Here’s one example.
737s still have some sort of tabs that basically make manual control easier without a RAT or other issues.
(Trim tabs come to mind, but I don’t think that’s the correct terminology)
Servo tabs.
Anti-servo tabs
Trim tabs
Balance tabs
Bar tabs, pull tabs, Tab…
We are required to report certain incidents to our company and to the country’s aviation safety authority (ATSB in Australia). The company shares the information internally and, if necessary, makes changes to procedures to prevent recurrences. The ATSB will monitor trends, investigate serious incidents, and share information and make recommendations. Our company has its own substantial safety department that investigates company incidents. We also have flight data that is recorded for every flight and downloaded. Our safety department reviews this data and investigates any irregularities. E.g., if a high rate of descent occurred at low altitude. This system isn’t perfect as by the time it gets investigated the crew often have no recollection of the flight, particularly if it was a brief deviation on an otherwise mundane flight.
That’s a bit simplistic. A four engine aeroplane must be able to take-off, suffer a single engine failure at the most critical point in the take-off roll, and continue the take-off with a net climb gradient of 2%. The engine out departure track must be designed so that the net climb gradient clears all obstacles by 35 feet (50 feet if a turn is required.) There is no requirement to guarantee take-off performance in the event of a second engine failure.
This means that in the case of a B747 it can lose an engine and take-off safely, but if it lost a second engine you’re in unknown territory. If the take-off performance was already limiting such that suffering a single engine failure put the aeroplane right on the engine out performance limits and there were any significant obstacles, a second engine failure would probably not go well. On the other hand if the original performance was well in excess of what was required on the day, you may suffer a second failure and get away with it.
Once the take-off is completed, a second failure is not such a big issue. As part of our regular simulator checks in the BAe146 (much smaller than a B747 but subject to identical performance requirements) we have to demonstrate an engine failure after take-off followed by an approach and missed approach. We then have a second engine failure and conduct a second approach and missed approach. The missed approach performance requirements for operating on two engines is very limiting and the aircraft weight required to make it work is often not achievable in the real world. So we could do an approach and landing on two engines but we can’t safely lose two engines on take-off and we can’t safely conduct a missed approach on two engines unless we are very light.
A side affect of all of this performance stuff is that the performance of a twin jet with no failures is far better than a quad jet with no failures. This is because the twin has to be able to safely lose half of its engine thrust while the quad only needs to be able to lose a quarter of its thrust. Therefore the excess thrust available when all engines are operating is far greater in the twin than the quad jet.
Yes. In fact jet airliners generally descend from cruise altitude at idle thrust, so every descent is not far removed from a glide descent. Of course there is some residual thrust at idle so it’s a bit better than gliding.
And arguably even more amazing case was Air Transat Flight 236. This airliner ran out of fuel in the middle of the Atlantic (thru no fault of their own, maintenance had installed the wrong bracket causing a fuel line to break and leak). By sheer luck they had previously diverted a little south to avoid weather, and this just barely put them in range of an Atlantic island airport. Landed dead stick at 200+ knots, blew out all the tires, successfully stopped before reaching a cliff at the end of the runway(!) No serious injuries.
Reason (I think) few people remember this is because it happened on August 24, 2001 (i.e. just two weeks before 9/11).
From the wikipedia article on the 737:
Well, we sure had a good run. 
I had the exact same thought. 
I see no indication that this is a catastrophic failure of the aircraft, though. The escape ramps are deployed; there’s clearly somebody alive in there. Let’s wait a couple of hours and see what’s what.
Looks like pilot error. The plane hit the runway prematurely and the tail snapped off. Not that I know much about these things. The weather was perfect.
Casualties will be low by the looks of things.
It appears the survival rate was very high; maybe 100%. Passengers were texting loved ones from the tarmac.
It’s not safer. There are more fatalities per mile than cars. It’s just that people don’t spend as much time in planes, so it is less likely they will end up in an accident.
Ridiculous. The table shows deaths per vehicle mile. Commercial planes carry far more people per vehicle than cars. If you want individual risk per mile, you need to use deaths per passenger mile, which is around 3 per 10 billion.
There’s so much fail in that article I don’t even know where to begin.
ETA: What Dr. Strangelove said.