"A380 Nosedives" - Wear Your Seatbelt - Indeed!

Great article this week on the A380 that took a "10-second roller-coaster nosedive" from ANOTHER A380's wake turbulence.

Folks, like many of you, my family thinks I live on airplanes. Sometimes it does feel like George Clooney's "Up In The Air" movie was scripted by air-warriors like us (200,000 kilometers in the air so far this year, and it's still June ... with my next flight from New York to Munich tomorrow for Aviation Electronics Europe).

I was teaching an ARP4754A safety class recently and a student asked "why" we need to have such extensive health monitoring, fault detection, and mitigation in our avionics designs. I replied, "Would you drive or sit in a car without a seatbelt"? He said "Of course not". I asked him when was the last time he was in car crash and was glad he was wearing his seatbelt. His reply? "Why I've never been in a crash". So I replied "Then you've wasted 20 years of time putting on your seatbelt thousands of time in the car - if you never needed it, why did you waste your time putting on your seatbelt?!?" His look was incredulous. Exactly. The reason he, and all of us, wear our seatbelts is because our knowledge of safety probability (and 1,200,000+ automobile crash victims in the world each year) indicates we'd be stupid driving without a seatbelt.

Folks, if there's any question about wearing our seatbelts in the plane, this article resolves that question. Whenever I pilot a plane, I legally must be wearing my harness. When a passenger, let's all buckle up. Planes are quite safe - statistically safer than any other mode of transportation. But when the world's largest commerical aircraft (and a fine plane I always enjoy flying in) can suffer air turbulence, then ANYTHING can suffer turbulence. Happy buckling ...

Cheers, Vance Hilderman, CEO AFuzion.