I went back and looked for this link but now I can’t even find it. But I got it from a post in this thread… I’m not sure what happened. I’m still just incidentally curious about what the silence in the clip I mistakenly referenced meant.
There are several links to media in that article. I thought you were referring to the one labeled “Air India 787 Crash Audio Extraction”
I don’t understand the source of that “video” (it’s audio only); was it just somebody recording with their phone from nearby? Also, I only hear the drone of a jet flying and then sudden silence at about 11 seconds in to the 21 second clip. Is this silence meaningful? Is it supposed to indicate that the engines suddenly quit? Is it supposed to indicate that the RAT started?
Because to my non-aviator self it seems that no incident outside of a Twilight Zone episode would suddenly make a jet completely silent. The sudden silence seems to me simply the recoding ending and then 10 seconds of silence after the actual audio clip ends.
(IOW, someone recorded about :11 of something but somewhere in the chain of custody of the clip an extra 10 seconds of nothing–not silence, but no media at all–was mistakenly added on.
TL;DR - in the audio clip, is there some significance to the audio stopping at 11 seconds?
It can. That’s literally a requirement for twin engine planes. They won’t be able to continue to their destination, but all modern two engine planes are required to be able to climb to I think 5000 feet, return to the airport, and land with only one engine.
If they want to cut out the actual explosion sounds, okay, maybe someone would be triggered by such a thing. But at least say that the audio is truncated, or better yet, make the clip only the length of the sound up to explosion (:11) instead of a mysterious sudden silence (out to :21). Who does that?
Mathematically that may be true, but don’t a lot of air crashes have multiple failures that lead up to the accident? Sometimes there are little mistakes, any one of which would be survivable, but when enough of them happen together, it leads to a crash.
I’m not saying that the flaps were wrong, and there was engine failure in this case. But there may turn out to be other factors that led up to it.
There are soooo many failsafes against incorrect flap settings on take off.
If both engines are lost tho and the RAT deployed the pilots have very limited flight controls.
The bang the survivor heard
Mr Ramesh, who is now being treated in hospital, told India’s Hindustan Times that he heard a loud noise 30 seconds after take-off.
would appear to be the RAT deploying and makes sense that he had time to exit/jump - 30 seconds
Nose up glide says pilot slowing plane
If you look closely at good video you see normal full power debris after rotation …then that disappears …hard to pick out.
Sound on good clips is wrong for full power 787.
FWIW
If you look carefully at the youtube above you can see the engines kicking up debris from the runaway…then it appears to stop …either no power or the plane has gone beyond the runway …can’t tell.
It’s a type of error called a “slip”. A slip is where you intend to perform the correct action but instead you perform the wrong action. It’s important to note that these errors happen regardless of experience levels. My understanding is that as you learn a task you create a little subroutine that can then carry out that task without any significant conscious thought. Sometimes when that subroutine is called into action the wrong one is triggered.
Because the action is effectively bypassing conscious and deliberate thought, mitigations such as lever placement and handle shape can be ineffective. The brain was never given a chance to look for and identify the appropriate control, it just attempted to trigger the gear up action and the body carried out the flap up action instead (stupid body!)
The link below includes some examples from EasyJet:
Airbus discussion about these types of errors and how they can be mitigated:
And a video from Airbus on the same topic. This one leads with a simulator scenario where the FO has his hand placed on the flap lever during the take off roll and subsequently retracts flaps instead of gear. Not surprising given the way it’s presented but it can be more subtle than that, perhaps your hand is resting close to the flap lever on your thigh, a natural enough place to put a hand that doesn’t have a job to do for the time being.
Fascinating. It sounds like exactly the same kind of thing we all do every day, much-repeated actions that become part of our automatic behavioral inventory but that occasionally short circuit for no clear reason. “Time to brush my teeth. I open the medicine cabinet, I grab the toothpaste, I close the medicine cabinet, I grab my toothbrush, etc etc.” Except every now and then I close the medicine cabinet and then I pause in confusion because I am holding my deodorant.
Sure, yet that won’t result in your bathroom blowing up.
Modern aircraft (pretty much anything that carries passengers) need to have a computer that overrides what it perceives as “I want to stall this airplane on takeoff”. Hopefully they find both boxes yet the voice recorder will have some kind of vocal or distinct sound from the computer, and for sure the other box will be definitive on what happened and in what order.
Well the more modern ones do. I’ve never flown a Boeing but the Airbus will lock the slats in place if they’re being retracted at too slow an airspeed and if you get close to the stall the thrust will automatically go to TOGA (max thrust). But the discussion above is more about why the error might occur in the first place rather than what technology is available to fix the subsequent mess.
To return to the bathroom analogy, I can imagine “mirror tech” that’s watching you (if you don’t mind) and would at least interrupt your actions with, “Dave, you have just put toothpaste on your shaver. I believe that is incorrect.” and whether or not it can or would take any evasive action to prevent you from trying to shave with toothpaste is probably not important.
The “why” on this crash seems like it’s going to be some kind of cockpit confusion (“I thought you did that” or “what did I just do?”) sort of thing. ETA: I mean, if the computer detects the inputs it is receiving will lead to catastrophe, do the TOGA thing, get to 5,000 feet and flip on the auto-pilot till things are worked out.
Yet I recall the Malaysian flight which is thought to be pilot suicide. Or was it hypoxia throughout the plane? It just isn’t definitely known Yet setting a course for Antarctica or nowhere in the Southern Ocean ought to have been relayed to someone, even if neither a human or the on-board computer could do anything about it.
“A search team has found one of the two black boxes, though it is not clear whether it is the cockpit voice recorder, or the data recorder, which stores a flight’s real-time information.”
Captain Steeeve has what seems to be a careful, although quite cautious & preliminary, idea of the cause. He suggests that the pilot monitoring, when told by the pilot flying to raise the gear, grabbed the wrong handle, and disabled the flaps instead. Capt. Steeeve says that is consistent with everything he knows and what he sees on the only video yet available.
(for some reason, SDMB isn’t letting me imbed the YT link to the video.)
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