Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

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Gaybutton
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Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by Gaybutton »

Bangkok Airways Selects GlobalBeacon as GADSS Solution

April 18, 2018

HOUSTON, April 18, 2018 -- Bangkok Airways will deploy GlobalBeacon to improve passenger safety as part of The International Civil Aviation Authority's (ICAO) Global Aeronautical Distress Safety System (GADSS) concept of operations. Under GADSS, which will be applicable starting on November 8th of this year, aircraft operators will be expected to track their aircraft during normal operations at a frequency of one position every 15 minutes. By January 2021, they will need to automatically receive once-per-minute positions for aircraft in distress.

GlobalBeacon is a first of its kind product from Aireon and FlightAware that combines FlightAware's data processing platform and web-interface with Aireon's space-based ADS-B network. The Aireon network is hosted on the Iridium® NEXT constellation of satellites, which is over two-thirds of the way complete and will be fully operational later this year. The constellation provides the first and only solution for global coverage that exceeds GADSS standards and recommended practices (SARPs) for flight tracking.

"Today's agreement means that Bangkok Airways will surpass the GADSS SARPs applicable this year, and will also proactively meet the 2021 requirements for distress tracking," said Theng Hui Low, Director of Asia Pacific for FlightAware. "GlobalBeacon is cost-effective, easy to deploy and won't require Bangkok Airways to install new avionics."

Mr. Kittisak Sudtachart, Director of Operations Control Center for Bangkok Airways, said, "At Bangkok Airways, safety is at the very core of our value-offering to our customers, partners in the industry and our employees. We are proud to continue our commitment to leading the industry in operational safety standards by deploying GlobalBeacon," Mr. Kittisak added, "GlobalBeacon will provide our Flight Operations team with better visibility of our entire aircraft fleet, thereby improving operational safety and efficiency. It also aligns with our safety mission, which is to continually upgrade and maintain worldwide industry safety standards."

https://www.prnewswire.com/news-release ... 31866.html
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Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

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It's a shame this technology was not available when that Malaysia Airlines flight 370 disappeared in 2014. To this day that plane has not been found and recovered and the cause of the disappearance and crash is not known. There is plenty of speculation, but nobody knows what happened.

If this technology was available at the time, had been installed on the airplane, and if there was no way for a rogue pilot to turn it off or disconnect it, at least it would have been known approximately where the airplane went down and probably would have long since been recovered.
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Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

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See also: https://edition.cnn.com/2014/04/25/worl ... index.html

I should say I became aware of this story because someone on another board sent me a PM and gave me the link. While I'm sure he wouldn't mind at all and would have no objection if I identified him as the source and credited him for it, since this came to me as a PM I would not feel comfortable revealing the source or any other aspect of the PM.
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Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by a447 »

It's a bit late knowing where the aircraft is after a problem arises. The problem shouldn't arise in the first place.

Bangkok Air has a poor safety rating.

https://www.airlineratings.com/ratings/bangkok-air/
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Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by Gaybutton »

a447 wrote:The problem shouldn't arise in the first place.
While that is true, when something does happen it's better to at least have a good idea where to look. I'm still intrigued by the disappearance of Amelia Earhart.
fountainhall

Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by fountainhall »

There is one thing I still can't grasp in this saga. I know from a friend who has worked with Cathay Pacific all his life and is now very senior that the engines on all their aircraft relay real-time information back to their maintenance base so that engineers can assist the captain with fast information and advice etc. if an engine problem occurs. My understanding is that all major engine manufacturers provide this facility. So MH should have been monitoring at least the two engines even if they did not know where the plane happened to be. Presumably it would also have known that they were still functioning normally as the aircraft flew down and west of Australia.

The plane will have loaded sufficient fuel to cover the 6 hours and 21 minutes scheduled for the flight to Beijing and at least another hour's worth to take into account weather and the possibility of diversion to a secondary airport. So you'd expect those monitoring the engines to be aware that their plane was still flying until at least 8:02 a.m. Malaysian time - and probably even longer. Yet the public announcement of its disappearance was made at 7:24 a.m.

I doubt that the captain on an aircraft could manually switch-off such monitoring systems in the same way that he can the aircraft transponder signal. If the aircraft did fly until its fuel ran out, the assumption surely has to be that someone within MH knew it was still flying after the disappearance announcement was made.

Like all conspiracy theories, no doubt this one has holes in it somewhere. But we already know that many official organisations, especially the Malaysian government, withheld a great deal of information for several days. Essentially they lied. It did not take many more days for the experts to be 100% certain it landed in the water off Australia. How much vital information was lost as a result of these delays, goodness knows!
Jun

Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by Jun »

I agree that real time monitoring of planes is essential, but monitoring at 1 or 15 minute intervals is more for disaster recovery, than a safety improvement. My idea of a safety improvement is not losing the plane in the first place.

To be honest, I cannot believe constant monitoring of planes is not standard already. Thanks to my phone, google can give me a timeline of everywhere I have been. All the planes need is something like that, combined with a satellite radio transmitter.

Rolls Royce can monitor their engine performance in real time from Derby. I suppose GE do the same. I don't know what they monitor, but the engineer in me says they will know the atmospheric pressure, which is a good guide to altitude. However it's much less likely they know precisely where the engine is.
fountainhall

Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by fountainhall »

As one who has flown millions of miles, equally important in my view is a total update of the archaic black boxes. The fact that the lifespan of the underwater positioning beacons is just 30 days has been shown to be ridiculous following the crash of the Air France flight over the Atlantic and the disappearance of the MH flight. Whilst IATA and the International Civil Aviation Organisation are working on the issue of real-time monitoring of every aircraft, there has been discussion after discussion about bringing the black boxes up-to-date. But this seems to focus on having the boxes automatically eject from aircraft, something presently only found in military aircraft. There is also concern that the present proposals for ejection from passenger aircraft will not happen automatically. It will only operate in the event of a major structural deformation or if the aircraft is submerged in more than six feet of water.

It is also surely ridiculous that some aircraft are still flying with data recorded on to a continuous tape loop using technology from the 1960s. Fortunately most have now switched to solid state memory, but this is still technology roughly 25 years old. There is also talk of extending the present two-hour length of the present cockpit voice recorders to 25 hours to bring them in line with the time covered by the data recorders. Talk. Talk. Talk.

The real issue, of course, is cash and who is to pay for updates. About 25 years ago when first mooted, the estimate was US$60,000 per plane. In the USA a request for funding was made to Congress in 2003 and revised in 2005. It was kicked over to a sub-committee. Where it is now, I have no idea, but the provisions of the proposed bill have not been adopted.

With many airlines now operating some form of low cost model, funding the costs of installing updated ejectable black boxes will increase the price of tickets considerably - and that presumes that the airlines themselves can find the cash in the first place. As Mary Schiavo the former Inspector General of the US Department of Transportation told CNN two years ago, airlines “simply will not add additional safety measures unless mandated by the federal government.”
Jun wrote:To be honest, I cannot believe constant monitoring of planes is not standard already. Thanks to my phone, google can give me a timeline of everywhere I have been. All the planes need is something like that, combined with a satellite radio transmitter.
I have a plane finder app on my iPad that provides me with real-time monitoring (with perhaps a few seconds delay) on up to around 10,000 passenger aircraft at any one time. When I returned from the UK in mid-October last year, long before I received an sms from the airline it was this app that informed me my plane would be three hours delayed. I was then able to find my inbound plane somewhere over the Black Sea when it should have been over the Netherlands!
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Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by Gaybutton »

fountainhall wrote:there has been discussion after discussion about bringing the black boxes up-to-date.
I think most of us are well aware that for many airlines it is quite rare to spend any money at all unless they are forced to. Apparently profits are much more important than people's lives.
fountainhall

Re: Bangkok Airways - passenger safety improvements

Post by fountainhall »

Your suggestion may well be true to a large extent, although all airlines have to comply with mandatory government and international regulations regarding maintenance and airworthiness. Mind you, with some countries, even these are sometimes bypassed - as was the case with Adam Air in Indonesia. Launched in 2002, it quickly became the largest low-cost airline in the country with 25 Boeing aircraft. Following the total loss of two aircraft and two other serious runway incidents, the airline was found to be rife with corruption, faulty training and a host of other faults. It collapsed in 2008.

Notwithstanding the black box issues, I do believe that in most countries safety is not compromised by failure to spend money. That is achieved by gradually stripping service down to the bare bones. Once proud carriers like British Airways are now a pale shadow of their former selves, worse in some respects than a low cost carrier.
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