I think you are thinking of Tenerife.
The delay was not that long…
[QUOTE=the article]
A minute and a half after the crisis began, the captain returns to the cockpit
[/QUOTE]
The story also explains quite plausibly why the captain might not want one of the co-pilots to unbuckle and stand up at that point…
[QUOTE=also the article]
This, experts say, is not so hard to understand. “They were probably experiencing some pretty wild gyrations,” Esser says. “In a condition like that, he might not necessarily want to make the situation worse by having one of the crew members actually disengage and stand up. He was probably in a better position to observe and give his commands from the seat behind.”
[/QUOTE]
I think you’re thinking about the Tenerife collision: Tenerife airport disaster - Wikipedia
ETA: took too long to reply…
A minute and a half is a long time in those circumstances - more than long enough for the junior pilots to wonder what the hell was taking him so long.
To be fair, they may not have done their best to get the proper message to him: “We have an emergency - get here ASAP.”
It’s plausible - but it leaves the captain spectacularly short of having done his duty.
If he came onto the flight deck and found clear evidence the junior pilots were getting things under control, okay. The actual situation was clearly out of control, which called for him to do his best to put things right. And there are two pilot positions - so he need not disturb things while taking one of them.
Considering the guy was likely asleep in his bunk, a minute and a half seems pretty good. And the other pilots had all the same level of training that the captain had. The pilot left in command and his copilot were both fully qualified to operate every aspect of that flight. They were not interns or volunteers from first class.
And they had the lasagna.
Yep, thats it.
What a harrowing read.
I imagine the part where the co-pilot finally says "But I’ve had the stick back the whole time! " must have been a :eek: moment like you see in horror movies when they find out the caller is inside the house or the killer is the person in the room with them.
The Captain then says “No, no, no… Don’t climb… no, no”, so he at that point likely knew they were doomed. Good God.
The article also states they were descending at 10,000 ft/minute, which to me sounds more like “free-falling” rather than “descending”. That’s 167 ft/sec. I don’t want to think what the cabin was like.
I agree with the others that have said it sounds more like an inexperienced pilot panicked rather than acted unprofessionally.
IMO, if the captain had any real notion of an emergency, it’s shockingly bad. We know the junior pilots took issue with it.
On paper, perhaps. In the event, it turns out they weren’t.
If it’s a constant 10,000’/min the sensation would be 1g, not freefall.
But the plane could not have been fully stable in pitch, yaw or roll, and the airspeed was far from normal - so the passengers had to have been aware that things were not right.
I thought it was pretty interesting that when asked what to do, the captain responds “I don’t know”, which implies to me that the information being provided to him by the instruments was not enough to make sense of the situation at that point.
You’re in bed, asleep. A buzzer goes off. How quickly can you wake up, get fully dressed, and make your way down to your kitchen?
And despite the errors, there were no ‘junior pilots’ flying the plane. They were all pilots, with one of them having enough airline seniority to have the title “Captain”. I in no way wish to excuse the errors that every pilot in that cockpit made, but no major airline in the world sends up a flight with a captain in the left seat and a trainee in the right seat. I don’t know about Air France policy, but I would not be surprised if one of the relief crew was also technically a captain.
If the buzzer means “Emergency - a couple hundred lives in your care might be in jeopardy” I think the time would be well under a minute and a half.
A recent example: I stayed up a bit late on Wednesday, and so overslept on Thursday. I was expecting a somewhat important phone call from England, and woke to hear my cellphone (located in my kitchen) ring. I was able to take the call on the 5th (which is sometimes the last) ring.
I certainly wasn’t fully dressed. I question whether the AF447 captain was undressed and fully asleep. This source says he left the cockpit around 2:02, and the first call for him to return came at 2:10:50 - just 9 minutes later. And I question whether the A-330 has actual beds for pilots - a common arrangement is that a crew member can relax in a reclining seat and perhaps doze off, but he’s not in bed in his PJs.
That link also says that prior to the captain leaving the cockpit, there was a discussion about turbulence:
In view of this, leaving the cockpit itself may have been questionable. Leaving under the assumption that he should now expect a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep would have been a very dubious thing.
The OP’s link has this: “The co-pilot in the right-hand seat, an inexperienced 32-year-old named Pierre-Cédric Bonin…” … which sound like a junior pilot, in the sense of young, inexperienced, the opposite of “senior”.
I think you are making assumptions here, we don’t know why the captain took so long to appear. He may have had difficulty reaching the cockpit due to the pitching and rolling of the plane.
Leaving the controls in the hands of the junior pilots also seems sensible to me, rather than wasting critical time switching places. The captains job is to assess the situation and decide on a course of action. If he’d been able to do so, either of pilots should have been capable of following his orders.
I’d have thought that flying the plane through a bit of turbulence would be entirely routine, and would not require the presence of the captain. The captain can’t stay in the cockpit all the time, he also has to think about crew rotation. It wasn’t until after he left that Robert adjusted the radar system and realised they were heading towards an area of intense storm activity.
The performance of the crew was undoubtably very poor, and the primary reason for the crash. Whether there was any actual negligence is a difficult question, and one for aviation experts to try to answer. The crew’s failure to follow CRM procedures may indicate some laxity among the pilots or a weakness in their traning. Or it might simply have been a consequence of panic. Emergency training and precedures are meant to give them good habits to lean on when they get into trouble, but humans are not machines, and there is no way of telling how they will react under stress.
The report makes for sad reading, there were so many opportunities to avert the disaster. At least the recovery of the black boxes makes it possible to learn some important lessons, about cockpit procedures and ergonomics. Lets hope they are acted upon.
It’s sensible provided the pilot(s) at the controls are obtaining desirable results. When results are anything but desirable (an understatement in this case), a different approach is called for.
And no critical time is lost by leaving one pilot on the controls while the captain takes the other seat. Whereas continuing an out-of-control 10,000 fpm descent means critical time is being badly wasted.
He’s likely to do a better job of assessing the situation by sitting in a pilot seat with the controls at hand and all instruments clearly in view.
And we now know that if he’d taken the seat of the most junior pilot (as would seem to be the likely choice in this situation) the continuous stick-back input would have ceased and AF447 would have proceeded to Paris.
They’d encountered St. Elmo’s Fire before the captain left - so everyone knew they were near storms.
One interesting thing I noted: Bonin seemed to be unfamiliar with the phenomenon of St Elmo’s fire. To me that seems to suggest an degree of unfamiliarity with foul weather flying- I first encountered it while flying piston twins in weather (when I had below 1000 hours), and have since seen it dozens of times in my relatively short airline career. Weather flying can be a pretty tense sensory experience for folks with little experience with it. I wonder if that could have contributed to his apparent sensory overload and ‘freeze.’
Again, you are making assumptions. How much is the plane pitching and rolling at the time? Can the captain see all the instruments from the seat he takes?
Reading some of the comments on the article, it seems the captain was following procedure by not taking control of the plane.
It’s easy to be wise after the event. Actually, it seems that letting go of the stick would not have been enough to recover the aircraft. They may have needed to pitch down and reduce engine power, as running full throttle causes the nose to pitch up (the engines are below the centre of gravity).
The captain was able to walk into the cockpit and sit down - so it’s likely he could have managed to sit in one of the pilot seats.
They have a size, arrangement and orientation optimized for viewing from the pilot seats - he’ll certainly see them better from that position.
I’d love to see something saying “In an extreme emergency the captain shall not ask a less experienced pilot to give up a seat at the controls.”
An important point is that you don’t need two pilots at the controls - you just need one who’s doing the right thing.
We now know it would have been easy to be wise during this event: in response to 4 minutes of repeated loud “Stall!” warnings, and having seen other things fail, consider the possibility that the plane is in an aerodynamic stall and give stall recovery procedures a try.
That is interesting to me. If I’m a trained pilot, and I’m receiving stall warnings, I think I would do what trained pilots are supposed to do: increase the angle of attack and eliminate the stall.
I understand the confusion with frozen sensors and all, but when you are at, I don’t know 30,000 feet, and are getting stall warnings, why would you not do what your training suggests and increase air speed by diving?
Weird.
I think you mean “decrease”.
But yes - in the face of 75 (!) loud warnings of “Stall!” it’s beyond astonishing that in 4 minutes no action directed toward stall recovery was even taken.