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British Airways is set to launch mobile phone technology on its flights between London City Airport and New York JFK for its business-class travellers.
Passengers will be able to send and receive text messages and access the Internet on planes from autumn this year.
The service is aimed at people in the Square Mile. We believe the route and the new technology will offer an appealing package to business travellers, the Telegraph quoted a spokesman for BA as saying.
There are no plans for voice calls at the moment but we will listen to feedback from passengers. The customer is in charge, he added.
Other airlines that are in the process of testing or considering the technology include Air France, Qantas, TAP Air Portugal, Kingfisher and Air Asia. (ANI)
The downing of a US Airways jetliner in New York’s Hudson River last week sparked anxious talk about bird strikes, a problem airport safety authorities say happens almost every day somewhere in the country.
The pilot of that flight reported a flock of birds was sucked into both engines of the Airbus A320 shortly after the plane left LaGuardia Airport on Jan. 15. Feathers and remains have since been found in one of the jet’s engines.
At San Diego’s Lindbergh Field, intermittent birds strikes are documented and on occasion have prompted emergency landings, though an airport spokesman said birds pose a minimal hazard to aircraft there.
“It’s extremely rare to have a serious bird strike incident,” spokesman Steve Shultz said.
Still, national experts say potential contact between planes and birds are a concern.
Between 1990 and 2008, there were 106,604 reports of birds striking U.S. civilian or military aircraft, according to a national database prepared for the Federal Aviation Administration.
“It’s a problem for every airplane at every airport,” said John Ostrom, chairman of the Bird Strike Committee, an advisory group made up of representatives of the FAA, the U.S. Department of Agriculture, airlines and pilots.
Airports and pilots are encouraged to report as many incidents as possible, Ostrom said. But because reporting is voluntary, he estimated that only about 20 percent of strikes are counted.
Lindbergh Field officials have recorded 30 bird strikes in the past three years, according to a summary of the incidents maintained by the airport.
At least two flights from Lindbergh have required emergency action because of bird strikes, a Bird Strike Committee report states.
A barn owl sucked into the engine of a Boeing 737 shortly before liftoff in 2004 caused the engine to vibrate so badly that the airliner was forced to circle the airport and make an emergency landing.
And in 2002 an American Airlines flight bound for Chicago ran into a flock of ducks shortly after takeoff. According to the report, as many as 10 ducks slammed into the jetliner, breaking holes in the aircraft’s nose cone and one wing.
The plane, carrying 131 passengers, was dispatched to Los Angeles International Airport for an emergency landing.
Most strikes are not so dire. Pilots have reported birds slamming into nose cones, wings, engines and landing gears without incident, the airport said.
To reduce the danger, Lindbergh officials have developed a wildlife management plan, a mandatory strategy for every airport across the nation meant to make runways and surrounding skies safer from birds.
Lindbergh’s plan calls for keeping bushes and shrubs trimmed to discourage nesting along the runway and 650 acres surrounding the airport. It requires that trash be cleaned up.
Traps set up across the airport capture 50 to 100 birds a month, including pigeons, doves, gulls and sparrows – the kinds of birds Lindbergh authorities believe are among those that have hit aircraft in the past few years.
There is also a provision for using explosives with the sound of a shotgun blast and flash like fireworks to chase birds away. And scattered across the airport are bright orange “spooky eyes” owl balloons Shultz said are intended to frighten away birds.
“The plan recognizes the potential for problems,” he said. “But the actual record for bird strikes shows there hasn’t been significant impact on the operations record of safety at the airport.”
Worldwide, bird strikes happen every day and can be deadly, with about 200 people killed since 1988 because of airborne collisions with birds, according to the Bird Strike Committee.
The FAA’s Web site on Airport Wildlife Mitigation says bird strikes do more than $300 million in damage to U.S. aircraft each year.
But the flight attendants’ enrollment in the Aviation Safety Action Program comes three months after American’s unionized pilots withdrew from ASAP over concerns that reporting incidents could lead to company disciplinary action.
American’s pilots are joined by pilots from Delta Air Lines and Comair in withdrawing from ASAP, industry and company officials said. 
With American’s 18,000-member Association of Professional Flight Attendants participating in ASAP and the Allied Pilots Association declining to enroll, the situation is ripe for conflicts between cabin crews during flights, pilots say.
The APA represents 13,000 American pilots.
“Their (flight attendants’) exposure is less than that of pilots,” said APA spokesman Scott Shankland. “We’re having to remind pilots not to skip on procedures because they could be reported by a flight attendant for breach of procedure.”
ASAP encourages the voluntary reporting of safety incidents by airline employees. Parties to the agreements include the Federal Aviation Administration, 79 U.S. airlines and 169 employee groups, including pilots, flight attendants, dispatchers and mechanics.
The program encourages airline employees “to voluntarily report safety information that may be critical to identifying potential precursors to accidents,” the FAA says on its ASAP “Fact Sheet.”
Under ASAP, safety issues are resolved through corrective action rather than through punishment or discipline. “The aviation community has moved away from the ‘forensic’ approach of making safety improvements based on accident investigations to a proactive strategy that incorporates a mix of actual flight data, data from other government agencies and voluntarily submitted information from airline employees,” according to the Fact Sheet.
American’s flight attendants have been assured by the company that a “sole source report” — an event reported only by the flight attendant — accepted into ASAP will not be used to initiate or support any FAA or company disciplinary action, nor will the event be the basis for any FAA or company disciplinary action. The program allows a flight attendant to voluntarily and confidentially report an event or incident that may otherwise go unreported.
“We have a non-disciplinary letter of agreement that there will be no discipline taken against flight attendants,” said APFA spokesman Lonny Glover.
American’s pilots say they are willing to enroll in ASAP as long as they are provided the same safeguards against disciplinary actions afforded the flight attendants.
“If a guy purposefully broke the rules or if he was willfully reckless, it is not protected. We have no problem with that,” Shankland said. “But if an event is reported and accepted into ASAP, we don’t think a pilot should be disciplined.”
American spokesman Tim Wagner said incidents reported through ASAP are weighed by a panel that includes representatives of the union, the company and the FAA. If the incident was unintentional, there would be no discipline administered by the company or the FAA, Wagner said.
“If an employee were to submit an ASAP report, and someone else submitted a report (of the same incident) not in ASAP, that report could be used against an employee violating procedure,” he said.
In the past year, pilots submitted 5,800 incident reports that were accepted into ASAP, Wagner said.
“None of the ASAP reports were ever used in disciplinary proceedings,” Wagner said. “There were three reports outside the ASAP that resulted in minor discipline for employees (pilots).”
Pilots are being advised by the union to be prepared to follow rules and regulations by the book.
“Flight attendant ASAP guidance specifically lists “failure to receive crew briefing” as an item they are encouraged to report,” an APA officer wrote in a memo to pilots. “Therefore, we are recommending captains brief the flight attendants EVERY LEG (of the flight), without fail, no matter how long it takes or how much it inconveniences them or the gate agents/passengers.”
Poor visibility caused by fog Saturday morning in usually sunny Bangkok led to a boat collision on the Chao Phraya River, the diversion of eight flights to the Thai capital’s domestic airport and a railroad death, media reports said. A thick fog that blanketed the capital until 9 am was blamed for a collision between a container ship and cement barge on the Chao Phraya River. Two crew members on the barge, which sank, were slightly injured, according to The Nation online news service. 
Poor visibility was also partly blamed for the death of 88-year-old Nipha Chunhasiri, who was hit in the shoulder by a train in Bangkok and flung to the ground, cracking her skull. The train driver said he failed to see the woman in time because of the fog, The Nation reported. The fog also forced at least eight flights to be diverted from Bangkok’s Suvarnabhumi International Airport to the domestic terminal at Don Mueang airport because of poor visibility, airport officials said. Bangkokians have been waking up to foggy mornings since Thursday. Fog is almost unheard of in the low-lying capital that was built on the Chao Phraya River, a few kilometres from the Gulf of Thailand. Thailand has been experiencing unusually cold weather this “cool season,” with temperatures dropping to zero degrees centigrade in parts of the North and averaging 20 degrees in the central plains. The unusually long and cold cool season, normally a two-week phenomenon that occurs between December and January, has reportedly affected the second rice crop in the central plains, where output has dropped and grains have been harvested shorter than in previous years.
Filed under: airlines news, cheap flights, main, perfect flights | Tags: flights, health, news, travel
Fainting is the commonest of all in-flight medical emergencies, according to a new study.
Michael Sand led researchers from the Universities of Bochum, Germany, and California at Los Angeles (UCLA), which analysed 10,189 different emergencies reported during flights. 
“Although in-flight medical emergencies are rare in general, they can have a significant effect on other passengers and crew, potentially with operational implications for the flight,” he said.
“The breakdown of the various medical emergencies encountered in our study showed that fainting was by far the most frequent medical condition, followed by stomach upsets, and heart conditions,” said Sands.
The study authors found 5,307 cases of fainting (53.5 percent), 926 cases of gastrointestinal problems (8.9 percent) and 509 cases related to a cardiac condition (4.9 percent).
The highly publicised problem of thrombosis accounted for only a half percent of cases, although they do occur most often after a flight, rather than during it.
“Surgical illnesses accounted for a minor percentage of all on-board emergencies. There were 47 cases of thrombosis (0.5 percent), 27 appendicitis cases (0.25 percent) and just one case of gastrointestinal bleeding (less than 0.1 percent). There were two births and 52 deaths.”
The authors highlight that there are major problems with record keeping about in-flight emergencies. Out of 32 airlines approached to take part, 27 did not have the data available, one had data that was unsuitable and two refused to take part due to company policy, said an UCLA release.
“Standardisation of in-flight medical emergency reporting is necessary for further larger studies to be conducted, as the current quality of data is poor,” Sand emphasised.
The study was recently published in BioMed Central’s open access journal Critical Care.
