This is more of a non-traditional Ask Cranky in that it’s been asked several times over the years, particularly in light of the Air France accident over the Atlantic when the thought was that the black boxes would never be found. The question? Why don’t airlines stream black box data so that they don’t have to actually find the box itself? It’s a great question, and there are ways to do it. I spoke with Mark McWhirter, Business Development Coordinator at FLYHT about a product they have that does just that.

But first, let’s back up a little. What is a black box? There are actually two separate devices and neither of them are black. (It’d be a lot harder to find that way.) The Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) is used to record conversation in the cockpit. It doesn’t record for very long and so there isn’t a ton of history on there; it just keeps recording over itself so the most recent data is available. Then there’s the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) which takes a bunch of different data points about what the airplane is doing and stores them. Newer versions collect more data points with better info, but these also don’t record for very long.

The idea is that if something goes wrong, you won’t need to know what happened a week ago. You’ll really need to know what happened in the final moments. The most important thing about these devices is that they need to be crash-hardened so that they can survive a massive wreck, and that they do. When they pulled the black boxes off the ocean floor from that Air France wreck long after the airplane went down, and they could actually recover the data, it was a testament to how good these things are. But, doesn’t that seem strange in this day and age that the data isn’t just sent down to the ground? It’s not as easy as it might seem.

With internet access becoming more and more available, you would think that would create more opportunity for streaming the data, but reliable inflight internet is still only in a small geographic subset of the world. In many places where you’d really want to have this capability the most (over oceans, mountains, etc.), it’s not cheap to get data off the airplane using more traditional methods. At upwards of $3 to $5 a minute or so, that can get expensive quickly. That probably doesn’t make any sense, but there are better ways.

FLYHT has a product called Automated Flight Information Reporting System (AFIRS) which is actually quite smart. What is does is basically set up a recording device the plugs in and takes the feed between the aircraft and the data recorder. It stores anywhere from a week up to a month of data depending upon the aircraft, and the data can be removed at any time. This is useful for airlines that have FOQA programs and really work to analyze the data to improve safety.

The system uses the Iridium satellites to then communicate that data from anywhere in the world. On the legacy system, there would be a variety of triggers that would automatically send an alert back to base if something went wrong. These were the catastrophic types of events but normal issues that would want to be analyzed later. After Air France 447, however, there was a renewed interest in doing something more. And that’s exactly what’s happening.

Now, if an emergency happens, there are three ways that the mechanism can be triggered. One is automated depending upon the parameters set, the other is by the pilots in the cockpit, and the third is from the airline on the ground. If one of those is triggered, then the system will not just send an alert but will immediately begin streaming all the black box data down to the ground. Within 30 seconds, that data can be viewed in a simulation with only a slight transmission delay. Looks like this:

Kind of awesome, right? At $3 to $5 a minute, it’s only a concern if all data was being streamed throughout the flight. If it’s just during an emergency, that price is peanuts and worth a lot more than that.

Great idea, huh? And who is using this? Well, it’s not widely out there yet, at least not the streaming stuff. It’s being tested on two customer aircraft right now. One is a US-based 767, but they wouldn’t tell me anything more than that. They do hope, however, that there will be more to talk about it down the line. Having this kind of information streaming makes a ton of sense, and as data coverage gets better and cheaper it will soon become a no-brainer to have a system like this if it isn’t already.

The FAA is back up and running and tax collection is beginning again, but some people are still angry. Most airlines decided that instead of passing along the tax savings to customers, they’d simply raise fares and keep the difference. I’ve seen some discussion about how the airlines really blew this and should have passed savings on the consumers for a variety of reasons. I disagree.

One of the arguments is that airlines like to complain that they’re overtaxed and that demand would be much higher if they didn’t have such a burden. So this was the perfect chance for them to show exactly what kind of benefit could be had, right? Some airlines did just that.

Both Alaska and Spirit passed savings along to customers and they saw big increases in bookings. Alaska showed a 26 percent increase in week-over-week bookings while Spirit showed a 22 percent increase in the early days. Some of that has to be due to the publicity they received for this move, but it was also the short term nature of the deal. There was never a question that taxes would be coming back, so people rushed in to buy before that happened.

That being said, I’m sure that lower fares were the cause of some stimulation. That’s always what happens thanks to simple supply and demand. When fares go down, demand goes up. The problem in this situation, however, is the supply side of the equation.

Within a couple of months of travel, the airlines pretty much have their schedules set. They’ve looked at the demand out there and put out the right number of flights, or at least as best they can see in advance, for the months ahead. In other words, the supply of seats isn’t changing unless something major happens (like the 9/11 attacks) to require a major, urgent shift in capacity. With that set, the airlines work hard to manage demand to fill that supply of seats with the highest revenues possible. If demand is particularly strong and growing, then they can add capacity but that’s more of a mid to longer term move.

When the taxes disappeared, the impact was bound to be short-lived (though longer than it should have been). So you have a two week window where taxes are lower, what can you do as an airline? You aren’t going to be able to add capacity for such a short term thing, so why would you want to pass on the tax savings and stimulate demand? You don’t have the supply to handle any demand increases anyway.

Instead, you should just keep the price to the consumer where it was before, since that was the right price to fill the capacity you were putting out there. Now you just make a little gravy on top while filling your seats exactly as you thought you would previously.

Of course, many will argue that it’s a fairness issue. I’m guessing that’s why Alaska passed the savings on. It just seemed like the right thing to do, or something like that. It’s a feel good thing that probably makes sense for the airline and its brand. But why is that the “fair” thing to do? If the government decides not to collect money, why is it that the traveler should get to keep the money and not the airline? Sure, Congresspeople want to whine and complain about it even though they were the ones who screwed up in the first place, but there’s no real reason that the money should have to go to the traveling public.

For Spirit, I think it’s a different issue. It’s not a fairness issue but rather more of a brand image issue. Spirit has been fighting very hard against the belief by some that its model of having a la carte pricing is not consumer-friendly, but this helps in the fight against that image. Spirit is more than happy to compartmentalize everything. You pay for what you want on that airline. It’s like having separate building blocks where you pick and choose the pieces you want to make the airline ticket you want to have. If the tax “block” goes away, then the airline is not going to reallocate it. So this helps Spirit in its quest to better explain its model and get some positive PR as well.

In the end, each airline’s goal is always to make as much money as it can. For a couple of outliers, that meant giving tax savings to the customer to further their brand proposition. But for most, without the ability to add more capacity, it made sense to raise fares to maximize revenue in the short term. If taxes disappeared permanently, then we’d see a different story because airlines could adjust capacity to match such a structural change, but that’s not what happened here.

Should the airlines have used this as a way to prove to the feds that taxation is killing demand? Why bother? There’s no chance at all that the feds would change their tune. But then again, Alaska and Spirit showed that anyway. No need for others to jump in.

[Original photo via Flickr user planetc1/CC 2.0]

Airport guide: Surviving LAX – CNN Out of the Office
This week, I give some tips and tricks on getting through LAX, my hometown airport. It’s a nightmare for a lot of people, but it’s been home to me for years.

Air travel tax refund procedure still fuzzy – CNN Out of the Office
It was a double CNN week as the editors decide to move forward next week’s post on tax refunds to go this week instead.

Fliers won’t get air travel tax refund – CNN Out of the Office
And it became a triple week, when I had to update this after Congress made the taxes retroactive and decided the no refunds would be given.

Ontario officials concerned over continued dropoffs of passengers, flights at ONT – Inland Valley Daily Bulletin
I was asked to comment on the continuing decline of traffic at Ontario airport. Really not the most accurate quotes, so let me clarify. Southwest isn’t cutting two more routes from Ontario in January – it’s reducing frequency on two more routes (Phoenix and Vegas). I also have no idea what that AirTran quote even means.

Apparently US Airways likes double digits. It seems that 9 Express carriers weren’t enough, so now US Airways has added a tenth to the stable: SkyWest. When Mesa came out of bankruptcy, US Airways agreed to keep 7 of the 50 seat CRJ-200s and 6 of the Dash-8 turboprops in the fleet for a short period of time. That time is up, and US Airways will replace those with 14 SkyWest CRJ-200s with the option to go up to CRJ-700s if it wants. What do you think of the move? Will Mesa’s remaining CRJ-900 operation end up flying under the SkyWest flag one of these days?

As a refresher, here are the other US Airways Express operators:

• Mesa – operates 38 of the CRJ-900s from Phoenix and Charlotte
• PSA – (wholly-owned) operates 35 CRJ-200s and 14 CRJ-700s on the east coast
• Air Wisconsin – operates 70 CRJ-200s on the east coast
• Republic Airlines – operates 20 ERJ-170s and 38 ERJ-175s on the east coast
• Chautauqua Airlines – operates 9 ERJ-145s on the east coast
• Trans States – operates 8 or fewer ERJ-145s from Pittsburgh
• Piedmont – (wholly-owned) operates 33 Dash-8-100 and 11 Dash-8-300 turboprops on the east coast
• Mesaba – operates 7 or fewer Saab 340 turboprops on the east coast
• Colgan Air – operates 7 or fewer Saab 340 turboprops from LaGuardia for now

There was plenty of backlash when I wrote about the causes of the 2009 crash of Air France flight 447 into the Atlantic Ocean back in May. Many of you wanted to wait until the final report came out, but I was confident that the story had become quite clear. With the latest interim report (which I can only find in French – summary in English is here), it looks like I was right on track.

Here’s what I said at the end of my last post:

Remember, the pilots were already working to pick their way through the worst of the storms. Add to that the loss of the autopilot, dozens of failure messages, and inconsistent speed readings and it seems like the answer might be simple. The pilots may have been so distracted that they forgot to do the one thing they needed to do to survive: fly the airplane. Once the final report is issued, look for training changes to come out of this and possibly even some changes in the way Airbus puts its airplane logic together.

Sure enough, the focus of the latest report is on training and puts a lot of the blame on Air France, but there is some discussion about aircraft logic as well. This has been enough for the investigators to push out safety recommendations, though not without controversy.

Throughout this 3rd interim report, a picture of normalcy is painted throughout the beginning of the flight. It was noted that when the Captain left to take his rest, he didn’t leave “clear operational instructions” and there was “no explicit task-sharing” between the two remaining pilots, but the crew composition was fine and the aircraft weight and balance was within the proper limits.

As mentioned in the last report, the crew was well aware of the weather ahead and had made course corrections to avoid the worst of it. That’s when things got ugly.

According to the report, the aircraft was flying at the “upper limit of a slightly turbulent cloud layer” when the autopilot disconnected. It’s believed that this happened because the pitot tubes froze over and that gave the aircraft incorrect speed information. When the system can’t make sense of the information it’s being fed, it shuts off autopilot and the pilots have to fly the airplane. Turbulence, however, was not a problem. The plane was perfectly flyable, but poor decision-making fed by weak training brought the airplane down.

Proper procedures were not followed for dealing with unreliable airspeed indication. To make things worse, neither of the two copilots had been trained to properly handle manual flying at high altitude. Despite the stall warning, the pilots continued to apply nose-up pressure, the opposite of what they should have done. In less than a minute, the plane went from being correctable to operating outside the design limits because of the improper recovery efforts by the pilots.

About 1 minute and 30 seconds after the autopilot disconnected, the Captain came back into the cockpit. At this point, stall warnings were going on and off and the airplane was still at 35,000 feet. Unfortunately, it was also losing 10,000 feet per minute as forward speed just disappeared. At times, the aircraft rolled from side to side as the pilots struggled to get the airplane under control. Those in the back must have felt sheer terror. The pilots never made an announcement to the passengers, and soon after, they all plunged into the Atlantic. I get goose bumps just thinking about how awful that must have been.

So after all that, what have we learned? We know the aircraft functioned properly. Were it not for the pitot tubes freezing over, this would have been a routine flight. Even when the pitot tubes failed, had the pilots been able to properly fly the aircraft manually, the passengers probably wouldn’t have even known there was an issue. Out of this, the French accident investigators have released safety recommendations that will need to be implemented by regulators in order to go into effect.

The main recommendation is around training. The idea is to make sure that all pilots have the proper training for manual flight at high altitudes, a skill which is rarely used in commercial aviation today. There is also additional training suggested around stall avoidance and recovery. Additionally, it’s suggested that the role of relief captain should be better-defined when the Captain is on rest. This way, there will be less confusion and more defined task-sharing if something goes wrong.

But the blame wasn’t solely on the training and pilots. One recommendation for aircraft manufacturers is to look at including an angle of attack indicator that pilots can see on the flight deck. There is an indicator showing the angle of the aircraft to the ground, but there isn’t one that shows the angle of the wing as compared to the direction of the air (angle of attack). That could have helped the pilots in their recovery efforts.

One recommendation not made was to revisit the way stall warnings are handled on the A330 aircraft. In fact, the pilots union at Air France is so angry about this being left out that it has decided to stop cooperating with the investigation. The on-and-off nature of the stall warning may have simply added to the confusion, and made it more difficult for the pilots to make the right moves. The investigators say that there wasn’t enough evidence to include this just yet, but it will be discussed in some form in the final report.

Regardless of what comes out in the final report, the picture is already very clear. It seems that current pilot training standards were not enough to help these pilots get out of an entirely recoverable situation. Were the Brazilians running this investigation, they probably would have already filed criminal charges against anyone they could, but the French handle this properly. Find the problem, fix the holes, and make sure that something like this never happens again.

[Photo of Sister Ship to Crashed Airplane via Flickr user Tab59|CC 2.0]