Episode 40 - Shoddy Maintenance and blown screens

08/22/24 • 23 min

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Episode 40 is about maintenance blunders. Aviation is littered with a long list of these, sometimes it the failure of unofficial parts, sometimes its poor management, sometimes engineers who cut corners - and believe it or not, all three. Because the topic is vast, I’m going to return to this subject in future podcasts. In this episode we’re going to focus on ground crews replacing important components with non-certified parts and what happens to aeroplanes when you do that. Our first nomination - the 1949 Strato-Freight Curtiss C-46A crash into the ocean 10 kilometers west of San Juan-Isla Grande airport in Puerto Rico which killed 53 of the 81 people aboard. The plane was en route to Miami and what happened was not just a story of bad maintenance. Three days prior to the accident, on 4 June 1949 the Strato Freight C-46 arrived in San Juan from Newark, New Jersey for regular maintenance. Mechanics installed a new flap follow cable, then checked both engines and they noted the right engine was misfiring. Thirteen new spark plugs were installed, the engines cleared and the Curtiss C-46 D registration NC92857 was sent back to its routes. We’ll come back to the problem with the plugs in a moment. On 7 June the Curtiss was cleared for a flight to Miami, taxying to the runway at 00:10 a midnight flight. Cheaper flight and strike two was the crew overloaded the plane. There were 75 passengers aboard, including five infants, babes in arms, and 14 other children aged between 2 and 12. Captain Lee Howard Wakefield was in charge, also on board were Captain Alfred Cockrill — the company chief pilot and vice president of Strato-Freight. Copilots were John Connell and George Cary. Stewardess as they called them back in the day, was Judith Hale.Moving along to example two of flouting maintenance rules A Transat Flight 236 from Toronto to Lisbon scheduled August 24th 2001. Everyone survived this accident as you’ll hear. The Airbus A330 lost all engine power while flying over the Atlantic Ocean- all because of improper maintenance. This incident became known as the Azores Glider - it was the longest passenger aircraft glide without engines at that point, gliding for nearly 75 miles or 121 km As you’re going to hear, the flight crew made the situation worse although they apparently appeared to get a bad rap. Experienced pilot 48 year-old Captain Robert Piché was in command, first officer was 28 year-old Dirk DeJager. Piche had 16 800 hours with 796 on an Airbus, while DeJager had logged 4800 hours - 386 on an Airbus. The aircraft was registered as C-GITS configured with 362 seats and placed in service by Air Transat on April 28, 1999. It was powered by two Rolls-Royce Trent 772B-60 engines. Leaving the gate in Toronto, the aircraft had 46.9 tonnes of fuel on board, 4.5 tonnes more than required by regulations. So how did it run out of fuel?The third example of poor maintenance involved the British Airways Flight 5390 1990 event which is very well known, when an improperly installed windscreen blew out, causing the Captain Timothy Lancaster to be sucked partially out of the flight deck. Again, this was a matter of millimetres. First the events of 10th June 1990. The County of South Glamorgan was a BAC One-Eleven Series 528FL jet airliner, registered as G-BJRT, captained by 42-year-old Timothy Lancaster. He had 11,050 flight hours, including 1,075 hours on the BAC One-Eleven, while the first officer was 39-year-old Alastair Atchison who had logged 7,500 flight hours — 1,100 of them on the BAC One-Eleven. The aircraft carried four cabin crew and 81 passengers. Atchison flew what was called a routine take-off at 08:20 local time, then handed control to Lancaster as the BAC One-Eleven Series climbed. As was the habit at the time, both pilots released their shoulder harnesses and Lancaster went further, loosening his lap belt.

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Episode 39 - Deadly delays during Ramadan as Saudia Airlines Flight 163 crew dawdles

This is episode 39 and we’re looking at a horrendous accident, Saudia Airlines Flight 163, a Lockheed TriStar which was gutted in a blaze on the ground on 19th August 1980 - all 301 aboard died. The plane was registered in Saudi Arabia as HZ-AHK, and made its first first flight on 13 July 1979, and was delivered brand new to Saudia on 21 August 1979. Some say this is a classic case of cockpit resource management gone haywire, with the combination of an autocratic captain, a young and apparently undercooked first officer, and a flight engineer who had his own list of mysteries as you’re going to hear.Saudia Flight 163 was a scheduled passenger flight departing from Karachi, Pakistan, bound for Kandara Airport in Jeddah, Saudi Arabia with a stop planned at Riyadh International Airport. The majority of the passengers were Saudi and Pakistani religious pilgrims on their way to Mecca for a traditional Ramadan holiday, joined by 32 religious pilgrims from Iran. A small number of pax worked in diplomatic missions for various countries. The question was why the captain had not shut down all engines immediately.He may have prevented the flight attendants from initiating the evacuation by continuing to operate the engines after stopping the aircraft.

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Episode 41 - Dangerous Dalliances: EgyptAir 804 nicotine addiction & Aeroflot 821 intoxication

Episode 41 is about substance abuse, technocrats behaving badly, sub-standard crew training and fatal attractions to nicotine and C H 3 C H 2 OH — methylethyl alcohol, otherwise known as hootch, or in South Africa, dop. This is an episode that’s longer than usual, with quite a lot of ATC sound thrown in later. I hope you find it useful - remember this series is all about aviation safety which ironically is one of the positive results of a catastrophe. But only if we institute the improvements — and take note as aviators and administrators. Our first example of a legal drug causing a commercial airliner to crash is EgyptAir Flight 804 which took off from Paris’ De Gaulle Airport heading to Cairo International on 19th May 2016. As is the case in many of these accidents, cutting corners when it came to snag reporting caught up with everyone involved. And the geopolitical high jinks and obscurantism caught up with Bureaucrats too. This was no idle fiddle, an Airbus A320 plunged into the Mediterranean north of Alexandria killing all 56 pax, 7 crew and 3 security staff aboard on that day. B In our second example, cutting the corners on training, more unresolved snags and alcohol caused the Aeroflot flight 821 disaster - a Boeing that crashed while the confused pilots were trying to land at Perm Airport in Russia, killing all 88 on board. Let’s kick off with the EgyptAir flight 804, an Airbus A320 registration SU-GCC serial number 2088 which had picked up mechanical snafus on four previous flights before the accident, according to automated messages analysed after the crash. EgyptAir pilots and the airline’s technical center in Cairo had ignored those errors. The Airbus was 13 years old, logging 48052 flight hours in 20773 flight cycles since its manufacture in 2003. This is one of the cases of a one error after another — and then one too many. The Airbus took off from de Gaule Airport at 23:09 local on the night of 19th May 2016 - bound for Cairo. It never made it. At 2h30 UTC the plane disappeared from radar while flying at 37,000 feet in clear weather 280 kilometers north of Alexandria. Finally, the world learned the Egyptian pilots had indeed been battling a fire in the cockpit. It was this that had caused the plane to spiral and break up, not a bomb, and the Egyptians knew it all along. The French BEA had been brazenly colluding with the Egyptians and hiding the truth.Now for our second example, and its a dangerous dalliance with alcohol that tipped the balance from incident to accident. Aeroflot 821 Boeing crashed on 14 September 2008, on approach to Perm International Airport in Russia, at 5:10 local time - it was dark and cloudy. All 82 passengers and six crew members were killed. Among the passengers was Russian Colonel General Gennady Troshev, Vladimir Putin’s advisor and commander of the North Caucasus Military District during the Second Chechen War. But for once, Putin was not fingered in the suspicious death of a comrade which comes as a surprise. The Air Crash investigation unveiled a litany of bad habits.