Whoa, way a sec. If you read my posts, I sure as hell don’t think I could land one of these planes [edit: I’m currently giving myself something like a 5% chance of survival with guidance from a pilot over radio]. That is totally unfair, and not at all what I’ve said. But I am asking for examples of where someone with my sort of knowledge would almost certainly fail 100% of the time. You gave an IFR conditions as an example. I think it is fair of me to question your own certainty here, because while what you say makes a lot of sense, the absolutist attitude you have seems questionable. I may very well have “so little understanding”… but geesh, that’s why I am here, to ask questions and try to learn!
Honestly, I don’t really see kicking Tom Cruise’s ass ever getting old.
I think you said “forget about the autopilot”. If you had an autopilot and everything going for you, you might be able to do it, might. Consider that a trainee airline pilot, one who probably has several thousands of hours on smaller aircraft, needs constant attention from their training captain, a pilot who sitting right there with them and can see exactly what is happening and doesn’t need to interpret whatever you’re saying over the radio. I’d give you less than a 1% chance, I’d actually say 0% but you never know.
The thing is, if you pick any one thing then I could agree that you might be able to do it on first try. Set an attitude using the artificial horizon (or real horizon if you can see it), you should be able to do it, some people couldn’t. Maintain speed using the thrust levers? You should be able to do that though some couldn’t. Use the trim to take the forces out of the controls? Work out how to transmit on the radio? Fly and maintain a heading? Anticipate changes in power settings as you change configuration? Maintain an altitude? I agree that you could do any one of those things in isolation, but you wouldn’t be able to put it all together, not hand-flying, not on first try, not going only by the guidance of someone who can’t see what’s happening. I haven’t seen the Mythbusters episode, was the instructor able to see what was happening in the simulator or was he relying purely on a verbal description from the passenger/pilot? That would make a big difference.
None of it is all that difficult on its own but it does require a gradual training process building on the foundation of skills already learned to put it all together. You’re saying you’d have a 5% chance of doing it off the cuff with no training at all, I don’t think you’d do that well. If you had a working autopilot with autoland, autobrakes, autothrottle, and autospoilers, then you might be ok.
Finally, knowledge is nearly meaningless. You can know everything you like about flying, but physically flying an aeroplane is not an academic exercise and knowledge doesn’t translate to physical skill. There are plenty of pilots around who say all the right things and know all the right stuff but when you ask them to fly an aeroplane they can’t do it, or at least not very well. The last ground course I was on we lost a guy because once he got into the simulator it became apparent that he couldn’t fly, the next ground school after that the same thing happened.
It would be an interesting exercise to test out properly. Set up a B767 full-motion simulator in the cruise with autopilot engaged, radio frequencies set, and the flight management computer programmed to fly to the destination but without the arrival and approach in there. Let you loose in the cockpit and tell you you’ve got 250 passengers including various occupations but no qualified pilots. You’ve got flight attendants who can help you if you wish. They have no aircraft knowledge but can read checklists, flick switches that are out of your reach, and offer emotional support. The flight attendant can also tell you that the reason no one is answering your radio calls is that the comms box is still set to transmit into the cabin PA system ;). Then if you manage to get out on the radio we’ll have you talk to someone who is not prepared for the exercise and is sitting in a radar control room somewhere. A pilot will be able to assist on the radio within 2 minutes but they’ll be a little preoccupied with flying his own aeroplane. A dedicated pilot will be available to you within 15 minutes. Once again they’d not know the nature of the exercise that was about to take place and would have no visuals from the simulator, they’d effectively be locked up in a box with a phone and whatever manuals they have in their every day flight bag.
That would be interesting to see.
I guess I have a distorted view of modern, especially fly-by-wire aircraft. I’m currently reading Fate Is The Hunter, which is really fantastic, the memoirs of a pilot who flew DC-2’s and DC-3’s. Now those stories make it sound like you really had to “fly the plane” all the time and not fuck up. But everything I’ve read about airbus planes, for example (the last I read was Fly By Wire), make it sound like you could pretty much do whatever you wanted and it would make sure you didn’t fly outside of parameters. The picture I got was that, barring pushing the nose downward into the ground, you were pretty safe doing almost anything up high in the sky as long as all the instruments were feeding good data to the computers. This would give you a lot of time to get oriented and focused on purely the landing part. I guess I have this all wrong?
An Airbus would be easier than another aircraft, but Airbuses are different from other designs, what if you aren’t a passenger in an Airbus? Anyway, an Airbus would stop you from stalling but that’s about it, it won’t stop you from making wild gyrations through the sky and it won’t stop you from flying into the ground, it won’t program the FMS for you and it won’t give you the judgement and skills needed to descend from cruising level down to ground level while staying above all of the limiting altitudes and avoiding any mountains lurking in the clouds. It won’t line up, fly down the glideslope and flare for you–that is unless you have the automatics working.
Sure, but what if you are in an airbus on a totally clear weatherless day above a boring geography, the plane is currently on autopilot, and you have plenty of fuel. I don’t think any of the above are particularly rare occurrences.
You wanted to forget the autopilot. When it’s on autopilot it’s like any other airliner.
My point was to forget the autopilot for the landing. Out of curiosity.
ETA: And the first time round you said in response:
- If so you will quite likely fail to manage the inertia of a large aeroplane travelling at 4 miles per minute. You would probably, at some point in the approach, get too slow and not pick it up in time to recover.*
Which I can accept. Although I’m still curious what the odds are of really killing everybody as opposed to just killing the plane.
It is hard to believe until you’re actually there in a cockpit trying to make it work.
It’s not just visual, you know - your getting a lot of feedback from you’re body you’re not normally aware of, and in this circumstances it’s all wrong. You’ve spent a lifetime relying on your senses, it is extremely hard to ignore that the first time you’re in that situation.
Among the problems people have are “lock-up”, where they get so overwhelmed they stop functioning, or slow down so much in their reaction they might as well be in that state; they start focusing exclusively on one instrument and ignore the rest (very common); they ignore a particular instrument (also very common); they lose “situational awareness” meaning they might be flying straight and level but they’ve lost their mental map of where they are and/or where obstacles are (this is one way airplanes wind up flying into trees while landing in bad weather, and which even trained and qualified instrument pilots can be subject to); or the conflict between instruments and body make them nauseous, sometimes to the point of vomiting. Training and experience usually take care of the above problems, but it’s not a permanent solution. Instrument pilots must practice on a regular basis or they will lose their ability to fly safely on instruments and will require re-training to be safe and reliable flying IFR again.
Your statement about being “a near 100% chance of being completely psychologically incapacitated” shows that you still don’t quite get it. It’s not just psychological. There is a lot of physical going on. That’s why a certain percentage of first-timers become physically ill from trying to fly on instruments. Actual vomiting is rare, but nausea among first-timers isn’t unknown based on what I’ve seen and people I’ve spoken to. How well can you ignore physical discomfort?
Are there people out there who might be able to pull it off the first time? Probably a handful in the entire world, and they’re probably not complete beginners but have something in their background that helps them.
The real wonder is that the human critter can be trained to fly on instruments so well it’s almost second nature.
Marky Mark’s (sorry, I’m 40 and will always think of him thusly.) next movie project stars Justin Bieber.
Whoa! We dealin’ with a badass here!
Thanks for the really good explanation, Broomstick. I didn’t realize it could really be that bad with nothing else wrong to make things confusing. I was thinking “horizon tilts slightly clockwise, better steer slightly counterclockwise (or whatever). Just keep it level…” Though I imagined it would be much more complicated in turbulence or other complicating factors etc or with a conflicting reading like the 747 that went down coming out of mumbai (I think)
I know the conversation has drifted somewhat, but that’s completely not the situation United 93 was in. You also mentioned landing somewhere other than a runway being easier than chancing overshooting a runway, so at that point you weren’t thinking of ideal conditions.
The landing is the most difficult part - autopilot and the automatic ILS systems on runways help a lot. Pilots have to know how to use them, but not having them would make landing even more difficult. Forgetting the autopilot then would be the worst time to do it, not the best.
Having someone there trying to guide the plane in would obviously increase the chances of survival. 5% might not be unreasonable in the situation you’ve outlined, though such an ideal situation would make it even less likely that a passenger* would ever have to take over. 5% is a really low survival rate. It’s definitely not what anyone would consider s safe landing.
*Especially a non-pilot. One thing I’ve noticed on these programmes is how many other professional pilots are often in the passenger list; they have layovers, free travel and long commutes and they fly a lot even when not in the cockpit. Sometimes (in these disasters) they step in to help, but most of the time they don’t have time to.
Then there are the hobbyists, retired pilots, former Air Force pilots, etc, who do actually have at least some similar experience. The chances of Joe ComputerGamer being asked to step in and take charge are not jumbo-sized.
Are you an engineer, maybe? Because I look at that cockpit picture and I honestly don’t think someone over comms could guide me around it well enough. But maybe it’s not as obviously daunting to an engineer or somesuch.
Physicist. But I’m not so arrogant to think that I could navigate the cockpit without very goog guidance. But I would have thought that I at the very least I would be able to grab hold of the obvious-looking yoke, and at least be able to hold the plane in level flight, while someone over the radio clued me in to less pressing issues. I would have thought that I wouldn’t immediately have the likely life-or-death need to have to flip any of those switches. Also, I would have thought that the horizon would probably be easy to find.
I was thinking of ideal conditions, but without auto-pilot. Under ideal conditions, what should the procedure be? I think it is plausible that the procedure should be to be find a very large flat area. Also, for flight 93, things didn’t start out in ideal conditions, but they could have ended up in ideal conditions, if the struggle ended while the plane was still high in the sky. The weather was beautiful, etc
ETA: let me say what the heart of my own question about all this was: could a non-experienced pilot sort of fumble the thing to the ground, keeping the wings level, maybe not lining up correctly, and maybe landing with too much airspeed. Sure this might cause damage to the plane, and be really rough, but maybe not totally lethal. I’ve been corrected, I guess, that I would probably die long before getting that far
So if Mark Wahlberg was on a treadmill on a 9/11 plane and the terrorists were on a treadmill going the other way and they were boxing… never mind.
Their first crashes were full out crashes. Plane torn apart in the air from doing the wrong thing kind of crashes. Survival value approaching zero.
Adam’s second crash was of the rough landing type, but I think (IIRC) he rolled the plane. It was a close but no cigar kind of landing. Survival value = low but not impossible.
Jamie actually landed, IIRC a bit rough but something you could walk away from.
For the circumstances of their tests, it is reasonable that they did both the unguided and guided landings, because on the guided landings they had the opportunity to get a fair bit of coaching from the “tower” prior to actually taking control for the landing. Any experience gained in the first run would have been of the “things are happening way too fast to know what any of it means” kind, nothing really useful for the second landing. Their familiarization and following the coaching would have given far more useful experience than their one “holy shit that didn’t work”.
Applicability to 9/11 flights is questionable, depending on circumstances. If the terrorists have already taken control, are on manual, and decide they don’t want you to succeed in recapturing the cockpit, you get what happened in Pennsylvania. If you somehow wrestle the controls way in the air with the autopilot on, you might have a shot at taking over, contacting the tower, and waiting until someone could give you instructions and acclimation time before actually trying to land.
Unless you go into a cloud.
As noted above the landing would be the time you really need the autopilot.
Any mishandling up to and after the point of touchdown could cause death for all. This video of FedEx crashing in Tokyo shows what can happen when things go wrong even very close to landing. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WZHla1nQzfA. Note that the series of bounces getting progressively more severe is very typical of what student pilots get into on their first attempts at landing. The Sioux City DC10 crash had some survivors and is an example of what may happen if it goes wrong a bit before touchdown. The Dash 8 crash in Buffalo is an example of what would happen if things went wrong a bit earlier in the approach, at around 10nm. These are all examples of crashes that were either the result of mishandling or, as in the case of the DC10, the result of flight paths similar to what you might expect from mishandling.
I would definitely advise against going for a flat area of land, it’ll never be as consistently flat as a runway unless you’re lucky enough to have some salt lakes. Even then you’re better off with the facilities an airport provides such as an ILS and emergency services.
Your best chance would be to keep the autopilot engaged, get hold of someone on the radio, program the arrival and approach into the FMS for an airport that has good facilities, use the autoland and autobrake if fitted. Go over and over the expected sequence of events, what you expect to see and what you will do at each point. Descend early so that you can get the aircraft configured and the speed stabilised prior to starting the ILS. Keep the autopilot in for the landing. If you do all that then you put yourself into the position of managing and monitoring the aircraft. You will have brain space available to be able to talk on the radio, and you’ll be better able to describe what’s happening to your instructor. If you’ve ever tried playing a musical instrument and holding a conversation at the same time you’d know that it’s very difficult to do a physical task that requires concentration and talk simultaneously, even if you’re good at the physical task.
If you hand fly the approach and landing or even just the landing I’d think less than one in a hundred people with zero flying experience would make it with only external guidance. It’s only my gut feeling though, as I said before I’d like to see a proper realistic test done in a simulator.