#also same with TCAS and EGPWS

[bucketsofgiggles]

Wait tell me something about commercial aviation safety that sounds cool.

okay so like, the engines being Important is an obvious statement right? because not only do they make the Plane Go but they're also the plane's electrical power plant. it's why you've got cabin lighting and A/C and flight attendants can make you food of various quality, and also, ya know, let the pilots have instrumentation. and modern aircraft can fly safely on only one engine! granted, your pilot will be landing that thing at the closest suitable airport ASAP, but it'll all in all be a fairly standard landing, probably just earlier and likely at a different place than you were planning.

but what if you lose both? like US Airways Flight 1549? i mean, beyond the fact you're now in a Giant Glider, the pilots are now flying said Giant Glider without all but the most basic, analogue instruments, right?

nope! (unless your pilots panic/are busy trying to keep the plane in control/incapacitated, to which then you have Bigger Problems, Sorry). there's the Ram Air Turbine, which will deploy automatically and use the air blowing past it to make electricity, though it'll be prioritized for cockpit instruments only. there's also the Auxiliary Power Unit or APU which has to be deployed by the pilots, but gives them even more power than the Ram Air Turbine because, if you've flown, i guarantee you've been on a plane that's used it, because that's the plane's power source on the ground when the engines are off, such as when at the gate.

if Flight 1549 sounds a bit familiar, that's because it's better known as the Miracle on the Hudson, AKA the A320 that landed on the Hudson River in NYC in 2009 after losing both engines to bird strikes at low altitude. and among the many brilliant things Captain Chelsea "Sully" Sullenberger did in that accident was almost immediately start the APU, which gave him and First Officer Jeff Skiles way more instrumentation a lot faster. in fact the emergency checklist made after Flight 1549 (because checklists for dual engine failure before it assumed you were at higher altitude, and thus assumed you had much more time to troubleshoot/try and re-start the engines) is pretty much just everything Sully and Skiles did based on pure instinct during that emergency, with starting the APU one of the first instructions. it's colloquially called the Sully Checklist for that reason.

anyway here are some more links to Wikipedia articles about really interesting air accidents (FYI none of these have fatalities so don't worry if you're sensitive to that sort of thing!):

TACA Flight 110: Proto-Flight 1549 effectively, a 737 loses both engines during final approach into New Orleans after hail ingestion into the engines. Captain Carlos Dardano (who is worth a look up on his own, this dude is a badass) safely brought the airliner to a stop on a levee.

British Airways Flight 5390: First Officer Alastair Atchison lands a BAC One-Eleven alone after Captain Tim Lancaster is partially ejected from the aircraft after the cockpit windscreen on his side is blown out due to improper maintenance. to an airport F/O Atchison is unfamiliar with. while also overflying London, some of the busiest airspace in the world.

Air Canada Flight 143 AKA The Gimli Glider: another loss of engine power, this time due to incorrect fuel loading due to Canada's then-recent switch from Imperial to Metric. pilots landed the plane safely at a closed down airfield that had been converted to a drag racing course. one of the most famous airplane crashes.

Federal Express Flight 705: (TW: attempted murder-suicide) okay this is technically a cargo flight, but it's one of the most badass displays of flying ever. a disgruntled Federal Express employee attempts to hijack the flight and crash it for life insurance payout and also revenge (he was targeting Federal Express' hub). despite inflicting all three pilots (this is old enough that this plane still had a flight engineer) with severe head wounds, they all fought off the attacker and landed safely, while also flying a fully-loaded DC-10 frighter like a fucking fighter jet to throw the attacker off-balance.

i also recommend the Mentour Pilot YouTube channel. it's run by an active 737 pilot who's also trains new pilots, so there's tons of good insider knowledge and he breaks down complicated aviation concepts into plain language very well. his videos are very well done and i always learn something new, even with accidents and incidents i've read extensively about.

[jacewilliams1]

The GPS revolution at 20 – how aviation has changed

2018 is a year of milestones for the Global Positioning System (GPS). The concept of navigating by satellite was first discussed in the early 1960s, but it was exactly 40 years ago that the Department of Defense launched the first fully-functional NAVSTAR satellites into orbit. It remained a somewhat obscure military project until the early 1990s, when portable GPSs began to show up from famous brands like Sony (remember the Pyxis GPS?) and startups like Magellan (remember the NAV 1000?).

It was Garmin that really changed the aviation industry, though, with the introduction of the GNS 430 and 530 twenty years ago. Even jaded old veterans had to admit that a color moving map that always knew your position and groundspeed was pretty impressive, and it ushered in a new era of direct-to navigation and GPS approaches. Over 125,000 430s and 530s were sold before the GNS line was discontinued in 2011.

Decades after it first caught on, GPS is so deeply embedded in everyday life that we now take it for granted. Over two billion people carry around smartphones with GPS receivers inside, enabling everything from Uber to Instagram. As life-changing as these services have been, it’s hard to think of an industry more transformed than general aviation. Consider the long list of capabilities that even a 60-year old Light Sport Aircraft can now have thanks to 24 satellites.

Nobody gets lost anymore

Everything changes when the navaid is in space.

At its most basic level, GPS does only one thing: it tells the user exactly where they are. That deceptively simple feature unlocks so much more when paired to a navigation database and a large screen, but even the basic lat/lon location is a huge benefit for pilots. Before GPS, lots of brain power was required just to understand where the airplane was, especially when flying in clouds. Dead reckoning skills, VORs, NDBs, DME and radar were all used to answer the question, “where are we?” Even with all that technology, getting lost was a major concern. When I began my pilot training in the mid-1990s, we spent a lot of time discussing “lost procedures,” which included everything from circling water towers to asking for a DF steer.

Those conversations seem quaint now. Sure, you can lose situational awareness (usually due lack of proficiency with avionics), but truly being lost for a long period of time is almost unthinkable. The panel-mount GPS will show you where you are and where you’re going. If not, the portable GPS will… or the tablet… or the phone. Maybe this has made our pilotage skills a little rusty; it has also prevented countless accidents.

Navigation doesn’t just mean in flight, either. Geo-referenced taxi diagrams have become mainstream with the growth of the iPad, and have played at least some role in reducing serious runway incursions. Consider the famous (and frightening) incident at Providence, Rhode Island, when a 737 was cleared to take off directly into the path of another airliner that had strayed onto the active runway. Today, both crews would most likely know right where they were thanks to GPS, and they might even have a display of ground traffic to complete the picture.

Instrument approaches to small airports

Once a flight reaches the terminal area, the navigation challenge gets even more acute, at least when it’s IFR. Major airline airports have always been well served by ILS approaches that can guide an airplane down to 200 feet AGL, but smaller airports (where most general aviation pilots fly) had to make do with worse options – maybe nothing more than a circling VOR approach or an NDB approach.

GPS has fundamentally changed the distribution of power. Because WAAS GPS approaches depend on a single constellation of satellites instead of hundreds of locally-installed radios, a quiet country airport can have the same precision approach that a major towered airport does, complete with a glideslope down to 250 feet. There is a cost to creating an approach, but it’s far less than installing a full ILS. The proof is in the numbers: today there are almost 4,000 WAAS approaches, over 1,000 at airports not served by an ILS. Score one for the little guy.

Terrain and obstacle alerts

Terrain alerts were once found only in airliners; now they are included with most aviation apps.

Most pilot intuitively know that these navigation tasks are easier with GPS, but what’s less appreciated are the huge advancements in hazard alerting that have come about. Throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s, Controlled Flight Into Terrain (CFIT) was a leading cause of fatal accidents, with the American Airlines crash in Cali, Colombia a more recent example. That Boeing 757 had a basic Ground Proximity Warning System (GPWS), but it only gave the pilots a 12-second warning before impact with a mountain. Modern Enhanced Ground Proximity Warning Systems (EGPWS) use GPS to provide much more sophisticated alerts, and critically, they also provide a visual overview of terrain. They have been spectacularly successful, almost eliminating CFIT accidents in properly equipped airplanes.

The latest advancement has brought this technology to consumer devices. An iPad running ForeFlight or Garmin Pilot can provide not just terrain alerts but also obstacle warnings. Some avionics even show power lines, a critical feature for helicopter pilots and crop dusters. Without GPS these alerts would be either impossible or annoying to the point of uselessness.

Traffic and weather

GPS isn’t the essential technology behind traffic alerting; after all, radar kept airplanes separated for decades before it was invented. What GPS has added is another level of precision and a lower cost of entry. Instead of spending $20,000 or more to install an active traffic system (or a full-blown TCAS), ADS-B traffic can be displayed on an iPad for well under $1,000. And instead of just showing position and altitude, ADS-B traffic can also show track and speed. This means pilots can make smarter deviations based on where a threatening airplane is going, not just where it is.

Datalink weather has been even more widely adopted than traffic alerts, with tens of thousands of pilots now flying with up-to-date radar images received via SiriusXM satellites or ADS-B ground stations. This is beginning to show up in the weather accident rate, which started declining around the time when ADS-B weather went mainstream. Again, GPS is not the main technology at work here, and yet it’s impossible to imagine modern datalink weather without it. A static radar picture in flight is nice; having your position and route as well makes it far more valuable. The big picture awareness is what makes strategic avoidance so easy. It’s not just radar, either. Imagine trying to avoid a temporary flight restriction (TFR) without GPS on board.

The future

Is the GPS revolution running out of steam? Not yet. The latest generation of GPS satellites, called Block III, are scheduled to launch in October, which should bring improvements in accuracy and availability. Beyond fundamental system upgrades, there are plenty of exciting projects in the works, many of them outside aviation. These include everything from detecting seismic activity to tracking shipping containers with pinpoint accuracy.

In aviation, the most visible advances will come from the world of ADS-B. While the FAA’s mandate has been a source of frustration for many pilots, this massive program will slowly transform how air traffic control works. By connecting a WAAS GPS to an upgraded transponder, ADS-B offers coverage in many places that radar could never reach, and usually with better accuracy. It’s even beginning to change airspace, as routing and frequencies are redesigned around GPS navigation instead of VORs.

An instrument approach that is only possible with GPS.

Pilots can also expect to see more WAAS approaches to remote airports, many of them in places where traditional navaids are simply impractical. The latest RNP approaches feature curving paths and multiple step down fixes, designs that are only possible with very precise GPS receivers.

Another interesting idea is the creation of more data-driven safety programs that use GPS flight data recorders to analyze flights and identify potential safety issues. Such programs have made a difference in the airline industry, and inexpensive GPS receivers might make them practical for GA pilots too. Perhaps GPS could even begin to make a dent in the number of fuel exhaustion accidents, by showing real-time range graphics and more accurate time en route numbers, although that may be wishful thinking.

As magical as GPS seems, it is obviously not perfect. Much of the behind-the-scenes work going on now is focused on protecting it from interference, either intentional or accidental. This is a small but growing problem, as it’s shockingly easy to spoof a GPS receiver. The more our world relies on GPS, the more critical this problem becomes.

Unfortunately the bigger threat, as you might expect, comes from pilots. GPS is merely a tool, not a replacement for a competent pilot. Used wisely it can improve situational awareness and increase safety margins; used carelessly it can lead to disaster. Indeed, the key mistake made by the pilots in Cali was to mis-program their flight management system. This is a reminder that avionics proficiency is an essential skill in the modern cockpit, not a bonus.

Still, 40 years after the Department of Defense launched NAVSTAR and 20 years after Garmin launched an avionics boom, GPS deserves the prize for the most significant innovation in aviation history. One key reason it has had such an impact is its wide reach – unlike say, the jet engine, it has touched all parts of aviation. GPS has been a democratizing force, both adding features and reducing cost for pilots all around the world. Here’s to 40 more years of saving lives.

The post The GPS revolution at 20 – how aviation has changed appeared first on Air Facts Journal.

from Engineering Blog https://airfactsjournal.com/2018/06/the-gps-revolution-at-20-how-aviation-has-changed/

[herryadams-blog]

In order to bring Evergreen's world-class ocean shipping experience to the forefront, Evergreen Group founder Truong Vinh Phat founded  Eva Air  in 1989 and on October 6 of the same year. Ordered 26 Boeing and McDonnell Douglas US aircraft with a total contract value of $ 3 billion to $ 600 million, drawing the attention of the global aviation market.

On July 1, 1991 , Eva Airlines officially took off, operating to date, with more than 70 aircraft, covering all four continents: Asia, Australia, Europe and America. and more than 60 cities, as well as joint ventures with major airlines in the world, forming a comprehensive passenger and cargo transport network around the globe. Eva Airlines also cooperates with Uni Air, flying to the major cities of Mainland China.

On June 18, 2013 ,  Eva Airlines  officially joined the global aviation alliance - Star Alliance, through its global distribution network of Star Alliance member companies. Passengers to 192 countries, nearly 1,330 routes and more than 18,500 daily passenger service.

INCREASING AND EXCESSING A FLIGHT SPACE ON FLIGHT

With the consistent corporate culture of "Challenges, Creativity, Teams" of Evergreen Group, Eva Airlines maximizes the business philosophy of "Safe, fast route; service considerate; effective business, creative ". 1992's "Fourth Class" - High Class, creating a wave of imitation of other world famous airlines, changed its name to Evergreen Deluxe Class in 1995, Changed its name to "Elite Class", received the praise and love of a large number of international passengers.

Year 2003 Eva Airlines introduces the A330-200 to the creative category - the "Premium Laurel Class", which features the most advanced AVOD (Audio / Video on Demand) interactive entertainment system, creating a stylish, new to the aviation industry. In 2012 imported the Boeing 777-300ER and launched the "Royal Laurel Class", seats arranged like a skeleton backward, encapsulated passengers in their private space, can nest 180 degrees, create luxurious space in the cabin and serve utensils. 2014 will lead the domestic aviation industry to install Wi-Fi on the new aircraft line, as well as introduce the next-generation Panasonic eX3 entertainment system and global communications system (GCS), not only to lead globally,

In 2015, EVA Airlines and Boeing Company signed a contract to import 24 passenger airliners 787, which is expected to be delivered in 2018, regardless of seat design, interior design and service quality. These are upgraded to enhance international competitiveness.

CREATIVE HOSPITALITY SERVICES STARTING FROM AIRCRAFT

When putting ideas into practice, aviation is not just a transportation industry. In 2005 and 2011 Eva Airlines teamed up with Sanrio Japan to launch the world's first Hello Kitty aircraft, subtle fuselage motifs, more than a hundred types of gear. Many Hello Kitty aerials in limited numbers and a website dedicated to Hello Kitty, passengers will be placed in the flight fun from the start of the flight.

Eva Airlines teamed up with Sanrio Japan to launch the Hello Kitty aircraft

Since the launch of the Hello Kitty motifs to date, has received the love of numerous international passengers, full of ideas for design and creativity, won the "Design aircraft body design excellent "by the British magazine" Wallpaper "in 2007, and the" Top 8 most famous motorsports worldwide "by the British" Daily Mail "in 2016 and the outstanding service excellence award 2016 of Global Traveler magazine, USA.

SAFETY SAFETY IS NOT EXCESSIVE

"Safety" is the promise of EVA Air to passengers, which is also the responsibility and goal of leading efforts of all employees Eva Air. Since its inception, Eva Airlines has expanded its comprehensive aviation safety training program, bringing the concept of safety into the hearts of all employees, and establishing a complete " "use the method of the management system to understand the potential risks in the whole system and apply appropriate precautions to ensure safe flights.

EVA Airline, in  addition to training, testing, strict management, strict discipline and refinement of the crew, the investment and updating of flight safety hardware and software, including Equipped with state-of-the-art ground fault warning system (EGPW), airborne crash control (TCAS) system, AHM system, Electronic Flight Bag. In 2011, leading the aviation industry to provide the entire crew using i-Pad electronic astronauts, the company's own research and development, and the development of types of advanced aerospace skills and APP for safety management, risk assessment.

"Safety" is the promise of EVA Air to passengers, which is also the responsibility and goal of leading efforts of all employees Eva Air.

Eva Airlines' efforts and investment in safe flying, safety and performance have always been confirmed by domestic and foreign industry, and are powered by the Jet Airliner Crash Data Evaluation Center, the most powerful German company in the world, voted "Top 10 Global Safe Airline" for many years, achieving a third place in 2015. In addition, Global Airlines AirlineRatings.com announced the 20 safest airlines in the world, Eva Airlines also achieved a full seven-star rating. Eva Airlines always insists on flying safely in front of one another, also demanding higher standards to bring convenience and peace of mind for passengers.

TOWARDS THE FUTURE OF INTERNATIONAL TURBINES

Eva Airlines in its early days, has set a goal of becoming the world's leading airline, and will continue to continue its commitment to quality flight safety and serve passengers as warmth. With all the heartfelt thanks, flying to every corner of the lane and abroad, setting international vision, looking forward to the future, striving to reach the best airline in the world.

EVA AIRLINES VIETNAM

EVA Air Vietnam operates two routes: Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi fly direct and transit in Taiwan to destinations in Asia, Australia, New Zealand, Europe and North America. Customers  from EVA Airlines  Vietnam  will be assisted by professional staff at  EVA Airlines office in Ho Chi Minh City.

With continuous effort in upgrading and improving service and safe flight performance, EVA Airlines has been successful in ranking top 10 times in the leading aviation magazine in Germany.

In 2010, 2012, 2016 was the travel magazine Travel & Leisure, US comparison, voted as "Top 10 best global airline"; 2014 and 2016 are AirlineRatings.com's "Top 10 Best Global Airlines" by AirlineRatings.com.