PlasticPilot.net

It’s with great sadness that I got informed of the death of Shaun Lunt. Shaun was representing a different breed of pilots, flying SuperCubs over Alaska, and reporting on the beauty of this region on his blog. Shaun was as gifted for aviation as for photography, both domains lost a talented person.

Shaun got killed in the crash of his SuperCub, south of Quinhagak. I did not knew him personally, but I immensely appreciated his work. Shaun’s flying is probably as far as possible from the kind of flying I do, showing how varied aviation is.

My thoughts go to Shaun’s friends and relatives, particularly to Loni Habersetzer who was flying together with Shaun in his own SuperCub. Seeing a friend going down is probably the hardest thing a pilot can have to face up with.

Shaun left us, and flew west, beyond fog, but we will never forget him, nor what he teached us.

On the 5th of June, an Eclipse 500 was about to land when it experienced a windshear. The pilot applied full power to counteract it. After touchdown, the plane accelerated, with both engines delivering full power, and the crew was forced to take-off again.

Both engines were still delivering full power, and both FADECs were reporting failure. The Quick Reference Handbook (QRH) do not mention procedures for a double FADEC failure, but says that if a FADEC is failed, the corresponding engine must be shut down.

The crew decided to shut the right engine down. After that, the left engine stopped delivering thrust, remaining at idle power, whatever the throttle position. The crew achieved to land, kudos for that, and this hopefully happened in VMC conditions.

Each FADEC is made of two channels, and if one fails the second one takes over. If both fail, parameters are taken from the other engine. If the other engine FADEC is also failed, the last known parameters are kept. As both FADECs failed simultaneously, the engines continued to deliver maximal thrust. After the right engine was stopped, its FADEC was no longer reporting failure, so the left engine FADEC “copied” its parameters, leading to idle thrust.

The system behaved as designed, and if it allows for more redundancy that classical (electro-mechanical) systems, in that particular case, it failed almost completely. The open question is why pushing the throttles to a full forward position causes a double FADEC failure..

On request of the NTSB, Eclipse did upgrade the AFM and QRH to inlcude a procedure to handle such an even, and the FAA mandated an inspection of the throttle assembly of all Eclipse 500 aircraft. Read more from Eclipe, and from NTSB.

The problem could be reproduced (on the ground), and the FAA issued an airworthiness directive requiring an inspection of all Eclipse 500 aircraft before their next flight, and inclusion of the new procedures in AFM and QRH. This inspection can be performed by the pilots themselves, and simply requires to turn electrical power on and push the throttles forward, looking for any FADEC alert

Several sources are reporting an aircraft taking fire after landing in Khartoum, Sudan. The initial reports mention 100 passengers killed, on a total of 200 (both figures being approximative). The flight was coming from Amman, Jordan.

The available videos show massive fire, making hard to even guess the aircraft type (not reported yet, but likely to be an Airbus 310). The flight was operated by Sudan Airways. The weather reports for the time of the accidents include thunderstorms with rain. There are also mentions of a sandstorm.

As always under such circumstances, my thoughts go the the victims and their relatives. After the facts reporting phase, several rumors and hypothesis will start to spread from various sources, including media looking for super scoops. Let’s wait until information becomes available from the investigations before commenting further on.

I will report additional facts here when they’ll become available. You can find more coverage with the following links, several include videos:

CNN report - Reuters report - MSNBC report - BBC report - Sudan Tribune (in english) - Al Jazeera English