AvTalk Episode 310: “Engulfed in flames”

AVT 310 Transcript
EPISODE 310
[EPISODE]
[0:00:07] IP: Hello, and welcome to Episode 310of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchenik here, as always
with –
[0:00:16] JR: Jason Rabinowitz. What’s going on, Ian?
[0:00:19] IP: Huh?
[0:00:21] JR: God. Another deep sigh intro followed by, “Well, that's that episode. Tune in next
week.”
[0:00:27] IP: This week, thankfully, nothing as bad as it has been in the past couple of weeks in
terms of crashes, incidents, and accidents or near misses or anything like that, unfortunately, it's
just someone with either too much time on their hands or someone who really doesn't like flight
tracking or something. It’s just hammering us with a DDoS attack as of, still going on,
Wednesday, March 5th.
[0:00:54] JR: So, that's one thing to crash, just of the servers or the Internet.
[0:00:58] IP: Well, so yes, it's all more technical than I will claim to fully understand, but the data
is safe, both in terms of the ADSB data that we're receiving, but of course, more importantly to
our users, the user data, that's never been an issue. But being able to display the site in the way
it's supposed to be displayed 100%. That's been the tricky part. So, the things, we were down
for a while, but things have been back up and thankfully we're ahead of the game, but that's
been –
[0:01:31] JR: If you were the one – F5 on Flightradar25, 400 billion times every second, please
stop it.
[0:01:38] IP: Yes, 555,000 times a second, please stop.
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AVT 310 Transcript
[0:01:41] JR: Yes. Good advice.
[0:01:43] IP: Yes. So, that's been fun. But we have had some things happen this week. We got
a great episode for you because we're going to talk about the Daily Mail and their aviation
reporting, which is always just a fun thing to discuss because it makes Jason and I, our hair
turns gray, and then it falls out when they write about airplanes.
[0:02:03] JR: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.
[0:02:05] IP: And in this context, we're talking about the FedEx 767 that departed from Newark
International Airport over the weekend and promptly returned to Newark because it had struck a
bird or birds and the engine caught fire. There was fire emitted from the engine and then the
aircraft came back and landed safely. According Daily Mail, which is where, I know everyone
who listens to this podcast gets their aviation news. The aircraft became engulfed in flames.
[0:02:40] JR: Oh, no.
[0:02:42] IP: Yes.
[0:02:43] JR: Yes.
[0:02:44] IP: And then, yes, go ahead. It didn't. It’s safe to say it didn't.
[0:02:50] JR: It didn't. A little part of that 76, which I'm sure is, if not already back and service
will be at some point in the very near future. It was a little crispy. Typically, when this kind of
thing happens, if there's an engine fire, that the flight crew postal thing and fire extinguishing
bottles are discharged and fire go out. Didn't happen that way this time and was it the engine
itself that was still ablaze a little bit? Hard to tell because the video resolution isn't too great. But
do we know exactly what was on fire?
[0:03:21] IP: Something within the engine. So, the fire was contained within the engine nacelle,
but we don't know exactly what specifically was on fire. Obviously, the NTSB investigation that is
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AVT 310 Transcript
underway will determine the bird strike caused damage to what exactly within the engine and
then why there continue to be fire even after the discharge of both bottles.
[0:03:46] JR: That is the key question. But please don't get your aviation news or really any
news from the Daily Mail. No, the airplane was not engulfed in flames. If you read about this
from elsewhere, no, the engine did not fall off of the airplane. That especially did not happen.
[0:04:02] IP: That one's interesting because that one shows the danger of blind reporting of raw
sources without kind of following up, because that information came from a pilot, that was – I
listened to the ATC audio, and what happened was the aircraft departs, a Spirit Airlines flight
lines up to take off, and the FedEx plane makes its turn, initial right turn, and strikes the birds.
So, the [inaudible 0:04:35] key up the mic and tell Tower, “Hey, we think we saw his engine fall
off.” That's alarming.
[0:04:43] JR: Not what happened.
[0:04:43] IP: They come back on later, probably having discussed it, knowing that he, in fact,
did not literally lose the engine. They're still flying with both engines and say, “Okay, we saw
something fall off.”
[0:04:58] JR: Ah, there you go.
[0:04:58] IP: Which has happened before –
[0:05:01] JR: Or they saw the birds.
[0:05:04] IP: The birds or anything.
[0:05:06] JR: It’s Newark. It could be anything.
[0:05:09] IP: It could be flying raccoons. You just never know.
[0:05:10] JR: That's true.
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AVT 310 Transcript
[0:05:10] IP: But they corrected themselves later on. So, if you continue to listen, like if you stop
listening after you hear their engine falls off and then you go and report that, that's not what
happened. Context, my friends.
[0:05:22] JR: Newark, Newark, Newark. Couldn't have actually happened at a worse moment in
time for Newark, not only was it an aircraft emergency, in this case a fire, that's a serious
emergency. You'll have the aircraft stop on the runway. The ARFF teams are going to come out
and put out that fire, but it was the exact, basically the exact moment that one of the two main
runways at Newark started its year-long periodic closure.
So, at that point, Newark was already running on basically one and a half runways. And at that
exact moment, they were down to just the cross runway. What is that, 229, I think? Not great.
And for those of you Newark passengers, this is going to keep happening every Friday night
through Saturday until the summer, when the thing is going to be closed, I think for months on
end, and then it happens again in the fall. Not great, but a really bad start for the construction
there where the exact moment the runway is closed, they lose the other one.
[0:06:28] IP: Yes. Just Newark stuff. Speaking of keeping things contained in the engine
nacelle, the FAA has finalized the airworthiness directives that are related to a few failures of
CFM56 engines on 737s, the infamous of which resulted in a passenger's death on a Southwest
Airlines flight. When the engine suffered an uncontained failure, the piece punctured the
fuselage, broke a window and the passenger was partially sucked out of the aircraft during a
rapid depressurization.
So, the FAA has come out with a set of airworthiness directives requiring modification of the
737NG nacelle that wraps around the CFM56. So, the CFM56 is manufactured by CFM. And the
nacelle itself is not manufactured by the engine manufacturer. That's Boeing's responsibility. So,
this is some work that is going to be retrofitted on the 737 so that there are various parts of the
nacelle and the cowl that will be strengthened in order to better withstand any of the forces that
come out during an engine failure.
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AVT 310 Transcript
The airlines, if you're already operating, well, they're all already operating because it's 737NGs.
So, airlines will be responsible for doing some of the following, replacing engine call fasteners,
modifying radial restraint assemblies, and replacing crushable spacers, which are used to
connect the inlet to the engine fan case. They must also install bridge brackets reinforcing
where the primary exhaust nozzles are on some of the CFM56s and those brackets can help
prevent the nozzles during any engine failures from breaking loose and going back toward the
rear fuselage or the horizontal vertical stabilizer.
So, for its part, Boeing says, “Yes, absolutely. These are things that we're already working on
through service bolt-ins, and they are where these directives are a good start.” They can
start working on all of these things. Modifications are due by 2028.
[0:09:04] JR: Oh, 2028. Initially, I felt like, that's a really long time from now. But actually, given
the scale of how many 73s there are in the world, I guess that's reasonable, isn't it?
[0:09:15] IP: Yes. There are hundreds and hundreds of aircraft that are impacted by this in just
a few airlines alone. So, the effect worldwide is large. So, 2028 seems judging by how many of
these need to be done, seems pretty reasonable.
Sticking with Boeing, their gap year is over, Jason.
[0:09:36] JR: - I don't know what that means, so tell me more.
[0:09:40] IP: Well, if you don't know what it means, then it's just not funny, and my comments
are for naught. What Boeing was using the old 747 factory area for was taking apart 787s that it
had already built, inspecting them, and rebuilding them to make sure that the fuselage section
joints were within tolerance –
[0:10:07] JR: I get where you’re going with this now.
[0:10:08] IP: – and did not have gaps. So, they had to do that on 122, 787s. It took them –
[0:10:21] JR: It's a lot. How long?
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[0:10:23] IP: Took them a while.
[0:10:24] JR: Was it a year?
[0:10:26] IP: It was not a year.
[0:10:29] JR: You said gap year.
[0:10:29] IP: I know. It took multiple years. But the last aircraft to come out of what our good
friend Jon Ostrower called, a shadow factory, which I love that term, was a 787-10 built in 2021.
[0:10:44] JR: Wow.
[0:10:45] IP: So, that is out of the factory or out of the factory again. That chapter is over for
Boeing, which is great news for Boeing. But it also now gives them the 747 factory and that'll
probably just sit for a while. Because if you remember, there was a plan to use that space for a
new 737 line as they ramped up to, I think it was more than 57 aircraft per month.
[0:11:15] JR: We have not heard anything about this production line in a very long time. I mean,
you'd have to imagine it'll happen at some point, but I don't believe we've heard an update on
this in a very long time.
[0:11:27] IP: Well, no, I mean, they're rate limited now, both by supply chain constraints,
technical constraints, and the FAA saying you can't build more airplanes than you're building
right now, so you can't increase the rate. So, they don't really need that extra assembly line.
[0:11:44] JR: What are they going to do with that space?
[0:11:47] IP: Fill it with ping pong balls?
[0:11:48] JR: Should we take suggestions? How many Tully's coffees can they fit inside?
Because they love to tell you when you take a tour that there are like three of them. How many
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could they cram in? How many football fields could they put in? Because they love to tell you
how many football fields big that facility is. If you have a suggestion for what Boeing should do
with that space, I'm sure they'd love to hear it, but tell us first so we can take the credit.
[0:12:11] IP: Tell us first. Yes, there you go. Podcast@fr24.com. Okay, here's one that we might
actually need to rely on the expertise of some of our listeners because as it turns out, we have a
very engaged and very wise and knowledgeable listener base. This one has a whole lot of
people scratching their heads, including people who are supposed to be able to answer these
questions, I think. So, let's see if anybody out there listening has any information on this. At
DCA, arriving aircraft have been experiencing phantom TCAS RAs when there is no traffic
anywhere around them that could possibly be giving these off and no one knows why yet.
[0:13:00] JR: That's not good.
[0:13:01] IP: Yes. It's very bad.
[0:13:02] JR: All right. So, that's our analysis of the situation.
[0:13:07] IP: Analysis. It's bad. But yes, so the FAA is investigating, but we haven't heard
anything yet. I am very keen to learn what is going on and why it's happening specifically at
DCA, and specifically to a certain subset of aircraft, it seems, more so affecting regional jets.
But I don't know if that's specifically the case or just the ones that have been reported. So, a
very interesting set of circumstances.
[0:13:36] JR: Yes, specifically why this is so worrying beyond TCAS being a thing that we've
talked about many times that save many flights, allegedly, and in reality, TCAS operates
independently of air traffic control. It is not a system that air traffic controllers have any hand in.
If the TCAS system issues in RA, which is a resolution advisory, not a traffic advisory, but a
resolution advisory, it is an instruction generated by the system, given directly to the pilots to,
“Hey, you need to do this now. You need to either climb, or descend, or level off, or do
something to prevent a crash with another aircraft in your airspace.” I think that's what's so
frightening about this is the autonomy the system has, and then if there's a possibility that it
could be generating false RAs, that's a real problem. No one really seems to know why this is
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happening yet? Maybe there was just radio interference that happens to be on the same
frequency. Maybe it was just a transient thing, but not too often, you kind of see all the experts
in a field stumped by something like this, is it?
[0:14:47] IP: No. I mean, with the kind of similar nature of the ground proximity warnings
happening at 40,000 feet due to GPS interference, this is one of those things where it's its own
animal. It's designed to be self-contained without outside interference. When you get these
surprise alerts, there's a real sense of what happens if someone follows one of these when they
shouldn't and even worse than ignore it. You don't want to get complacent about these things.
It's very concerning and I hope they get to the bottom of it very soon.
[0:15:27] JR: Yes. I think you were just leading to the most critical part of this is nuisance alerts
over time. They become increasingly problematic. If pilots start treating TCAS less like an
absolute life-saving critical system too, this thing won't shut up and it keeps telling me about
ghosts, that's going to become a real problem. Because if pilots don't have absolute unwavering
belief that TCAS is correct, the entire system doesn't work. I really hope they could figure out
what's causing this very, very soon.
[0:16:01] IP: Yes. The Transportation Safety Board of Canada is out with a preliminary report on
an incident that I guess I don't think we talked about. It may have escaped my knowledge
entirely up until this preliminary report, which actually came out a while ago. So, I'm not sure
why it's been surfaced now, but they did a go around and they scraped the tail. What good? And
there's a really good photo of what happens when you drag an A350’s tail cone –
[0:16:37] JR: Sparks.
[0:16:38] IP: – on the runway.
[0:16:38] JR: Where did these photos come from because they look like the – I mean, they're a
little far away. They're a little bit grainy when you zoom in, but they're clear enough to read the
registration. It feels like these are stills from the original A350 flight testing or it's not flight
testing, but who took these? We know who took them because they're credited, but where was
this person?
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[0:17:03] IP: Yes. On the airfield, it looks like. They give the person's name, but they don't say
who the person was. They're definitely either sticking a telephoto lens to a fence or they're on
the airfield, which is entirely possible.
The first officer was on a training flight with this A350 and was the pilot flying, the pilot
monitoring, the captain. After the aircraft had touched down said, “Go around,” then set it again,
and the pilot flying, the first officer, then initiated the go around, put the thrust levers all the way
forward, and they pulled back on the sidestick. The aircraft became airborne at a very low
speed, for the most part, except for the tail, which was dragged across the runway. I will read
what happened to the tail from the Transportation Safety Board's preliminary report. “Damage
included skin delamination, punctures and damaged fasteners, an eroded flange, and a
severely damaged tail cone with deformed skin and cracked frames.”
We'll put a link in the show notes to the report, which shows not only the tail strike itself, but
also, what happened to the tail afterwards. This happened in January of 2024, and the aircraft
was repaired enough to fly back to France. Then, Airbus took it back to Toulouse and worked
with their magic, and the aircraft returned to service in October of last year.
[0:18:39] JR: All right. Good ending to that story. I wonder how expensive that mistake was. But
hey, they put it back in service. That's great. And right now, it's in Cairo. Fantastic.
[0:18:50] IP: There you go. Cool. Embraer, which we talked about in previous episodes, not for
a while now, but in previous episodes, in the context of will they build a new airplane? What will
that new airplane look like? Will it be a 737/A320 competitor? Will it compete with the A220?
What will it do? They say we're making no decisions until the next decade. We're going to spend
the next couple years bulking up our cash reserves before we decide what we're going to do.
[0:19:16] JR: I can't blame them. We've talked about this so many times. They're just going to
keep building the current E-Jets forever at this rate.
[0:19:24] IP: Forever and ever.
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[0:19:26] JR: Why do anything else when you've already perfected the art?
[0:19:32] IP: Yes. Let's go to the northeast and see if an alliance can be reformed because
American Airlines has finally gone with, I think, just weeks, if not days remaining on the clock to
do so. They have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reverse the ruling that disbanded or barred
the Northeast Alliance between American Airlines and JetBlue. So, that is interesting given
everything we've talked about over the past couple weeks with JetBlue saying, “Yes, we're
absolutely open to new partnerships and maybe old partnerships.”
[0:20:18] JR: But someone else is going to have to do it for us.
[0:20:20] IP: Yes. So, this is American Airlines saying, “Yes, we want that Northeast Alliance
back.”
[0:20:27] JR: Yes, more likely they want to set the precedent that they can do something like
this in the future, especially right now with the Supreme Court, the way it is. I wouldn't be
surprised if they take this case up and rule in favor of American. The question that comes at that
point is, does JetBlue want this? Because JetBlue hasn't really signaled that they want the
Northeast Alliance back. They didn't respond to Comet when Reuters asked them about this,
that they're kind of going their own way right now, but it doesn't hurt to have the precedent set
that actually this is something that should be allowed to go forward. We'll see. No guarantee the
Supreme Court takes up this case, but I'm betting on yes.
[0:21:09] IP: I think that's a safe bet, Jason.
[0:21:11] JR: Thank you.
[0:21:12] IP: Let's go to Ireland for this next story, because –
[0:21:19] JR: It's a wacky one.
[0:21:19] IP: What? Explain to me what happened here. I'm still trying to get my head around
this.
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[0:21:24] JR: So, the wheels of justice don't move too swiftly in some cases. In others, they
move really slowly. And in this particular case, Aer Lingus finally won a decades long lawsuit
over an airline that doesn't exist anymore, that hasn't existed in a very long time. Twenty-eight
years in fact, Aer Lingus apparently leased two Boeing 737s, which I'll tell you how old this is
because I don't know the last time that Aer Lingus had 737s in its fleet. They were probably, not
probably, they were definitely classics, which was 1993, but at least two Boeing 737s to East
West Airlines in 1993. There was some back and forth about landing fees and then bank
guarantees and that Aer Lingus had to pay out of pocket, and then they had to go back and get
their aircraft in 1997. They ended up in Turkey and then eventually the aircraft was sold to a
European lessor and they ended up in Kenya of all places. But 28 years later, the legal
proceedings are over and Aer Lingus has been awarded 109,983 pounds or 10 million rupees
by the airport's authority of India, finally closing a dark, dark, dark past. Twenty-eight years. How
many listeners of this podcast are younger than this court case is?
[0:23:04] IP: Probably a good handful, at least.
[0:23:06] JR: Absolutely wild that it took 28 years to resolve this, but good on them for definitely
spending more than that in court fees and attorney fees and everything else. I'm sure, over 28
years. But again, it's about the precedent, £109,000 richer Aer Lingus is.
[0:23:27] IP: Sure. Why not? Speaking of richer, or really for poorer, not, yes. This headline, it
makes you kind of read it a few times to make sure that you've got the numbers right. In 2024,
Spirit more than doubled its loss from the previous year to lose $1.2 billion with a negative
operating margin, so negative 22.5%.
[0:24:00] JR: Whoa. But on the positive side, they took in $150 million for those defective Pratt
& Whitney engines, so that's a drop in the bucket.
[0:24:09] IP: Yes. Those payments will continue through at least 2026.
[0:24:16] JR: How do you lose $1.2 billion when other airlines are not making money, hand or a
fist, but they're turning a profit? Even some of the smallest airlines in the US in this market are
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breeze, finally turned a profit, then you've got Spirit losing $1.2 billion. Where did they put it? I
hope they can find it.
[0:24:39] IP: Oh, one day. Let's go to Germany to talk about lasers.
[0:24:45] JR: Oh, what?
[0:24:46] IP: That's what I said. This is really cool. So, our good friends at the DLR in Germany
have been testing what they're calling intelligent load control systems. And it's part of Project
OLAF. The idea here is that you use LiDAR and other sensors to sense turbulence and wind
gusts ahead of the aircraft and precisely, automatically, and quickly adjust the flight control
services to alleviate the load on the things, reduce fuel consumption, and increase passenger
comfort.
[0:25:31] JR: Kind of sounds like what Boeing already does today with the 787, except I guess
instead of reacting to something that's already happened, it would be able to react to something
that is about to happen?
[0:25:46] IP: Exactly.
[0:25:48] JR: Me understand science.
[0:25:49] IP: Yes. So, they are finding that in their wind tunnel testing, it reduces fuel
consumption by 7.2% and significantly increases CO2 emissions as well as they're projecting
that it will increase passenger comfort. So, that is just some really cool stuff that they're working
on and hopefully this will get built up enough where they can start to test it on some of their
aircraft.
[0:26:20] JR: Yes.
[0:26:21] IP: Because I would love to see how that works.
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[0:26:23] JR: And I look forward to this being integrated into the next Embraer clean-sheet
aircraft in the sometime in the mid-2040s.
[0:26:29] IP: There you go. Let's end the show with some fun news. This one's just fun.
[0:26:38] JR: And it kind of came out of nowhere, but I'm okay but I'm okay with it.
[0:26:41] IP: It did.
[0:26:41] JR: We talked about this recently, that JetBlue loves special liveries and our friends at
JetTip are going to have to add another one for JetBlue. This one called Cloudtop Cruiser,
tail number N561JB. It is adorned with Mario and friends with JetBlue is kind of now very
common light blue fuselage. I feel like they have a number of special liveries with that same light
blue. But on the side, you'll find Mario and Luigi, Princess Peach, Yoshi, Donkey Kong, and
Bowser peeking out of the rear door, who some people have noted he's at the dreaded last row
that doesn't recline, that kind of squeezes into the lavatory at the back. So, if you see Bowser
out your window, you know you have a particularly bad seat.
It's not promoting a new game directly or a new console because Switch 2 still doesn't exist.
There's no new Nintendo worlds. It's just here's Mario and his friends and enemies on an
airplane. We called it Cloudtop Cruiser. There you go.
[0:27:49] IP: There you go. Cool. Sure. We'll take it.
[0:27:51] JR: Why not?
[0:27:53] IP: Why not? If Nintendo wants to get together with JetBlue and do that, why not?
[0:27:58] JR: Well, they say they partnered with Nintendo to bring our fun value to life on this
colorful A320 livery. I agree, it is fun and colorful.
[0:28:07] IP: It is fun and colorful. Let's see, do we have an entry into service? We do. They
entered into service this morning.
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[0:28:17] JR: Yes.
[0:28:17] IP: To Boston. It will be through the next couple of days. Let's see, Sarasota, Boston,
Denver, back to Boston, and Cancun.
[0:28:28] JR: Oh, some very JetBlue things, yes.
[0:28:31] IP: So, there you go. Look for that one in the JetBlue network near you. This has been
episode 310 of AvTalk. I am Ian Petchenik here, as always with –
[0:28:45] JR: Jason Rabinowitz. Thanks for listening.
[END]
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