Closing Remarks and Community Engagement

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Ai or click the direct link in the show notes Well, you old, Todd Hello J. I guess that's you and I flying without Greg today, although he indicated he might be on Well, he's missing out. We got some good stuff today We had a busy week in aviation By week with mishapson. in misadventures. Maybe it's a better way of saying it. whyy don't you lead us in into the Events of this week or some of the events of this week. Certainly let's talk with the most recent one, which happened this past Saturday on in Boston. There was an aircraft taking off American Airlines Ive was A three hundred nineteen and another aircraft landing a Deltaven seven three seven eight hundred. and unfortunately some messages got cross Near event, what the FA calls a runway incursion, the American Airlines was taking off as a Delta was tryed land and apparently, the Delta crew executed a missed approach, and they came within about by my estimates, about eight hundred fifty feet from each other, way too close than it should have been, and this generated quite a bit of press coverage And John, you have extensive experience with this particular airport. What are some of the issues with Logan that makes this how should I say it a challenging airport, even for professional pilots? Andot only pilots, but controllers as well. So every runway at this airport crosses another runway So there is no runway that you can take off clearly without having a risky potential risky situation So they all cross another runway And because of how busy this airport has come a number of years ago, they decided to split some of the duties between the air traffic controllers by cutting the airport up geographically And if you listen to some of the tapes, you can see that there's two different controllers controlling different pieces of the operation right now to the ground. So they need to be coordinated themselves and what they do. And I think this is a good example of where that coordination broke down But it's not the first time this type of event has happened in Boston involving two different controllers. So that's why we went to it. Information is still a little bit hard to come by at this point in time, but it clearly is very similar to other events that we've had involving controllers at Logan Airport And this is an event that will likely be investigated by both the FA and the NTSB, but I was able to get some preliminary information using some publicly available data. And I created a graphic that illustrates how close these two aircraft came. And if you look at these three lines, the sort of U shape line at the top is distance slant range between the aircraft that was airborne and the one taking off. and you can see that the minimum occurred when they were only about eight hundred or so feet away from each other, sort of like six hundred feet horizally excuse vertically and five hundred or so feet horizontally. This is way too close. This is close enough where R side of the airborne airplane, you would have clearly seen, in my opinion, a airplane on the runway under you, which would have made the average passenger a bit nervous. Now, this is just preliminary because we don't know exactly what was known in the cockpit of both aircraft and in the controller station For that matter, who was talking to whom and when and whether or not one or both aircraft were executing a proper request from air traffic control. Again, this is something that will have to be figured out, but it is clearly something that is going to be a high interest item because looking at the FA's website They have four categories of runway incursions And this event, in my opinion, is going to be in one of the top two categories. A category which basically says the top one, if weren't for the actions of someone in the process, this could have resulted in, let's say, a worse outcome than what we had. And I tried to find out before the show if the NTSP was going to investigate it and I was unable to get an answer officially. but I heard unofficially that they were going to get involved. So I don't know. I wouldn't put any faith in what I just said. It's unofficial and we'll have to wait and see for the official word from the NTSB I'm sure the FAA has been gathering all the information they could. I was told that. And we had a couple of other noteworthy newsworthy events in the last few days. There was a crash of a skydiving aircraft in Missouri, south of Kansas City, where it was an aircraft model, a single engine turbo pro that had a number of skydivers on board, I believe, eleven skydivers and one pilot, and they crash near the airport. And this is something that's being investigated. We don't know a lot of the information about this right now. and we should have on the the screen I leave a picture there we go, a picture of the aircraft, which kind of looks like a cessina caravan, single turborope engine created by a company out of I believe New Zealand. and so this investigation will probably have participation from the New Zealand government and any representatives from the manufacturer from New Zealand But this is not the first time that we've had in the last few years, a skydiving aircraft crash with many people on board. And it's unclear what might have transpired. I looked at the recent flights of this aircraft, and this was an aircraft that regularly did this sort of flight, taking off, going up to around, I don't know ten, twelve thousand feet and coming back down Fairly quick flights. Why no one was able to escape, that remains to be seen. And whether or not this aircraft had exceeded any of its rered excuse, any of its limitation remains to be seen. The only information I was able to find is publicly available ADSB data from places like Flight Aware and it gives you the ground speed but it doesn't give you the airpeed. and certainly, We don't have anything like a black box or the equivalent from inside the aircraft that shows what sort of stressors or what sort of speeds the aircraft was experiencing during this flight. There was some discussion on the news media, you know, referencing eyewitnesses that possibly a structural failure of the airplane And You know, some of these airplanes actually exceed the limitations after they unload the skydivers because they dive out of the way themselves and sometimes they exceed the limits of the airplane. I'm not saying that's the cause of this one. I'm just saying that that has been an issue for quite a while. While I was at the board, we' had many discussions about this about the way the airplane gets out of the way the skydives. They want to get down on the ground as quickly as possible and take another load up So and you know that's how they make their money is how many trips they can make bringing people up to jump out of the airplane. So all of that's going to have to be looked at by the NTSP and they will because this has been on the NTSP's radar for thirty years that I know of So it It needs a good shop look this time because we might have some good information out of this airplane. That was not always the case in previous accidents involving skydiving And the last of the recent events was a recent crash, which happens to be the first fatal crash, or first fatal accident involving a Net jets's aircraft. This was a let me get the There we are, we have the aircraft there on the screen. and of course, I forgot what the model number was. This was a FessNA six hundred eighty eight that was flying from Cabo San Lucas to Austin. and there was some sort of issue as it was nearing the Texas border, and the crew made an emergency landing on a highway in or near in Loreredo, Texas The initial reports said something ineffective they had a fuel issue. said to myself, This is ajet aircraft Very likely flown by two very experienced pilots because NetJetets, as many of you know is one of the largest, if not the largest operator of executive type aircraft around, used by executives all over the world to do short, how should I say it? short notice flights from point A to point B. and Koblam Lucas to Ain is not going to be something stretching the capacity of this aircraft. And very likely, if this aircraft were properly loaded with fuel would have had enough fuel to get to its destination, divert to another airport be able to fly around for forty five minutes on top of that with plenty of spare. So saying that they had an issue as they were approaching Loreredo doesn't make sense. That said, there's some pictures out there on the internet that shows people Jumping into action, using hand tools and whatnot to break out the cockpit windows. Oly one person on board the aircraft was killed. everyone else survived. And so hats off to them for whoever these folks were taking action at a moment's notice when that action was needed. Well, it's interesting to listen to some of the other podcasters out there You know, other usually captains or pilots that are very quick to come with a conclusion even though we don't have a lot of data. So there's been a lot of people speculating online that they ran the airplane out of fuel. It's way too early to say that. It is a possibility, but I think it's a very remote possibility I think we may have either fuel leak, could have had a fuel leak, and we could have had a bad fuel gauges because very often the people who fuel the airplane will use to fuel gauges, not necessarily stick the tank. They'll say give me, you know, give me three hundred gallons, one hundred fifty aide And that's what the fueler does and it doesn't he doesn't the fueler doesn't care. what the gugers say he was just putting that amount of gallons in the airplane. So it's going to be interesting to see what method of fueling they did. It's down in Mexico. so I'm sure they're going to have to talk to that person to fuel the airplane to see what he did or she and then also What kind of interface that they have with the flight crew. But I'm not ready to jump all over the flight crew yet because there's fuel quantity issues, fuel leak issues. You NetjS has a limited number of mechanics on their own payroll that works on their airplanes. They usually contract it out. and in fact, I think one of the major FBO's does a Lion share will work for them I know that that's the case in a few airports that I've had worked in in the recent past the last five years or so, I know that Netjet uses local facilities to do a lot of the work. So We don't have enough information ourselves to make a judgment, and I really wish that some of these other people that are on these podcasts would take a minute and before they open their mouth I mean, it's just it's just unbelievable. And I still have a burr my saddle about the one the one particular so called Ctain expert who was blaming pilots without regard for their family or anything as far as factual, just making a determination himself based on very limited information and blaming the pilots. And it's premature. It's premature. Yeah, it could be the pilots. but why are you doing it without adequate information? Just because you can speculate We try to avoid that. Do we get caught with speculating? sometometimes we do But we try to avoid it like the plague We try to try not to do that Well one thing I won't speculate about is what happened at the end of the flight. Whatever the pilots might have done or not done beforehand, the fact is they were able to put the aircraft down on a highway and not some eight lane or ten lane highway. This was a two or three lane highway near the airport. and were all but one person was able to survive And one can tell from the photos from the site, there was a post crash fire. I'm not going to say it was a fuel fed fire or what have you. And the aircraft did break apart. The rear part of the aircraft was sitting at some distance from the rest of the fuselage. So this was a very challenging landing. They were able to execute it. sort of reminiscent of what happened a few years ago in Florida where an aircraft had issues and they put it down on I believe it was Instate seventy five with a lot of traffic on it. And three of the five people on board survive, all the passengers survive. bothoth pilots unfortunately perish. So those are two examples where a pilot or a flight crew of an executive jet had an emergency situation, were able to put the aircraft down and have at least some of the people on board survive It's unusual. Normally this segment of the industry has a very safe record. As you said in the beginning, this is the first fatal accident NetJets had. NetJets has been a company that has really paid attention with procedures. They have a pretty good And I've actually looked at it. They have an SMS program to get information out of their pilots and their mechanics. that they act upon. So it it is it is one of the better operators in this country. So it is unfortunate that they've had this. I just hope the NTSB just holds to their own procedures and runs this one to ground because this one might might not be, you know, the obvious is you ran out of the ran out of fuel They might have to do some real heavy lifting to figure out why the fuel was down there, Especially if it was a case where the airplane was the engines were using more fuel than they should have a dumping fuel because of a leak. So it it's going to be a little bit challenging for the NTSP to get through there. So it's going take notot only the MTSB's expertise but also the expertise in in their maintenance department as well. to try to make sure that there was no procedures and fueling and maintenance were that needed to be Mified And we're going to move from one fuel event to another fuel event, specifically, episode three threety three, which we published earlier this year. This was the one titled Student Pilot Runs Out of Fuel. And we had a question from one of our listeners, one of our viewers there, Inlined to fly, where Thene comment they had was he or she admitted to being a former FAN NTSB investigator, who, in that person's experience found that many of the times a pilot claimed that an engine failure was actually fuel exhaustion. And this person inclined to fly said, It's better to admit it rather than to deny it and maybe face an enforcement action. John he told me before went to air that this is something you've seen that if you admit to something, FAO go easy on you. Yes, it has happened many times before in my experience where if you admit that you made a mistake with the FAA and help and maybe even do a safety seminar for them or whatever, the certificate action may not be taken. They'll still record it, but they may not take any punitive action against you your certificate. It's not the first time. But you know what, I have a bigger concern here. And that is I don't know that all of these are being reported. And I think everybody here knows, I know you know Todd, and I think everybody that listens to us know that I'm always hopping on pre planning, before flight and a good pre flight, and then putting your head on the swivel at the end So as I'm going through accidents lately and I've been going through quite a few over the last several weeks getting material for future shows And I recently found a newspaper article that talked about an airplane that ran out of fuel and landed on the highway. And I went digging to the NPSV And there was no record of it And then I went to the FIA and started digging, and there was no record of it. So now I went back and started to check different pieces. In the article it mentioned that the police were involved And guess what? The police did come involved. This airplane was on its way home. It was close to its home airport when it ran out of fuel, landed on a highway, no damage, no injury, noobody on the road We very early in the morning. It was a night flight, but daybak was just breaking And Apparently and this you know, this is a verbal piececes that I picked up. so there's not there's no real record here. but apparently The police took one of these pilots to a gas station where they got some gas, maybe to the airport, that's not clear, where they got some gas, back to the airplane, gased the airplane up, and then the police blocked the roads on both ends where the airplane was and the direction it was taken off, and they flew the airplane back to the airport And I got to thinking about that. I wonder how often that happens. You know, If you're out in Arizona, Nevada, New Mexico, Texas, in fact, the middle of the country, virtually everywhere, even in Ohio, Indiana, where there's a lot of farm country, that's very easy to happen. Now if you're a stranger in Oklahoma, wouldould the pilots do that for you? I don't know But if you're that close to your home airport, that's a different story. That may actually be something that happens from time to time. So I would ask our audience if they know of anything like that, similar to that. let us know Just do You actually were reading the mind of our listener Richard Turner six two hundred seventy eight because for the same show he had the question, how could this incident fly under the radar basically not be advertised? Well, you just gave the answer. Circumstances are such where it doesn't enter into the record. By the way, some things are reportable events you do serious damage to an airplane, otherther things aren't. they're voluntarily reported. and this is something I see all the time. You come across something like this where you're involved, where it was a close call, no harm, no foul. Write a report, send it to the aviation safety repeporting system at NASA, which is running this program on behalf of the FAA. and the rest of the community can learn You're near disasters. I use the database all the time and I'm always finding fascinating things which give insights into events that didn't quite result in an accident did result in some educational value I actually did the fuel And he what he to I don't want to say it by memory because I might make a mistake. But anyway, we know how much fuel he took on to he bought and paid for and then just did the numbers because he did a multiple stop. was he was building time at night and getting checked out. So we know the flight time and he actually used a little bit more than what he took on, not a lot, just a little bit, maybe two gallons. So that calls into question, how much fuel was in when he fueled it up, did he make a mistake and maybe look at the gauges instead of sticking the tank? assume that a quarter tank was four gallons Well, I'm just picking that number out of the air, but just assume the number that because the gauge read a quarter tank and added fuel accordingly, That's not an acceptable behavior. You've got to double check. You've got to be sure, not assume You know, we all know what happens when you assume something And so you can't do it. You've got to take your time and do it right Now this feeds into a question that came from episode three hundred and thirty one, Can AI improve aviation safety? And we had a listener or a viewer, Charles Furling four three eight two, whose comment was, I'll play along. AI will fly the jet before it can rig the flight control unit. And the implied question there was What are some things human can do around aircraft that AI really can't replace? Let me just say right off, taking a dipstick and checking your fuel tank? that's one thing AI can't do There's a whole bunch of'm checking your oil R? Do the visual inspection on your airplane. you know, prop damage, you know, looking at your tres, making sure they' get the proper air pressure in it. The list goes on and on and on. AI can't do any of that they also AI can't fly the airplane, but it can help you a little bit with information but I can't fly it. And one of in my presentations, one of the things and both Greg and I say this What if Sllally who' used to work for USAir and I work for USA, so we've crossed paths many times together What if it was just AI on that airplane was flying they AI would have tried to get that airplane back to the airport because it may or may not had enough energy to do that, either Titelbur or back to Laguardia. But the point is that and Sully said in some statements afterwards He was thinking ahead about where he was going to put the airplane down. And if he turned to go back to La Guardia, there's nothing but houses and buildings and private residence and high rises between where he was and back to the airport. Never mind making the impossible turn And The outcome would have been different if he tried to go back In fact, he recognized that early on because of his training. you may recall that very early in the transmission to the tower, they were tryrying to push him back to either Lguardia or divert him over toch Peterbough, and he clearly said unable. He said, we may be in the Hudson So he was already thinking about how much energy he had left and where he was going to go. And this is by memory as well, so it may not be one hundred percent accurate. but I kind of remember that he went over the George Washington brridge at approximately nine hundred feet and the bridge height where he went over was eight hundred fifty feet So that was that was pretty close for a no engine airplane. So it It's of the things I tried to sorry about that. One of the things I tried to do with this particular question is let me use AI to basically illustrate the promise and the problems with AI. I thought, okay, AI, give me something that illustrates the relationship between human questions and AI conversations. We have a nice little fancy graphic here. However, it can only do something like that based on the information it has available. If you don't put the information in ahead of time, either in your question or in its data, it can't answer the question. likeike John just said, unless you put into the AI's brain All the various combinations of bizarre things that could happen, when a bizarre thing happens, it might not be able to give you a good answer. In fact, they probably won't give you a good answer. So yeah, AI is a great tool. Heck, I use it for this graphic. But it's not a tool that replaces decision making. It's not a tool that replaces experience. It's not a tool that replaces judgment That is still a very human capability Yes. And unfortunately we don't always behave the way we should in making those assessments You know, the number of airplanes I see running out of fuel in events that get reported, it's scary It's scary Well, our last question for today is not AI related, but is related to the Lagordy event that happened a few weeks ago. from episode three hundred twenty six, which is called What Really Went Wrong at Leagordy Airport, we should have a graphic here that shows basically the aftermath, which unfortunately was fatal to the two pilots. And Rob T Pim sixty two, should the temporary closure of a runway involved in an active emergency response be treated as a standard preventive measure As many of you recall, there were fire trucks that were approaching the runway, when for whatever reason, a fire truck entered the active runway, and the landing aircraft hit the fire truck. But I was wondering out loud looking at his question, is this going to be unnecessarily disruptive if you make a standard practice of whenever there's an emergency vehicle or something crossing the runway, you close the runway Well, I'll tell you that I was involved in a couple of them. R right? So I was involved with an airplane that had an an accident in The middle of a country I think it was Stt Louis, but I can't remember exactly now because it's thirty years ago. But anyway So we had an event H. T airplanes collided onn an airport And that if would continue to operate And they were landing airplanes on the runway that this one airplane just turned off of. And they had passengers that evacuated the airplane wandering around the airport. They came down the slides and went out And they were they were scattering, getting away from the airplane absolutely crazy and And the NTSV, I was on the board at the time. we We u issued some rather pointy Comments about the operator of the airport and the folks involved. for allowing that to continue And it's not just something in the United States. I was also involved in one in Italy, very similar And they continue to operate as well So it's almost like the controllers are having to and they got all these airplanes that they're trying to get in and get out. and they're just using different paces of the airport to do that All right, so it does happen. Controllers make mistakes. They get just like pilots, just like mechanics, dispatchers, you get focused on the issue and you just keep on going And And without thinking about the negative consequences of continuing. I think it should be standard operating procedures when you have an emergency that you just stop, let everybody take a breath.esn't mean you can't start it up again, but just not just do a pause. You know, a minute two minutes, let everybody get their their minds back on whatever job they had and digest additional information and then continue on Well let me ask you this, John. I know that the NTSB and the FA have very different roles when it comes to things like this. NTSB is all about safety. They do not consider the operational rather the profit or Revenue aspects of decision making, whereereas the FAA has a job of regulating air traffic as well as promoting aviation. what kind of pushback would you expect from the FAA and its lobbyists saying, hey, you, we should close down the runway completely. if it means your airplanes are going to go and do a missed approach and maybe spend a few more minutes in the sky? Safety is paramount Do you think the FA would say, yes, we agree with this, or would there be a fight? No, I think the FAA would if whatever feelings they have, they publicly they're going to not fight that issue. The one that will fight that issue is the airport themselves because their revenue depends upon those airplanes takaking off and landing with landing fees. So they're going to be concerned about that. to us maybe maybe not the CEO of the airports peopleeople below them They want to keep the airport open, keep the airport moving, you know, don't want to inconvenience hundreds of passengers or maybe even thousands. So there's a lot of moving parts in that equation. And I tend to look at things solely from the safety point of view and you know, the fact in that that one accident that I said where the passengers came down the slides and were running all over the airport the truts emergency equipment wasn't even there yet And these people were running around the airport and they were on the edge of the runway where other airplanes were landing So it's crazy. You need to. you have an event, you got to pause. We send everybody go around You know, manage the manage the, uh holding patents until everybody else gets their act together And the situation is firmly under control So I No, it's crazy. It's crazy to do that You know, L Guide here is busy airput And You know nobody wants to send those airplanes around the holding pad while they deal with the United airplane that had an initial emergency. But this is the consequences when you try to push You. Push too many airplanes with too many other events going on And we' got the emergency airplane We've got all kinds of equipment I mean, we talked about a little bit. I've been looking at some in the past, I looked at some of the radar and the pictures of the airport proper with the equipment that was running because of that emergency. Man, there was tons of equipment moving on, which I expect from an airport like Aaguardia. They have a lot of equipment So they expect them to have everybody all hands on deck We're trying to get out and deal with this emergency. But in the meantime, the controllers are still pushing airplanes in on the same runway that the airplane just turned off of. just we need to figure out a way to make a safe pause until we figure out, you know, it might only be five minutes. but just do it so that everybody gets the chance to take a breather, assess what's going on, and then crank it up again if the need arises, if it can be done safely So And Livuaria is a very compact little airport, so it's It's probably a bigger risk at La Guardia than it is at JFK or other airports. And with that, I think it is time for us to start thanking everyone involved in the show I'd like to thank of course you, John for giving your contributions, which again, your wisdom is appreciated by based on the fan mail we get. and also like to thank our major host of EO, which has been supporting our show for the entire time we've been up and running and they offer all sorts of insurance products for aircraft owners and operators and check them out. If you don't have them already, check out what they have to offer for you. And also I'd like to encourage our audience who are members to send us questions