EMAS: Engineered Material Arresting System

Aircraft overruns during landing and take-off are a frequent occurrence and statistically are the fourth largest cause of airline fatalities. . An overrun occurs when an aircraft passes beyond the end of a runway during an aborted take-off or while landing. To minimize the hazards of overruns, the Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) incorporated the concept of a safety area beyond the runway end into airport design standards.  However, there are many runways, where natural obstacles, local development and other constraints make the construction of the RESA impracticable. Recognising the difficulty associated with accomplishing RESA without compromising the performance capability of a runway, research programmes were initiated to find alternate and effective arresting solutions.

A380 PUSHING TECHNICAL BOUNDARIES

Airbus has always been at the forefront of pushing technical boundaries in aviation and excelling in aircraft design and technology. Airbus says efforts to lower the weight of the world's largest airliner lay behind recent A380 wing cracks and pledged to learn from mistakes that lay dormant for a decade, as repair costs looked set to climb towards 500 million euros ($A642 million).

AERONAUTICAL DECISION MAKING

In life, one makes decisions of various kinds, some routinely, and some after deliberate considerations. In aviation too, decision making is an essential pilot skill. While pre-flight situations are static in nature and under time pressure, inflight scenarios are constantly evolving and are dynamic in nature that needs immediate decisions and constant review.  The basic skill sets that a pilot need to fly the airplane safely can be categorised as :

DELIVERY OF CRITICAL DATA TO FLIGHT DECK

Anew flight data delivery solution for airlines developed jointly by teams at Boeing subsidiary Jeppesen and Boeing  Information Services slashes the time required to deliver and load vital flight data to an airplane. Application Data Enhanced Loading (ADEL) is a solution that reduces overall workload, network bandwidth requirements and costs associated with airline data operations. ADEL supports Boeing and Jeppesen Electronic Flight Bags.

TCAP AN ALTITUDE CAPTURE ENHANCEMENT

Wikipedia

Agrowing sense of alarm over the rising incidents of mid-air collisions and near misses, brought about the introduction of TCAS and today the sky is far safer to fly  in.  However, this also brought about an unwelcome and recurrent side effect that of nuisance or operationally undesired RA commands.

An operationally undesired RA is one that is triggered during 1000 ft level off manoeuvres, while the crew is operating within clearances granted. This normally occurs when the vertical closure rates are high. This accounts for almost 50 % of RAs encountered in today’s environment.