TPT November 2009

G lobal M arketplace

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.”

Benis Arapovic

The malfunction made it impossible to accurately judge flight speed

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

Dorothy Fabian , Features Editor (USA)

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N ovember 2009

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