Teddy Bears and $30k or Less!

Teddy bears floating in the sea are pitiful

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney, LHD Lawyers, Sydney, NSW, AU. 2000,  January 7, 2015

What does it mean that Air Asia has a subsidiary, affiliate, associate or hub in almost every country in SE Asia, Asia proper and the Pacific. It means that it’s lawyers have been exceptionally good at hiding the ball. The headquarters is in Kuala Lumpur. The principle place of business is in Kuala Lumpur, the training originates out of Kuala Lumpur and the whole convoluted mess of transport, holding companies, supply companies and mottos from the 2013 Annual report all scream out Air Asia is about Malaysia and Malaysia is about Air Asia. So big guys when the shock is over and you decide how to compensate the victims families will the owners of those floating teddy bears get the Warsaw Convention pennies or will you develop a conscience and pay as if your whole rock star flashy but flat operation is what it really is, a Malaysian operation with Montreal Agreement rights and limitations. Teddy bears should never be cheap.

Where , Why, What Next?

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney, November 23, 2014

Where did MA Flight 370 go? Not a napkin, not a piece of empenage, nothing, anywhere?  Why was MA Flight 17 so low and so tempting as it passed over the Eastern Ukraine? Does anyone living know? In July why did MA Flight 4 pass low and straight over the Syrian-Iraq-ISIS conflict? Hey you, yes you at Malaysia Air, no not you, the crabby insurance adjuster, you pilots what do you think?

OOOOps, MHA Does it Again!

Aviation Attorney, Jerry Skinner, October 3, 2014

Hello, Hello Mr. Potato Head is anybody home? I at least had an excuse for not picking up on this story. I just had major surgery and have been struggling to recover. Hence my absence on your back

So Mr. Malaysia air, yes you, the same one who offered all of the families shattered by MHA 370’s disappearance and MHA 17’s horrific shoot down, peanuts on the dollar without any mention of the Montreal Agreement. Yes you, the same one who publicly questioned my knowledge and advice to my Australian clients who seem to think that the deaths of their loved ones  at 30,000 feet by hundreds, no thousand of pieces of warhead and the fragments of a 12 ft long missile traveling at 3000 ft. per second was not worth the bus token and three pull tabs you offered. Can you imagine tissue paper and a shotgun blast? You can grasp this can you not, absolute stark terror at 30,000 feet, may only last for a second, but that second exceeds the value you seem to place on human life.  Yes and can I tell you why I say this!  Emphatically! Absolutely, yes!  You still don’t get it, because on or about July 21, 2014 after your ops people lost flight 370 and after flight 17 was shot down in a hot war zone where two major nations were at war, you geniuses dispatched and flew MHA 4 over the ISIS/SYRIA/Iraq conflict zone and risked the deaths of several hundred more people. Sirs you need to understand, you need to learn from your own mistakes. If you cannot you need to find another line of work. You see the problem is not the legal representation of the Plaintiffs, the problem is that you are not willing to take responsibility and that people are somehow still choosing to fly with you through one conflict after another. They are all getting on the wrong airline. OOOOps, you did it again.

The End of Days II : Where is the World Community

August 2, 2014, Aviation Attorney Jerome Skinner

ALERT PARADIGM SHIFT, TEDDY BEARS ARE FAIR GAME

Where are the international peace organizations. Where is the UN, Where is the International Court of Justice. Where is every peace preaching, outraged, new world order, we are all one activist hiding while the Russians, their separatists and the Ukrainian government and military continue to bar, desecrate, spoiliate and dishonor the MHA 17 crash site and the memories and families dignity of those innocent travelers who died as the target of a 4.5 mach super weapon. They are hiding shamefully. I haven’t heard one voice yet chastise the shirtless horseman whose ambitious striving for former glory left so many teddy bears in a bloody field.

I have been working in claims related to air disasters, including bombings for 35 years. I do think this event marks a new low for our western world and our species. This was a no contest attack, a game changer. It took no courage and it has seemingly resulted in no remorse. What can be done. I can tell you from experience that nothing can be done to restore what has been lost. It is too late. My goal has always been to do everything within my limited power to help the victims families survive and move on. You can’t bring them back, but if the last thought these lost souls ever had was ” what about my family, my spouse, those that depended upon me?”, then you can do something.

We need an international remedy, one that has no jurisdictional limits, one that makes no judgments and imposes no sanctions. We need the “contributors” to this horror to step up create a claims fund and each to contribute generously. There has to be enough to carry the families past the shock. There has to be enough to create a new international paradigm, go to war if you must, humans have always done that, humans always will. But the world is small and if the rule of law can’t protect total innocents from the far side of the globe from Security Counsel Member super weapons, we are hopeless indeed. If this continues there will never be enough teddy bears in children’s arms, they will all be in bloody fields. Let’s start a fund, a new body of compassion, Mr. Putin surely you would like to ante in first!

The End of Days, at Least the End of Acceptable Risk Commercial Air Travel

26 Years and man still kills man as they sail through the beauty of the skies.

Jerry Skinner Aviation Attorney, July 22, 2014

Malaysia Air 17, the choice of route, the weapons in the hands of men who probably care only about killing, the spoliation of the accident site, withholding the bodies and delaying the analysis of the DFDR and the CVR, the realities of the entire MHA17 and MHA370 twin tragedies is sobering. For what ever reason or reasons the world seems to be spinning out of control and becoming more and more dangerous even to those of us just minding our business trying to live another day. One of the costs of living in a harder more dangerous and more war-like world should be flying commercially with great, great care.
If other airlines, including some of the world’s legacy carriers, are choosing to fly around the Ukraine, why would you even consider getting close. I guess the mentality “that MHA 370 just happened and lightning does not strike twice” is meaningless after all! If you want to express the absurd positively “why would any reasonably prudent airline make the boneheaded operational level decision that since they have one aircraft that has been missing for 4 months, it would be the correct thing to dispatch another 777 through a war zone where two nation states are arming Dwayne and his other brother Dwayne with high altitude, high tech, high explosive surface to air missiles”?

Modern commercial flight is the realization of every man’s dream. It is a technological miracle. We must find disincentives and remedies that are so expensive that making war on modern commerce and innocent non-combatants stops. If anyone has any idea how we can re-instill living values and the value of each life back into a world that seems to long for a return to barbarism, please let us all know. That goes for you too Mr. Putin!

USA Today says, GA Unfit to Fly, FAA Unfit to Regulate

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney, June 18, 2014.  Unfit to Regulate! The June 16, 2014 edition of USA Today published an excellent, long in the works series of three articles under the title: Unfit to Fly. The theme explores the very high rate of accidents and fatalities involving general aviation aircraft, both fixed wing and rotary, small airplanes and helicopters. It also discusses the FAA’s failure to adequately investigate the true causes of most accidents, which is described as “risk v. benefit analysis” or “economies of scale”.  How can you correctly assign cause or prevent future fatal accidents with one NTSB investigator, one FAA investigator and several company representatives with vested interests.  That sadly enough is the best case scenario. Often times the NTSB IIC (Investigator in Charge) will not visit the scene, review the actual data or write the final report. Should the regulations be changed to root out the truth of each fatal accident, that is unlikely. In this report the former head of the NTSB,  Deborah Hershman squarely and honestly addresses the FAA and the difficulty in moving the FAA to address safety issues ahead of air commerce issues, she says despite the carnage, “we do not kill enough people to justify regulatory change”.  This confirms what attorneys like me, who call pilots friends have long believed about the FAA. The FAA follows a shameful, but real policy called the “Tombstone Principle” nothing in the law or regulation changes until enough tombstones have been raised! Who decides what is enough?  The IRS, the NSA, the EPA, the FAA are any of them actually looking out for you. Not likely.

Without a Trace, Nothing……..

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney, May 1, 20

“It echo’s in the sounds of silence”  Simon and Garfunkel were not writing about Malaysia Air 370. But they could have been. The song was sad, melancholy, urgent and most of all true.  The story of the disappearance of MH370   is sad and melancholy.  It is also still to this day, 5 going on 6 weeks later, a story in need of an ending, or at least in need of a beginning of an ending.  The families need to know where, why, how.  They need to say good-bye. But, make no mistake, we all need to know what happened. We are all concerned with this crash in particular, because it raises fears that are as old as the race. In 2014 we have miraculous technology, organized in stunning arrays of complexity and used to do what was once unthinkable. We fly at 600+mph at the edge of space with only 3 to 4 inches of space separating our fragile bodies from oblivion.  We do it everyday. MH370 is a grim reminder of our humanity, our frailty and our mortality. The Boeing 777 has multiple means of communication, 3 HF radios, 2 ACARS, 2 ELTS, the EMSAT system and the subscription service that communicates continuously with Rolls-Royce and perhaps other flight critical component manufacturers. Many systems are redundant, they are backed-up by 2 or 3 levels of active identical systems. The pilots of a B 777 are among the most highly trained, up to date pilots in the world.  But, and this is the rub we all fear,  all of that technology, in it’s multiple layers and with it’s hundreds of thousands of developmental man hours, all failed and was unable to prevent the disappearance. Now after 5-6 weeks all the finest search technology the world has to offer has failed to find a thing.  Not one seat cushion has been sited at sea, not one ping has been definitive, no undersea topography has be revealing.  As Tony Abbott the Australian Prime Minister recently said, ” we know nothing more than we did when we started,”   What is it we all fear that this tragedy underscores?  MH370 reminds us that there are events which all the technology, all our sophistication, all our modern competence cannot prevent or solve.  We all effectively live minute by minute. It does not sit well does it?  There are 2 thing we can say about MH370 :

1. It began with a deliberate act and if the airplane plunged into the sea, it plunged in nearly whole. Finding it will take time and good luck. If you believe in that.

2. If it was hijacked, the crime was nearly flawless. The perfect plane, the perfect geographical location, the perfect time. Evil still has sway over our attempts at security, at least sometimes.

Think deeply and sleep well, the world is and always will be a dangerous place. To the MH370 families at 5 weeks +,  sorry that it had to be those that you loved who reminded us of our 21st century mortality.

………and Again!

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney,  April 11, 2014

I am a child of the sixties, I remember the lyrics, Peter, Paul and Mary, I think……. ” how many times does a man…… before they call him a man?”

April 8, 2014 Bethel, Alaska 208B down!

This is the clue to a topic which appears far to often on this blog, appears far too often in the news, appears far too often in family obituaries and just appears far too often!

On Tuesday, March 11 a Cessna Caravan 208B crashed near Bethel Airport in Bethel, Alaska. The same model on a passenger flight originating in Bethel crashed near St. Marys, Alaska on November 29, 2014. Does anyone at the FAA have anything to say about limitations to light ice being sufficient in the Caravans manufactured before TKS and bigger engines?  Guess not.

The Flight With No Destination: Part II

Jerry Skinner, Aviation Attorney, March 18, 2014

Flight 370 Flight Path

We still have no airplane. Will still have a limited number of alternatives:
– A catastrophic event, such as a fire in the electrical supply system could simulate the deliberate disabling of the ACARs.
– The radical views of the pilot could explain the deliberate silence by all means, except fr the short bursts from the engines.
– For the truly paranoid, devotees of the conspiracy theory school of explaining all thing, two Iranians both with stolen passports, a pilot with radical Islamic leanings, the execution of several high skill tasks and no wreckage or claims of credit. Add it up and Flight 370 rises up like the phoenix to carry a large bomb, perhaps atomic into Tel Aviv.
This is the spectrum, non-threatening, threatening but localized in impact and finally massively threatening with immediate and devastating world wide impact. I know which one I would prefer, make it simple and limit the deaths to those on the airplane.

But, one thing is getting lost in this discussion and in every media report. We are now beyond one week since MA370 vanished. It is highly unlikely that any of the 227 passengers are still alive. Let’s pray for a miracle, let’s pray for divine intervention, lets pray for the peace of Jerusalem. But by all means, please pray, this is a bad, bad thing in a world where bad thing happen on a large scale. Pray hard!

The Flight With No Destination

A flight plan with no end!

Jerry Skinner Aviation Attorney, March 11, 2014
Airplanes rarely disappear. Malaysia Airlines flight 370 has disappeared. No wreckage in the water. The oil slick was not jet fuel. No may day was received. No Airlink HF message. No ACARs up link to the satellite with an urgent call of catastrophe. The best evidence in 3 going on 4 days is the deafening silence over the airwaves and in the shallow sea south of Vietnam. A Boeing 777 is a big aircraft. It has many ways, redundant systems, automatic alarms and alerts, horns, transmissions and data feeds to send out information. So far not even a short burst of static lost in the background noise of world wide communication. Yes, we still live in a world where 239 people can disappear without a trace. How, I really don’t know any more than you.

But 2 things are clear. To accomplish this silent and catastrophic and event, the cause was fast, faster than every one of the automatic systems that should have communicated with the world about a pending disaster in seconds. Second, it was big, very big and powerful, the aircraft power failed instantly or the aircraft was rendered apart instantly. That kind of force at 35,000 feet at cruise airspeed would shatter and aircraft into tiny pieces and project those falling pieces over a wide wreckage field. This event left nothing, nothing physical and most tellingly it left silence. Pray for the families of the 239 souls who are missing also. May God give you all peace.

If this is an act of terrorism, it is despicable and cowardly