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G
lobal
M
arketplace
www.read-tpt.comN
ovember
2009
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American company: privately-held Aero-Instruments, founded in
Cleveland, Ohio, in 1925.
Alison Grant of the Cleveland
Plain Dealer
reported that the
possible malfunctioning of the plane’s French-made pitot tubes
has prompted an urgent call for replacement of the sensors on
Airbus planes in service worldwide. While the French accident
agency BEA is still investigating the disaster, interest has centred
on the pitots, fixed externally on the forward fuselage. If they iced
over, they could have been sending false speed readings to the
jet’s computers when Flight 447, on course for Paris from Rio de
Janeiro, met with a thunderstorm over the Atlantic. (“Air France
Crash Increases Demand for Airspeed Sensor,” 27 August)
As it happens, at the time of the crash Aero-Instruments was
just concluding an 18-month review of its pitot tube for installation
on Airbus aircraft; and deliveries of a device certified by the US
Federal Aviation Administration for Airbus use began in July.
A company executive said the FAA certification clears Aero-
Instruments for installing pitot tubes on more than 4,500 Airbus
aircraft globally. Crucially, the company’s pitot tube is heated to
prevent ice buildup.
“We are ramping up our manufacturing quickly to help meet
the increase in demand,” Ryan Mifsud, vice-president and general
manager at Aero-Instruments, told the
Plain Dealer
.
In appearance, the one-pound L-shaped metal sensor belies
its centrality to a replacement effort on such a scale; and in fact it
will not have the market to itself. While Aero-Instruments was still
vetting its device, European air safety regulators scouted another
source of supply, also American, for replacement pitots for the
Airbus A330 and A340: a division of Goodrich Corp (Charlotte,
North Carolina).
Ms Grant wrote, “An order from the EuropeanAviation SafetyAgency,
expected to be finalised in September, would mandate swapping out
two of the three probes on each plane within four months.”
›
The
Plain Dealer
article, to which reporter Frank Bentayou also
contributed, noted that airlines with large Airbus A330 and A340
fleets are Germany’s Lufthansa, Cathay Pacific, Emirates, Qatar, Air
France, China Eastern, and Northwest (now a unit of Delta), of the
US. According to the newspaper, American air safety investigators
have determined “that sensors on Northwest A330s may have
malfunctioned on at least a dozen recent flights, making it impossible
for the pilots to know how fast they were flying.”
Dorothy Fabian
, Features Editor (USA)
The malfunction made it impossible to accurately judge flight speed
Benis Arapovic