Free Republic

The 32-year-old captain of a Batik Air A320 and his 28-year-old FO (and the new father of month-old twins) have been suspended after they both fell asleep and the aircraft drifted off course. The Airbus, with 159 people on board, took off from Kendari, on the island of Sulawesi, for the 2.55-hour flight to Jakarta on Jan. 25. About a half-hour later after reaching cruise, the captain asked the FO for permission to nap in his seat and nodded off for an hour. He woke and asked the FO if he wanted to take a rest but the FO declined...

At no point did the pilots say they had a problem with their landing gear or any other type of emergency, according to the radio calls. A deadly plane crash in Pakistan is prompting questions about how the crew could touch down without landing gear when their sophisticated jetliner was bristling with equipment to prevent pilots from doing just that "It is unbelievable to me that an airline crew on a jet like an Airbus, with all the warning systems, would attempt to land the plane without the gear extended," said John Cox, an aviation safety consultant who formerly flew...

A passenger plane belonging to state-run airline Pakistani International Airlines has crashed near the southern port city of Karachi, according to Abdul Sattar Kokhar, spokesman for the country's civil aviation authority.

Chinese President Xi Jinping shakes hands with veterans after attending a wreath laying ceremony with his French counterpart, Emmanuel Macron at the Arc de Triomphe monument, in Paris, France March 25, 2019. Francois Mori/Pool via REUTERSy Marine Pennetier PARIS (Reuters) - Airbus signed a deal worth tens of billions of dollars on Monday to sell 300 aircraft to China, coinciding with a visit to Europe by Chinese President Xi Jinping and matching a China record held by U.S. rival Boeing. The deal between Airbus and China's state buying agency, China Aviation Supplies Holding Company, which regularly coordinates headline-grabbing deals during...

“The light passed about 100-200ft above their aircraft. They assumed it to be a drone and reported it to air traffic control. There was no time to take avoiding action,” said the report on the incident, which happened on May 26. ... In 2013 another A320 also had a narrow miss with an unidentified object over Glasgow. The A320 was flying with its landing lights on, in clear conditions and at an altitude of about 4,000ft above the Baillieston area of Glasgow, when the pilot and non-flying pilot saw an object “loom ahead” at a range of about 100m. The...

Two pilots have been suspended from duty after their aircraft, carrying 99 passengers, nearly ran out of fuel because they forgot to retract the landing gear after take-off. Air India Flight AI676 was en route to Mumbai from Kolkata on July 22 but was forced to divert to Nagpur when the crew became alarmed by the speed at which the aircraft was losing fuel thanks to the additional drag created by the extended wheels. An unidentified source told the Times of India that the “brand new Airbus A320”, one of the most fuel efficient aircraft in existence, had struggled to...

SAN FRANCISCO — In what one aviation expert called a near-miss of what could have been the largest aviation disaster ever, an Air Canada pilot on Friday narrowly avoided a tragic mistake: landing on the San Francisco International Airport taxiway instead of the runway. Sitting on Taxiway C shortly before midnight were four airplanes full of passengers and fuel awaiting permission to take off, according to the Federal Aviation Administration, which is investigating the “rare” incident. An air traffic controller sent the descending Air Canada Airbus 320 on a “go-around” — an unusual event where pilots must pull up and...

The plane’s cockpit voice recorder indicates there was a fire on the aircraft before it crashed — and an attempt to put it out, a senior source from the airline told CNN Tuesday. The revelation adds another detail to a picture that’s been slowly emerging since the May 19 crash. But investigators have said it’s still too soon to say what happened aboard the flight. The cockpit voice recorder captures sounds from the flight deck, including flight crew conversation, alarms and background noise that can help investigators understand what the flight crew was doing. Authorities haven’t released a transcript or...

AIRO (AP) - The voice and data recorders from the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean nearly a month ago are "extensively damaged" and will need repairs before they can be analyzed, an Egyptian official said Friday, dampening hopes for quick answers as to what caused the disaster. The official didn't elaborate on how long the repairs would take but said if this cannot be done in Egypt, the so-called "black boxes" would be sent abroad. The official who spoke on condition of anonymity because he wasn't authorized to speak to the media. With the wreckage of the Airbus...

A second flight recorder with information on crashed EgyptAir Flight MS804 has been retrieved, Egyptian investigators said on Friday. The Egyptian investigation committee said preparations were under way to transfer the two flight recorders to Alexandria where they will be received by an official from the general prosecutor's office and investigators.

Egypt's investigation committee said a doomed plane's cockpit voice recorder was found and pulled from the Mediterranean Sea on Thursday. ADVERTISEMENT Egypt on Wednesday said that it spotted and obtained images from the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane flying from Paris to Cairo that crashed into the Mediterranean last month, killing all 66 people on board, according to a statement by the country's investigation committee. The committee said in a statement that a vessel, the John Lethbridge, contracted by the Egyptian government to join search efforts for the data recorders and the wreckage "had identified several main locations of the...

Cockpit voice recorder of crashed EgyptAir flight found in Mediterranean, Egyptian investigators say

<p>Egypt says it has spotted the wreckage of the EgyptAir plane that crashed into the Mediterranean last month, killing all 66 people on board.</p> <p>An investigation committee said in a statement late Wednesday that a vessel "the vessel contracted by the Egyptian government to join the search efforts for the data recorders and the wreckage of the doomed A320; had identified several main locations of the wreckage, accordingly the first images of the wreckage were provided to the investigation committee."</p>

Laplace's equipment picked up the "signals from the seabed of the wreckage search area, assumed to be from one of the data recorders," the Egyptian statement read. It added that a second ship, the John Lethbridge, affiliated with the Deep Ocean Search firm, will join the search team later this week. Locator pings emitted by flight data and cockpit voice recorders can be picked up from deep underwater. The Laplace is equipped with three detectors made by the Alseamar company designed to detect and localize signals from the flight recorders, which are believed to be at a depth of about...

Missing EgyptAir flight MS804 had reportedly been forced to make three emergency landings in the 24 hours leading up to crash. The Airbus 320 is said to have been forced to turn around shortly after takeoff on three separate occasions after it's warning systems signalled an anomaly onboard. The claims, made in French media, have since been denied by the Egyptian lead crash investigation committee.

An engineer stands next to a Hellenic Air Force C-130 HAUP aircraft at the 133rd Hellenic Air Force Base in Kasteli on the island of Crete, Greece, May 20, 2016. The plane is participating in a search operation for the missing EgyptAir flight 804 Airbus A320. Credit: Stefanos Rapanis/REUTERS

Egyptian political commentator Nabih Al-Wahsh accused Israel of downing EgyptAir Flight 804, and called for Egyptians and Arabs to kill any Israeli they come across and to mutilate his body. Al-Wahsh, a lawyer, filed a lawsuit with Egyptian courts four years ago in an attempt to abolish the Camp David Accords. Al-Asseema TV presenter tried to stop Al-Wahsh from inciting to violence, but to no avail, as Al-Wahsh called for the establishment of “death squads” that would hunt down Israelis all over the world. The show aired on May 20. Nabih Al-Wahsh: "All the evidence indicates that the filthy Zionist...

Forensic expert: EgyptAir human remains suggest explosion CAIRO (AP) — Human remains retrieved from the crash site of EgyptAir Flight 804 have burn marks and are very small in size, suggesting an explosion on board may have downed the aircraft in the east Mediterranean, a senior Egyptian forensics official said Tuesday. "The logical explanation is that an explosion brought it down," the official told The Associated Press. The official, who is part of the Egyptian team investigating the crash that killed all 66 people on board the flight from Paris to Cairo early last Thursday, has personally examined the...

Egypt rejects report that crash evidence points to explosionThe chief of Egypt's forensics authority denied reports Tuesday that an initial examination of human remains from doomed EgyptAir Flight 804 pointed to an explosion, Egypt's state news agency MENA reported. “Everything published about this matter is completely false and mere assumptions that did not come from the forensics authority,” MENA quoted Hesham Abdelhamid as saying in a statement.

A senior Egyptian forensics official says human remains retrieved from the crash site of EgyptAir flight 804 suggest there was an explosion on board that may have brought down the aircraft. The official is part of the Egyptian investigative team and has personally examined the remains at a Cairo morgue. He spoke on condition of anonymity because he isn't authorised to release the information. He says all 80 pieces brought to Cairo so far are small and that 'there isn't even a whole body part, like an arm or a head'.