Regulators made the call to ground the planes after two incidents thought to be battery related. On Wednesday, an All Nippon Airways flight in Japan made an emergency landing after the crew reported “smoke in the cockpit” and the battery-warning light went off. Last week, a Japan Airlines Dreamliner caught fire at Boston’s Logan Airport.
The emergency order was a result of the second incident “to address a potential battery-fire risk in the 787” and will “require operators to temporarily cease operations,” the FAA said in a statement.
“Before further flight, operators of U.S.-registered, Boeing 787 aircraft must demonstrate to the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) that the batteries are safe and in compliance,” the statement said.
This shouldn’t have a major effect on your air travel in the U.S. — United only flies six of the planes, which they first started flying in November.
Three US Airways planes came within seconds of a midair collision Tuesday afternoon at Ronald Reagan National Airport after air traffic controllers reportedly mistakenly cleared two outbound flights to head in the direction of an incoming plane.
The Washington Post reports that the commuter planes were carrying 192 passengers and crew members. The newspaper cites federal officials with direct knowledge of the incident.
Based on the planes’ speeds and their trajectory, they were apparently 12 seconds from colliding with each other, MyFoxDC.com reported.
Three planes, twelve seconds away from a deadly plane crash? Scary.
When SkyWest Airlines employees got to their St. George, Utah home base this morning, they found a strange sight — one of their planes, a Delta Airlines Bombardier CRJ-200, was sitting in a ditch for some reason. It appeared someone broke into the plane and tried to drive away with it. (See photo, above.) Now, the mystery has taken a dark turn, as Brian Joseph Hedglin, a 40-year-old former SkyWest pilot, was found dead inside the plane of an apparent suicide. Hedglin was wanted for questioning in the death of his girlfriend, Christina Cornejo, who was found dead in Colorado Springs on Friday. Very strange. (photo via KSL)
EDIT: Corrected direction of the flight — which was headed FROM Rio De Janeiro to Paris.
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Currently unaccounted for: A newly-made Russian jet in Indonesia, reportedly with over 40 people on board. The jet was being flown over mountains as a demonstration for journalists and people who might be interested in buying the plane. The Russian Sukhoi Superjet 100 only made its first flight last year. (AFP file photo)
New startup idea you should follow: SurfAir. Basically, sorta like an airplane version of Uber — that is, an attempt to disrupt a mode of transportation. Pay $1,000 a month, fly first-class up and down the California coast, between Palo Alto and Los Angeles at will. Imagine this being tough to scale, but this would prove popular on the East Coast, where an inter-city Amtrak commute isn’t unheard of. (On a side note, when is someone going to disrupt the passenger train system already?) Anyway, this sounds slightly more realistic than Taco Copter. (ht Hacker News)
They’re going to take us down. They’re taking us down. They’re going to take us down. Say the Lord’s prayer. Say the Lord’s prayer.A hitherto unnamed JetBlue captain • Comments made during a flight from New York City to Las Vegas earlier today. The plane and its passengers, thankfully, are all fine, and were never in any danger – “they” were never trying to take down the flight. Rather, the captain stormed out of the cockpit, seemingly in the grip of some manner of mental episode, causing his disoriented and hysterical claims of an impending terrorist incident. Said one passenger, Gabriel Schonzeit: “He started screaming about al-Qaida and possibly a bomb on the plane and Iraq and Iran and about how we were all going down.” The captain, now at a medical facility in Amarillo, Texas, was tackled and held by four passengers until the flight was diverted safely. Authorities interviewed all passengers as they left the plane, and the FBI is reportedly coordinating an investigation with the FAA. source (via • follow)
» But there’s a major downside: Because the FAA is so entwined with the kind of red tape only a complicated government organization could invent, if things are decided a certain way, it could force some crazy rules before an airline could allow such devices. For example — just for the right to allow the iPad on their plane, the current standards would force each airline to test each version of a device in a plane by itself (i.e. no passengers) to make sure everything was OK. If that sounds like an insane waste of money, that’s basically how the airlines feel.
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Tumblr this morning. [h/t anne]
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It’s not an unheard-of thing, either. Heavy D, born Dwight Arrington Myers, already had a heart condition and suffered from longstanding weight issues, making him more susceptible to such an ailment, and the deep leg vein thrombosis became much worse as a piece of the clot traveled to his lung, killing him. Doctors say that the best way to avoid such an ailment on a long flight or train ride is to get up and move around a little bit — which is at times easier said than done, even on a flight like the one Heavy D took.
nhaler asks: The most persuasive argument I've read for banning the use of cell-phones—and NOT electronic devices in general—derived not from the airline industry, but from cellular carriers. When a pod of 300 people is loaded with cell-phone users, and you have anywhere from a handful to dozens of these pods overhead, they zoom tower-to-tower with great speed and with great impact on the cellular networks' attempts to keep up with the huge clots of connector-disconnectors overhead.
» SFB says: So in other words, cell phone carriers couldn’t handle the infrastructure issues caused by hundreds of people flying in tightly-packed quarters thousands of feet overhead at high speeds. Hm, interesting take. — Ernie @ SFB
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