American Morning
Will airlines be the next GM?
From CNN's Carol Costello and Bob Ruff
Anyone out there old enough to remember the days when flying was fun and the airlines made you feel, well, special?
"The powder rooms," says this Pan Am commercial from the 1950s, "...look like those in a private home." The commercial shows smiling "stewardesses" attending to every passenger's need. Viewers are assured that "the travail has been taken out of travel."
Those WERE the days.
Today, not getting bumped from an overbooked flight and scoring an aisle seat are considered triumphs.
And airline profits seem as dated as that Pan Am ad (Pan Am went out of business in 1991).
The airlines are losing money hand over fist. Here's the roll call from the first quarter 2009:
- American: $375 million net loss
- Continental: $136 million net loss
- Delta: $794 million net loss
- Southwest: $91 million net loss
- United: $579 million net loss
- US Airways: $103 million net loss
High fuel costs are only part of the problem. People just aren't flying as much as they used to. The International Air Transport Association (IATA) says so many people are in debt that, even if the economy improves, "a significant portion of existing income or any new cash could be used to pay down debt rather than spend and travel." Businesses too are figuring out ways to curb air travel.
So, are the airlines about to land on the same road that led GM and Chrysler to bankrupcy?
Expert: Replace ‘black boxes’ with new technology
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/09/intv.irving.clive.art.jpg caption="Clive Irving tells CNN that new technologies could replace existing flight data recorders."]
24 victims from Air France Flight 447 have been pulled from the sea so far. The number one priority according to the Brazilian military is recovering the bodies, but searchers are also desperately looking for the flight data recorders before time runs out. The area they’re concentrating on is about the size of Nebraska, almost 80,000 square miles.
Clive Irving says the daunting task of finding the so-called black boxes should be a wake-up call for doing away with this “antiquated technology.” Irving is the editor of Condé Nast Traveler magazine and specializes in aviation reporting. He joined John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Tuesday.
John Roberts: Brazilian authorities released a photo of the vertical stabilizer from Air France 447. It was found yesterday. It’s eerily similar, if you remember, to American Airlines 587 where they pulled the entire vertical stabilizer out of Jamaica Bay.
Clive Irving: In fact, it looks just like a plastic model assembly kit where you clip the vertical stabilizer on the fuselage and if you pull it off…it's an extraordinarily clean break there.
Roberts: And the fact that it is a clean break and it seems to be pretty much intact, does that give you a thought as to how this plane may have come down?
Irving: I think I’d be very wary to make a connection between the two things. Remember, this is a composite, not a metal vertical stabilizer. So the whole physics of the thing and how it shears off might be very different to the circumstances of an all metal plane.
Roberts: With American Airlines Flight 587, the pilots over-corrected. They put too much pressure on it and it snapped right off. We know the weather was bad in the area this aircraft was flying through.
Irving: Well yes it was. It was very bad. But I think the wake-up call here is the most significant thing, is we had our eyes pointed to a completely new technology that we almost didn't realize was there because the only clues that we have so far since this crash came from the uploaded data, the 24 messages sent to the maintenance center at Air France. That's all we've got to go on at the moment.
Was Air France jet flying the wrong speed?
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/08/cox.john.cnn.art.jpg caption="CNN talks with an Airbus expert about what might have caused last week's Air France crash."]
Sixteen bodies have now been recovered from the wreckage of Air France Flight 447, but the cause of last week's crash is still a mystery. New reports say at least a dozen other flights traveling in the same area at around the same time had no problems with weather conditions.
John Cox is president and CEO of Safety Operating Systems. He’s flown Airbus jetliners and is familiar with their controls and systems. He spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Monday.
John Roberts: What do you make of this idea that some 12 other planes flew through that area? Air France had four flights, a couple from Sao Paulo, and others went through that area of thunderstorms without any problems.
John Cox: Well I think it says the weather itself is probably not the single cause for the accident. This accident, just like all I've been associated with, will end up being a series of events. We'll end up learning that series one piece at a time to understand what happened.
Roberts: Air France sent out some literature over the weekend regarding one of the air speed indicator sensors, the Pitot tube, and there might be some problem with that. With your knowledge of Airbus…What do you know about problems with anomalous speed readings?
Cox: The fleet has shown a little bit of this issue to come up before. I'm aware of three or four previous cases in fleet history but it's typically been short duration. What we learned by the information that the airplane up-linked to the Air France maintenance facility, is they had a lot of very confusing signals that the pilots would have been confronted with. And exactly what caused that, it could possibly be Pitot tubes or air speed indications that would be causal in some way but why the crew was not able to satisfactorily determine which of the air speed indicators was bad, there's a procedure for it. Where that procedure either wasn't acted on properly or failed, that's going to be something the investigators are really going to have to look into carefully.
Expert: Investigators blind without wreckage
[cnn-photo-caption image=http://i2.cdn.turner.com/cnn/2009/images/06/05/goelz.peter.cnn.art.jpg caption="Fmr. NTSB Managing Director says investigaors are blind without plane's wreckage."]
The Brazilian air force is now saying that debris picked up Thursday near where officials believe Air France Flight 447 crashed into the Atlantic Ocean is not from the plane. Officials are saying it's “sea trash” and not part of the jet that apparently went down with 228 people on board.
Peter Goelz is the former Managing Director of the National Transportation Safety Board. He spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Friday.
John Roberts: Are you surprised to hear the news that what officials thought was the wreckage of Flight 447 turned out to be just sea trash?
Peter Goelz: Well, I thought the announcement was a little premature. But it's very disappointing because it really sets the investigation back in terms of searching for the flight data recorder and the voice recorder. They don't know where to start.
Roberts: So they’re back to square one again. What about the other pieces of debris they saw floating in the ocean – pieces of metal, bales of wire? Will that give them some idea of where the plane when down?
Goelz: The longer time goes on, the further away from the actual crash site the debris floats. It will be terribly challenging to find where to start the search for the data recorders and the clock is ticking. The batteries on the locator devices attached to the black boxes have a limited life span – just 30 days.
Is recovering Flight 447 possible?
Today, an armada of ships is converging on an area about 400 miles northeast of the Brazilian island of Fernando de Noronha. Some are carrying submersibles that can work miles underwater, all to start piecing together the disaster of Air France Flight 447, which disappeared over the Atlantic Ocean.
One expert said it could be the hardest recovery since the search to find the Titanic, which took decades. Underwater recovery expert John Perry Fish spoke to John Roberts on CNN’s “American Morning” Wednesday.
John Roberts: What will searchers be looking for at this point in their operation? And what kind of topography of the ocean floor are they going to be searching in?
John Perry Fish: The searchers are going to be looking for a very important piece of equipment called a digital flight data recorder… These record many, many parameters of the flight, the aircraft, its attitude, even the amount of force that one of the pilots might put on a pedal. And it’s very important to find these in order to find out what happened to the flight. Attached to each of these data recorders is what we call a “pinger.”
It puts out an acoustic pulse once a second for 30 days as soon as it's submerged in the water and these contacts are joined by electrical forces. So it's important to find these. And they'll be looking for these in an area that's fairly deep, as deep as a couple of miles and also part of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, which is a mountainous area that runs all the way from Iceland down into the South Atlantic.
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