You’re pretty fly for an Asian guy
thankfully, i didn’t notice such comments. instead, there were mainly kudos for minimising casualties and “not another asian airline” posts.
Reminds me of this classic..
It probably was radar-guided, not a heat-seeker, so it probably hit somewhere other than the tailpipe (or engine, to be precise).
I get your point! I’m just playing along.
Anyone that thinks Asians can’t fly weren’t at Pearl Harbor.
Later in the war there were a lot of their countrymen who kept crashing into US Navy ships. Maybe they just took the best pilots along on the trip to Hawaii.
Fixed.
Well, those Asian airplanes all look alike to me.
The main British Radio station, Radio 1, is in trouble after a guest on a show made a joke about the crash:
I’m not sure but I don’t think it is especially funny:
*BBC Radio 1 DJ Nick Grimshaw was forced to apologise to listeners who were offended by a joke, made by guest Keith Lemon, about the plane crash in Taiwan that killed 31 people.
Lemon, who is played by 41-year-old comedian Leigh Francis, compared the pilot of the doomed TransAsia Airways Light GE235 to Lady Gaga.
“Did you see that plane that crashed? What’s going on there? What happened there? How can you crash a plane into cars on the road?,” he said.
Radio 1 breakfast host Nick Grimshaw Radio 1 breakfast host Nick Grimshaw “How come the co-pilot didn’t say, ‘You’re going too low you know? You’re going too low.’
“And him to go, ‘Yeah, I know. I shouldn’t go this low should I?’
“Can you just stop living on the edge like Lady Gaga? Wow, it was incredible.”*
:dubious:
Latest update is that before the crash, engine 2 flamed out and then engine 1 propeller was feathered. which would leave the airplane with no thrust at all.
It is possible that the number one engine was feathered by mistake, instead of engine two, leading to the crash.
Using a single plane crash in which mechanical failure seems to have been the primary cause as evidence that Asians can’t fly is pretty lame.
OTOH, Korean culture specifically has been found to be a poor match for the kind of teamwork - crew resource management (CRM) - that has been shown to be most effective at minimizing crew error. There are two specific aspects involved:
-the authority structure in the cockpit. In Korean culture, you, the underling, dare not do anything that suggests your superior is anything short of an infallible diety. Sure, maybe your captain has the plane 200’ below glideslope and doesn’t seem to notice, but you better just watch your tongue; you really don’t want to embarrass him; your best bet is to just ride it out and hope he notices before it’s too late. If things get really dicey, you might go out on a limb and provide some kind of cryptic hint.
-the listener-oriented communication style, in which the burden for correctly understanding an utterance is placed primarily on the listener instead of the speaker. So your captain is bringing you in way below glideslope, and you make your cryptic hint - and instead of making sure the captain got the hint, you just figure you’ve said your piece, and now it’s up to him to figure it out.
For a long time Korean Air had a horrible safety record, but some time in the 90s officials at the company sought to improve it. Recognizing these important causative factors, they drilled their flight crews on the tenets of CRM: junior officers were trained to voice any concerns they had to their seniors (up to and including pointing out that the boss is just plain wrong) in a clear-but-diplomatic manner, and senior officers were trained to accept and consider such input without taking offense. It worked: these days, KA has one of the best safety records in the world.
Asiana, Korea’s other national airline, needs to take a page from KA’s playbook. When Asiana 214 crashed in 2013, the junior pilot who was flying the plane did not feel like he was up to the task - but did not feel comfortable expressing this to the senior officers in the cockpit. If he had been able to express that, maybe his seniors would have watched more closely, or not put him in charge of the landing.
As for GE235…we’ll see what the investigations say, but it sounds like there were serious engine problems.
What’s been reported so far makes me wonder if it’s another case of “Captain-san.” Apparently the captain got out of his flight seat to fix some equipment problem - flip a breaker? - when it may have been more sensible for the less-experienced co-pilot to do that. The Korean tendency to respect seniors (especially air captains) right into the mountain has precedents. The co-pilot may have been unable, on several levels, to say, “No, *you *fly, I’ll go flip.”
Just so we’re clear, Transasia Airways is a Taiwanese airline, and GE235 was piloted by Taiwanese citizens. I don’t know whether Taiwanese culture is conducive to good CRM practices or not, or whether crew error had a role in the GE235 crash or not. I brought up Korea and KAL to make the point that while “Asians can’t fly” is stupidly broad claim and is not supported by the GE235 crash, it’s not 100% false, either.
Wouldn’t be the first time an incorrect engine was shut down. Yikes.
I’m looking forward to reading the investigation; trying to glide a plane with no engines through a populated area sounds insane.
And Machine Elf, I had friends who took lucrative jobs flying with the Saudis; they said that the hierarchical structure (at that time, at least), made flying scary. If one of the pilots was from the Royal family, telling them to go around after screwing up an approach was near impossible.
Taiwan pilots ‘faced problem with one engine, restarted the other’
*(Reuters) - The crew of a twin-propeller TransAsia plane faced a problem with one engine but restarted the other, investigators said on Friday,…
…The right engine entered a state called “auto-feather”, in which it reduced thrust to the propeller, Thomas Wang, managing director of the council, said. The flight crew then reduced acceleration to the left engine, turned it off and then attempted to restart it, but it did not gain enough thrust.
…He said the aircraft could fly with one engine. The plane was powered by two Pratt & Whitney PW127M engines. Pratt & Whitney is part of United Technologies. A fuller report on the crash will be available in next 30 days, with a final report expected in the next three to six months.*
http://www.reuters.com/article/2015/02/06/us-taiwan-airplane-idUSKBN0LA04N20150206
Oops.
[Moderating]
russian heel, it’s against the board rules to edit another poster’s text inside the quote box, even when done as a joke or when the edit it clearly labeled. Please do not do that again.
No warning issued.
[/Moderating]
Sum ting wong with people who are racist.
I’m considering booking Malaysia Airlines for every leg of travel in my quest to circumnavigate the globe. Who wants to ride with me?
Me, if you’re payin’. I know people who have flown Malaysia since the crashes and lived to tell the tale.