3 Links I Love: Bad Near-Miss Reaction, Ryanair Wants airberlin, Making the Eclipse Flight Happen

Links I Love

This week’s featured link:
Editorial: Air Canada, FAA hindered investigation of SFO near-missEast Bay Times
How in the world does a near-miss like the one at SFO not trigger drug/alcohol tests and capture of the black boxes? With every accident… or near-accident… you want as much data as you can get to help figure out what went wrong to prevent it from ever happening again. This is frustrating to see.

Two for the road:
Ryanair Says It’s Interested in Air Berlin, Wants In on BiddingBloomberg
If you’ve been watching, you know that airberlin is on its death bed. Now it’s really just a matter of who takes over. Ryanair sees an airline with a hugely attractive portfolio in Germany that it would like to acquire. But it seems to be pretty much a done deal that Lufthansa gets first dibs despite the anti-competitive nature of that transaction. This is going to get much more interesting before it’s done.

Threading the celestial needle: Catching the Great American Eclipse at 35,000 feetAlaska Airlines Blog
I guess I didn’t quite realize how much went into designing the perfect flight to catch the eclipse from the air. Alaska put together a great post detailing how it came together.

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7 comments on “3 Links I Love: Bad Near-Miss Reaction, Ryanair Wants airberlin, Making the Eclipse Flight Happen

  1. For AC, I was surprised to hear that the pilots flew out the next day. I would have thought they would be kept here for a short time at the start of the investigation. Does sound like A.C. wanted to cover up what happen as fast as possible since flying to the USA is big business for them and they didn’t want the public booking away from them.

  2. Wow, I would’ve never thought the near miss at SFO wasn’t reported to the FAA for 24hrs. One would think the tower controller would have a secret button like bank tellers to notify the authorities we have an incident. This is dereliction at best and a cover-up at it’s worst. Shame on AC and the FAA here. Doesn’t make me feel better about flying. If we don’t learn from mistakes that weren’t catastrophic we have a ticking time bomb waiting for catastrophe.

  3. I would imagine the pilots have a mandate to self-report an incident like that. I’d be curious to know if they did. Considering the fact that they flew out the next day, they either failed to report it or AC swept it under the rug.

  4. People need to relax with the AC incident. It didn’t meet any of the mandatory reporting requirements that required notification of the FAA or NTSB. Nor did it trigger any of the automatic reporting systems that are tied into ATCs systems. On what basis would you be able to detain a flight crew for not technically doing anything wrong?

    1. Almost landing on a taxiway (i.e., not being aware of where you are) is “not technically doing anything wrong”?

  5. Totally incredible that the near miss in SFO with what could have been the worst aircraft accident ever could have the CVR erased and the pilots not tested for drugs/alcohol.  So we will never have any explanation except simple pilot error….which it may have been.  But to lose that evidence is almost criminal.

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