Gov't Worried About Foreign Airline Safety

[Mulboyne]

[floatr][/floatr]Yomiuri: Govt to boost foreign plane safety checks
The Construction and Transport Ministry has decided to strengthen monitoring of foreign airlines operating in Japan with a view to improving safety and preventing accidents, ministry sources said Sunday. The tighter monitoring will start next fiscal year and is a major change in the ministry's current safety policy, under which it depends on foreign aviation authorities to supervise airlines based in their countries. The ministry judged that it is necessary to conduct its own safety guidance ahead of an expected increase in the number of foreign airlines serving this country. According to the sources, the ministry will appoint "safety control officers" who will specialize in monitoring the safety of overseas airlines. When a foreign airline is classified as "caution necessary," the officers will step up monitoring of the company and call on the aviation authorities in the relevant country to instruct the company to improve its safety standards...Japan lags the EU and the United States in terms of safety checks on foreign airlines. The number of unannounced safety inspections conducted on foreign airplanes in Japan is about 100 a year--far below the number in the United States, which conducts about 3,800 inspections each year...The ministry decided to change its policy on the safety of foreign airlines following an increase in accidents and problems involving foreign airplanes, and concerns over airline safety standards in other Asian countries...more...

[2triky]

Wednesday, December 21, 2005 at 18:37 EST

TOKYO — Japan Airlines had been flying a Boeing jumbo jet for seven months without realizing the plane's left and right outer engines had been placed on the wrong sides during maintenance in Singapore in February, airline officials admitted Wednesday.

Some components of the engines are required to be inspected once every 650 flights, but as a result of the mistake, one of the engines completed about 850 flights without being examined.

The officials said there were no safety problems but the Land, Infrastructure and Transport Ministry instructed the airline to take measures to prevent any recurrence.

In February, JAL commissioned ST Aviation Services Co Pte Ltd in Singapore to conduct maintenance work on the four-engine Boeing 747. The plane resumed service after the overhaul was completed in April.

It was not until a regular maintenance checkup in November that the engines were discovered to have been attached wrongly.

Reversing the engine locations results in air flow toward the fuselage instead of away from it during reverse thrust. However, it does not create any difference during normal thrust and thus poses no safety problems during flights, the officials said.

They said JAL will revise in-house procedures to ensure that inspections on the planes are conducted after outsourced maintenance work. The current policy only calls for checking documents after the completion of maintenance work.http://www.crisscross.com/jp/news/359247

A pretty silly mistake when you look at it, but the bit I don't understand is where the JAL official explains that the reverse thrust is normally directed away from the fuselage. Does that mean that somehow the flaps that reverse the bypass airflow in the engine through the sliding cascade on the 747's engines can be enabled/disabled independently on the left and right sides of the engine when in maintenance to improve pax comfort?