BREAKING NEWS
This will be a doubly tragic and poignant day for Air New Zealand. The loss of one of its Airbus A320s in the south of France has happened on the 29th anniversary of the Erebus disaster.
The crashed A320 was ZK OJL, acquired new by Air New Zealand in 2005 for its former Freedom Air subsidiary but leased for the past two years to the German charter company XL Airways, carrying the registration D AXLA.
It crashed at about 6am New Zealand time in the Mediterranean Sea just off Perpignan, on a test flight after being reconfigured back to Air NZ seating layout for its return to service in New Zealand.
The seven crew — the two German pilots and five New Zealanders — died. The jet was apparently performing exercises including a “touch and go” landing and was coming back over the sea to land at Perpignan (before flying to Frankfurt) when it simply fell into the water, according to witnesses.
It was being flown by two XL pilots, with an Air New Zealand pilot in the cockpit jump seat. The other New Zealanders were an engineer from Auckland, two engineers from Christchurch and a Civil Aviation inspector from Wellington.
It is the third loss of an Air NZ owned jet aircraft. The first was on July 4 1966 at Auckland International Airport, when one of the airline’s DC8s, ZK NZB, crashed on takeoff for a training flight, with the loss of two crew.
The second was on this day, November 28 1979, when an Air New Zealand DC 10, ZK NZP, operating as sightseeing flight TE 901, crashed into the lower slopes of Mt Erebus with the losss of 257 passengers and crew. That was New Zealand’s greatest peacetime disaster.
Air New Zealand owned 13 A320 jets, mostly used on transtasman and Pacific flights.
Today’s crash is the 18th loss of an Airbus A320, which is a highly computerised “fly-by-wire” aircraft. Ironically, the very first was of a brand new Air France A320 during an exhibition flight at Basel-Mulhouse airport in 1988. The jet came in low over the airport and crashed into trees.
In August, a former Air New Zealand Boeing 737 crashed on takeoff at Bishkek in Kyrgyzstan. It was one of the second series of 737s bought by Air New Zealand and its domestic predecessor NAC and was registered here as ZK-NAS in July 1980. Sold in 1995, it had various owners over the years before being sold to the Kyrgyzstan airline Itek Air in 2006.
Airbuses are not my favourite planes, for the very reason that their computerised controls have been blamed for a number of incidents over the years, including the sudden plunge over Western Australia last month of a Qantas A330 which injured more than 70 passengers. Preliminary investigations found the jet’s computer decided the plane was not flying level and put it into a dive, overruling the pilots who fought to regain control.
However, there are more than 3500 of the twin-jet A320s in service around the world, so the loss of 18 (many with few or no deaths) for a variety of reasons in the 20 years since the first one flew is a good safety record.
Air New Zealand must also be regarded as one of the world’s safest airlines. As noted, it is 29 years to this day since the Erebus crash and the national carrier has not lost a passenger since, nor an aircraft till today (and its pilots were not flying it). The Erebus crash was not a scheduled flight but was effectively a charter sightseeing flight, so Air New Zealand’s record is almost as good as Qantas, which has not lost a single jet or a passenger in the jet age.
- Update:The dead New Zealanders have been named as Captain Brian Horrell, 52, of Auckland; engineer Murray White, 37, of Auckland, engineers Michael Gyles, 49, and Noel Marsh, 35, of Christchurch, and Civil Aviation Authority inspector Jeremy Cook, 58, of Wellington.
15 Comments
November 28, 2008 at 9:02 am
When I was 17 I trained for my Pilots License in Napier. Part of that was having a flight check before you were allowed to fly solo. This involved taking off, climbing, turning downwind and approaching and landing.
My check instructor was Greg Cassin, co pilot on the Erebus flight.
Anyway flying downwind with Greg I commented that I was too high at 1200 feet and should have been at 1000.
Greg turned to me and said “David, being too high never killed anybody…”
November 28, 2008 at 9:24 am
I grew up with Greg. His family and mine visited each other about every month for nearly 40 years. At school he was what we would now call a Nerd.. not a great sportsman at all, very safety conscious in the playground was our Greg.
Anyway, the Airbus. I’ve had a slight fear about them always. I flew on one in Oz in the 1980s.. and it made very strange clanking and groaning noises somewhere under my seat. Then there were those accidents where the plane’s computers would take the wrong actions.
The 747 might like a bit like a Model T, but it’s always comforted me.
JC
November 28, 2008 at 10:23 am
Au contraire, Poneke.
I suggest 18 losses out of 3,500 aircraft over twenty years is an appalling record. You should compare this with the figures for Boeing’s 737 which is the comparable aircraft. I doubt very much that one 737 each year has driven itself into the ground.
I hope you’ll publish the results.
November 28, 2008 at 11:03 am
Adolf, 140 Boeing 737s have been lost out of the 5800 delivered since the type first flew in 1968. That’s an average of 3.4 a year compared with just under one a year for the A320.
However, in the past two decades or so, the number of major jet aircraft crashes has been falling steadily and air travel has never been safer despite the huge rise in the number of planes in the sky and the number of people travelling in them.
November 28, 2008 at 12:49 pm
Thanks for that. To be fair, one should look at the same twenty year period. After all navigation and other aids to safety have moved along considerably since 1968.
[Poneke says: I don't feel like spending all day doing your research but as you write such rubbish I will respond. Since 1988, 106 Boeing 737s have crashed, compared with 18 Airbus A320s. This does not mean either plane is safer or less safe than the other as every crash is different. So far this year three 737s have crashed with the loss of 156 lives, compared with two A320s and 12 lives. The comparisons are meaningless as one needs to look at the causes of the actual crashes.]
November 28, 2008 at 1:18 pm
Every few years, I end up doing a job that requires lots of travel. Last year, I was travelling four or five times a week. I’ve never worried about flying despite the fact that a close family friend was one of the female stewards on flight 901.
I won’t comment on the safety or otherwise of flying, I’ll simply add my condolences to all the families.
November 28, 2008 at 1:41 pm
Australian Avaiation magazine had a number of articles about the A380 in last month’s edition. One went in to quite a bit of detail about the computerised controls. If you ignore the possibility of computer errors, the computers stop the pilots performing a lot of actions that would damage or destroy the aircraft and making flight safer.
And possible errors? I don’t see why these should be treated differently to other possible faults, such as the errors in conceptual design that downed the Concorde, errors in detailed mechanical design, errors in assembly, or risk created by the aircraft aging that are difficult to predict. Analysis, testing, quality control, and regular maintenance are the proper way to address technology risk, rather than refusing to use technology.
November 28, 2008 at 1:52 pm
If you ignore the possibility of computer errors, the computers stop the pilots performing a lot of actions that would damage or destroy the aircraft and making flight safer.
While this is the case, it also appears that the computers attempted to stop the pilots of the Qantas A330 last month from regaining control of the jet, after the computers threw it into a dive, mistakenly believing it was not in level flight. Fortunately the pilots were eventually able to retake control of the plane. However this was a problem not seen before. Such computer controls should be able to stop pilots committing suicide along with their passengers, as happened with the Egypt Air and Silk Air flights that were deliberately crashed by their mentally unstable pilots.
November 28, 2008 at 3:14 pm
>should be able to stop pilots committing suicide along with their passengers
I think the addition of GPS and the concept of computer, rather than mechanical, control allows several possible improvements. If you can link the GPS to an electronic map, then why shouldn’t you stop the aircraft flying in to land which isn’t a runway, or in to tall buildings.
I’m not sure what the current status is, but I believe that collision avoidance is moving from an ATC issue to one where aircraft transmit their positions continuously, with other aircraft receiving the positions and taking mutually agreed avoidance actions as required. It is decentralised rather than centralised and feels like an elegant solution.
November 28, 2008 at 3:22 pm
I’m not sure what the current status is, but I believe that collision avoidance is moving from an ATC issue to one where aircraft transmit their positions continuously, with other aircraft receiving the positions and taking mutually agreed avoidance actions as required.
Every modern jet has this. It is called TCAS (Traffic Collision Avoidance System) and using transponders on each plane, alerts pilots if they get too close to another plane. It even tells them to “turn left” or “descend” etc to avoid a collision.
It also prevents planes flying into objects, by calling out “terrain!” or “pull up!” in good time to avoid a collision, and screens on modern jets also show the plane’s exact position, as well as the location of every plane in the locality. If the plane is landing below the glide path it will even call out “sink rate!” and there are various other measures and alerts.
Erebus could not happen again, thanks to this modern equipment.
As an example, while landing at Queenstown on the flight deck of a 737, I could not help but notice we were flying straight towards the Remarkables, with the runway to our right. The system began calling “Terrain! Terrain!” just before the point where the pilot turned right — she told me that when it’s cloudy, “you can’t even see the mountain!” but the navigation gear is so good it has made even this very difficult approach quite safe… jets use a mix of auto-pilot and GPS for Queenstown now, a system known as “required navigation performance” or RNP which allows landings there even in quite low cloud.
November 28, 2008 at 10:21 pm
Poneke wrote “The comparisons are meaningless as one needs to look at the causes of the actual crashes”.
Quite right, and also the age of aircraft involved, so picking an arbitrary period doesn’t improve the comparison.
November 29, 2008 at 11:47 am
Queenstown has frightening approaches and I wouldn’t like to rely on RNP. I understand pilots are not overwhelmed by the aids that allow them to land in conditions where they would previously had to continue to Dunedin or Invercargill. To my mind that airport is just another place waiting for an accident to happen.
December 1, 2008 at 4:52 am
Poneke,
TCAS only gives vertical guidance (ie up or down); it is notoriously useless in terms of displaying the position of conflicting traffic with respect to azimuth. Also GPWS (ground proximity warning system) is not a TCAS function.
And I’m afraid that another Erebus could very well happen. As long as humans are involved in aviation, they will discover new ways of killing themselves. In other parts of the world, ageing jets and Soviet-era buckets of bolts will continue to crash until the cows come home. We don’t even hear of half of them in NZ but let me assure you, they go down all the time!
Happy flying, folks.
December 4, 2008 at 3:15 am
Aircraft will soon become an a dinosaur of modern technology.. there is a new technologies for transportation. For example — a train, that moves with 3700MPH (based on magnetic pillow) And no crashes, deterioration. For more info see movie: Zeitgeist: Addendum
May 5, 2009 at 12:00 am
It was certainly a nasty ringing of coincidence that the Airbus crash occurred on the anniversary of Erebus. But crash of ex Air New Zeland 737-200 ZK-NAS has an uncanny story to it, as well. It was involved in a near miss with a Cessna on approach to Dunedin on 25 August 1994. This was when it was 14 years old, and 14 years to the day (if you consider tthe time difference) to the tragic crash of Aug 24, ‘08.