Henderson, Garner M

  Insider threats in Aviation!      The biggest threat to aviation does not always come from an outside occurrence such as FOD getting into an engine or the system failure on an aircraft. The biggest threat in aviation comes from insider terrorist attacks in the form of sabotage, espionage, and hijacking. It takes very few resources to be able to completely disable and kill any who would be riding on an aircraft while destroying that same aircraft in the process by using one of the above techniques.     Sabotage is an act or process tending to hamper or hurt and is deliberate subversion (Merriam-Webster Dictionary, 2022). Sabotage can take place in many ways, whether it's deliberately using improper maintenance practices to cause destruction to an aircraft which could cause catastrophic system failure and death, or it can be on the manufacturer's end by making subpar components that either will not work or have a built-in weakness or fault that wi...

The Weeping Wing!! What it is.         The least common method of de-icing a wing is the weeping wing method, in this method an antifreeze solution is released in addition to de-icing holes through the leading edge of the wing and spreads across the airfoil chemically breaking the bond between the ice and the airframe that has accumulated ice (PHAK Chapter 7). The ice is then sloughed off during aerodynamic flight using the force friction of the moving air. How it works and how it can break. The antifreeze solution being leaked out through the wing is due to small holes that are along the leading edge of the wing, though the initial design of the holes is to block ice formation along the edge to begin with by making the ice essentially bridge the gap across the whole and stops the ice from creating a full unified front on the leading edge (PHAK Chapter 7). Which brings us to the main fault in this design, which is the clogging of the holes along the leading edge...

     During the operation of an airfoil, it can be observed that air flowing around the wing has an initial point where it is stopped at the leading edge, this is defined as the stagnation point (Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge-Chapter 4: Principles of Flight, p 8). The idea is to mitigate this stagnation point, thus reducing or erasing the friction that the air molecules can cause on the leading edge of the wing.                                                          How is the friction caused?     Friction is caused when two molecules of mass attempt to move across eachother, ( Pilot's Handbook of Aeronautical Knowledge-Chapter 4: Principles of Flight, p 2) while air has an incredibly small mass, it still has mass which will attempt to stop ...

 The personal meaning that ethics in aviation has to me is to, "safeguard the present while stepping towards the future." In safeguarding the present, we use our moral compass to not take shortcuts in our maintenance practices. When you have that lockwire (or similar task or component) that, "does the job" or is, "good enough" because we just want the job to be over and done with for the day. You have to use your moral compass and take into account that you are now responsible for that aircraft (to include every soul onboard) and it going up into the sky, and then coming down (hopefully not in a fireball due to negligence). Safeguarding the present starts with you taking the time to do the task and doing it properly and correctly in accordance with all of the technical manuals. With the task of safeguarding the present comes stepping to the future, many of the redundant systems on the aircraft that we have didn't initially come with the first aircraft ...