Jeff Wise – Page 6 – science journalism

New York: Alaska Airlines Inflight Blowout Raises New Doubts About 737 MAX

The boom came just five minutes into the flight, as Alaska Airlines flight 1282 was climbing out from Portland, Oregon en route to Ontario, California. At 5:13 p.m. local time, as the 737 MAX was ascending through 16,000 feet, part of the wall on the left side of the passenger cabin suddenly blew out, taking with it the padding of an unoccupied window seat and ripping the shirt off a young man sitting in the adjacent middle seat. As the pressure in the cabin dropped, air masks dropped. The roar of the slipstream was so deafening that passengers could not hear what flight attendants were saying over the intercom; the stars in the night sky and lights on the ground below could clearly be seen through the gaping hole. “The first thing I thought was, ‘I’m going to die,’”one passenger told the New York Times. The flight crew declared an emergency and returned immediately to Portland International Airport, where it touched down 14 minutes later. A flight attendant reported minor injuries, and the teenager who lost his shirt had red, irritated skin, but otherwise no one was hurt during the incident, and Alaska Airlines was able to book the passengers onward to their destinations on other flights.

While there is still much to learn about the details of the incident, what we know so far is enough to cast another troubling light on the 737 MAX, an aircraft that has already garnered what is inarguably the worst reputation that any new plane has earned in decades, and is likely to raise new questions about the safety culture at Boeing and the competence of its leadership.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 16: Debris

To watch Deep Dive: MH370 on YouTube, click the image above. To listen to the audio version on Apple Music, Spotify, or Amazon Music, click here.

In our last episode, we talked about the search of the seabed, which started in October 2014. By that time the plane had been missing for 8 months. And while the seabed search was everyone’s best hope for finding the black box and solving the mystery, people hadn’t forgotten about floating debris.

You’ll recall that in the first month after the disappearance, there had been an extremely extensive search of the ocean surface by ships and airplanes from many nations, and they hadn’t spotted anything.

When Australia called off the surface search for Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 on April 28, Prime Minister Tony Abbot explained that “It is highly unlikely at this stage that we will find any aircraft debris on the ocean surface. By this stage, 52 days into the search, most material would have become waterlogged and sunk.”

But would the debris really have sunk?

New York: Everyone Could Have Died in the Tokyo Airport Crash. Here’s Why They Didn’t.

It was exactly the kind of disaster scenario that aviation-safety experts have been warning could happen. A pilot, apparently disoriented, taxis his aircraft onto an active runway right into the path of an inbound, heavily loaded airliner. Unable to react in time, the pilot of the landing plane collides head-on into the first plane. The ensuing fireball envelops both aircraft.

Accidents like this, called “runway incursions,” can be extremely dangerous. The deadliest crash in aviation remains a collision between two 747s that took place on a foggy runway in the Canary Islands in 1977, which killed 583 of the 644 people aboard the planes.

It is all the more remarkable, then, that there were no fatalities and just 11 injuries aboard the Japan Airlines A350 that crashed into a Japan Coast Guard Dash 8 at Tokyo’s Haneda Airport on Tuesday. The situation aboard the Dash 8 was much worse, killing five of the six crew members aboard.

The fact that the outcome was relatively benign is a testament to the advances in engineering that have been incorporated into the latest generation of airliners, as well as to the safety culture that infuses a top-quality carrier like Japan Airlines. But the remarkable extent to which passengers’ lives were protected — this event merits the word “miracle” as much as Captain Sullenberger’s 2009 landing on the Hudson does — shouldn’t overshadow the profound problems revealed by the fact that the accident occurred at all. Unless there are major changes in protocol and technology, this kind of crash will happen again, quite likely with deadlier results.

New York: Air Travel Is Not Ready for Electronic Warfare

Airway UM688 cuts an invisible path through the air from Samsun, Turkey, on the Black Sea coast down through Basra, Iraq, on the Persian Gulf and is used heavily by airliners traveling from Europe to the Gulf States. One stretch in particular, a 280-mile-long section in northeastern Iraq, has become a hot topic in pilot forums online. Planes passing through experience all kinds of strange system malfunctions.

“What’s happening is that the plane is flying along normally, everything is very chill, very relaxed, you probably have a foot up on the pedestal and you’re doing your crossword. And then, suddenly, either the plane will start to turn or you’ll get a whole bunch of warnings: terrain failure, navigation error, position error,” says Mark Zee, the founder of OpsGroup, an online forum that collects pilots’ reports. “For the crews, the initial reaction is What the hell is going on?” In at least 15 cases, pilots became so confused that they had to ask air-traffic control to tell them which direction to take. In one incident, a business jet nearly passed into Iranian airspace.

Someone, it seems, has been confusing the planes’ navigation systems by transmitting false GPS signals, a technique called “spoofing.” “Commercial aircraft are having their GPS units captured and taken fully under the control of the spoofer,” says Todd Humphreys, a professor of aerospace engineering at the University of Texas at Austin. “It’s eye-opening and unprecedented.”

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 15: Seabed Search

As the southern spring of 2014 approached the search authorities prepared to undertake a search of the seabed where their calculations indicated the plane had gone.

They hired a Dutch marine survey company called Fugro, which dispatched three ships to the area: Fugro Discovery, Fugro Equator and Fugro Supporter.

The area they were going to search had been defined by the probability density function we’ve described earlier. It stretched about 600 miles long and covered water that was about three miles deep.

The logistical and technical challenges of searching this 23,000-square-mile area were enormous. Because it lay so far from land, crews would have to stay out for a month at a time, in a clime that mariners considered to be among the most inhospitable in the world. Here in the fabled “roaring forties” the waves at times reach 50 feet high.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 14: Another One

Last week we discussed the route the plane would likely have taken had it traveled north. Its endpoint would have been in central Kazakhstan, a client state of Russia. In that context, it’s interesting to note that three men with Russian names were aboard the plane. One was a passenger from Russia, Nikolai Brodsky. The two were two Ukrainians, Sergei Deineka and Oleg Chustrak.

A little online research turned up a fair bit of information about Brodsky. The Russian media contacted his family and interviewed his wife. He seemed like a fairly high-profile guy. He ran a timber company in Irkutsk and was active in a dive club that in the winter cut holes into the frozen surface of Lake Baikal and scuba dived under the ice. The reason that he was on the plane was that his club was on a ten-day drip to go scuba diving in Bali, and he was coming back early. There two different reasons given for why he was coming back early; one was that he’d promised his wife that he’d have dinner with her on March 8, international Women’s Day; the other was that he had to go on a business trip to Mongolia.

There was much less information available at the time about the Ukrainians, as their relatives didn’t want to talk to the media. What we did know was that they had a furniture company called Nika Mebel. Mebel is the Russian word for “Furniture,” the men were joint owners of a furniture factory in Odessa. They didn’t have a store to sell their stuff but they had an online store that had gone live a few months before. There was no explanation given as to why they were on the plane.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 13: North

We’re back! Andy and I took a week off to catch our breath, and now we’re back on the case. This week we look at where the plane could have gone if it didn’t go into the remote southern Indian Ocean. According to the Inmarsat data, it would have flown to the northwest, but that raises another question: if it flew over mainland Asia, why wasn’t it picked up by anyone’s military radar?

As you’ll recall, when Australian scientists applied the technique of Bayesian inference to the BTO data, they found that it indicated that the plane might have taken one of two flight paths, one to the north, one to the south:

Zooming in on the northern route and rotating:

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 12: Descent

Once Australian government scientists had generated the probability distribution for the plane’s last known location on the 7th arc, the next question they had to answer was: how far did the plane travel from that point before it impacted the water?

As we discussed earlier, their goal was to define a search box within which the plane was likely to be found. The plane’s location along the 7th arc defined the length of the rectangle, and the distance it could have traveled from the 7th arc would define the width of the search box.

So the question of how far the plane could have flown after the last transmission depends on what the investigators thought was going on with the plane at that moment. You’ll recall that the plane took off at 16:42 heading from Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia to Beijing, China.. A flight that normally takes 5 1/2 hours but it was carrying enough fuel to keep it flying until around 00:12, in case it needed to divert somewhere else and needed extra fuel.

Deep Dive MH370: Episode 11: Routes

Today’s episode is something of a double-header, as we address two different but related topics: the scientific method, and how Andy and Jeff’s efforts fit into it. In the first half of the show, Andy and Jeff talk about their personal histories, and how their experiences prepared them for tackling the mystery of MH370.

In the second half, Jeff describes how working on this mystery has shaped his understanding of the scientific method, and in particular how scientist deal with uncertainties in data and in their knowledge of initial conditions. Understanding so-called Bayesian methods is crucial, because it’s the approach that search officials used in defining the the search area on the seabed of the southern Indian Ocean.

Deep Dive: MH370 Episode 10: The Vulnerability

Today we tackle our most controversial topic date: the question of whether a backdoor exist in MH370’s satcom system that would have allowed the BFO data to be tampered with. If so, it will have radical implications for what might have happened to the plane.

Back in Episode 7 we explained how the BFO data worked and how it showed conclusively that the plane must have gone south. But then some strange facts started to appear that, taken together, suggested that all might not be as it seemed.

The first was that, as we’ve discussed earlier, the Satellite Data Unit had been turned off and back on again. Officials didn’t let that slip until June 26. Up until that time, we’d all assumed that the satcom had inadvertantly been left on when everything else was turned off. The fact that it was turned on was really hard to explain. In fact to this day, people have had a hard time coming up with a convincing reason why anyone would either know how to do this or want to do this. I hasten to add that is a hugely contentious point. Some people say they have perfectly good explanations, but they all seem pretty daft to me. For instance, Victor Iannello thinks it was done in order to prevent someone in the cabin from using the satphone to call for help, but there are simpler ways to turn off the satphone.