When things go wrong…
On 15/09/2010, in Flashback, by steve
The aviation industry has such a wonderful safety record that people boarding an aircraft rarely, if ever, think about the possibility of an accident happening to them. Of course the same people will have driven down the highway to the airport similarly unaware that, statistically, they were in a much more dangerous place than on board their aircraft. This is as it should be of course.
But for those of us whose life is dedicated to aviation as pilots and air traffic controllers, incidents and accidents have a different meaning altogether. We train to handle them intellectually and emotionally and we do everything we can to prevent and avoid them. Nevertheless, on occasion things do go wrong and we are in danger of being reduced to mere spectators of the brute forces of physics.
But we fight back, to the last breath, the last instruction, the last pull on the control yoke and never give up. In many cases, this kind of resolve can actually beat the odds and we turn a potential catastrophe into an incident of little consequence.
We all have memories of cases where things had gone wrong. Some were more serious than others, in some friends and colleagues flew west into the sunshine never to return in others some escaped with their lives while others did not.
I will never forget the sight of the blackened vertical stabilizer of the IL-18 that flew into the ground in Budapest in bad weather or the voice of the navigator of a TU-134 who continued broadcasting a narrative of what they were experiencing on board as the stricken aircraft that had lost all instruments in near zero visibility slowly rolled to one side finally hitting the ground with its wingtip…
I was on duty when we got the AFTN messages that a Tu-154 of MALEV went missing over the Mediterranean and the message was brought to the duty supervisor by the tearful wife of the captain of that flight (she was one of the operators on duty in the AFTN centre). The IL-18 that went down while approaching Copenhagen in pouring rain, took off from Budapest while we were on duty in the tower.
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The tower with a soul… 4
On 29/01/2010, in The tower with a soul, by lajos
Wrestling with the “furniture”
The huge control panel for the various ground lights, like the taxiway lighting, was next to the ground controller’s console. The control
panel was teeming with various switches used to turn various sections of taxiway lights on and off. The panel was variously nicknamed Christmas tree and railway shunting-yard. The multitude of small LED’s presented an impressive picture when night fell. There was only one problem with this panel, and also the panel used to switch the runway lights… you could operate the switches only through a very specific movement of your hand, something that needed to be learned separately. Not infrequently, the first attempt had to be followed by a second one… For some colleagues the frustration was too much with the result that we had to call the maintenance crew to restore certain broken parts…
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Same time, same place, same level…11
On 22/10/2009, in Same time, same place..., by steve
Animals seen from the tower – chicken in boxes
Animals flown by air seemed to create all kinds of difficulties. Our local airline had a number of elderly turboprops, with a few years’ worth of flying time left in them, and these were converted for cargo duty. The catch was they had no big cargo doors, neither was there any chance for a retrofit. So they carried only stuff which could pass through the original openings. In spite of this limitation, they were pretty busy most of the time.
When one of the big farms started exporting live chickens, it was only natural they should come for help to the national airline. The cargo people were happy, as the chicks, one day old at the time of transport, were housed in nice cardboard boxes, 101 chicks to a box. The supernumerary plus 1 chick was supposed to account for the unavoidable casualties while in transit. Now can you imagine the stench and noise created by a few tons of day old chicks? We couldn’t, but according to the crews it was quite phenomenal.
The first few flights went well, but then summer came, and one day they found half the “passengers” dead on arrival at destination. The Arab buyer refused to accept the shipment and even threatened to break the contract if this ever happened again. Since a lot of money had been riding on those flights, the experts got together to investigate. They traced events right from the moment the chicks were hatched in their mechanical mother, through transport to the airport and finally to the loading operation. Everything appeared in order. Next, they wanted to look at the flight itself.
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A venerable old lady – the Ilyushin IL-18
On 14/10/2009, in Flashback, by steve
She was born at a time when glasnost and perestroika were still only words in the dictionary. A four-engine, turboprop transport that was noisy inside and out, was difficult to fly and needed an oil-well to keep her in the air. Yet she formed the backbone of East European air transport for more years than most of us care to remember and, above all, she was beautiful. With perfectly circular fuselage, sleek wings and graceful vertical stabilizer, the IL-18, by appearance, was a queen among aircraft.
But where did this lady come from?
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Anniversary – IL-18 HA-MOH crash at Budapest-Ferihegy airport
On 10/10/2009, in Anniversaries, by steve
35 year anniversary on 15 January 2010
Some anniversaries are occasions for sadness and a moment’s silence. An aircraft crash is always sad, a huge loss for everyone involved. When HA-MOH flew into the ground in the early evening of 15 January 1975 only 9 crew members were on board and they all lost their lives. She was on a positioning flight coming home from Berlin. They were stuck there for several days, waiting for the visibility to improve in Budapest.
The plane struck the ground 1360 meters from the runways threshold and about 120 meters from the centerline. The probable cause has been given as bad weather, darkness, fog, lack of crew coordination and possibly spatial disorientation.
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Same time, same place, same level… 8.
On 30/09/2009, in Same time, same place..., by steve
View from the tower
There can be little doubt that an airport looks its best from the control tower. True, pilots may lay claim to this, insisting that nothing equals the view from the front office window of an airplane in the final stages of its approach, but for earthbound controllers, the tower is absolute tops.
The panorama afforded by the wraparound windows set at 60 or more feet above ground level is nothing short of breathtaking and the sight of the tiny airplanes, ground vehicles and people moving far below transports one back right into our childhoods’ dream world of model railways. In addition, there is very little happening at an airport without the tower people being aware of it and this tends to impart a sense of power. It is only natural that controllers in the tower should have their share of stories to tell.
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