When the black box data is analyzed, will it indicate if the RAT was deployed automatically or manually?
Couldn’t sleep as I was pondering;
In the case of bird-strike that would have knocked out thrust and electrical power (and deployed the RAT). Yet if it was just loss of electrical power, the RAT should still be able to power the control surfaces assuming the engines would keep working (wouldn’t they?) and the plane could continue in flight. Yet if a reaction to either event led to the inadvertent reaction of raising the flaps, those three rare occurrences, or some combination of (would it need to be all three?) would explain the sudden loss of altitude would they not?
They didn’t for US Airways 1549.
Went from climbout thrust to no thrust at all in a single-digit number of seconds. Which is why catastrophic birdstrike is being seriously considered here.
There have been no reports of bird strikes. They’d have the evidence of bird debris.
I’m not sure if that’s unusual or just “modern”. The only aircraft I’ve flown that were big enough to have tillers are the Dash 8, BAe146, and A320. Of the three, the Dash 8 is the only one that did not have a tiller for the right seat pilot. The BAe146 had tillers both sides, but it was an option, so the company’s procedures were all based around aircraft only having a tiller for the captain, even though in fact all of our aircraft had tillers on both sides. The A320 has tillers both sides as well.
On the Dash 8 and BAe146 the captain started engines, taxied to the runway, then handed over to the FO if they were flying the leg, but the captain had their hand on the thrust/power levers ready for an RTO. The Dash 8 had some nose-wheel steering through the rudder pedals but the BAe146 could only be steered at low speeds by the tiller. Therefore the BAe146 captain didn’t hand full directional control to the FO until the FO had rudder authority, generally around 60 knots.
On the A320 the FO does almost all of the ground handling on their leg. They start engines, taxi, set thrust etc. However the captain still has their hand on the thrust levers for the RTO.
I think the BA method of having the FO handle an RTO is just the way they do things and not necessarily tied to the presence of a tiller for the FO. BA also do monitored approaches where the landing pilot does not fly the approach itself.
To be honest, the vast majority of pilots don’t do anything requiring real stick and rudder skills. From start to finish they fly tricycle undercarriage aircraft with docile handling characteristics and, aside from some limited instruction and practice on stalling and upset recovery, they keep bank angles to less than 30º and pitch attitudes to between -10º and +20º. If we were serious about giving pilots stick and rudder skills we’d make them all do 50 hours of aerobatics where they got to feel the aircraft wings nibbling at a high speed stall as they pull out of loops, and how the wings continue flying at speeds well below the 1g stall speed over the top of loops, and in hammerhead turns, etc.
Having said that, modern airliners are not stick and rudder aircraft. Airline pilots keep their feet off the rudder pedals unless there’s an engine failure or for directional control during take-off and landing. It is such a powerful control surface that you can’t afford to be waggling it about the way you do in a Cessna 185. Passenger jets do reward pilots with good handling skills, but very much in a “less is more” way.
Not worth the 11 minutes, but:
Pilot Explains: A New Detail in the Air India 787 Crash Everyone Missed
[Garybpilot] on Youtube: dual engine failure and or contaminated fuel.
That’s something I have wondered about for a long time: Why is ‘number of flight hours’ used as the main metric of pilot experience - would ‘number of takeoffs/landings’ (ideally the same number) not be a better metric?
But not always. Any pilot who has had to bail out has more takeoffs than landings. Chuck Yeager, in his autobiography, explains that he has more landings than takeoffs.
Right, I have an uncle I am close to whose dream was to become an airline pilot. He didn’t have 20/20 vision so the military pipleline was out. He instead went through a training program sponsored by one of the major airlines that led to him getting all of the necessary certifications and a job at a regional subsidiary airline flying turboprop planes to build up enough hours to hired onto the major airline. (It was akin to professional baseball where you play in the minors hoping to make it into the major league.*)
Unfortunately he lived in Houston and his base was in Florida. So he had to commute to Florida multiple times a week and pay for a small apartment there while his family remained in Houston. His salary was so low it didn’t even cover the apartment. It was considerably less than $20K/year in the mid-‘90s. He stuck it out for two years but it was ultimately unsustainable. His wife got tired of being the sole breadwinner and solo parenting too. I think he had to choose between chasing his dream and his family, so he gave up on his dream and chose his family.
I had a childhood dream of becoming an airline pilot too (probably inspired by my uncle). Similarly, my hope of getting into military aviation was also dashed by not having 20/20 vision. When I got out of the military (serving in submarines instead), I could have used the GI Bill for pilot training, but having seen what my uncle went through I didn’t even try.
*ETA: which I now see @Robot_Arm also mentioned upthread.
One of our past friends flew charters, and he went through the early steps of qualifying for Delta. Once he got a good look at the pay and benefits, however, he blew it off and stuck to the little(r) jets.
Then people would just game the system by spending hours flying circuits but not gaining any real experience. You can’t really cheat getting more hours and for most pilots the hours they fly correlate reasonably well with experience gained.
What experience do you gain when you are just sitting in the cockpit while the autopilot flies the plane?
Ugh, this again. Here:
It depends on what the flying is.
Generally speaking the act of physically flying the aircraft is a fairly simple skill that can be learned with practice and just becomes a distraction from the important stuff which is more around managing the flight.
For most pilots early in their career most flights will be between one and two hours, maybe longer, maybe shorter, but it’s a reasonable number to work with. So each couple of hours of flying represents planning a flight and executing a flight. You will have done things such as:
- Checking weather and NOTAMs for the route, including departure, destination, and alternate airports.
- If the weather is bad at the destination, is it worth going for a look? Where does the company want you to go if you can’t land?
- Deciding how much fuel is needed to safely and efficiently complete the flight. You can’t just fill the tanks because that means you can’t take as many people or cargo.
- Liaising with ground staff about special requirements for the flight, any special needs passengers, or special cargo.
- Acting as a gate keeper for the rules and regulations. Someone has an electric wheelchair in the hold, can they take it? What about the battery? Is it stored correctly?
- Is the aircraft serviceable? Have the required maintenance checks been done? Is it due for maintenance in the near future? Does it have enough hours available to complete the days flying? If it has inoperative equipment, how does that affect our ability to conduct the flight?
- Given the weather conditions for departure can we depart? What are our options if we have an engine failure at the worst time? Can we land back at our departure airport? Do we need a departure alternate? Can we land back at our departure airport if we are over weight? What about if we’ve had a hydraulics failure and don’t have flaps?
That sort of thing. And we haven’t even gone flying yet. As you progress to bigger companies with bigger aircraft, more and more of the pilot’s job gets delegated to other people. You get a flight planning department, load control, flight attendants, check-in staff, operations control, etc. But by then no one really cares about your hours and the challenges/threats change as you go from having had to do everything, to making sure that other people have done their jobs correctly.
Example from airline ops: The FO comes back from their walk around and notices that a passenger with an electric wheelchair is boarding the aircraft. The wheelchair is being folded up and can go into the overhead locker. About 10 minutes later the NOTOC arrives on the aircraft printer. This is a document that lists any dangerous goods or special load the aircraft might be carrying. It says there is no dangerous goods and no special load. FO says to the captain, “That’s not right, I saw an electric wheelchair being loaded so there should be a battery noted in the NOTOC”. The crew contacts load control and find out there’s been a communication breakdown and the battery was missed by load control.
That said, I don’t want to oversell it. On a nice day with nothing going on it can be a very easy job, but it can also be very challenging, and the more hours flying someone has, the more challenges they will have faced.
The autopilot is another matter entirely. It’s like having an incredibly skilled helper that does exactly what you tell it to but has no awareness or common sense. Believe it or not, pushing buttons and operating the autopilot is a skill in itself.
“Auto-pilot, why are you making the plane go faster?”
“Because you told me to make it go faster!”
“No I didn’t, I selected a speed so I want you to maintain that speed.”
“Yes but I am in DES mode and I have captured the vertical path which appears to be too steep for the actual conditions and so I am programmed to fly the path instead of the speed.”
“But ATC have told us to fly 250 knots”
“Yes.”
“OK, now I’ve pushed the open descent button so we are in the OPD DES mode, will you hold the speed now?”
“Yes I will”
“Great thanks”
“Hey autopilot, you’re about to bust an altitude constraint and get us into trouble”
“Yes, well I am in OPN DES mode now and am not programmed to respect altitude constraints.”
“Fine, what if I set the altitude constraint in your altitude window to protect it, then I will enter 250 knots into the FMC managed descent speed so the vertical profile is working off the speed ATC have given us, then I will push the descent button to get us into DES mode again, so the altitude constraints are respected, then I can reset the altitude window to the clearance limit. Now although we are in DES mode again, the vertical path hasn’t been captured and so you will fly the selected speed, yes?”
“Yes”
“Sorry to interrupt, FMC here, you know, the flight management computer? just letting you know you are 1000’ high on the optimum descent profile”
“I know, that’s ok because it stops auto-pilot from capturing the vertical profile and I can fix it a bit later.”
“OK”
“FASTJET 123 FLY TWO HUNDRED KNOTS”
“Hey auto-pilot, ATC want us to fly 200 knots now.”
“Yes”
“That’s right at our minimum clean speed”
“Yes”
“Our best glide speed”
“Yes”
“So now we are going to get really high on profile”
“Yes”
“Pilot, you are 3000’ above the optimum descent profile”
“Shut up FMC”
“…”
I watched the Mayday episode on the Colgan crash. I sure hope the Air India crash was something like birdstrike, and not like Colgan where the pilot basically killed himself and everyone on board in a manner of seconds by doing completely the 100% opposite and incorrect (and fatal) action to a stall warning.
And Air France 447: Mais je suis à fond à cabrer depuis tout à l’heure! (But I’ve had the stick back the whole time!)
Oh yeah!
Air France was a failure not only of the inept pilot but the inept captain who wasn’t managing his crew well enough and didn’t know until it was too late what the guy was doing.
A couple points:
On Jun 17th 2025 an official, a former Air India Captain trained by the Captain of the accident flight, stated, that the CVR has been successfully read out, the voices on the CVR are very clear. It is becoming gradually clear from the newly emerging evidence that there was probably zero negligence in the cockpit, the crew did not give up until the very last moment. The probability of a technical cause is high. A preliminary report by India’s AAIB can be expected in a few days.
And:
His wife and two children - [17 year old] Aryan and his elder sister - live in their ancestral village near the border between Gujarat and Rajasthan states.“This was Aryan’s first time in Ahmedabad. Actually, it was the first time in his life that he left the village,” Mr Asari said. “Whenever I’d call, Aryan would ask if I could spot aeroplanes from our terrace and I would tell him you could see hundreds of them streaking the sky.” Aryan, he explained, was an aeroplane enthusiast and liked looking at them as they flew in the sky over his village. The idea that he could see them much more closely from the terrace of his father’s new home was very appealing to him.
An opportunity presented itself last week when Mr Asari’s daughter, who wants to become a police officer, travelled to Ahmedabad to write the entrance examination. Aryan decided to accompany her… The siblings arrived at their father’s house around noon on Thursday, roughly an hour-and-a-half before the crash.
In fairness to Captain Dubois, the error committed by Bonin was so shocking - something not even a student pilot past private license stage would do - that Dubois would be justified in not even having the thought of “the copilot is stalling us the whole time” cross his mind until Bonin himself said it out loud.