Malaysian Flight 370 Crash Update Plus War Impacts Aviation Safety Episode 108

welcome to the flight safety detectives hosts john golia and greg fife two of the world's most respected aviation safety experts talk all things related to aviation and aerospace this podcast and the flight safety detectives youtube channel are brought to you by the professional aviation maintenance association pama and avemco insurance a world-class provider of aviation insurance and you're one stop for all general aviation insurance needs get a customized quote at evemco.com or give them a call at 888-879-0389 tell them you're a listener of the show and receive a 5 discount now it's time to buckle up because it's wheels up for the latest episode of flight safety detectives good afternoon john hey good afternoon todd i guess we got the show this week because greg is on the road very good which means we can actually exercise some discipline and do what the people have been asking they've been asking us to not chit chat so much yes i know we're friendly and all that but to get right down to business and the business at hand is we're going to talk about several things we're going to talk about the anniversary of mh370 many of you know about this all too well we're also going to talk about something contemporary we have a lot of stuff going on with the various sanctions against russia because of what's going on ukraine one of the side effects might be in general aviation in that a lot of general aviation aircraft may be affected by those sanctions we're going to talk about that a bit and we'll end up by talking about me which is something i don't like to do but as many of you know i'm getting back into flying after several decades away and it's been an interesting journey so far and we'll talk about that at the end so john let's hear what you have to say all right so on on the issue of malaysia 370 today is the anniversary it's been eight years in the making and it's sort of fallen off the the radar in the in most of the world uh especially now with what's going on in the ukraine but there's still still a lot of people over in the in the far east that have an interest in this and in australia there is a group of pilots that have been lobbying for years uh to to move the search area from where the australian government and the malaysian government have insisted on doing all this work and moving it further south where pilots believe the airplane went because of the glide and that they most likely the captain was still alive and of course the malaysians don't want to admit that it was the captain who did it even though there's a proponents of evidence that clearly indicates the captain had done it and we are attempting to get the the spokesman for this pilot group out of australia to come on the program it's been a logistical challenge because they're 12 hours essentially different from us so we would have to do this in the middle of the night to get uh get them on but we are trying to do that as we speak but there's a big push down in australia again to to get ocean infinity to go to uh further south 39 salt i believe it is instead of 38 cells the latitude to uh conduct a search there and that's where many many many pilots believe that's where the airplane is and i made a few statements there them at the beginning about uh the people that believe the pilot uh the leak on the fbi information on the pilot's computer uh most of the most people that have looked at all the data believe it was murder suicide so we uh we will get to that uh that whole issue again of 370 and see if we can get new light on it based upon what these uh pilots down in australia have been uh working on in the discovery of information i mean they've got they've got a lot of information they got disclosures from from government people that admitted that that the malaysian government told them that it was a a murder suicide even though publicly they weren't admitting that so it's going to be interesting to see i hear how how one they believe and unfolded so that that's coming up uh in a future show but it's clear that uh this in this airplane is not going to go away anytime soon and i'd like to add that it's been eight years and uh john and i and several people that we know have been involved with giving comments and very little speculation on what happened and so an eight year recap the facts on the ground are few and here is a synopsis of it the best evidence is that the airplane was under control and went toward the middle of the indian ocean a route that it's hard to do accidentally but if you can uh program the airplane's a flight computer it's something that's fairly straightforward which is one of the reasons why a flight crew member or someone who's inside or suspected that having been involved in some way there have been a few pieces of debris found on the fringes of the indian ocean in the uh i believe reunion island and west excuse me the east coast of africa some of which have been positively identified as being part of the aircraft so conspiracy theories aside something happened to the airplane it happened in the indian ocean now segway to our next in the french the french have collected those pieces of debris and they're not releasing them because uh in france aviation accidents are crimes so it's under control of their judicial system so they're keeping control of those bits and pieces as they found them off the french coast of those islands which is a french possession so they have jurisdiction over them it will be an interesting international diplomatic process to finally finalize this investigation whenever that happens now there's actually an indirect connection to our next segment uh one of the sister aircraft of mh370 another malaysian airlines triple seven was actually shot down over ukraine several months later accidentally presumably by a missile battery from the russians there was some disturbances and basically a war going on there eight years before what's happening today in ukraine and fast forwarding to today one of the issues with the ongoing conflict in ukraine which has been going on for about 10 days as we speak is that there are massive sanctions against russian airliners russian aircraft and entities that have control over aircraft including some general aviation aircraft especially a long-distance business aircraft which may fly to and from places where they're now banned so you not only have a situation where over the entire eu and over north america russian aircraft in aircraft controlled by russian entities are not allowed to fly without special permission you have a situation where all the various companies that support these aircraft from engines to avionics to maps etc they're cutting their ties with with russia so there's a potential short and long term safety issue with these aircraft which may not be allowed to fly in certain areas but more importantly they may not be up to date but when it comes to maintenance when it comes to parts when it comes to updating software etc and this is an uncharted piece of territory but john if you can add anything to this can you think of an equivalent situation where you have such a large number of sophisticated aircraft that are cut off from maintenance and updating never never had it before you know in years past in the soviet union they used russian-built aircraft to the business leaders all the money people in that country but now since the things uh the wall came down many of those people have scattered their possessions and their wealth around europe and in the world you know that there is uh one of those uh rich russians owns a soccer team football team in the uk which it just was taken away from them and he used to fly himself uh on his jet back and forth from russia uh to the uk uh i can remember seeing in in the south of france a number of huge mansion mansions which i was told were owned by russians again all the uh the russians would that have all the wealth and they have these huge mansions located all around europe and uh so those those properties are going to be seized and the the airplanes will not be you know the persona non grata so they won't be flying into those countries in fact the opposite has been happening a lot of airplanes that are russian owned or maybe not even russian owned but russian operated have been flying out we uh you have some details on the one coming out of egypt yes there was a report a few days ago there was a an aeroflot airline i believe it was an airbus a320 or a321 where in flight on the way to cairo its a certificate of operation and its insurance elapsed it was uh well basically it couldn't legally fly it could land at the nearest available or next airport but it couldn't legally take off again but before authorities could confiscate the airplane or repossession or what have you the airplane took off again without insurance without a valid certificate of operation and that has obvious implications whether or not there are people on board or not that aircraft could be flying in such ways that are going counter to the long-standing international agreements as to how aircraft especially international flight should be operated and without going into great detail when it comes to russian airlines roughly half the aircraft in the russian airline inventory are actually leased and these leasing companies are outside in in the us and europe and whatnot and those contracts have been canceled suspended but happy but presumably roughly half the airliners being flown by russian airlines should be returned to the leasing companies at some point in the very near future whether or not that happens or not is up for grabs now another issue getting back to the shoot down of the malaysian airliner one of the issues that happened then was that there was a conflict area and civil airliners were allowed to fly over that conflict area there's no real international authority to keep people from doing so and there was a risk in doing so and that risk ended up with an airplane being shot down right now if you go to flight radar 24 flight aware you can look and see what's happening right now over uh belarus over ukraine over western russia very few commercial airliners are flying most of those are going to be russian airlines so the world world's airlines have done the reasonable thing they're completely avoiding the zone where this sort of thing may be happening so for those of you who are flying in europe especially going to and from the middle east going from turkey the airlines are aware of this and it's fairly clear that they're staying away from the trouble spots however there's a big however no one can predict where this will go no one can predict whether or not this will stay over ukraine over russia or whether things could happen outside of those borders and if things change you could change quickly and if it does one would hope that the airlines of the world will see to it that the aircraft stay way back and gone from there you know i i would like to see the condition of those airplanes when and if they ever come back out of the soviet union because i suspect that they'll be in horrible shape you know and you know i've seen russian airplanes i can remember being at the singapore air show uh many years ago and the soviet union had a uh a pretty good size display of their airplanes out there and i'll tell you that uh they don't change tires until the air shows you know not an air show but the air inside the tire is now ambient air because they they were just worn down past balls into the into the the structure of the tire and they were still using them so they they uh their idea of maintenance is considerably different than uh most western countries or airlines on the rest of the world they they use things to the worn out point before they get rid of them now for the younger members of the audience which is most of the audience at this point uh john and i go back far enough that we were around in aviation uh during that time when the soviet union was a thing this is years before the berlin wall fell where one of the things that was a reality was that when it came to aviation the soviet sphere including china and what used to be the warsaw pact eastern europe they were operating under a slightly different set of rules when it comes aircraft design and operation not necessarily a bad set of rules but because of the separation because of the cold war there were almost i would say two very similar but distinct systems in how to design aircraft how to operate aircraft how to maintain aircraft and one can make arguments one way or the other whether or not it was a safer or more risky way to operate but no one can argue that these were the same way of operation some of those aircraft are still in service although they're fewer and fewer as time goes on especially on the civil side but there are still ways of doing things in ways that for example airports were designed even that were different in the former soviet union than they were in the west and some of the habits organizational habits haven't changed fast enough for our taste well i actually before this this crisis started i was asked to become involved with trying to get certification for the mc21 which is a soviet-built passenger airline soviet engines but mostly western avionics mostly and that was an ongoing project the airplane's flying but it was built under that system that you just described and now trying to get it to meet the western world's certification standards was proving to be quite a chore so i i was asked to become involved with it uh from the point of view of the maintenance programs and maintenance manuals and and uh mels and all the all the maintenance things that are needed to keep an airplane flying so the project hadn't even started yet we've been talking about it for a couple of years and uh it's over now it's it's gonna die for sure and one one last comparison between the two systems that might be fairly obvious if you follow not necessarily aviation but space um the russians of course the sylvia is the first to put a satellite and orbit uh what was it uh come on now um and the designer of of that rocket system i might be mispronouncing his name corolla some of his of those designs are distinct the soyuz design for the soyuz booster it looks like you have these four fat modules on the side and the central core that's basically been a 60 plus year design some variation of that has evolved into what's launching soyuz a spacecraft to the international space station as we speak you might say well heck they had this design back in the 50s why they still have the same basic philosophy in my opinion they have reasons one of them being it works compare that to spacex what spacex does with rocket boosters completely uh different from the philosophy of of the old soviet union for one thing it's reusable and another thing it's being built uh fairly uh well because it's reusable they don't have to build hundreds of boosters to launch hundreds of missions so does this mean that the russian space design is old hat and unsafe and shouldn't be used well my point of view is it's still working may not be economically viable but it is workable and i think to john's point the same thing may apply to the aircraft design it might be technically feasible to design an airliner in russia but it may not be economically feasible to go through the certification requirements and the other requirements that you would need to maintain the standards out of the norm in western europe japan australia us canada et cetera yeah one of the things that i've seen over the years with the soviets is they don't do what we do we make when we when we design a new airplane we make a good leap in technology when the soviets upgrade something they it is just that an upgrade if you look at their tank systems it goes all the way back to the second world war in their tanks and they just keep tweaking them instead of designing from scratch so it's uh it's more cost effective but it has its drawbacks to our limitations maybe not drawbacks so it's just a difference in philosophy their rockets are safe they in fact i mean i've seen uh space launches in russia in the middle of a blizzard and they just launched and i i also was out on the west coast when we were doing the launching off that sea launch off that platform that left long beach and went out in the middle of the ocean a thousand miles uh to launch satellites in uh from out there and those rockets would sit on that that floating platform for a long time six months a year and then they bring them up there raise them up and hit the button and away they'd go so that their technology may be old but i think it's very very reliable compared to some of the some of the things that we do i mean we just had a new rocket system that that had to be uh bumped a couple of times delayed a couple of times because at the last minute the computers since something was wrong so it i don't i wouldn't say their systems are inadequate i would just say they're different big time different but they're different now this uh this wasn't planned at all to have three segments that actually had some connective tissue between them but speaking about russia and in former days of soviet union the last time i actually had a bino flight review where i was actually totally certified to fly a small aircraft was 1989 when the soviet union still existed the last few months in part because of my uh presence on the show the influence of of uh john i want to understand general aviation more i've been using uh my skills for airliners and the different side of aviation for several decades but i went away from general aviation because that wasn't my professional focus now i have an interest and i thought rather than being an armchair theorist i want to go back and see what it's like to fly in the 21st century and it's been a rip van winkle kind of situation in that the aircraft are largely the same i trained on cessna 172's then i'm getting re-certified on cessna 172s now but the biggest change for me and the biggest attitude change i had is that many of the things that existed in airlines airliners rather when i was at boeing the kind of flight management systems and such the things that were you know modern back in the early 1980s and only on the newest airliners are now available in every general aviation aircraft out there your cessnas your bonanzas your your pipers etc and the same kinds of technologies in many cases more sophisticated are in the hands of pilots often pilots who are doing single pilot ifr completely different way of doing things from when i was around airline pilots where there are always two people in the cockpit there were specific rules that each person did one person does something the other person checks on some on that person and each flight segment you know one pilot would fly be the primary pilot on one segment the other pad is on the other side now in the general aviation world looking at some of the accidents we've looked at in the last few months i have a new perspective on the difficulties that a general aviation pilot faces when trying to fly and also in my case difficulties of trying to learn the national airspace system how air traffic control was done now the fact that the vors and nbbs i grew up with many of them are no longer in use because gps is such a real and present thing in general aviation and although there's still a robust system of the uh traditional technologies it's been supplemented and some cases supplanted by the newer technology so there's a lot going on in my head most of which is sort of like flowing by but some of which sticks so how much how much uh digital instrumentation is in that airplane that you're learning to fly on well my approach was my goal was to get instruments to get a instrument rating and to do so in a glass cockpit aircraft there's a galaxy cessna at the flight fbo that i'm flying out of but i'm learning relearning the basics on the old steam gauges so when i go over to the g1000 equipped aircraft it's a g1000 system right now i'm on a system that has the old steam gauges with a few bells and whistles thrown in for example there's a gps in there and there is a bit of a moving map display and such not as big as the displays in the g1000 aircraft but the same kind of technology same kind of gps navigation can be used in the steam gauged aircraft and i'm looking at probably getting uh my uh my examiner fight in the steam gauge aircraft rather than the g1000 i might change my mind in the future but i want to be familiar with both and i want to get my instrument ready tall otter it is a tall order and you know it's like all the bad habits i used to do in my spare time those have to fly out the window for the next few months as i do things like pass my written exam and get my hours in understand how to train in a regular airplane as well as doing some training in a fixed base simulator actually i think the simulator the one i'm using is is somewhat not full motion but it has some motion to it so that's another thing that i found out that when it comes to getting your instrument rating are faa regulations that say you can do a certain number of hours of the 50 or so that you need to have in an approved simulator and these are not as sophisticated as the multi-million dollar simulators for an airliner but they're good enough that the faa will i'll actually allow you to use that for some of your hours and also use that to get the recurrence not recurrent what's what's phrase for it have your currency updated you can do it in a regular airplane you can do it in a simulator so once i get my my certification i'll still be doing a little bit of regular airplane a little bit of simulator well i can remember you and i out at oshkosh when we uh latched on to that company that had their their simulator there and you and i uh hogged the seat all day long i mean we were in there for hours and then then we decided to give him a break and let him work on his other customers that might spend some money and we went away and came back and did it again now that is going to be another show entirely including one with uh that that exhibitor if we can get to them and get them on the show but one of the things that that interested me about that system was it used as its core the x-plane flight simulator that you can get for your pc or your mac now the x-plane software itself is like 50 bucks or so but to get the instrumentation the simulated instrumentation the foot pedals the control wheel etc would set you back several more hundred if you're going to have like a three screen set up so you have somewhat of a field for a real cockpit it'll cost you several more thousand so basically you can go 50 bucks and be real cheap and just do it keyboard controls you can throw a couple hundred more bucks at it and have like a side stick controller and some pedals you can go a whole hog and get something that is just short of being something that will be certified by the faa as an aviation training device i remember right the non-certified uh computers computer programmed simulators were like 10 to 12 000 but they jumped up to 15 for certification so i'm not going to buy one of those because uh let's just say that if i'm going to spend 15 000 i'm going to spend it first flying in an airplane and then maybe if i hit the lotto i'll buy this for my home training so that's our three areas we wanted to cover today talked about obviously my time flying and one of these days i'll have some pictures of me sweating in the cockpit and again it'll be uh frightening for the audience to see that but again relearning something after so many decades out of the cockpit is uh kind of intimidating but i'm getting used to it and also the russian situation which will unfold by the time you see this video even if it's a week later things might be radically different and the 8th anniversary of mh370 and i'll say this about that event which i've been saying for years i'm absolutely certain the aircraft most of the wreckage will be found i'm not certain that any of us will be alive to see it but it's going to happen i i believe that it's going to be found and these folks down in australia have been really uh nose to the grindstone trying to get their government to do the right thing so we'll see uh i mean i got an email from him last night that uh it's it's on my screen right now and they actually had a uh he says here a 21 and a half hour uh meeting with uh some of the people about what information they had on the airplane being at uh 39 south instead of 38 so so it'd be interesting to get them on on the show one or two of them and and see what they have to say you know sometimes an email doesn't have enough information and certainly this one doesn't have enough information in it for us to do a show off of so with that we can uh can wrap this one up and we talk about uh we're gonna do something on the malaysia 370 and we've got a bunch of other uh interesting accidents in the queue many of which have come to us via emails from the folks out there uh listening to us uh interestingly uh february 27th uh 22nd excuse me february 22nd stats uh just in yesterday and uh it looks like we had between uh youtube and the podcast uh a little bit more than 42 000 listeners so uh and the numbers keep going up very slowly which is a good thing very slowly and it's it's been a challenge for us to get these out every week and sometimes it's you know eight days or nine days before we get it out because of uh logistic problems but uh i enjoy doing them and it keeps me focused back in on an accident investigation and other issues because we're not all about just accidents we're about all sorts of issues so having said all that todd i want to remind everybody that this show is brought to you by uh avemco insurance so if you need insurance especially renters insurance which is uh getting to be an issue give them a call eight 888-879-0389 mention the show you'll get a discount and i'll leave you with the last word this time well my recent experience we're learning how to fly uh reminds me that what you say at the end of every show about using checklists and such is absolutely relevant and should be followed and let's hear it one more time before we end the show all right and i had an email sent to me directly by uh somebody that says because they because of listening they have done a and yet they've gotten to somebody a mechanic i assume that shown them what they need to look at and they are spending twice the time doing a pre-flight on the airplane that they did than they did before so i was happy to hear that so there's two things that i always say one is if you're gonna go flying do a very thorough job of pre-planning and that starts before you leave your house or your hotel room or wherever you are you need to start thinking of getting your head in the game about where you're going to go fly when you get to the airport redo it again double check your numbers uh get everything up to date get the weather not only where you are where you're going but in between and you know have a plan engine failure on takeoff bad weather in the middle have a plan before you get in the airplane and when you walk out to the airplane do a very thorough pre-flight inspection and if you can touch your airplane move the flight controls with your hands uh it it pays all kinds of benefits down the road and after you're in the air please please please fly safely have that head on a swivel we're gonna talk about our next show we're gonna talk about uh an airplane pilot that did not have his head on the shoulders swiveling around uh two pilots that didn't for a mid-air collision so having said all that please fly safely to listen or watch more episodes of this show go to flightsafetydetectives.com the flight safety detective's youtube channel or your favorite place to listen to podcasts to contact john and greg about the show send them an email at flightsafetydetectives gmail.com and remember for aviation insurance needs contact uvemco insurance at avemco.com or give them a call at 888-879-0389 mention flight safety detectives and receive a 5 discount thanks for listening to the flight safety detectives and remember to always fly safe [Music]

Channel: Flight Safety Detectives

Views: 7,982

Keywords:

Id: uY-hksjO-8k

Length: 34min 2sec (2042 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 11 2022