NEWARK, New Jersey — As United Flight 731 climbed out of Newark, New Jersey, with 107 people aboard, the pilot and first officer were startled to find screens that display crucial navigational information were blank or unreadable, and radios were dead. They had no way to communicate with air traffic controllers or detect other planes around them in the New York City area's crowded airspace. “We both felt an extreme urgency to get this aircraft on the ground as soon as possible,” first officer Douglas Cochran later told investigators. Within minutes, the plane had turned around and safely landed. Cochran told investigators that clear weather might have been the only thing that saved them. The January 2008 emergency was not the first such multiple electrical failure in what is known as the France-based Airbus A320 family of aircraft, and it wasn't the last. More than 50 episodes involving the planes, which first went into service more than two decades ago, have been reported. And it could be another few years before the last of the thousands of narrow-body, twin-engine jets in use in the US and overseas are modified to counteract the problem. The Federal Aviation Administration issued an order in 2010 giving US airlines four years to make the fixes. The FAA's European counterpart did the same thing in 2009. While no accidents have been blamed on the problem, the pilots union in the US wanted the FAA to give airlines just two years to comply, but the FAA rejected that. Aviation safety consultant Douglas Moss said the FAA should have acted a lot more quickly. “These things cost money and the industry is in bad shape, so you have the economics thrown into it. But if the end result is higher airfares and higher cost of transportation, then that is the price we have to pay to ensure a safe transport system,” said Moss, a commercial pilot with 34 years' experience, including 14 years flying Airbuses. A National Transportation Safety Board investigator said long time frames for fixing problems are not uncommon because of the inconvenience involved in grounding planes for repairs. Airbus told NTSB investigators in 2008 that 49 electrical failures similar to the Newark emergency happened on its planes in the US and abroad before that episode. Nearly half involved the loss of at least five of six cockpit displays. Also, pilots who post to a website operated by NASA have described at least seven more instances of multiple electrical failure that forced them to abort takeoffs or make unscheduled landings. Rudy Canto, director of flight operations-technical for Airbus Americas, said that temporary electrical failures in all makes of jets aren't uncommon and that all planes have backup systems — as well as backups to the backups — to handle those situations. New Airbus models are equipped with an automatic power switchover to counteract failures like the one at Newark, Canto said. A pilot who recounted a 2009 incident on NASA's Aviation Safety Reporting System said that 28 years and 20,000 hours of flying experience couldn't help him explain why the cockpit was “like walking into a simulator with no power or batteries on ... only light was the moon.” While the NTSB has called the electrical failures “a significant safety risk” on takeoffs and landings in low visibility, long gaps between when a safety recommendation is issued and when airlines must carry it out are not uncommon, an investigator in the Flight 731 probe said. — AP
