After a long trend toward greater safety in air travel, there has been an uptick in airline accidents and deaths in 2018 and 2019. Many aviation experts regard that recent increase as a statistical blip, however. They note that accidents and deaths remain a fraction of the numbers from as recently as the 1990s. Advances in aircraft and airport design, better air traffic control, and improved pilot training are often cited as factors in reducing accidents. "I don't think we'll ever get to zero accidents, but aviation is still the safest it's ever been," said Seth Young, director of the aviation program at Ohio State University. In the US, no airline passengers were killed in accidents from 2009 until April 2018, when a woman on a Southwest jet died after an engine broke apart in flight. Worldwide, there were more than 50 fatal airline accidents a year through the early and mid-1990s, claiming well over 1,000 lives annually, according to figures compiled by the Flight Safety Foundation. Fatalities dropped from 1,844 in 1996 to just 59 in 2017, then rose to 561 last year and 209 already this year. Nearly half of the airline deaths in 2018 and 2019 occurred during the crashes of two Boeing 737 Max jets in Indonesia and Ethiopia. In each case, investigators are examining the role of flight software that pushed the nose of the plane down based on faulty sensor readings. That raises concern about safety around automated flight controls, said William Waldock, an expert at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. "Pilots are not being trained as much as pilots as they are system operators and system managers," he said. "So when something happens and the automation fails, they get flummoxed."<br/>
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Russia sees no reason to ground its domestically produced Sukhoi Superjet 100 aircraft despite one of the planes bursting into flames during a crash-landing and killing 41 people, the country’s transport minister said on Monday. The crash-landing Sunday is the latest serious setback for the plane, the first new passenger jet developed in Russia since the fall of the Soviet Union, and threatens to undermine confidence in an airliner Moscow touts as proof it can produce its own high quality civil passenger aircraft. In a blow to the Russian aviation industry, regional carrier Yamal Airlines, the country’s second biggest operator of the Superjet after Aeroflot, said on Monday it was cancelling its planned purchase of 10 of the planes, the TASS news agency reported. It cited high servicing costs, not safety concerns. Investigators have started trying to piece together why the Aeroflot jet, which had been flying from Moscow to the northern Russian city of Murmansk on Sunday, was forced to make an emergency landing and why that landing went so badly wrong. Various versions are being looked into, including technical failure, human error, and bad weather conditions.<br/>
Moscow Sheremetyevo airport is restoring normal traffic capacity after the removal of wreckage from the Aeroflot aircraft which suffered a landing accident on 5 May. The airport had issued a NOTAM on 6 May stating that capacity had been reduced to 42 hourly movements, and that the restriction would remain in effect until early the following day. Sheremetyevo’s operator states that the wreckage has been transferred to a remote parking zone, and that two-runway operations have been restored. “Over the coming days the airport will re-establish its regular schedule of flights,” it adds. Sheremetyevo is nearing completion of a third runway, construction of which is due to be completed in July.<br/>
An influential pilots’ union in the US says its trust in Boeing has been shaken after learning that an important safety feature on their 737 Max aircraft did not work as they had been told it would. The criticism from the Allied Pilots Association, which represents pilots working for American Airlines, adds to complaints about communications from Boeing regarding software that has become a focus of investigations into two deadly crashes. Boeing admitted on Sunday that it had known in 2017 that an error warning light that was meant to be standard in the cockpit was not in fact in operation in all of its 737 Max fleet, but it did not communicate that to airlines or to its regulator until after a crash in Indonesia in October 2018. American Airlines, which has the second largest 737 Max fleet in the US, after Southwest, did have the alert in operation, but its pilots union said it was told by Boeing that an error warning light would have alerted them before take-off if one of the plane’s so-called angle of attack (AOA) sensors was likely to be faulty. Captain Jason Goldberg, spokesman for the Allied Pilots Association, said Boeing previously assured its pilots that they would have received a cockpit alert before take-off if the two sensors on the plane disagreed, indicating one might be faulty. Now Boeing has told the pilots that the disagree alert would not work until after take-off, when it might be much harder to deal with, Goldberg said. “Boeing and the operators have made it clear that pilot confidence is a huge part of the return to service of the Max,” he said. “If they are trying to instil confidence in the operators this is not the way to do it.” <br/>
A fatal airplane crash a decade ago prompted a life-saving fix across thousands of Boeing 737 cockpits. So why wasn’t the same lesson applied to the design of the 737 Max, an upgraded version on which 346 people died in recent disasters? Investigators of the 2009 crash of a Turkish Airlines jet identified a faulty altitude sensor that thought the plane was closer to the ground than it was and triggered the engines to idle. The plane’s second radio altimeter displayed the correct elevation, but it didn’t matter: the automatic throttle was tied to the first gauge. The Amsterdam-bound plane crashed into a field, killing nine people and injuring 120. Boeing ended up changing that throttle system to prevent one erroneous altitude reading from cascading into tragedy, changes the US FAA subsequently made mandatory. Yet when the Max debuted in 2017 with a new flight-control feature to help pilots avoid a stall, it was designed to react to only one of the plane’s two “angle of attack” sensors that measure the jet’s incline. That proved deadly when malfunctioning sensors on jets operated by Lion Air and Ethiopian Airlines automatically commanded the noses of the planes down over and over, even though the other sensor showed it wasn’t necessary. “When I read that the planes had two angle-of-attack sensors, I couldn’t think of a reason why they wouldn’t use both,” said Robert Canfield, an aeronautical engineering professor and technical director of the Virginia Tech Airworthiness Center. A software fix for the 737 Max that is now in testing will do just that, and multiple investigations of two crashes, the first in October and the second in March, are probing why it wasn’t incorporated into the original design. Boeing says the Max disasters shouldn’t be compared to the Turkish Airlines crash and no evidence has emerged to indicate that the altitude sensor, known as a radio altimeter, failed on the Lion Air or Ethiopian planes. “These incidents address fundamentally different system inputs and phases of flight,” Charles Bickers, a Boeing spokesman, said in an email.<br/>
Boeing is pushing ahead on a plan to cut about 900 inspectors, replacing their jobs with technology improvements at its Seattle area factories, despite being under fire for software flaws in the 737 Max and quality issues in its other aircraft. The union has raised an outcry, calling it a "bad decision" that will "eliminate the second set of eyes on thousands of work packages" in its newsletter to members. Some 451 inspectors will be transferred to other jobs this year, and about the same number next year, out of a total of about 3,000 at its commercial aircraft operations in the Seattle area, the International Association of Machinists and Aerospace Workers, Local 751, has told its members. Boeing, which confirms the plan but won't disclose the number of workers involved, said the changes will result in better quality overall.<br/>
Asian airlines are cutting routes, revamping their schedules and leasing extra aircraft to fill gaps left by the grounding of Boeing 737 Max 8s after deadly crashes in Indonesia and Ethiopia killed 346 people. So far, regional carriers have managed to avoid major disruptions, but analysts expect that idling the Max 8s, a fuel-efficient update of Boeing's popular 737, will crimp growth plans in the near future. As investigations into the crashes continue, Boeing anticipates a $1b increase in costs related to the 737 Max, including fixing software implicated in the disasters, adding pilot training and compensating airlines and families of crash victims. Investigators are examining the role of flight-control software that pushed the planes' noses down based on faulty sensor readings. Nearly 400 Max jets were grounded at airlines worldwide in mid-March after the Ethiopia crash. In Asia, where air passenger traffic is growing the fastest, the groundings are pushing airlines' costs higher at a time of rising fuel prices, squeezing carriers' profits. Chinese airlines had 96 Max 8 jets but have managed to avoid massive cancellations by swapping in other models of aircraft, said Kelvin Lau of Daiwa Capital Markets in Hong Kong. "However, this may limit their capacity growth for the coming peak season," he added. China Southern Airlines, which has 25 Max 8 jets, will likely revise its targeted growth for passenger capacity, he said. Indonesian carrier Lion Air said Friday in a statement that it was "operating normally by minimizing the impact" from the grounding of its 10 Max 8 jets. "Lion Air continues to serve routes that have been operated by Boeing 737 MAX 8 by replacing them using other Lion Air fleets," a spokesman said. Story has more.<br/>