Are Cost-Cutting Measures Cutting Airline Safety?

A Washington-to-Los Angeles flight by an Airbus 320 with 150 passengers burns about 29,500 pounds, or 4,300 gallons, of fuel at about $14,600. An additional 1,500 pounds, about 219 gallons, would cost about $750 more. It is costly.

Airlines are forcing pilots to fly low on fuel. Pilots and crews feel their safety is being compromised. Flying low on fuel results in emergency landings. (Is that what is behind all of these emergency landings we are seeing now?) This is because airlines have new policies designed to reduce fuel consumption. Airline labor unions are protesting safety measures by the airlines to fly lean.

FAA regulations require airliners to take off with enough fuel to reach their destination plus 45 minutes of flight.

The US Airways pilots' union took out an ad in USA Today 16 publicizing that that eight senior captains had been singled out by the company for requesting extra fuel and had been required to attend training sessions.

The number of pilots reporting low fuel on approach to Newark Liberty International Airport tripled from 2005 to 2007. More than half were Continental Airlines flights, the dominant carrier at Newark. Is the airline pressuring pilots "to either not stop for fuel when needed or to carry insufficient amounts of fuel?" Bulletins from Continental's management urge pilots and flight crews to cut back on fuel, pointing out that "adding fuel indiscriminately reduces profit sharing and possibly pension funding."

I guess a pension isn't particularly useful if your death in an emergency landing eliminates the pension question entirely.

In this wrestling match between airlines and pilots, the question is if government regulators are going to support the pilot's need for safety or the Airline's need to cut costs?

Crash Victims suffer from hypothermia

What: small plane
Where: Ketchikan Alaska off Gravina Island
When: Friday evening
Who: Troopers say the 66-year-old pilot, Robert C. Davis, and his 58-year-old passenger, Glenn B. Davis,
Why: Plane ran out of fuel on its approach but there were no injuries.

Chile Crash Kills 8 Adults and one Baby

General Hugo Pena co-ordinated the retrieval efforts of the crash in Chile in the outskirts of the southern Chilean city, Puerto Montt, 1,058 kilometres south of the capital Santiago.

The plane came down In a scrub area during windy, rainy weather and came to rest just past a cluster of several hundred houses in a wealthy neighborhood.

Sergio Galilea, governor of Los Lagos region went public with information earlier but aviation official Francisco Rogel (and others) will be continuing the investigation.

The 10 person capacity plane is a small Beechcraft 99A two engine passenger plane, owned by a company called Aerocord. There were nine individuals on board, including the pilot. All were fatalities.

The eight adults and one child were identified online by Patagonia Times as Gastón Alvarado Alvarado, his two-year-old son Maximiliano Alvarado González, Arsenio Rosales Zúñiga, Marcela Orellana Jara, Roberto Saavedra Araya, Claudio Fernández, Hernán Gallardo Palma, Nelson Clieb and Óscar Aguayo, the pilot. We offer condolences to the families in their time of grief.

The plane took off from La Paloma airstrip for its original destination, the Island of Melinka but it never arrived.

Five kilometres north-west of the airport, the plane fell from the sky. Witnesses on the ground reported seeing flames on the plane’s left wing before it crashed and burst into fire in a barren area (scrubs)

Further investigation is planned by aviation authorities to determine the cause of the crash.

This is the 3rd plane crash in southern Chile in the past few weeks.

On July 1 a Chilean Air Force plane crashed into a mountainside near Cochamó (Region X), killing all three crew members. The Twin Otter aircraft was on an instructional flight in the Los Lagos region when it ran into a set of power lines and careened into the side of a mountain (PT, July 3).


Three weeks earlier, July 9th, a Patagonia Airways flight went missing. Four days later, the downed plane was located. All nine of the plane’s passengers survived. The Cessna 208’s pilot survived the accident but died two days later – before rescuers arrived.

Official Accident description

• Status:Preliminary
  
• Date:10 JUL 2008
  
• Time:10:30
  
• Type:Beechcraft 99A
  
• Operator:Aerocord
  
• Registration:CC-CFM
  
• C/n / msn:U-145
  
• First flight:1971
  
• Crew:Fatalities: 1 / Occupants: 1
  
• Passengers:Fatalities: 8 / Occupants: 8
  
• Total:Fatalities: 9 / Occupants: 9
  
• Airplane damage:Destroyed
  
• Airplane fate:Written off (damaged beyond repair)
  
• Location:near Puerto Montt (Chile)
  
• Phase:Initial climb (ICL)
  
• Nature:Domestic Scheduled Passenger
  
• Departure airport:Puerto Montt-Marcel Marchant Airport (SCPF), Chile
  
• Destination airport:Melinka Airport (SCMK), Chile
  
• Narrative:Crashed and burned shortly after takeoff.
  

Bogota Crash on July 7

Click to see Video and News
What: Centurion Air Cargo Kalitta B742 registration N714CK took off runway 31L getting airborne at 3:58am local time.
Where:
When:
Who: 8 people on board. A woman from the farmhouse survived, but her husband and son were the only fatalities. Crew was transported to a Madrid, Colombia hospital.
Why:Twenty seconds after liftoff the crew radioed an emergency call stating, that engine #4 was on fire. The airplane initiated a left hand turn as by the published engine out procedure. Radio contact got lost afterwards. The airplane hit the wires along the highway triggering sparks, before it hit a farmhouse.