Keeping An Ear Out For Trouble The grandiose but poorly conceived plan of a four-man terrorist cell to blow up the fuel pipelines running into JFK Airport was recently nipped in the bud, with security consequences still rippling across airports everywhere. The plotters included an ex-JFK ...

Fault Tolerance Versus Fault Containment When you design a fly-by-wire system (FBW) and hook it up to a central nervous system and then plug in a brain, it's prudent to ensure that brain failure or dementia will not cause system "death", paralysis or Parkinson's Disease. For the crew of ...

Investigation Into Fatal Crash Continues Even though the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) was apparently more damaged than the cockpit voice recorder (CVR), only the FDR has yielded information on the events leading up to the Garuda 737-400 crash on March 7 that killed 22 people of the 140 aboard. ...

The NTSB Rekindles Objections to Onboard Electronics The world's largest PC maker Dell is in the midst of one of the biggest safety recalls in the history of consumer electronics. Dell is recalling 4.1 million Sony-made laptop batteries after several dangerous incidents involving the lithium-ion ...

The RoboLander Agenda A European consortium of regulators and aviation manufacturers is pushing forward with development of the RoboLander air security device, to the tune of $45 million. The International Aviation Safety Association initially conceived the RoboLander concept, in the immediate ...

While the Federal Aviation Administration's (FAA) April 18 proposal to mitigate widespread fatigue damage (WFD) in aging transport aircraft through operational limits is intended to make the aviation industry more proactive with WFD problems, some aviation safety experts aren't so sure that will ...

Federal officials' preparations for a new rulemaking on airport deicing is bound to take some aviation officials by surprise. On April 7, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) sent a rather involved questionnaire on the subject to 153 airports and a much simpler one -- at least for now -- to 94 ...

Damage tolerance, or the design philosophy that allows for crack growth up to certain limits, depends ultimately on feedback from the fleet to assure that actual cracks on planes in service match predictions. In this respect, service difficulty reports (SDRs) are fundamental to damage tolerance, ...

All of the flight attendants wound up in the hospital as a result of the airplane's encounter with turbulence. The cockpit crew had requested a deviation from the normal flight path to take them around the storm, but they didn't detour far enough or soon enough. The reason? The weather radar didn't ...

But deployment decision is problematic The time is fast approaching when the Bush administration and Congress must decide whether missile defenses for airliners are worth the money. In the next few weeks, Northrop Grumman and BAE Systems will be installing and flying prototype missile defense ...