinger at a frequency where it could be easily heard? (Or quite possibly at both a high and low frequency.) Wouldn't an audible ping help divers/searchers to quickly locate the box under certain conditions?
Nope.




...



low frequencies will travel further, however they take more energy to develop than the higher frequencies. Low frequencies are also in the main background frequencies of the ocean, below the snapping shrimp and whale song freqs​. Shipping noise has primary frequencies in the very low levels, with blade rates and shaft rates that are down in the bottom of the spectrum, (still audible to human ears though), but they have harmonics above that which can be strong, particularly when a multiple of the number of blades.Higher frequencies will attenuate faster than the lower frequencies, but they are also usually easier to analyse with fewer artifacts from the sampling rate that is used for the transform. ​​​​​​

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Old 4th Mar 2019, 18:23
  #271 (permalink)  
 
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Originally Posted by gums
Salute!
@Bubba!! PLZ keep those tweets coming as I refuse to have a tweet or face account.
Here's a picture of the International Brotherhood of Teamsters pilot investigators with the Chambers County Sheriff. Since the operating pilots were represented by the IBT, the union is a party to the NTSB investigation. Traditionally a union pilot typed in the accident aircraft will be part of the CVR Group that auditions the CVR recording for the official transcript.

Sheriff Hawthorne respects the professional relationship that Captain John Jester IBT Teamsters (Pilots Union) Chief Accident Investigator from Hoofddorp, Netherlands and Captain Howard Lentz Accident Investigator from Cameron Park, CA, have with the National Transportation Safety Board. The Sheriff has reached out to these gentlemen for expert advice regarding equipment and systems of the aircraft which has been instrumental in assisting the Chambers County Sheriff’s Office with our role and responsibilities in the recovery of flight 3591.





The Teamsters have an unfortunate long history of close ties to what is euphemistically called 'The Mob'. I believe James Hoffa, the current IBT president, is the first head of the Teamsters since 1952 not to be indicted on felony federal charges. Not all of the predecessors went to prison, Jimmy Hoffa (James' father) disappeared, Jackie Presser died of a heart attack before reporting to Club Fed and Ron Carey was acquitted.
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 17:52
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Update on the CVR and FDR analysis from the NTSB:

NTSB Laboratory Completes Initial Review of Cockpit Voice Recorder, Recovers Flight Data Recorder

3/5/2019
​Engineers at the National Transportation Safety Board’s Office of Research and Engineering Vehicle Recorder Division completed the initial review of the Atlas Air Flight 3591 cockpit voice recorder Saturday evening and recovered the airplane’s flight data recorder Sunday.



Three people (the two pilots for the flight and a non-revenue jump-seat pilot) died when Atlas Air Flight 3591, a Boeing 767-300 cargo jet, crashed in the muddy marshland of Trinity Bay Feb. 23, 2019, about 40 miles from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport. The airplane was destroyed. The airplane was carrying cargo for Amazon.com Inc., and the US Postal Service from Miami to Houston.The condition of the accident site made locating the recorders challenging. Directors from the Office of Research and Engineering and the Office of Aviation Safety conducted an audition of the CVR as part of the NTSB’s ongoing investigation of the accident. The audition revealed the following information, which is preliminary and subject to change as the investigation continues:
The length of the recording is approximately two hours and was obtained from a download of a solid-state type cockpit voice recorder.

The recording included the final portion of the flight; however, the quality of the audio is poor.

There are times during the recording when the content of crew discussion is difficult to determine, at other times the content can be determined using advanced audio filtering.

The crew was in communication with air traffic control and were being provided radar vectors for the runway 26L approach into George Bush Intercontinental Airport.

Crew communications consistent with a loss control of the aircraft began approximately 18 seconds prior to the end of the recording.

The flight data recorder arrived at the NTSB’s Recorder Lab Sunday at 11:45 p.m. The memory module was disassembled, cleaned and dried, and download of the data was achieved Monday afternoon. Initial review of the data revealed:
The accident flight was captured, and the FDR contained a total of about 54 hours of data from 17 flights.There were approximately 350 parameters recorded by the FDR detailing the motion of the aircraft and operation of its engines, flight controls and other systems.


NTSB recorder investigators are currently verifying and validating the FDR data, and the NTSB plans to provide a summary in an investigative update in a few days. Technical experts in the CVR group will convene in the coming week to review the entire recording and produce a transcript of the accident recording. It will be a time-consuming process to complete the transcript. The CVR group is one of the seven investigative groups established by the Investigator-in-Charge for the accident investigation.




In this photo, taken Saturday in the NTSB laboratory in Washington, an NTSB engineer from the Office of Research and Engineering’s Vehicle Recorder Division inspects memory boards from the cockpit voice recorder of Atlas Air Flight 3591 for signs of damage and water intrusion. Atlas Air Flight 3591 crashed Feb. 23, 2019, about 40 miles from Houston’s George Bush Intercontinental Airport, and the NTSB recovered the airplane’s CVR March 1, 2019. NTSB photo.
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 18:05
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B-roll video from the NTSB of the FDR arrival at the Vehicle Recorder Lab.

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Old 5th Mar 2019, 18:09
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jackscrew obsevations

Originally Posted by Old Boeing Driver
@ FDR Thanks for your response.

Here is the "proposed AD

" ....in 2000"On January 31, 2000, there was an accident involving a McDonnell Douglas Model DC-9-83 (MD-83) airplane. The National Transportation Safety Board (NTSB) determined that the probable cause of this accident was a loss of airplane pitch control resulting from the in-flight failure of the acme nut threads of the jackscrew assembly of the horizontal stabilizer trim system.
The NTSB concluded that the thread failure was caused by excessive wear, resulting from insufficient lubrication of the jackscrew assembly.Start Printed Page 58621The drive mechanism of the horizontal stabilizer on McDonnell Douglas Model DC-9-83 (MD-83) airplanes has a jackscrew assembly with an acme screw.
The drive mechanism of the horizontal stabilizer on Boeing Model 767 airplanes uses a ballscrew. Acme screws and ballscrews have some differences in design, but perform similar functions and have the same airplane level effect following failure. The manufacturer's safety analysis of the 767 drive mechanism found no safety problems with the configuration of the drive mechanism, but showed that changes to the maintenance procedures and maintenance intervals are required to keep the drive mechanism properly maintained and operating as designed.
We have received a report indicating that the ballscrew in the drive mechanism of the horizontal stabilizer on a Boeing Model 757 series airplane showed extensive corrosion, which could lead to excessive wear. The ballscrew on Boeing Model 757 airplanes is similar to that on Boeing Model 767 airplanes that are the subject of this proposed AD. Therefore, both of these airplane models could have the same unsafe condition.
We are considering separate action for the Boeing Model 757 series airplanes and other similar Boeing airplanes.Extensive corrosion of the ballscrew in the drive mechanism of the horizontal stabilizer, if not corrected, could cause an undetected failure of the primary load path for the ballscrew and subsequent wear and failure of the secondary load path, which could lead to loss of control of the horizontal stabilizer and consequent loss of control of the airplane."
I am a commercial pilot and A&P and was an inspector at a major repair station with a B.S. degree in Aeronautical Science. We did freighter conversions on Boeing 727s that had been pulled out of storage. Many of the 727s had pitting corrosion on the jack screws and had to be replaced. It would be interesting to know where the Atlas aircraft had been stored as the environment of storage to determine the probability and speed with which corrosion could occur. As an inspector, I had rejected the lubrication of jackscrew work numerous times. Proper lubrication involves pumping grease into the ball nut until clean lubricant comes out, cleaning the screw, moving the jackscrew, recleaning the screw, applying oil to the screw, and re-greasing the nut. This is a timely and very messy operation if performed correctly. After the Alaska Air disaster our MRO initiated the procedure that only specific individual mechanics would perform lubrication procedures and that all lubrication work cards would be inspected by an inspector. Your theory of a jack screw failure seems the most likely scenario to me as I could see the aircraft rolling in a vertical dive on the video. As a pilot, I think that if I experienced a sever unintentional dive without elevator response, I would try to manipulate any other controls available to avoid imact. It would be interesting to know if the pilots of the Alaska Air crash migt have used roll control to avoid their demise.
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 18:33
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Pictures of the FDR processing from the NTSB. My workbench also has a vise with a bent handle and a can of WD-40.





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Old 5th Mar 2019, 20:10
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Crew communications consistent with a loss control of the aircraft began approximately 18 seconds prior to the end of the recording.
Does this support or rule out any of the possible causes which have been discussed?
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 20:57
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Originally Posted by PastTense
Does this support or rule out any of the possible causes which have been discussed?
That is an extremely neutral form of words from the NTSB, as it should be at this stage; it simply confirms that the crew were conscious and had situational awareness. I wouldn't read any more into it than that.
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 21:18
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Originally Posted by PastTense
Does this support or rule out any of the possible causes which have been discussed?
Since no comment about an overt sound of a warning horn was mentioned it might limit some theories
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Old 5th Mar 2019, 22:57
  #279 (permalink)  
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Originally Posted by lomapaseo
Since no comment about an overt sound of a warning horn was mentioned it might limit some theories
Don’t expect a comment on anything specific untill they do a full read with all teams in the investigation.
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Old 6th Mar 2019, 01:00
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An ultimate loss of control may not disprove the speculation about a deliberate act, but "crew communications consistent with a loss of control" seems to come pretty close.
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