Maggots Raining on Passengers Forces US Airways Flight Back to Gate

Some airline incidents are quite stranger than fiction, and that was the case on June 28, 2010 in Atlanta. US Airways flight 1537, which was scheduled to go from Atlanta, GA to Charlotte, NC, was taxiing prior to takeoff when passengers began noticing maggots falling from on overhead bin. The flight crew announced that they were returning to the gate because of a "minor emergency on board."

The source of the maggots was from a container of spoiled meat that was in the carry-on baggage of one of the passengers. The plane returned to the gate, where a ground crew cleaned out the aircraft before it was allowed to continue to Charlotte. The passenger who caused this situation was also allowed to continue, but on another flight. Only after the flight arrived at Charlotte did the airline fumigate the aircraft.

Comments from one of the passengers on this flight show just how disturbing this event was to them:

• I heard the word ‘maggot' and that kind of got everybody creeped out...All of a sudden, I felt somebody flick the back of my hair and on the front of me came a maggot, which I flicked off me
  
  
• I felt like they were crawling all over me because it only takes one maggot to upset your world
  
  
• And as they're telling us to stay calm and seated, I see a maggot looking back at me and I'm thinking, ‘These are anaerobic, flesh-eating larvae that the flight attendants don't have to sit with

How Can Maggots Get on an Airplane?
In the US, the federal government restricts what kinds of animals or other live creatures are allowed on an aircraft, and what kinds of animals can be imported into the US. However, for domestic airline flights it is up to the airline to set rules for animals, and those rules typically deal with flying with pets and service animals. Also, while the TSA has many rules about what items are permitted and prohibited from checked or carry-on baggage, there are no specific restrictions on bringing either spoiled meat or insects through security.

AirSafe.com contacted US Airways directly, and a representative indicated that dogs, cats, and birds were allowed on flights, but not bees or other insects. Presumably this means that maggots would not have been allowed on the aircraft if the airline had been made aware of their presence. It is not clear whether the passenger who brought the maggots on board either received permission from the airline or was even aware that there were maggots in their baggage.

Video Report of the Maggot Event

Advice from AirSafe.com
Most airlines have very detailed rules on what kinds of live animals or biological specimens you can bring on an aircraft. If you are thinking about bringing any kind of animal or insect on board the aircraft, contact the airline ahead of time to see if your animal will even be allowed. If you are traveling internationally, make sure you are following all appropriate import and export rules. If you see something that may be a problem, for example someone sneaking an animal onto the aircraft, or a carry-on or checked baggage item that may be a health hazard, contact an airline representative immediately.

The Miracle on the Hudson, Ejection Database, and A319 Landing Incident

Anniversary of the Miracle on the Hudson
One year after the ditching of US Airways flight 1549 in the Hudson River, the NTSB investigation is still ongoing. While the investigation may not be completed for several months, there is a large amount of information from the investigation that is available for the public to review. The NTSB information page on last June's public meeting about the accident has links to past NTSB press releases, and links to transcripts and videos from the three day public hearing. Additional information on the accident is available at the NTSB's public docket for this investigation.

Ejection Seat Database
If you ever had a question about military plane crashes featuring the use of an ejection seat, then Project Get Out and Walk is worth a visit. The site is an illustrated history of assisted aircrew escape system and has a database of all known ejections and bailouts, with ejections listed by year, country, and aircraft.

United Airlines Emergency Landing at Newark
On January 10th, a United Airlines Airbus A319 (N816UA, flight 634)was damaged when it landed at Newark's Liberty International Airport with its right hand main landing gear retracted. The aircraft was on a scheduled flight from Chicago's O'Hare airport, to Newark, and the flight was normal until approach, when the crew experienced problems with lowering the landing gear.

The crew carried out a missed approach, and later landed with the right main gear retracted and came to rest on the runway, damaging the right engine and the underside of the aircraft. All 48 passengers and five crew members evacuated using the emergency slides and there were no major injuries.

This being the Twitter era, it isn't surprising that there were a few Tweets (Twitter posts) on this event. A passenger on another aircraft with Twitter name @expodebbie said: On runway. Newark just closed. Another aircraft with bad landing- mechanical issues. Emergency vehicles. Zero idea just how bad. 6:28 AM Jan 10th

Below are several photos of the damaged aircraft, plus a video of the actual landing taken from the cockpit of another aircraft.

Severe winter storm in the eastern US forces airlines to cancel and delay flights

The winter storm that has swept through the northeast US the weekend before Christmas, forcing a number of airlines to cancel, delay, and reroute flights. JetBlue, United, and Virgin America were just some of the airlines that canceled flights, and experienced delays and other problems associated with the heavy snowfall associated with the storm.

If you plan to travel by air in the US in the next few days, even if your trip does not take you to the east coast, you should take the time to do the following:

• Check with your airline to see if your flight is affected
  
• Check the airline's web site to see if they are posting special notices about the storm
  
• Keep track of storm forecasts
  
• Be prepared to have your flight delayed, rerouted, or canceled

Many airlines are waiving change fees associated with any affects flights. Keep in mind that airlines are not obligated to provide any compensation for flight delays. Just about the only situation where you can get compensation for a delay is if you are significantly delayed because you were involuntarily bumped from a flight.

Additional Resources
Dealing with delays, bumping, and cancellations
How to make an airline complaint
General baggage advice
US flight delay data from the FAA

134 Flights Delayed on Tarmac for Four or More Hours from January to August 2009

In the last several years, airlines in the US have occasionally received very negative media attention when an aircraft gets stuck on a tarmac for several hours as passengers wait helplessly for relief. Sometimes the terminal is literally right outside their window, but they have no choice but to sit and suffer.

These events often make the news, but not always. The US Department of Transportation (DOT), which includes the FAA, has quietly included some very detailed information about these events. Reviewing their monthly Air Travel Consumer Report reveals some very interesting information. According to recent reports that cover January through August 2009, there have been a number of occasions where one of the 19 airlines required to report such data to the DOT by this report have had tarmac delays of over four hours.

Delay Summary
From January to August 2009, there were 134 occasions where a regularly scheduled flight was delayed four our more hours on the tarmac. The longest delay was seven hours and 43 minutes. The airline with the most delays in this list was Delta with 32. Of the 19 airlines tracked by the DOT, four, Alaska, Frontier, Hawaiian, and Skywest, had no flight with tarmac delays of four hours or more.

If you would like more information, such as the origin and destination airport, or the date of the occurrence, you can view the spreadsheet with the delay information

Airline Codes Used in the Air Travel Consumer Report
If you take the time to download these reports, you may have to decode some of the two-letter airline codes used in the document. The codes for the 19 airlines reporting key consumer data to the DOT are below:

FL AirTran Airways
AS Alaska Airlines
AA American Airlines
MQ American Eagle Airlines
EV Atlantic Southeast Airlines
OH Comair
CO Continental Airlines
DL Delta Air Lines
XE ExpressJet Airlines
F9 Frontier Airlines
HA Hawaiian Airlines
B6 JetBlue Airways
YV Mesa Airlines
NW Northwest Airlines
9E Pinnacle Airlines*
OO SkyWest Airlines
WN Southwest Airlines
UA United Airlines
US US Airways

Airlines in bold had no tarmac delays in excess of four hours during the first eight months of 2009.

Pinnacle Airlines volunteered to submit their data. The other 18 must report based on requirements of the DOT's Bureau of Transportation Statistics.

Infomercial Celebrity Billy Mays Dies After Flight

Television infomercial celebrity Billy Mays died in his sleep less than a day after he was involved in a landing incident where he was struck in the head by one or more falling objects. US Airways Flight 1241, a 737-400, departed from Philadelphia, PA just after noon on June 27, 2009 on a nonstop flight to Tampa, FL.

The aircraft experienced a hard landing, which ruptured the two nose wheel tires. The aircraft remained on the runway and the 138 passengers and five crew members, none of whom at the time appeared to be seriously injured, were taken to the terminal. Billy Mays was interviewed by a reporter from WTVT television in Tampa shortly after the incident and stated that he had been hit on the head by something falling from the ceiling.

Billy Mays had returned to Tampa on Saturday in order to undergo hip surgery the following Monday. According to his family, he had no other significant medical conditions at the time of his death. Tampa police reported that Mays wasn't feeling well the evening of the landing incident, and he went to bed at about 10 pm. He was found dead by his wife at about 7:45 the following morning.
Listen to the 911 Call from the Home of Billy Mays (2:25)
Source: Tampa Fire Rescue

So far, a direct connection between the head strike on Billy Mays during the hard landing and his subsequent death has been neither ruled in or ruled out by local authorities. Although Mays reported that he was struck in the head, neither he or the Tampa police could confirm that he was struck by luggage. Local authorities will conduct an autopsy to determine the cause of death, and the results may be available before the end of June.

If the authorities determine that Mays's death was not connected to the landing incident, then the incident will be considered minor and would likely not end up in the online incident and accident databases of the FAA or NTSB. If the death is determined to be associated with the hard landing, then this would be considered a fatal accident by the NTSB, but would not likely result in a major investigation.

The most recent significant safety event for US Airways was the ditching of an A320 in the Hudson River last January. The last fatal crash for US Airways involved a regional aircraft in Charlotte, NC in January 2003. That crash killed both pilots and all 19 passengers. The most recent fatal event involving a 737-400 was a Garuda Indonesia Airways crash in 2007.

Dangers from falling luggage have long been recognized by the airline industry. In 1998, the Flight Safety Foundation published the results of a study that estimated that worldwide, there were about 10,000 injuries every year involving falling baggage. The same study looked at 397 cases at a major US airline where a person was struck by falling luggage, and 30 percent of those strikes resulted in bruises or lacerations.

For more information on how to protect yourself from threats from falling luggage due to hard landings and in-flight turbulence, please visit turbulence.airsafe.org.

Resources
Listen to the Podcast About This Event (3:00)
Plane Crashes and Significant Events for US Airways
Plane Crashes and Significant Events for the 737

Update 29 June 2009
Hillsborough County Medical Examiner Vernard Adams stated that preliminary results from the autopsy of Billy Mays indicates that he had hypertensive heart disease. He also said that Mays was taking the prescription painkillers Tramadol and hydrocodone for hip pain, and that pill counts indicate that Mays had been taking the correct amount of the drugs. Initial tests showed no evidence of head trauma. Hillsborough County includes the city of Tampa.

The "Miracle on the Hudson" and AirSafe.com

Last month's ditching of a US Airways A320 was quite dramatic, and the survival of all on board, due in part to a very quick and very effective rescue operation, has been called the "Miracle on the Hudson" by the public and the media. Two elements of the accident, the ditching and the suspected role of birds in the accident, were of particular interest to AirSafe.com. Dr. Todd Curtis, AirSafe.com's founder, has had a long relationship with bird and wildlife hazard professionals in the US, Canada, and Europe, and had designed and launched the web site of Bird Strike Committee USA.

After the crash, a number of bird hazard items were added to AirSafe.com, including updates of two previous research projects of Dr. Curtis. You can find links to those projects, as well as other links to Bird Strike Committee USA and other bird hazard related information, at http://birds.airsafe.org.

The crash involved a suspected bird strike, a common occurrence that rarely leads to a crash. The ditching aspect of this accident was even more rare, with this event being only the fourth time that a passenger jet airliner has been involved in a ditching. The attention the site attracted, especially an article published in the USA Today newspaper the day after the accident, led AirSafe.com to clarify its definition of ditching, a definition that is much more specific than those provided by the NTSB, FAA, and other major aviation safety organizations (See http://www.airsafe.com/events/define.htm).

You can find many more details about the event, and about issues related to the US Airways ditching, at http://hudson.airsafe.org. Among the resources at that location are:

AirSafe.com podcasts about the US Airways accident
http://www.airsafe.com/plane-crash/us-airways-flight-1549-hudson-ditching.htm

Previous US Airways crashes
http://www.airsafe.com/events/airlines/usair.htm

Other significant A320 events
http://www.airsafe.com/events/models/a320.htm

An overview of bird strike hazards to aircraft
http://www.airsafe.com/birds.htm

Jet airliner ditching events
http://www.airsafe.com/events/ditch.htm

Selected bird strike videos
http://strikevideos.blogspot.com

Comparison of the US Airways event with seven other bird strike accidents
http://www.airsafe.com/birds/bird-strike-comparisons.pdf

Bird strike study from the AirSafe.com Foundation
http://www.airsafe.org/birds/BirdstrikeRates.pdf

Comparison of Eight Bird Strike Accidents, Including US Airways Flight 1549

The 15 January 2009 accident involving US Airways Flight 1549 was one of those rare bird strike events that resulted in the loss of an aircraft. A crash due to a bird strike is a rare event, but over the last several decades there have been several of these accidents that were investigated by authorities in the US and elsewhere. In the 2000 book Understanding Aviation Safety Data, Dr. Todd Curtis of AirSafe.com reviewed seven of these accidents and found that there were very clear patterns among them, including the key roles that flight crews had in the accident sequence, both in preventing fatalities as was the case with the US Airways crash, or contributing to an accident that may have been avoided had the crew performed differently.

After last week's accident, that original analysis was updated to include the US Airways accident. The goal was to provide a better model for how bird stike related accidents occur, and more importantly highlight issues that the aviation industry should address in order to reduce bird strike related risks. This method could be applied more broadly, specifically to risks such as runway incursions, which is a problem area that is of great concern to both the FAA and NTSB.

You are invited to not only review this analysis (links below), but also to send comments, suggestions, or even corrections to AirSafe.com at feedback.airsafe.org. Once the review period has ended, AirSafe.com will make this study permanently available on the site.

Download "Comparison of Eight Serious Bird Strike Accidents"
PDF: http://www.airsafe.com/birds/bird-strike-comparisons.pdf
Word: http://www.airsafe.com/birds/bird-strike-comparisons.doc
OpenDocument: http://www.airsafe.com/birds/bird-strike-comparisons.odt

Complacency and the Qantas A330 Accident of 7 October 2008

The accident earlier this month involving a Qantas Airbus A330 on a flight from Singapore to Perth seriously injured several passengers, but didn't result in any fatalities. While the event drew substantial news media attention in Australia and Asia, there was very little mention of it by major US media. This is very likely another example of how when it comes to airline events, it's difficult to get the attention of the US public, or of the policy makers in the US, if no one is killed.

My belief was that there would have been more media attention in the US if there had been at least one recent fatal event involving a US airline. While researching recent fatal US events, I found that the most recent passenger fatality on a US airliner was in August 2006. Looking back further, I realized that the US airline industry had quietly passed a milestone. The 26-month period between the last fatal US event and the date of this recording on October 21st, 2008 is the longest period without a passenger fatality on a US airliner since airlines in the US first began using jet aircraft in 1958.

One could argue that there's a certain amount of public complacency about airline safety when there are no major accidents. Looking through my archives, I found that this wasn't the first time I'd dealt with this subject. In late May 2004, the US airline industry was in the midst of another fatality-free period. At the time, it had been nearly 17 months since the last fatal US airline event. That month, I was interviewed as part of a National Public Radio program on airline safety that discussed some of the reasons for that absence of fatal events.

In the following segment, you'll hear my interview with Mike Pesca of NPR about some of the reasons behind the reduction of accidents. Also interviewed was David Evans of the publication Air Safety Week, who talked about how accidents drive the regulatory process.

Five months after the show aired, a regional airliner crashed in Missouri, killing both crew members and 11 of the 13 passengers, bringing to an end a 21-month period with no US passenger fatalities. Currently, the US airline industry has gone 26 months without a passenger fatality. This current fatality-free period is a sign that in spite of all the problems faced the industry, that the risk faced by passengers continues to decline.

Although this record is a positive sign for the industry, the recent Qantas event demonstrated that no airline, even one with no passenger fatalities in its history, is immune from accidents.

I'd like to remind the AirSafe.com audience that however good the system may be, there's always room for improvement. One way to improve things is to learn from those rare events such as what happened with Qantas earlier this month. AirSafe.com will continue to follow the accident investigation, and any future podcasts about the event, or news from the investigation, will be available at qantas.airsafe.org.

You can hear the associated podcast, which includes my interview with NPR, at:
http://www.airsafe.com/podcasts/show73-npr.mp3