Editorials

ON A WING AND A PRAYER

02/12/10 14:44 Filed in: Air Safety | Aviation
Mentioning The Unmentionable

 On the 24th of April 1989, the ABC TV’s Four Corners ran a program called ‘On A Wing And A Prayer’ which examined recent changes in the national carrier’s engineering policy. The reporter was Mark Colvin – currently anchoring the PM radio program.

Qantas management had made the decision to ‘release’ their recently-qualified apprentices.

This was a first in the carrier’s history.

Previously all apprentices, after concluding their training, were offered full time positions with the company.

The company had started outsourcing maintenance —to AerLingus, from memory.

 Two interesting interviews were conducted during the show. One was an anonymous QF Captain who had grounded a 747 after they asked him to take an aeroplane with something like 30 defects.

He said (sic)“I don’t mind bringing an aeroplane home with 30 defects —minor cabin items and the like— but I won’t take one OUT of Sydney after maintenance with that many defects.”

 The most disturbing interview was conducted with an engineer who was in charge of a new 747 under production in Seattle. He had walked into the semi-constructed aircraft and found a Boeing worker suspending his whole bodyweight on hundreds of wires, with Canon plugs on them, coming down from the cockpit. When challenged, he had told the interviewee that he ‘always had to stretch them to make them reach the wiring loom’.

This led to a detailed discussion about the use of Kapton wiring —and its properties of becoming brittle and arcing with ageing.

Maybe 4 Corners should re-run the program. I have emailed Mark Colvin and he does not have a copy.

It is believed that the US Navy and Air Force has removed all Kapton from its aeroplanes. The space shuttle —also full of it— is being retired, partly due to the problems with replacing the wiring.

 Yet it exists in older commercial aircraft.

 Procedures have been modified. No longer do pilots reset a popped circuit-breaker. All systems have back-ups, so there is no need to cause a possible arcing.

Upon hearing the words ‘smoke in the cockpit’ a chill runs through the bones of every aviator.

 Memories come back of Swissair 111, an MD11 that was lost near Halifax, Nova Scotia in September 1998, in which 229 people died. 53 minutes after leaving New York a fire began in the inflight entertainment system. Nineteen minutes later the aircraft crashed.

 In September this year, in a crash that was totally unreported in the Australian media, a young UPS Boeing 747 cargo plane crashed near Dubai airport, killing the two pilots onboard. (See my blog post A 747 CRASHES AND NO-ONE KNOWS). The onboard fire started soon after takeoff – reportedly in lithium mobile phone batteries being carried. The smoke was so thick they could not see radio frequencies or their instruments.

Unlike other aircraft, Airbuses can be depressurised and RAM AIR used to clear smoke. Pilots can even open the cockpit windows.

Whilst passenger flights have the added benefit of flight attendants, who are all trained fire-fighters (and who have skills examined annually), there are three things pilots know about onboard fires:

 1. They usually start within two hours of departure.

 2. You have two minutes to get the fire under control.

 3. If you don’t, you have to land the aircraft within twenty minutes.


Or you die.




LINKS:
BBC Panorama TV ran a story on Kapton wiring, the link to the transcript is HERE.


Their journalists wrote a story which was published in The Age HERE.


Channel 9’s Sunday Program, tackled the matter transcript HERE.


The Canadian report into Swissair 111 can be found HERE.


For detailed analysis of wiring types, Australian airline pilot, Alex Patterson has produced a chart of the types of wiring used HERE.



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