Under scrutiny

A good example of the “new media” at work was the US Airways Flight 1549 which crash landed in the Hudson River with the first news broken on Twitter. On YouTube there have been many millions of hits for the various videos related to the crash. And last November when a Qantas A380 suffered an uncontained engine failure after takeoff from Singapore, passengers were transmitting images of the damaged wing via their cell phones to Twitter and news services before the aircraft made its well documented landing.

Adding to Qantas’s woes at the time, SkyNews was carrying cell phone video images supplied from the Indonesian island of Batam of debris sporting the white flying kangaroo while its media team were still denying the airline had a serious problem. Other passengers were recording video footage again from cell phones or video cameras which were uploaded onto YouTube within hours of the plane landing in Singapore.

According to social media marketing group Sysomos, the news and politics category is the fastest growing aside from music and most popular with the 36 and above age group. In a paper Social Media Meets Business Intelligence, Dr Nick Koudas said that “social media are empowering individuals and are redefining the media landscape.” Giving that power scale, the latest data from www.comScore says YouTube served 12 billion video views during November, up 137 per cent year over year. Unique visitors to the site are robust as well, up 32 per cent.

Mobile phone news

According to mobiThinking.com, a mobile phone analysis group, mobile subscribers will pass the 5 billion mark in 2010, which is 70 per cent of the world’s population. More importantly from a news gathering and transmitting perspective, over 1 billion phones are 3G capable or have access to 3G networks. And the 5 billion cell phones transmitted 6.1 trillion messages in 2009.

When it comes to the “tech savvy”, the Japanese are way out in front with 60 per cent accessing the mobile phone Web, 63 per cent taking photos, although US and European consumers are catching on fast, says mobiThinking.

A Channel 7 news spokesman told Australian Aviation that the television station had seen a “massive increase” in the volume and quality of news gathering by the public. “We have been surprised by the quality and it appears that everyone with a cell phone is a de facto news reporter or TV cameraman, the spokesman said. “And they also have a good sense for what is in the news, such as Qantas, and what we will take. Some want money but most want the glory.” SkyNews also reports similar feedback from the public.

Flight Safety Foundation CEO Bill Voss warns that “there are also special interests exploiting minor incidents” to their own ends. “Industrial and outsourcing concerns are always suspicious. You never hear any headlines over local maintenance,” notes Voss. He highlights the record US$24.2 million FAA fine in August 2010 for American Airlines over the 2008 MD-80 groundings saying that it is ironic that the heaviest fine has been levied against an airline which does all its maintenance work in house.

The fine, which is being vigorously challenged by American, relates to the 2006 AD related to inspection of wiring bundles for signs of chafing or arcing close to fuel tanks on the airline’s fleet of 286 MD-80s and the FAA alleges that the airline made 14,278 flights with the fleet without making required upgrades.

“Part of the problem is also the airlines are more transparent and pilots more conservative. They used to troubleshoot in the air. Now they do it on the ground,” Voss adds. “And that is a good thing.” Another major factor notes Voss is the “immediacy of news today and the scramble to come out with news first without double checking sources. Sometimes there is no quality control and no correction for errors. Just an updated version with corrections quietly slipped in.” Voss also points to the significant increase in 24 hour news channels across the globe that are hungry for any news to fill the time.

And in a lighthearted twist of the immediacy of Twitter and the mistakes that can be made, Qantas celebrity Deborah Hutton who spruiks the values and brand of Qantas was caught out in an embarrassing slip when she was forced to fly on the Qantas low cost subsidiary Jetstar to a golf event. A disgruntled Hutton who was forced into a long queue and then had to pay extra for her clubs tweeted en route: “Jetstar nightmares: queues as long as Tiger’s [Airline] biggest drive and then I get whacked $180 for the privilege of taking my Callaways!” Hutton had the tweet taken down from her site within an hour but not before the media pounced on it.

Passengers are also taking to social media such as YouTube to vent their frustrations when they consider they have been dealt with unfairly. Canadian musician Dave Carroll’s video about United Airline baggage handlers who apparently damaged his Taylor guitar hit number 5 globally last year with a massive 7.5 million hits!

Union agendas

The media blowtorch has been applied to Qantas for the past three years related to a long running spat with its key maintenance union. Secretary of the Australian Licensed Aircraft Engineers Association Steve Purvinas conceded to Australian Aviation that out of “utter frustration” with dealing with Qantas’s previous management over a pay deal, it had “turned to the media” with incident reports to press its claims for less offshore maintenance. In fact Qantas employs 5,000 engineers and performs 90 per cent of its maintenance in Australia.

And despite the pay deal being concluded, incidents have continued to be linked by the media and others with offshore maintenance, which has in one case backfired on the union. Immediately after the Nov. 4 Qantas A380 engine explosion, the ALAEA linked offshore maintenance at Lufthansa’s Frankfurt facility as a factor which brought a heated response from Qantas’s CEO Alan Joyce who labeled the suggestion as outrageous. “This is not an issue with overseas maintenance and it’s the union making these outrageous claims for industrial relations agenda that is quite damaging in the current environment,” Joyce said.

In an interview with Australia’s Daily Telegraph published the day after the incident, Purvinas claimed that since the national carrier sent its engineering and safety checks to countries such as Singapore, Qantas’s once near-perfect safety record had suffered. According to the Daily Telegraph Purvinas said the “Lufthansa engineers who serviced the A380 involved in yesterday’s emergency landing in Singapore did not even have the same aircraft in their fleet” which of course is not correct and in the airline industry context meaningless, although it would have impact with the lay public. Ironically most of the serious incidents in the past two years involving Qantas have involved either freak events totally unrelated to maintenance or the maintenance was done in Australia.

But the campaign waged by the ALAEA has been extremely effective. Google “Qantas” and “Maintenance” and there are 3.46 million hits. By comparison United Airlines gets just 2.78 million, Southwest Airlines 2 million and Singapore Airlines just 1.5 million while Cathay Pacific gets barely a million. According to a public survey conducted by UWR Research in Australia, while four out of five Australians believe that Qantas is a safe airline, 50 per cent believe that the airline’s safety standards have declined over the past few years. During the height of the ALAEA dispute in mid 2008 only 66 per cent felt that Qantas was safe but that has recovered to 83 per cent just prior to the A380 incident.

The real numbers

According to Boeing, in fact the improvement in incidents is significant. The turn back rate for all Boeing aircraft has dropped from 1.55 per 10,000 flight cycles in 2006 to around 1.3 in 2010, while the diversion rate has declined from just above 0.6 per 10,000 flight cycles to 0.5 over the same time period.
At the same time the number of commercial jet flights – greater than 60,000lbs max gross weight – has increased from just 17.5 million in 2006 to 21.6 million in 2009 or 60,000 flights a day.

Another perspective on Qantas’s incident rate can be found in Australia where the Australian Transport Safety Board (ATSB) publishes a comprehensive online summary each week of safety incidents. In the period between October 16 and November 19 last year, when Qantas endured an apparent horror run of incidents including the A380 engine explosion, there were 545 safety incident reports to the ATSB in the commercial transport category sized Saab 340 and above. These relate to Australian registered commercial aircraft or foreign registered aircraft in Australian airspace.

Of the 545 only 51 or 9.4 per cent were for technical issues for the core Qantas fleet from the 717 to A380. Another 122 incidents – or 22.39 per cent – related to weather, bird strikes and medical emergencies with Qantas aircraft.

The balance of 372 incidents which made up nearly 70 per cent of the total for all other Australia airlines and foreign airlines in Australian airspace were made up of: 73 technical and 299 nontechnical such as bird strikes. Despite the figures, Qantas received the overwhelming percentage of negative publicity.

Over the nine years from 2000 to 2009 the ATSB found that the accident rate – fatal and non fatal – for high capacity Australian registered aircraft had declined from 9.3 accidents per million departures in 2000 to 2 in 2003 and has remained around that figure ever since apart from a small spike in 2007.

In day-to-day operations, Qantas leads the way on time performance according to Australia’s Bureau of Infrastructure Transport, Regional Economics 2009-10 performance report. Qantas’s departure record was 87.7 per cent, followed by Virgin Blue at 85.3 per cent, Jetstar at 82.1 per cent and Tiger Airways at 77.4 per cent

Regional airlines were led by QantasLink at 86.8 per cent, Regional Express at 86.4 per cent and Skywest at 82.8 per cent. Qantas also achieved the highest on time arrivals among the major domestic airlines at 87.4 per cent, followed by Virgin Blue at 85 per cent, Jetstar at 82.9 per cent and Tiger Airways at 78 per cent. QantasLink was the best performing regional airline for on time arrivals at 83.7 per cent, followed by Skywest at 82.2 per cent, and Regional Express at 81.8 per cent.

However those numbers are a dramatic turnaround for Qantas from mid 2008 during the industrial dispute with its engineers when its arrival and departure performance bounced around the 70 to 75 per cent mark for several months and slumped to 65 per cent in June 2008.

Major cause?

The reality is that the major cause for aircraft diversions are non technical, and more related are to medical emergencies. According to Boeing, 34 per cent of the diversions for its 777s under ETOPS operations are non-technical with engine issues 14 per cent of which only 1 per cent was during the ETOPS part of the flight. Problem with air conditioning was the next biggest issue at 11 per cent.

Medical issues loom large in diversions. A paper Predictors of Flight Diversions and Deaths for In-flight Medical Emergencies in Commercial Aviation by Dr Colin Graham of the Chinese University of Hong Kong found that one major Hong Kong-based airline had 4,068 medical emergencies, with 46 diversions and 30 deaths in the 5-year period from 2003 to 2008.

Another research paper Flight diversions due to onboard medical emergencies on an international commercial airline by Valani et. al. of the McMaster University in Ontario Canada in a similar study between 2004 and 2008 found that there were 200 diversions and 5,386 telemedicine contacts with ground support providers.

Voss reflects that today everyone with a mobile phone is a potential reporter or TV cameraman. “We are in the internet age and now countless minor events are visible – and news – to folks all over the world.” And the mystery of flight does not help either with many public perceptions incorrect, says Voss.

“With the number of flights ever increasing while the capability of cell phones seemingly doubling year the problem will only get worse.”