Wind shear: an invisible enemy to pilots?
Weather plays a significant role in aviation safety and is regularly cited as a contributing factor in accidents or major incidents. Wind shear in the form of microbursts particularly, can be a severe hazard to aircraft during take-off, approach and landing.
Airbus Brake Testing
Regulatory aircraft performance is certified as a set of performance models and aircraft physical characteristics that are built and validated from flight test data. While the primary purpose of these models has always been to allow computation of aircraft performance for dispatch, the models used to determine the in-flight landing distances during approach preparation are derived from the same testing. Part of this model, affecting both the accelerate-stop computation at take-off and the landing distance computation, are the characteristics of the braking system installed on the aircraft.This article explains which flight tests are involved in the identification of the system characteristics and how they are conducted.
Hard Landing, a Case Study for Crews and Maintenance Personnel
In this article, Airbus would like to take you through a case study and use it to learn some lessons and share our safety first culture. The article is split into three distinct parts:The first will describe the eventThe second, targeted at flight crews, will discuss and develop the stabilization criteria and present a prevention strategy against unstable approaches. It will also insist on the need to use the appropriate level of automation at all times.The third part, targeted at maintenance personnel, will illustrate the need to always use the Aircraft Maintenance Manual (AMM) as the source document for maintenance operations.