Posted on 2nd September 2010 by gjohnson in Uncategorized
airplane accident attorney, airplane accident lawyer, airplane accidents, airplane crashes
It’s been a bad year so far for airline crashes, and it may be hard to keep that number down in the future, according to The Wall Street Journal Thursday.
In a story headlined “The Difficulty in Improving Air Safety Now,” The Journal reports that there have been 13 fatal crashes of passenger airlines through August this year, compared with 10 crashes for all of last year.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704791004575465503445748046.html?mod=WSJ_hpp_editorsPicks_3
And the 13 figure for this year doesn’t include military and private-plane fatal crashes.
But the gist of the story is that there may not be many more air safety improvements that can be made, that in fact these measures may ”be bottoming out,” as The Journal put it.
I don’t know if I agree with that thesis, but the story contains a wealth of information and statistics about plane crashes.
Perhaps not surprisingly, most crashes occur when a plane is taking off or attempting to land.
And regional airlines score have much worse safety records than larger aircraft, “involved in five of the seven fatal accidents on scheduled airline flights in the past 10 years,” The Journal wrote, citing data from the National Transportation Safety Board.
Plane crashes have multiple causes, and about 80 percent of the time they involve human error; about 50 percent have causes like bad weather; and 20 percent of the time there is something wrong with the plane, according to The Journal.
Posted on 31st August 2010 by gjohnson in Uncategorized
airline crashes, airplane accidents, runway overruns
Federal aviation officials are reexamining how some jet braking systems perform in wet weather, according to The Wall Street Journal.
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB100014240527487043kungn 23704575462000284345266.html?mod=WSJ_WSJ_US_News_5
The National Transportation Safety Board is doing the reassessment in the wake of of several recent incidents where jets overran runways in foul weather, The Journal reported Tuesday.
For example, on Dec. 22 last year American Airlines Flight 331 coming from Miami to Kingston, Jamaica, hit the runway midway down during a storm. The pilots used all the breaking power available, but the Boeing 737 ran off the end of the runway. The jet ruined its landing gear and its fuselage broke in two, according to The Journal.
By the NTSB’s standards, the jet in Jamaica should have been able to land safely. But an investigation found that even when the maximum braking power was exerted, the jet failed to decelerate to the degree that flight tests and technical calculations had predicted, The Journal said.
So federal safety officials are considering making recommendations to reexamine and possibly make safety margins for landings stricter.
The Journal said that runway overruns are the largest category of accidents for commercial airlines around the world.
