Plastic Pilot

Modern world sometimes create strange collisions of facts… You probably heard of Mistral Air starting to operate flights on behalf of the Holly Seat, offering pilgrims with low-cost flights to Catholic shrines. The planes are specially decorated, and have been paint with Vatican colors.

The first flight took place on monday, and on the flight home, the pilgrims / passengers have been affected by the (not so) new safety regulations about liquids on board. You know, the rule that says liquids must be within containers of less than 100 milliliters, in separate plastic bags, and so on… So when the pilgrims arrived at the safety checkpoint, the officers had to confiscate many bottles of Holy Water that the passengers bought in the Lourdes shrine… Dangerous Holy Water…

One good point to the airline though, they distributed a bottle of Holy Water in the shape of Virgin Mary to each and every passenger after boarding. No doubt this ones went through extensive security checks…

BBC report: Holy Water Ban

The recent accident with the chinese Boeing 737 that was destroyed by fire in Osaka is a good opportunity to talk about what the authorities are doing when a technical risk is discovered.

The Federal Aviation Administration, which regulates the civil aviation in the USA, recently issued a paper called “Airworthiness Directive”, or AD. This paper describes a problem, and a way to identify and / or solve it.

Each time a national authority publishes an AD, it’s sent to all companies operating the concerned type of aircraft, as well as authorities of other countries for similar action. It is then the airline responsibility to comply with the AD.

Depending on how critical the problem is, an AD can be mandatory or not, and the authority can also publish a due date for its application. Any company not complying takes the risk of severe fines, and possibly withdrawal of operation certificates.

In this particular case, the AD is about a nut located close to the slats (the part of the leading edge that is mobile, helping to generate more lift at low speeds), which can apparently fall, and then perforate the fuel tanks. Yes, just in case you don’t know, the fuel tanks are in the wings. Here is the link to this particular AD: B737 AD2007-18-52.

As you will see, it contains a description of the problem, and a way to check and solve it. The delay is 10 days, which is quite short

This AD system ensures that any potential problem will be fixed on all planes of a given type, and that no operator would be tempted to “hide” events, making the whole system unsafe… even if the flames in Osaka would have been quite hard to hide.

After months spent animating various blogs on different sites, I finally decided to group all these various topics at a single place, which is plasticpilot.net

This will help me to save time, and to focus even more on contents. I hope you will like it, and feel free to send feed-back via comments or e-mail. If you were reading one of my blogs only, you will find it in the “Categories” tab on the left hand side. However, please note that there is a single RSS feed covering all the topics, so you will may be discover new interests in aviation.

Stay tuned…
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