That is the slogan of the budget airline AirAsia. But Air India could well adopt it, as this story shows. The pilots on an Air India flight from Bangkok to New Delhi went back to nap in business class after showing some flight attendants how to monitor the autopilot.
And then one of the attendants accidentally switched off the autopilot. :eek:
Scratch Air India off the list of airlines I might ever fly.
Russians do this too.
cite from 1994 - cite from 1942
In Russia, planes fly you.
I recently watched a show about the first one. The pilot had his children in the cockpit which was not all that uncommon at the time. He put his daughter in the seat and had her “fly” the plane. The autopilot was on and when she turned the wheel he turned the heading knob on the autopilot to make it feel like she was flying the plane. He then repeated this with his son, but when his son took the controls he turned hard on the wheel before the pilot had a chance to turn the knob on the autopilot. This had the effect of partially disconnecting the autopilot. The autopilot still had control of the rudder and elevators but it no longer controlled the ailerons. The autopilot also gave no warning at all that it had partially disconnected (a bad design if you ask me). Because the son had the wheel slightly turned the plane began to bank. The pilots got confused, thinking that the autopilot was still completely engaged, and in their confusion they allowed the plane to continue banking until it began to bank and turn so steeply that the g forces prevented them from taking the controls. After a long struggle the pilots did manage to get to the controls and were getting the plane back under control but they ran out of altitude and slammed into the ground.
If the autopilot had worked the way that the pilots thought it did there wouldn’t have been a crash. Or if the pilots had been properly trained on the way the autopilot did work there wouldn’t have been a crash. Ironically, if they had just let go of the controls at one point and let the autopilot sort it out they wouldn’t have crashed either. In their fight for control they over-compensated for the dive, pulled up too steeply, and put the plane into a stall. They didn’t have enough altitude at that point to recover from the stall.
Everyone did agree though that putting kids at the controls was a monumentally stupid thing to do.
According to the cite, the pilots were “suspended”. Seems to me that if they’re so tired they have to nap on duty, they should be fired so they can get the rest they so badly need.
Isn’t that the basic story (surprise) for
Crichton’s Airframe?
Oh, Sweet North America, I shall never leave thee!
Not by airline, anyhoo.
Aw, I thought this might be a hypothetical for discussing what would happen if everyone on Earth suddenly gained the ability to fly like Superman.
I hate to break it to everybody but pilots routinely doze off in the cockpit. Think about it. You’re sitting in a chair looking out a window at… nothing. And that’s in the daytime.
When I use to jumpseat on planes I brought magazines to keep them awake while I slept.
I’m pretty sure it’s perfectly acceptable for one guy to nap while the other guy monitors the autopilot. It’s sure as hell not acceptable for both pilots to snooze in bizclass while a flight attendant is the only one in the cockpit.
Pfft. What do they call them flight attendants for if they can’t attend to flight?
It’s **not ** permitted, actually. It does happen occasionally.
You’d be surprised how brutal some of the schedules are. 13, 14, up to 16 hours on duty, with circadian clock flips, oh, and as little as 9 hours on the ground (that ends up being about 6ish hours of actual sleep, by the way). It’s not always that bad, but it can be. I’d rather the guy next to me tell me “hey, I’m having a hard time staying awake, spot me for 15 minutes?” while in boring cruise flight than him not being alert when the workload gets high in the terminal area. A 15 minute power nap does wonders for alertness levels.
occassionally… snicker. It’s not that both pilots are out cold. It’s more of a grayout. Once you’ve achieved cruise altitude there is not much to do. the plane is doing all the work. Even a change in course is a matter of dialing in a new heading. With GPS’s it’s now possible to go direct without ever making a course change. All a pilot has to do is acknowledge departing and entering various radar center areas and change frequencies accordingly. I know I’m oversimplifying it but it can get pretty boring in a cockpit on a nice day.
Can we do that one?
OK, here it is:
Now everyone can fly! (Hypothetical: humanity gains the power of Superman-like flight)
I know the Soviet space shuttle Buran flew an entirely automated mission, how far away are we from passenger jets being fully automated with the pilot being there just in case something goes wrong?
btw I’d rather have a pilot take a nap while their co-pilot covers them than someone struggling to stay awake throughout the flight. But then people lose all sense of reason entirely when aircraft are involved, look at the wave of righteous indignation when someone in an American control tower let their young child talk to the pilots a couple of years ago.
I seem to recall a BBC report on this, only the premise was totally automated and no pilot on board.
I don’t think I’d be keen on that!
