Hm… Depression, eye problems, end of relationship? It’s all plausible.
But I have statements (from commenters on Yahoo news articles) that the real reason he crashed the plane is that he was a homosexual, crypto-Muslim terrorist. 
But if the plane could be set to 100 in the Alps, that would mean the envelope allowed for potentially lethal action.
Good point. I did say that the wages where not enough.
I’ve know a pilot and FA that had to ‘commute’ a thousand miles. In my mind I thought “are you out of your freaking minds?” But it was a polite dinner, and I kept my trap shut.
Yeah, I forgot to mention that the so-called envelop applies to making control commands that exceed the performance / safety parameters of the plane. For example a suicide dive would exceed the limits for aerodynamic stress. Possibly it prevents a pilot from causing a stall condition. Setting an altitude of 100ft would not be untoward for South Florida. In any case, the co-pilot could have set the desired altitude to 5000ft and achieved the same result. Maybe someone who knows more about this can explain the details better.
Not that it really matters, but I’m sort of stunned that an auto pilot can be set to 100 feet. Um…
I would think that at about 3000 a radar altimeter takes control and keeps (or try’s to) keep it at 1000 AGL or better. I guess it’s because auto pilot is used for landing.
Mountains are a problem of course, but Auto pilot can be set to 100 feet? Landing mode maybe? Huh.
You are pilot & develop a condition that the FAA says you can’t fly with.
They do not take your license, they take your medical.
Can’t fly without it.
You have to jump through the hoops they say to get it back.
Do a bad thing as a pilot. As in flying where you are not supposed to and you are caught doing it.
You get to go try to explain it.
They decide yes, no, or you are toast for x amount of time if they do not just permanently take your license.
In these cases, they take the license & not the medical.
It is not a court, you don’t get a lawyer, they tell you that you were caught, got an explanation that mitigates it? OK, we say you are grounded for 45 days. Your license will arrive in the mail on the 45th day.
For alcoholic addiction, there are two outcomes.
If you are not an airline pilot, they pull your medical and if you do this, that & the other thing and get letters from this doctor and that psychologist & remain sober for this amount of time, you may get you medicinal back. This will mean you have to take another medical because the shortest time this can all be done is 2 years.
If you are a major airline type pilot, they have ‘in house’ programs that their pilots can attend. If they are attending these programs, they can return to flying the very next day. No time frame they have to sit it out.
The FAA allows them this because they have a place that the FAA can actually find out what the pilots are doing, passing sobriety checks etc.
This is not in the FARs. It is an perk they give to airlines. Think about that when you see the good looking senior pilot going to the cockpit. He could have been a practicing alcoholic for years who started treatment just last week.
Other countries, I have no clue but for example, the shenanigans & stunts the Russian pilots do, seem to indicated a big swig of vodka before starting their takeoff run. Bawahahaha
I do not know about the conditions now but in the early 90’s, there were were approximately 25,000 alcoholic pilots ( supposedly in recovery ) flying the line for US carriers.
And flying is still the safest way to travel. 
You’re not really setting the autopilot to 100 feet, you’re setting the altitude selector to 100 feet. You can then fly down to that 100’ using either the autopilot, or hand flying with the flight director (a display that shows you how to manually achieve what the autopilot would do if it was flying), or just plain hand flying. When the autopilot or the flight director is active, the altitude selector (alt-sel) is what the aeroplane will level off at or direct you to level off at. When you are hand flying the alt-sel acts as a reminder of what altitude you’re cleared to or are planning to climb/descend to. There will typically be an aural and visual alert when approaching the selected altitude.
Uses for very low altitude selections are generally limited to when flying bad weather circuits to a runway that doesn’t have a straight in approach or sometimes (and it is very dependant on airline procedure) to set the minimum altitude for a straight in non precision approach (an approach without glideslope guidance.) You may need to set something as low as 400-500 feet in that case. Using the radar altimeter would be counter productive as you want to fly a constant altitude above sea level, not a constant height above ground.
Having said all that, the enhanced ground proximity warning system (EGPWS) has a database of significant terrain around the world and so the aeroplane certainly has all of the information it needs to know that the altitude selector is set to an altitude that is below ground level. The database is imperfect though and you can have glitches. It would be annoying if the aeroplane wouldn’t let you descend because it thought there was a mountain when there wasn’t.
An automatic response to an EGPWS alert would also not necessarily be useful. There are times when a particular combination of aircraft speed and flap/gear configuration can lead to spurious warnings. If you are in cloud you follow the escape procedure, but if you were clear of cloud and obviously visually clear of terrain you might ignore it. Also, what do you do if you suffer a multiple engine failure ala Capt Sully and have to ditch? You wouldn’t want the aeroplane to be trying to do an escape procedure then.
The point I’m making is not so much that it is a bad idea, but there are many variables, both ones we know about and ones we couldn’t foresee until an incident happens. You need to account for all of them, even the ones you don’t know about. It is easier, if you are to have pilots up the front, to give them ultimate responsibility for the flight path of the aircraft.
Off topic, but this is a question that popped into my head year ago. (They do that.) A long time ago now, DUIs have to be reported on your medical examination, and a DUI can be/is disqualifying. For how long? Suppose you ‘had one too many’ and got a DUI ten years ago. Or 20 years ago. You’ve been a responsible driver ever since then. AIUI, the reason for the DUI restriction is to try to keep alcoholics out of the air. But someone who got drunk at a party once in college and then drove a car (and I’m not talking about falling-down drunk, but legally impaired) is probably not an alcoholic. A pattern is a problem. Having one DUI isn’t a pattern. And no pilot I know will fly an airplane after drinking, even if he will drive a car. How long after a DUI is it disqualifying? Who makes the decision; the AME, or the FAA?
Important note: I have never had a DUI, and I’ve never flown a plane within 24 hours of having an alcoholic drink.
Again, don’t take this as gospel, but talking to pilots I’ve known with former alcohol/drug issues as a general rule the FAA wants two years of sobriety before you get into the cockpit. They or an employer might also flag you for more than the usual random testing for drugs.
ONE DUI will get you further scrutiny but won’t necessarily ground you. If you have two you’re assumed to have a Problem unless they’re decades apart.
If you have an issue with drugs or alcohol after you have your pilot’s license the FAA will probably want some proof you’re in treatment of some sort, almost certainly including regular/random testing. You could be required to take a drug test or breathalyzer prior to any flight, for example, if the authorities involved thought that appropriate.
It will vary somewhat with the situation, but that’s the basics.
Richard, thank you for the explanation.
I do believe I get it now. I’m not a pilot, but do occasionally play one on MS Flight Sim.
I’m too old to become an alcoholic or drug addict, and too old to be invited to That Kind Of Party. Besides, I worked too hard to earn my license to endanger it with such foolishness. It’s just hearing about some ‘enforcement actions’ – not necessarily involving drugs or alcohol, but medical issues, piloting mistakes, etc. – I wondered how screwed someone would be if s/he had an ancient DUI.
Thanks for the answer.
Much better explanation than I made. Thanks Broomstick. 
This I don’t quite get. We just had a plane fly into the ground in the US a year ago because there was terrain along the runway glide path.
My ipad with gps software is at least as accurate as that of a commercial airliner because it’s fed with both US and Russian satellite feeds. I’ve flown it down to the runway and it’s spot on. It also comes with terrain software that accounts for ground reference as well as tall objects such as buildings or towers.
If this were tied into a flight computer I would expect the plane to avoid hitting objects if it was on autopilot.
I wrote a little app for my Android phone a few years ago. Just to help me with flight sims mind you.
4 parameters for input.
- ground speed
- the altitude that you would like to lose based on your elevation and the airports elevation.
- distance in miles to the landing.
- feet per minute of descent.
Enter any 3, and it will calculate the fourth. Kinda handy.
Ground speed is always the bitch here, you have to watch your GPS.
You can’t automate a damned car for dense urban driving.
But you think you can automate a friggin’ airliner?
Yes, people screw up - sometimes they even break in truly spectacular manners.
Those are the facts - now that you know yet another possible way to get dead in an uncomfortable seat while traveling at altitudes and speeds inconsistent with survival, you get to decide if you want get on that plane or not.
You don’t get to redesign either the plane, ATC, or human nature.
Anyone ever xref crashes by ticket price?
Cheap seats often are on crapped-out planes with not-yet-seasoned flight and cabin crews.
Yes, there were a few things that went wrong with that one I think. Mainly poor procedures and trying to transition to visual flight when they weren’t really visual, as well as not correctly monitoring the descent profile. And they were flying an old aeroplane, it wasn’t fly by wire or anything.
GNSS
Airliner “GPS” also uses the Russian GLOSNASS as well as the American GPS, that’s why more generic terms are used such as “RNAV” for area navigation and GNSS for global navigation satellite system. GNSS is not perfect though, you might fly it down to the runway one day and it is spot on, the next day you might be 50m left of centreline, and the day after that you might not be able to do the approach at all because the satellite geometry at the time isn’t good enough. The variations in navigation accuracy can be improved by using a ground based transmitter at the airport that knows its position, knows the position its GNSS says it is at and works out a correction which is passed to suitable GNSS receivers on approaching aircraft.
Part of the pre-flight weather briefing for GNSS includes a “RAIM prediction” which gives times for each aerodrome where the satellite geometry is not good enough for an approach. The RAIM outages are normally short lived but they are relatively frequent, as in there will be a few each day. It is an imperfect system.
Terrain database
Does your iPad terrain database include trees?
The terrain database will also not be perfect. There have been inaccuracies in the data base in the past. A bit of rock sticking out of the sea called “Ball’s Pyramid” has been missing from previous versions of the database (noticed by Australia Coastwatch pilots flying in the area.) Inaccuracies can go the other way as well, a bit of terrain depicted that is not really there. I’ve never seen it but have read accounts from pilots who have.
And if it is not on autopilot? Normally the autopilot isn’t used to fly the aeroplane to the ground except for an ILS approach. Any approach to a runway that doesn’t have an ILS will be manually flown from about 500 feet. The reason being that without an ILS there is no glideslope guidance that is accurate enough. The ILS itself, when working normally, is very good. I think the accuracy of the ILS is severely under-rated by non-pilots and GNSS is over-rated.
If you want this to prevent rogue pilots from flying into the ground it will have to active on both autopilot and when flying manually, otherwise the rogue pilot can just manually fly into the ground. If you just want it as a safety measure for normal operations then it could have some use. I think companies like Airbus are working on autopilot response to EGPWS warnings now.
The EGPWS always needs to be over-ridable though, by the pilot. There are companies out there that fly to mine sites that aren’t in any navigation database because the runway has just been scraped out of the rock recently and the only operators using it are the contractors ferrying the mine workers to site. If you can’t over-ride the EGPWS then the aeroplane will think you’re about to crash every time you land at these places. There are other operators that fly to ice runways that move over time so the database is never quite right. These companies are using airliners, not little turbo-props.
The type of autonomy you want an aeroplane to have is getting into the pilotless realm and I think that the problems are similar. It is probably possible, but we are a long way away.
Why the focus on airline accidents?
There were apparently 10,000 deaths in the USA alone in 2013 caused by drink driving. Why does a single incident in an airliner that kills 150 people incite a call for radical redesign of airliners when the response to drink driving deaths is to do nothing?
We could have cars that won’t operate if the driver has been drinking. We could have random breath testing of drivers by the police (actually WE do, but I don’t think you do in the US, something to do with civil liberties?) We could have cars that automatically inhibit cell phones from working, that prevent radio operation while driving etc.
10,000 drink driving deaths in one year in one country. Ponder that and consider that maybe the reaction to this apparent murder/suicide is way out of proportion to the risk.
Prevention and Mental Health
Personally I think the focus should be on the mental health of our work colleagues, how we can effectively monitor it, encourage self reporting etc.
Is this for a passenger jet sim?
Try 3 x altitude to lose = distance from the airport to commence your descent. That is the most common use for your formula.
You can further refine it by allowing an extra 3 NM for each deceleration phase, there is normally two, the first from your high level descent speed back to 250 knots at 10,000’ and the second from 250 knots back to around 200 knots for your first stage of flap then gear then more flap etc.
+/- 5 NM for each 20 knots of average tailwind/headwind will mostly account for the groundspeed issue.
Something missing from your app is the aircraft weight. You need to allow for the weight of the aircraft. A heavy aircraft glides further than a light one so if your landing weight is light you will not need to descend until later, if it is heavy you will need an earlier descent point. When I say a heavy aircraft, I mean compared to the same aeroplane with less passengers/fuel, e.g., a B737 with full passengers/fuel as opposed to a B737 with a light load.
If you get it right you should have idle power from your descent point all the way down till extending the final stage of flap and stabilising the approach at 1000’ AGL.
Indeed?
That was oversimplified.
A passenger jet’s descent is flown at a particular speed in accordance with company procedures. That speed is significantly faster than its best glide speed. The best glide speed for a heavily loaded aircraft is faster than the best glide speed for the same aircraft that is lightly loaded. Therefore the standard company descent speed for the heavy aircraft is closer to its best glide speed than if it was light, it will therefore use more miles to descend.
the approach charts do. not that I care. I’m not trying to hit the numbers blind unless it’s a 600 ft runway.
They had an anonymous system to deal with it. Apparently his flight attendant girlfriend didn’t think he was kill-people-crazy.