What Can Some Past Areospace Disasters tell us about Malaysian Flight 370?

From Apollo to Air France

Successful Accidents

US Airways Flight 1549

What did the Papers Say?

Analysis

• NY jet crash called 'miracle on the Hudson' - NBC News• The moment Captain Cool landed an Airbus on the Hudson

Chesley Sullenberger

The News Offers Two Choices

If we want a truer picture…

The Chicken Gun

US Airways Flight 1549 was hit by a flock of geese. One engine suffered burnout and the other continued to provide some thrust and electricity.

Airbus A320

Fly by wire

To sum it up• True Chesley Sullenberger was a great pilot• However he was not alone• He had a network of engineers, designers,

computer programers, algorythms, hours of flight simulations etc with him in the cockpit.

• This was great piloting via a team of specialists, combined with years of learning from tests and errors, but not a miracle and well within the realms of possibility.

Oxygen and NASA

• Apollo I and XII

• The problem with air• The bends• Weight• Solution: Pure Oxygen

Apollo I

Apollo 13

Remember: in the right Oxygen atmosphere even metals will burn.

Allison’s three lenses for decison making

IndividualTeam or crew

Organization or network

Malaysian Flight 370

• Cognitive biases Pilot error Group think Blamestorming Trust in the machine

Windows of recoverySquashing divergent views

Pilot error

• Are 99% of all aircraft accidents caused by pilot error?

• Why is it easier to blame the pilot?

What happens if you ask a pilot?• A Startlingly Simple Theory About the Missing Malaysia Airlines Jet BY CHRIS GOODFELLOW

• The pilot did all the right things. He was confronted by some major event onboard that made him make an immediate turn to the closest, safest airport.

• The loss of transponders and communications makes perfect sense in a fire. In the case of a fire, the first response is to pull the main busses and restore circuits one by one until you have isolated the bad one. Hence communications go silent.

• going to 45,000 feet in a hijack scenario doesn’t make any good sense• let’s accept for a minute that the pilot may have ascended to 45,000 feet in a last-

ditch effort to quell a fire by seeking the lowest level of oxygen. That is an acceptable scenario. At 45,000 feet, it would be tough to keep this aircraft stable, as the flight envelope is very narrow and loss of control in a stall is entirely possible. The aircraft is at the top of its operational ceiling. The reported rapid rates of descent could have been generated by a stall, followed by a recovery at 25,000 feet. The pilot may even have been diving to extinguish flames.

Why wouldn’t Boeing want to mention Egyptair B772 at Cairo on Jul 29th 2011, cockpit fire?

Squashing divergent views

• Exploration firm claims MH370 wreckage found in Bay of Begal• The Adelaide-based GeoResonance said on Monday the possible wreckage was

found in the Bay of Bengal, 5,000km away from the current search location in the southern Indian Ocean off Perth, with the company beginning its own search on March 10.

• We identified chemical elements and materials that make up a Boeing 777… these are aluminium, titanium, copper, steel alloys and other materials," said Mr Kursa

• GeoResonance's search covered 2,000,000 sq km of the possible crash zone using images obtained from satellites and aircraft, with company scientists focusing their efforts north of MH370's last known location

• "The technology that we use was originally designed to find nuclear warheads and submarines. Our team in Ukraine decided we should try and help," said the company spokesman David Pope.

Pings

Audo Pings• The most recent acoustic signal (5th) detected by an Australian aircraft in the search Thursday is "unlikely

to be related to the aircraft black boxes," Australian chief search coordinator Angus Houston said in a statement Friday.