On aviation and the media

There used to be a time when newspapers, the so-called ‘quality’ ones at any rate, employed Aviation Correspondents.

These would be ex-air force or retired commercial pilots, or someone who worked at a professional level in the aviation industry. The main thing was that they knew what they were talking about and could write a story accordingly.

All that seems to have gone by the board with today’s, sensation seeking tabloids intent on selling as many copies as they can with scant regard for truth or accuracy. Even worse is TV ‘breaking news’ where the channel is trying to be the first on air with the ‘news’ at any cost.

We don’t have Aviation Correspondents any more. We have people with an ‘ology’ in ‘journospeak’ and a vivid imagination instead.

Time and again an aviation incident is blown out of all proportion or just badly misreported by (so-called) journalists with little interest in establishing fact from fiction before submitting their copy.

Headline: ‘Stricken jet plunges/plummets thousands of feet in seconds!!!!’  ‘pilots wrestle frantically with the controls!!!!’ (Add ‘narrowly missed school/convent/old people’s home/hospital’ etc. to taste)

No it didn’t. Passenger aircraft cruise at up to 40,000 feet, an altitude where the air is too thin and too cold for people to breath. If exposed to such an environment a healthy human has just 12 seconds of useful consciousness at moderate activity levels and 15 seconds with minimal activity. Thereafter consciousness is lost and brain damage can occur.

The lower the altitude the higher the period of consciousness – 5 minutes and 10 minutes at 25,000 feet and at 12,000 feet you can breath and function normally again. Even that is conservative. People have successfully climbed Mount Everest (27,000 feet) without oxygen!

That is why, in the event of sudden cabin decompression, breathing masks drop from compartments above the seats and the flight crew will initiate a speedy and controlled descent to 12,000 feet or lower.

Newspapers please note – this is NOT a plunge or a plummet. It is a controlled maneuver at a descent rate of between 4,500 and 5,000 feet per minute (6,000 fpm in some circumstances) that from 40,000 feet to 12,000 feet will take 5-6 minutes.

A skydiver reaches a terminal velocity of around 120 mph (10,500 fpm) before opening his parachute. Now that’s a plummet!

During a recent Boeing 747 cabin decompression, video footage taken by a passenger during the emergency descent (they were still wearing their masks) showed meal trays still sitting firmly on tables.

QANTAS cabin decompression

One passenger reported that, when the aircraft levelled out at 10,000 feet, his glass of beer was still where he had placed it on his tray table when the masks dropped with not a drop spilled.

Hardly the terrifying plunge that some journo’s would have you believe.

Generally there is little difference in aircraft attitude (nose down) during an emergency descent compared with a normal approach to land at an airport. It’s the vertical speed that matters.

Pilots do not ‘wrestle with controls’. If they did they’d probably break something! At the cruising levels where modern passenger aircraft operate, computers are in control. Even an emergency descent is pre-programmed into the Flight Director and controlled by the Auto Pilot.

Quite often during a flight the seat belt signs will be switched on and passengers will be asked to return to their seats and strap in because of air turbulence caused by weather conditions near the aircraft.

Clear air turbulence or CAT is a bit different. If an aircraft flies into an area of CAT then, yes, there will be abrupt and significant changes of altitude and unsecured people and objects inside the cabin will experience weightlessness and/or positive G forces with resulting injury and damage. It is a thoroughly frightening but, thankfully, quite infrequent experience because most modern passenger aircraft have weather radar that can warn the flight crew of the existence of CAT ahead. Training and experience can also assist the flight crew to predict the possibility.

Headline: ‘Terrified passengers screamed and prayed!!!!’ ‘My life flashed before my eyes!!!!’

Well, mayhap as Catweazle was want to say. Given the standard of driving in Thailand my life flashes before my eyes several times during a routine trip from Chonburi to Bangkok on the motorway!

Look again at the video taken during the Qantas 747’s emergency descent. It all looks pretty calm to me. If anyone was crying it would have been children experiencing ear pain due to the rapidly changing air pressure and not knowing how to counteract it.

As on many similar occasions, this situation was under control and the passengers knew that. It does not need a sensation seeking journo to invent things that were simply not happening nor to embroider the accounts extracted from passengers who have just disembarked and who are still trying to put the experience into perspective for themselves.

Yes – accidents do happen – sometimes unavoidable but more often man-made and it is here that a responsible press can help by drawing attention to inadequacies before accidents happen rather than sensationalising the aftermath.

The 1-2-Go crash at Phuket was caused by management greed in bending and ignoring basic safety regulations and in employing pilots of questionable ability (because they were cheap). There were some badly frightened passengers who survived that tragedy whilst 90 people, including both pilots, died.

By drawing attention to what Udom Tantiprasongchai, the gangster who runs this apology for an airline along with its sister airline Orient Thai, was up to then this tragedy might have been avoided. The press, particularly the Thai press, manifestly failed the public on this occasion.

Then there was the Adam Air crash in Indonesia where a serious mistake by a less than experienced flight crew (they inadvertently switched off the auto pilot at cruising altitude) resulted in loss of aircraft control while both were concentrating on trouble shooting an instrument malfunction that was, in itself, of no particular significance. The aircraft entered an unrecoverable dive and hit the ocean at a very high speed. There were no survivors.

No journalist could possibly know what happened in the cabin during the 2-3 minutes it took for those unfortunate people to die but, by publicising that airline’s well known inadequacies earlier, they might have hastened it’s demise before this needless loss of life.

Thank God we can count on the sheer professionalism of flight and cabin crews generally – like the BA 777 at Heathrow and the above-mentioned Qantas 747 off the Philippines and the way in which they managed their respective emergencies. Consider also that the vast majority of air flights – day by day, year by year, are just as professionally conducted.

The popular press rarely reports the positive aspects of air travel but then, I suppose, such mundane stuff doesn’t sell potential refuse wrapping.

Pandora’s box

In 1949 when I was 6 years old we moved to Australia. We lived first in Melbourne and later in Hobart, Tasmania where, because my Dad worked with the Government Housing Department, we were given a brand new house on the estate at Warrane (or ‘the Warren’ as it was known locally).

When we first moved in we had electricity but the roads weren’t finished and we had a fair hike to get to the nearest bus stop. Most significantly there was no mains sewage. That didn’t arrive until a couple of years later.

In the back garden of each house was a combination outside toilet and garden shed. The ‘facilities’ consisted of a wooden bench with a hole in it under which was a 20 gallon metal can partially filled with creosote to keep the smell down and to discourage the flies. The cans were replaced through a flap at the back of the building. In Australian parlance this was ‘the Dunny’.

The local council provided a weekly sewage collection service using trucks that looked not unlike a brewers dray but carrying something a lot less savoury than barrels of ale!

These were ‘Dunny Carts’ and the stalwarts who manned them were universally known as ‘the Dunny Men’.

There was a song around at the time called ‘The Butchers Boy’

Mama dear come over here
And see who’s looking in my window
It’s the butcher boy and oh
He’s got a bundle in his hand

(Written by Paolo Citorello and sung by Rudy Vallee)

I hasten to add that the song goes on to better explain what the ‘bundle in his hand’ actually was – something to do with sausages I believe.

Of course it was parodied to

Mama dear beware beware
Just look who’s passing by the window
It’s the Dunny Man and
He’s got a Dunny Can up on his back

At the first sight and sound of the Dunny Cart careering round the corner and into your street festooned with strings of flying toilet paper and accompanied by it’s own personal swarm of flies, doors and windows banged shut, children were dragged unceremoniously into the house and the area went silent as the populace collectively held its breath.

God help you if you were actually on the Dunny when these guys arrived. No quarter was given.

The cans were designed with lids for sanitation and the protection of those handling them but the lids were seldom used. It took too much time to fit them and the men were on piece work. The more cans they dealt with the more they earned hence the flying paper and a certain amount of spillage.

After the Dunny Cart had departed and after a decent interval to let the air clear, doors and windows were cautiously re-opened and life returned to normal.

The depot for the sewage operation was by the river in North Hobart where the waste was loaded into a specially designed barge that took it out into the Derwent River estuary to be dumped. The barge made the trip two or three times a day accompanied by a huge flock of seagulls as it made its way down river.

Warrane was on the other side of the river from Hobart city. There was a regular ferry service from Bellerive but if you went by bus or car it was across a floating bridge with a lifting span on the city side to allow ships to pass through. The sewage barge was a regular disrupter of bridge traffic.

A ship passes through the lifting span of Hobarts floating bridge

In the foreground work has begun on the replacement bridge

If you were unfortunate enough to be caught when a vessel needed to go through the bridge then you were in for a 20 minute or so wait as the span was lifted, the ship passed through and the span lowered again. My school was on the Hobart side but the excuse that ‘the bridge was up’ if kids were late for school was seldom accepted.

‘Yer should’ve left home earlier’ (thump).

However, if you just said ‘the Pandora’ then you got a sympathetic nod and no further questions asked.

Why? Guess what the sewage barge was named?

A real Pandora’s Box!