The Nation Newspaper

Tag: Black box

  • 737 Max 8: France accepts to analyse black box as Germany declines

    Ethiopian Airlines said Thursday that the black box flight recorders from the Boeing 737 MAX 8 that crashed with 157 people on board, have been flown to Paris for analysis.

    The airline stated this Twitter message.

    “An Ethiopian delegation led by Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB) has flown the Flight Data Recorder (FDR) and Cockpit Voice Recorder (CVR) to Paris, France for investigation.”

    This comes just as Germany’s Federal Bureau of Aircraft Accident Investigation (BFU) said  it will not analyse the black box from the Ethiopian Airlines passenger jet which crashed soon after taking off from Addis Ababa on Sunday.

    This led to some uncertainty for a couple of hours before the French Bureau of Enquiry and Analysis for Civil Aviation Safety (BEA) announced late on Wednesday that they would analyse the black-box flight recorders.

    The chief executive officer of Ethiopian Airlines, Tewolde GebreMariam, said  the black boxes from Sunday’s plane crash in Ethiopia would be sent to a “closer country in Europe” rather than the United States for analysis.

    Later on, an airline spokesperson reportedly confirmed that the country in question was Germany. However, just hours later, Germany’s BFU issued a statement reasoning their rejection of the request.

    “This is a new type of aircraft with a new black box, with new software. We can’t do it,” BFU spokesperson Germout Freitag told the media.

    Pilots have reported issues in US with new Boeing arrived in Paris for analysis on Thursday morning. The BEA is one of the world’s most active air crash agencies alongside the National Transportation Safety Board of the United States and has laboratories at its Le Bourget headquarters.

    A spokesman for the BEA said they wouldn’t be announcing the results. “Only the Ethiopian authorities will report on the progress of the investigation. There will be no press conference,” a BEA spokesman told reporters.

    The 737, which first entered service in the late 1960s, is the aviation industry’s best-selling model and Boeing’s top earner. The re-engined Max version has racked up more than 5,000 orders worth in excess of $600 billion.

    When Indonesian carrier Lion Air’s Boeing 737 Max 8 crashed on October 29 in 2018 killing all 189 people on board, Boeing pointed to maintenance issues and human error as the underlying cause, even though the plane’s pilots reportedly had been battling a computerised system that took control following a sensor malfunction. Ethiopian Airlines CEO also said that the pilots had complained about ‘flight control problems’.

    Just over  four months later, the Ethiopian Airlines crash on March 10 – killing 157 people – has triggered increasing global pressure on the manufacturer over safety concerns and software issues with the aircraft model. Ethiopian Airlines CEO  said the pilots had complained about ‘flight control problems’.

    The day after the crash, without referring to Ethiopian tragedy directly, Boeing Corporation  said it would deploy a software upgrade to the 737 MAX 8, a few hours after the Federal Aviation Administration said it would mandate “design changes” in the aircraft by April.

     

  • Williams’s memoirs of a Black Box

    Williams’s memoirs of a Black Box

    Depicting what he described as inspiration from his multi-dimensional creative disciplines, his work, mounted on three floors at Revolving Art Incubator (RAI), explored the foursome of human existence. The exhibits focused “body, mind, heart, and spirit” within the context of what the artist expressed as “a recollection mechanism in documenting culture, custom and tradition.”

    Through the scenery of visual cultural expressions, a quiet, but steadily growing young creative professional, Sadiq Williams, is making his presence known. His fresh contemporary imprint on the city’s creative space combine traditional and contemporary expressions just as his art and design content generate critical and commercial appreciation, previewing futuristic appropriation of art. From the background of architecture, Williams combines fine art, filmmaking, martial art, poetry and music writing.

    As a futuristic expression, Williams said, “Memoirs of a Black Box imagines the future generation of Africans uncovering our world today through data recovered from Black Box.”

    Between traditional processes of creating art and the digital-inspired technique, Williams floats along the divides, noting, “I am a mixed media artist exploring the contemporary, digital and traditional modes of expressions through multi-dimensional approach of drawing from blurring generational lines and the paradoxes of living in contemporary times,” he said.

    Enunciating his Memoirs of a Black Box, the artist who has an opportunity of working in multi-cultural Lagos and London environments explained, “I draw inspiration from many variants of life as a creative professional in architecture, film, culture, filmmaking, story-boarding, poetry, martial arts and music and as an observer and an avid participant, reality to me is more fluid and less rigid, hence my approach.”

    The artist’s aim was to use the exhibition to share his thoughts on handshake across creative genres. “Memoirs of a Black Box explore the intersection between the arts and notions of identity, connections and inter-connections to wider humanity, using performance, visual arts and music et al as a catalyst for engagement.”

    However, his approach in appropriation uses what he described as “fluid and dualistic” perspective that explores “the notions of ‘me is we’ philosophy as made famous by Muhammad Ali in relation to history, appropriation and negritude.”

    Between an individual and Williams’ conceptual Black Box, there comes again the artist’s liberal disposition in traditional and contemporary forms. In fact, he has something salient to share, particularly for those who create an iron-curtain over space and period.

    However, Memoirs of a Black Box, he said, was still a work in progress along the journey of “creative process.” Generating result he called “experiential dialogue in latex and figurative representation of subjects,” the body of work depicts life’s daily experiences by employing “date, time, objects and events.”

    Williams is one of the youngest Nigerian artists, whose career evolved through competitive spaces and events in talent hunt. For example, in 1988, he won the first prize, Independence Day, Brazilian Embassy, Lagos, Nigeria; he emerged finalist at Creative Pioneers in 2012 the ‘Can Start Entrepreneur Segment,’ organised by the IPA Institute for Practitioners in Advertising and the London Metro in the U.K., and was among the 12 finalists at the National Arts competition in 2016, organised by Heineken International, Nigeria Breweries and African Artists’ foundation.

    Among Williams’ solo and group exhibitions are Hippie and Gypsie Vibrations Live Art 2 Pieces (2018), Black Box weekend at The Blowfish Hotel Live Art 2 Pieces (2017), ‘Adire Heritage Festival’ at Freedom Park in Lagos (2017), among others.

  • Black box of ill-fated Bristow chopper found

    Black box of ill-fated Bristow chopper found

    The Accident Investigation Bureau  has announced  that the flight recorder, popularly known as black box, of the Sikosky 76 helicopter that crashed into the lagoon in the Oworonshoki area of Lagos on Wednesday, 12 August has been recovered.

    The Sikosky 76 helicopter marked 5N-BGD and operated by Bristow Helicopters was believed to have departed SEDCO oil platform offshore and crashed shortly.

    The search party led by Julius Berger with the assistance of a hired diver located the recorder, which is expected to assist the investigators in unraveling the cause of the accident.

    The Flight Data Recorder (FDR) contains data generated from different parts of the aircraft, including the engines and the avionics while the Cockpit Voice Recorder will unveil conversations within the cockpit and between the pilots and the Control Tower.

    According to the AIB, investigation has extended to retrieving documents and other materials from the Nigerian Civil Aviation Authority (NCAA), the Nigerian Airspace Management Agency (NAMA) and the airline operator.

    Other information will be released to the public as they unfold and according to the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO) Annexe 13.

  • Bristow helicopter’s Black Box recovered

    Bristow helicopter’s Black Box recovered

    The Accident Investigation Bureau (AIB), on Friday announced that it had recovered the Black Box of the Bristow helicopter that crashed into the Lagos lagoon on Wednesday.

    The Black Box contains the Cockpit Voice and the Flight Data Recorders.

    Commissioner of the Accident Investigation Bureau, Dr Felix Abali, made this known while displaying the two devices to aviation correspondents at the bureau’s headquarters in Lagos.