AvNews: 06/10/17

Brandon & Jonathan
Oct 7, 2017
7 min read

Major News

Air France 66

On September 30th, Air France Flight 66 diverted to Goose Bay after suffering engine #4 blowout over Greenland. At 1351UTC, above Narsaruaq, AFR66 declared an emergency and began their descent. The fan, with a diameter of 3m long, the inlet and the cowling of engine #4 ripped off.

Following that, the highly skilled crew lower their altitude and continued flying for another 2h before landing at CYYR (Goose Bay Airport).

The aircraft was powered by 4 Engine Alliance GP7200s, Qantas Flight 32, 7 years before, suffered an engine blowout as well, however on the #2 engine. On the other hand, Qantas A380s are not powered by Engine Alliance engines, but are powered by 4 Rolls Royce Trent 900 engines.

Aircraft sustained damage to the leading edge of the wings. Upon landing, reports emerged of a possible fuel leak. Once on the ground, a fuel leak was not found, however it was confirmed there was a hydraulic fluid leak.

Failure occurred at 37,075ft. The aircraft was flying at a speed of 446kts. at the time of the incident. AFR66 began their descent at 1351 UTC about 80KM northwest of Narsaruaq, Greenland and about 2h of descending into CFB Goose Bay Airport they performed a straight in approach into runway 26 at 1542 UTC

The aircraft was an Airbus A380-861, registration F-HPJE, first flew on May 26th, 2010.

The BEA (Bureau d'Enquêtes et d'Analyses) is taking the lead in the investigation, the BEA located the missing parts from the engine. A helicopter of Air Greenland spotted the missing pieces. The BEA is in contact with the Danish counterparts to organise the recovery of the parts.

The Transportation Safety Board of Canada deployed investigators to Goose Bay. The black box have been retrieved from the aircraft, still stored at CYYR, and extracted in Canada.

At 2232 UTC, Air France sent one of their Boeing 777-300ER from CYUL (Montreal-Pierre Trudeau Int'l) to Goose Bay, which flew the passengers from CYYR to KATL and then to KLAX. The passengers arrived in KLAX more than 24h after the initial incident. Nolinor also sent one Boeing 737-33A from Montreal-Mirabel (CYMX) to CYYR , in which the 733 picked up a few passengers, made a stop over in Winnipeg to refuel, then continued on to KLAX.

Monarch Fall

At midnight, October 1st in the UK, Monarch ceased to hold an ATOL license ceasing to operate with immediate effect. This left up to 110,000 passengers now stranded abroad and across Europe. The CAA have put in emergency measures to bring holiday makers back to the UK such as using 10 Qatar A320s, a Wamos 747, and a few government planes. For future holiday makers, their flight would be cancelled and were told to not go to their departing airport as the flight would not be taking place. The UK civil Aviation Authority (CAA) flew first 12'000 passengers stranded on October 3rd

Over the years, Monarch has been declining, and rumours have already been spreading for a long time about it's demise. Too many seats and failure to fill them on shorthaul European flights contributed to the fall of the British airline.

Monarch began service back in 1968, promoting themself as a cheap way to get away.

They did amazing in the first few decades, however with the rise of ultra low cost carriers like easyJet and Ryanair with newer aircraft, Monarch started to lose customers.

Another contribution to it's fall was increased terrorism in Tunisia and Egypt had made these popular destination hard to operate to.

In December 2016, Monarch announced orders for 45 737MAX of a price of £5 billion, but it was too late at that point.

At least 2,000 jobs have been lost as Monarch goes into administration. EasyJet is encouraging Monarch employees to apply for job at easyJet.

CSeries Dispute

Today, according to CTV news, Bombardier has been hit with another tariff of 80% bringing the duties to an unbearable 300% for all exports of CSeries aircraft into the US market. The latest decision to add 79.82% to an already preliminary duties of 219.63%, bringing it an astonishing 299.45%. This basically kills all sales of the CSeries in the US

With the two initially ruling to add an interim tariff, it'll be hard for the US International Trade Commission to reverse the two preliminary decisions If that's the case, Bombardier would be forced to appeal the decisions to higher courts such as the US Court of International Trade located in New York or to an International forum like the North American Free Trade Agreement or the World Trade Organisation.

Bombardier statement following the second ruling:

"We strongly disagree with the Commerce Department's preliminary decision. It represents an egregious overreach and misapplication of the U.S. trade laws in an apparent attempt to block the C Series aircraft from entering the U.S. market, irrespective of the negative impacts to the U.S. aerospace industry, U.S. jobs, U.S. airlines, and the U.S. flying public.

The Commerce Department's approach throughout this investigation has completely ignored aerospace industry realities. Boeing's own program cost accounting practices - selling aircraft below production costs for years after launching a program - would fail under Commerce's approach. This hypocrisy is appalling, and it should be deeply troubling to any importer of large, complex, and highly engineered products.

Commercial aircraft programs require billions in initial investment and years to provide a return on that investment. By limiting its antidumping investigation to a short 12-month period at the very beginning of the C Series program, Commerce has taken a path that inevitably would result in a deeply distorted finding.

We remain confident that, at the end of the processes, the U.S. International Trade Commission will reach the right conclusion, which is that the C Series benefits the U.S. aerospace industry and Boeing suffered no injury. There is wide consensus within the industry on this matter, and a growing chorus of voices, including airlines, consumer groups, trade experts, and many others that have come forward to express grave concerns with Boeing's attempt to force U.S. airlines to buy less efficient planes with configurations they do not want and economics that do not deliver value.

The U.S. government should reject Boeing's attempt to tilt the playing field unfairly in its favor and to impose an indirect tax on the flying public through unjustified import tariffs.

Commerce's statement that Bombardier is not cooperating with the investigation is a disingenuous attempt to distract from the agency's misguided focus on hypothetical production costs and sales prices for aircraft that will be imported into the United States far in the future.

As we have explained repeatedly to the Department, Bombardier cannot provide the production costs for the Delta aircraft for a very simple reason; they have not yet been produced. Commerce's attempt to create future costs and sales prices by looking at aircraft not imported into the United States is inappropriate and inconsistent with the agency's past practices. This departure from past precedent and disregard of well-known industry practices is an apparent attempt to deprive U.S. airlines from enjoying the benefits of the C Series, even though Boeing abandoned the segment of the market served by the C Series more than a decade ago.

This action also puts thousands of high-technology U.S. jobs at risk given the C Series' significant U.S. content. More than half of each aircraft's content, including its engines and major systems, is sourced from U.S. suppliers. Going forward, the C Series program will generate more than $30 billion in business for U.S. suppliers and support more than 22,700 jobs in the United States."

An additon Bombardier said in an indirect press release

"A growing chorus of voices have expressed deep concerns with Boeing's claim and the negative impact it will have on the aerospace industry airlines and consumers. The long list includes multiple U.S. Airlines; leading scholars in think thanks; advocates for taxpayers, consumers, and the flying public; as well as trade law and aviation industry experts."

Also according to Bombardier:

" By filling these cases, Boeing is effectively asking the government to misappropriate the antidumping law by finding that it is threatened with material injury by reasons of sales that have never taken place of a product that Boeing stopped producing more than a decade ago, all because Boeing might decide someday that i wants to reenter that market. Otherwise, Boeing is simply asking the government to enhance its monopoly power by forcing the airlines to boy aircraft that are uneconomical to fly. "

(The plane that Bombardier is referring is the aging 717)

Boeing's response to Canada and the UK:

“Boeing is not suing Canada … This is a classic case of dumping, made possible by a major injection of public funds. This violation of trade law is the only issue at stake at the U.S. Department of Commerce. We like competition. It makes us better. And Bombardier can sell its aircraft anywhere in the world. But competition and sales must respect globally-accepted trade law"

Never the less the, the Secretary of Commerce of the US , Wilbur Ross said announcing the decision for the first tariff:

“Even our closest allies must play by the rules,”

Aircraft News

CSeries

The first Korean Air CS300 has started test flights and should be delivered at the end of fall.

A350

Singapore Airlines received another A350-900 ,9V-SMR on Sep. 29th.
Cathay Pacific received another A350-900,B-LRT on Sep. 29th.
Qatar Airways will take delivery of its first airbus A350-1000 by the end of 2017.
First Cathay Pacific A350-1000 emerged from the final assembly line this morning.

787

The first Singapore Airlines 787-10 (78J) rolled off the final assembly line this week, SIA is due to receive it by the beginning of 2018.

777X

Emirates will be the first airline to receive the Boeing 777X.

Airline News

Ryanair

Belgium will be taking Ryanair to court for 'illegally punishing' thousands of customers by stranding them due to thousands of cancelled flight across Europe. These cancellations were due to pilot shortage.

Emergencies

An Antonov AN-140, Flight IK9788 caught fire a few minutes after take off. The Angara Airlines AN-140 took off from Talakan Regional Airport around noon (local time), flying to Irkutsk International Airport. A few minutes later, passengers saw a long flame trail on the #2 engine. The pilots shut down the engine and returned back to the airport.

Special

Qatar celebrated its 20th anniversary with Red Arrows fly-past.
During the Las Vegas shooting planes at Las Vegas McCarran International Airport returned to their gates and the airport closed.
Pilot Robert Piché retired after flying one last time on the aircraft that he masterly landed when Air Transat 236 ran out of fuel, his aircraft, the Air Transat A330. He flew from Azores, Portugal to Montreal, Canada.
Eurowings to open 35 routes which Air Berlin operated.