US Airways flight 1549 - One For The Breakers
By Rich Piellisch/Overhaul & Maintenance 
Birds are more likely than bank bailouts to have caused US Airways flight 1549 to ditch in New York's Hudson River on Jan. 15, but it's the economy that has prevented the 10-year old Airbus A320 from being salvaged and returned to service.
"Why repair this airplane when I have three of them on the ground?" asked Jim Jijawi, managing director of Source One Airplane Repair (SOAR) in Newport Beach, Calif., summing up the stance of the owners/operators. "The repairability decision on the airplane depends in large part on the economy," he said.
"It's all about financing," seconds SOAR Managing Director Chris Merry. "It really comes back to economics."
SOAR could have repaired the airplane for about $20 million, or perhaps as low as $18.5 million, Jijawi told O&M, but the company never got to submit an estimate, which itself would have cost perhaps $75,000 and taken two to three weeks to prepare.
Within days of the accident, the 9.5-year-old Airbus A320-214, s/n1044, tail N106US, with a go-team of six technical advisors from Toulouse on hand, was pulled from the Hudson River and taken by barge by NTSB contractor Weeks Marine across New York Harbor to Jersey City. Instead of preparing the waterlogged aircraft for a repair estimate, wings and tail were summarily removed so the carcass could be sent to a secure hangar for further investigation.
"They cut off the wings, they cut off pretty much the whole empennage," said National Transportation Safety Board spokesman Peter Knudson. "This plane will not fly again. I can promise you that."
And, lest anyone venture to term the events of Jan. 15 an "incident," they would be wrong. "This is an accident. It's defined as an accident because of significant damage to the aircraft. There was substantial damage to this aircraft beyond being wet," Knudson said, citing a broken aft pressure bulkhead. "The aircraft was totaled," he said. "It was a total loss."
SOAR disagrees. SOAR would have handled the salvage operation differently, Jijawi said. Rather than treating the airplane "like a block of concrete," SOAR would have hoisted it from water with cranes but then would have lowered the landing gear before setting it on the barge so as to avoid further structural damage. "We don't believe in cutting airplanes during recovery," Jijawi added. SOAR could have had the aircraft, on its own wheels, ready to roll into a hangar at waterside LaGuardia or Newark, "in two to three days at most," he said, and would have proceeded with a repair estimate.
Other Swimming Aircraft
There is precedent for repairing a jet that has been swimming. On Nov. 22, 1968, Japan Air Lines flight JA8032 from Tokyo, a brand new DC-8 named "Shiga," landed in San Francisco Bay with 96 passengers and 11 crew. As was the case in New York, everyone got off safely. Unlike this year's A320, JAL's DC-8 was repaired by United Airlines in San Francisco, and returned to service in late March 1969, less than six months after its water landing, at a reported cost of $4 million. "Every aircraft is different and every accident is different," said chief claims officer Mike Barnet of AIG Aviation, the chief underwriter of the US Airways jet.
"We have to be extremely cautious when we determine when certain aircraft will be returned to service," he said. Salt water immersion is a big negative, as "you're dealing with a lot of aluminum." On the other hand, "if the customer wants to keep his aircraft, we will try to make it work for him." Airbus s/n 1044 was owned by the Wells Fargo Bank Northwest (Salt Lake City) as trustee for US Airways.
In addition to the economy, "the factory OEM always votes against repairing any plane," Jijawi said. Just-in-time manufacturing protocols also stand in the way: modern inventory management means there is little inventory of major components like engines and pylons. A request for such parts by an outfit like SOAR disrupts the manufacturing supply chain. "We have to stand in line," Jijawi said.
His own experience extends back decades, as he managed RAMS, the Recovery and Aircraft Modification Services team at McDonnell Douglas, later Boeing.
In January 1982, a World Airways DC-10 ran off the runway at Boston's Logan Airport. It was "a very difficult recovery," Jijawi recalled, "one of the most difficult in aviation history" because the aircraft was essentially afloat some 180 ft. from shore--too far for landborn cranes, in water too shallow for barges. The RAMS team took a week, removing the jet's cargo and using pumps and jacks to gently lift the jet and build a ramp of steel plates via which the aircraft was towed to dry land. "That aircraft could have been repaired," Jijawi said, but the owners "felt they could use the cash." So the DC-10-30 was scrapped.
Two years later, the RAMS team used a similar technique to pull a Scandinavian Airlines DC-10, also a -30, from New York's Jamaica Bay after it overran a runway on Feb. 28, 1984, following a flight from Oslo. The economy was better, Jijawi remembers, and the eight-year-old aircraft was rebuilt in a Flying Tigers hangar at JFK. All three of the aircraft's CF6-50 engines were replaced, as was nearly everything else. "The only things that remained the same were the fuselage and wings." The cost was approximately 30% of the cost of a new DC-10, at that time about $45 million, Jijawi says. The job also entailed conversion of the aircraft from passenger to freighter configuration, and was the first such project to be completed at a field location. It "was the model for the follow-on DC-8, DC-10 and MD-11 modification later on," SOAR said.
The ex-SAS aircraft, s/n 46871, is flying today, with FedEx as an MD-10.
Since the late-2006 formation of SOAR, the firm has extracted a 1996-build MD-83 from a muddy minefield some 400 meters from its intended runway in Juba, Sudan, and an Iberia A340-600 from an awkward position after it ran off a runway at Mariscal Sucre International Airport in Ecuador, in November 2007. The MD-83 was rebuilt by the operator (Egypt's AMC), SOAR said, "and is flying today." The Iberia A340 was scrapped.
"Since the creation of SOAR," Chris Merry, managing director, concedes, "we've not had the opportunity to do a repair on a recovery airplane."
But other sorts of economic pressures may prove young SOAR's business plan to be viable. "The cost of aircraft has risen far faster than the cost of maintenance and repair," Merry said. "If a quarter-billion-dollar 747 goes off [a runway] and can be repaired economically for $50 million, there's going to be a lot of pressure to repair it. It's probably just a matter of time."
Photo credit: L.A. Hayes
