Unfair Fight ATC

Here's an update with the ATC dialogue during the incident. There's not a whole lot of information to hear. ATC uses the designation "Super" for the Air France A380, a step up from "Heavy" The Airbus is taxiing, apparently according to instructions from a perky, alert-sounding controller, when the Delta pilot calls in languidly to report that he's just been hit by the Air France. The controller immediately dispatches emergency equipment and asks the CRJ pilot if he needs any specific assistance.

I think some of the transmissions from the CRJ are not on the tape, and obviously we're missing a lot of dialogue inside the control tower as they decide which taxiways to shut down and how to reroute traffic. The controller asks the Air France to "shut your engines" and the pilot asks to confirm "close the engines?" Neither is normal English usage, but it's clear. I'm curious as to whether the controller was using an official phrase, or was used to French Québecois crews translating "fermer le moteur" directly into English and used that phrase for Air France. There's no indication that the Air France pilots are having any difficulty understanding normal English, they just have fantastically French accents. Update: See the comment conversation between myself and Ghislain for more about this. It appears that the Air France pilot actually says "hold the engines?" (not "close") and doesn't understand the "shut" instruction, because that does not correspond to the idiom in France.

I'm slightly amused that the offer of assistance for the A380 comes almost as an afterthought. I'm reminded of Hamish versus the MD-80. Did one Airbus pilot ask the other if he felt a bump?

What We Train For

I'm way too late to the party to comment much on the uncontained engine failure on Qantas flight 32 on November 5th, but I wanted to share with you the cabin PA the captain made during the incident. I'm always interested in what makes these sound frightening or reassuring, and I think this captain did a very good job of this minor detail of the emergency handling, as well as the major job of putting the airplane back on the ground efficiently. They had some hard decisions to make.

The issue that has forced the grounding of Qantas' entire fleet of A380, as you'll know if you've been following the story, is not so much an Airbus problem as a Rolls-Royce problem. The engine failed so spectacularly that Rolls Royce has recalled forty of its Trent 900 engines worldwide, and the incident airframe may be a write-off. Debris from the engine damaged the wing spar and it's not certain how that might be repaired or replaced in this new, composite aircraft. Christine Negroni drew my attention to and summarizes a power point presentation on the extent of the damage, blogged by Ben Sandilands.

Flightpath

I watched Flightpath with Jodie Foster recently. I watch pretty much anything with airplanes in it, even if it's not really an airplane movie, as this wasn't. It was instead a version of the ancient "Mother has lost her child and no one else will believe her" plot. The oldest version I know of that story is the changeling myth, not coincidentally the namesake of a current movie, same theme, starring Angelina Jolie. I haven't seen the latter.

The airplane in Flightpath is the fictional "E474" a A380-like airplane. Its engines were designed by Fosters character, who nevertheless knows every closet, access panel and electrical relay in the whole aircraft. More interesting than the movie was the director's commentary. The crew of the movie apparently went around to aircraft manufacturers and airplane scrapyards looking at layouts and hatches and access panels on all different aircraft. At one point a staffer was in a copyshop, photocopying an aircraft manual for use as a prop and the copyshop called the police, who called the FBI, who called Homeland Security, who showed up to find out if they were terrorists. The anti-terror sentiment was so strong that in the end they deliberately disregarded the research thy did on where the hatches actually were and went with the common airplane movie device where the protagonist can escape from the airplane washroom into a gigantic loft where they can short out all the airplane systems and plunge the aircraft into darkness by crossing a couple of wires.

Another part I liked was the comment that the studio had "pretty much one cockpit that was used in every movie for the last ten years. It was destroyed on Cast Away when they drove it into the water tank and shorted everything out." I'm going to be watching old movies with an eye for that now. I like to compare scenes from different movies. Maybe someday I'll get software that allows me to splice them together to make a visual commentary on similarities.

I suspect I blogged about the same thing last time I watched this movie, but I couldn't find the entry. And hey, I rewatched it so you can reread it.