Seeing as there is no thread about the Boeing 737 that went down in Indonesian waters, killing 189:
There are some similarities to the Silk Air 185 crash two decades ago - both a Boeing 737 that nosedived suddenly and hit the water at high speed. This Indonesian 737, in particular, was extremely modern - only delivered by Boeing a few months ago - and it seems highly unlikely that something like metal fatigue would be the cause. No doubt such a 737 of this modern type would be replete with safety features.
The AirAsia crash a couple years ago was a stall; this one nosedived, so it’s not a stall.
It had been snagged with unreliable airspeed and altitude indications the previous day. Occam’s razor would suggest a mishandled technical fault rather than anything else. There is a massive PPRuNe thread if you have the patience to wade through it. I don’t.
Information about the Lion Air crash is a bit sketchy at this point.
One report said that the pilot reported flight control problems and was unsure of his own altitude. This report did not come from any official source. The NTSB has said that this report has “similarities” with information that they have received. Even though the crash happened in Indonesia, the NTSB is involved since the plane was made in the U.S. and is flying in the U.S. as well.
There’s not much official information (and probably won’t be until they get a little further along in the investigation), but what little we have seems to point to a technical issue, not an intentional crash.
When I lived in Indonesia, Lion Air had a terrible reputation. The US government forbade its staff or any of its contractors from flying on Lion Air because of safety concerns.
Possibly the same problem that other tropical locations have had of insects getting into the probes for the airspeed and other instrumentation. If the ground crew forgot to check before flight, that could be the cause of bad instrument readings.
The cockpit voice recorder was only retrieved about two weeks ago. Analysis should tell us a lot about the OP’s question. If a voice is heard saying, “I rely on Allah,” there’s your answer.
Musicat, I know you’re being funny, but this was no suicide. It’s very clear what happened: there used to be TWO ways to disengage the auto-trim (pull back on the yoke, or push a particular button) — just like a car’s cruise control can be disengaged by stepping on the brake, or pushing a button — and now there’s just one way (the button).
The Times article is well written and makes some good points, but I have to say, the pilots should have remembered the “button” option, instead of just trying the “pull back on the yoke” option over and over. Indeed, different pilots flying the same plane had done just that, the previous day (or maybe it was even earlier that same day).
Certain pilots, like anyone else, can get stupid in a crisis. When AF447 pancaked into the Atlantic ten years ago, part of the problem was the crew’s response to the aircraft malfunction. The biggest problem was the copilot persistently pulling back on the stick, maintaining a deep stall, even after the captain instructed him to stop doing so.
Perhaps part of professional pilot training/screening ought to include (more?) rigorous testing of how they handle themselves in a crisis.
I hope one of our resident airline pilots will reply to this. If so, do those emergency simulations include just basic things like losing an engine during/after takeoff? Or does it include bizarro stuff like this Lion Air crash, or AF447’s loss of airspeed sense, or Air Transat 236’s peculiar fuel leak, or United 232’s total loss of hydraulic pressure? The latter group would be the kind of emergency where the crew initially has no idea what the hell is going on, and has to work together within a very limited amount of time to correctly understand the situation and take steps to mitigate/solve the problem. the Lion Air crew crew couldn’t solve their problem in time, and neither could the Air France crew. The Air Transat crew misunderstood their situation, but got through by the skin of their teeth. The United crew quickly understood their problem and worked together to mitigate it, and they are credited with saving 2/3 of the lives on that flight. Simulations of those sorts of crises would show which pilots are capable of working effectively under pressure with their fellow crew members, which ones have the ability to mitigate the effects of the many cognitive biases that hinder effective problem-solving, and so on.
Getting UA232 down with anything better than total loss of life was quite remarkable. The key to that was the assistance of Fitch, the off-duty DC-10 instructor who happened to be among that passengers, and notably:
I seem to recall reading that they subsequently presented the UA232 conditions to other pilots in simulator exercises, most resulting in far worse outcomes. I can’t find a cite for that though.
There are a few scenarios which are standard in most simulator recurrent training events, such as the “V1 cut”, which is loss of an engine just after reaching decision speed during takeoff. Other scenarios are sometimes at the discretion of the instructor, or possibly the request of the crew being trained.
I just came out of recurrent two weeks ago. Among the emergency stuff we did this time around:
Emergency descent from altitude due to smoke in the cockpit, including putting on the masks
Aborted takeoff with an evacuation
Several kinds of engine failures including fires, some with re-starts, most without
A couple of no-flap landings (more of an abnormal than an emergency scenario). But this turned out to be prescient because we had to execute one for real on my very first flight after training.
That’s in addition to the usual stuff - steep turns, stalls, circle-to-land at minimums, etc.
If I was king of the training world, I would like to do more scenarios that are not of the dire type. In real life, you’re probably more likely to experience an engine failure less dramatically than a V1 cut. More like, you notice the oil pressure starting to go down. You watch it a while, pull out the checklist, watch it some more before eventually having to shut it down as a precaution. But sim time is too valuable and scarce to run through that sort of thing. You generally work through that type of scenario during ground instruction.
Edit: Captains go twice a year. First officers usually go annually, but there are exceptions.
How is that even legal? You make a change, and it sounds (to my not a pilot ears) as if it’s a fairly significant change in how the plane operates, and you don’t tell the pilots flying the plane? How is that not criminal negligence, at best?
IANAP, but apparently because the “button” option was always the proper procedure — the one in the checklist — and still is. The “pull back on the yoke” option was just a convenient alternative — until it wasn’t.
