Wouldn’t the artificial horizon show whether they are nose up or nose down?
And assuming the pilots are IFR-trained (I can’t imagine any airline pilots without an instrument rating,) isn’t that training meant specifically to deal with spatial disorientation situations, such as night or clouds?
Normally, yes. But in the West Air Sweden case, the horizon had failed and the pilot flying, the captain, was chasing the broken one. The broken horizon was indicating the aircraft was pointed straight up and telling him to shove the nose down. The first officer had the true horizon on his display, that the aircraft was pointed severely nose down, but between surprise, the dark, alarms going off, he couldn’t communicate that to the Captain before they hit.
Not saying there was an instrumentation issue with the China crash, just that there are reasons other than pilot suicide that expain the sparse information we have so far.
I haven’t seen what the weather was like, but if it was cloudy, somatogravic illusions, PDF would not be unheard of, even for professional pilots.
My understanding is that when somatogravic illusions hit, they are overwhelmingly powerful and will convince you the instruments are wrong, not your head. Even highly experienced pilots have succumbed to it. Air France 447 was an example, as was Atlas Air 3591 near Houston just a couple of years ago.
If you go nose down, aren’t you going to experience zero G?
“Zero-g” is free fall, a powered dive is not.
I’ll bet that when the real cause is determined, the Chinese government will cover it up and we will never know.
I thought that was a given all along. We are talking about China after all.
It all depends on what the cause was: if it was in some way the Chinese government’s fault I agree with you but it is was Boeing’s fault we will know all about it.
If it was pilot suicide would China cover that up?
Egypt reacted very negatively to the possibility EgyptAir Flight 990 was caused by pilot suicide. China might as well.
Yes, And it would be backed up by what the other instruments display. So you would see the plane turning, descending, ascending and uncoordinated turns from other instruments.
WSJ via ABC news reports crash was intentional
Brian
Our fears are becoming confirmed.
Wow, that “Wikipedia - confirmed suicides by someone flying a plane” list is longer than I’d hoped, even if most were general aviation.
The list is sober and factual, but I think the wording of one entry includes a bit of gallows humor:
“A man who was an uninvited guest at a private party earlier that day crashed the airplane into a clubhouse…”
Ugh how terrible for all those families to think that their loved ones and so many others are gone because one person, the pilot, who should be trusted, was mentally ill and took innocent victims with him. (I try to use gender-inclusive language but it seems that all the recent cases involve male pilots?)
And is this another issue that plane passengers need to worry about now? I’ve flown 3x this year and plan on at least 4 more flights.
Actually, I found that list oddly comforting. It reminded me how safe planes are, and how well trained pilots are, and how much we’ve learned from past problems of mechanical failure and pilot errors. It’s almost like you really have to deliberately work hard to counter all that and destroy a plane.
Also, just like in AF 447, a warning was designed to stop warning when things got too extreme (a “decluttered display mode” erased the horizon-mismatch warning in the Scandinavian flight; the stick-shaker stall warning stopped in the Air France one).
Damn… the investigators are going to want to try to recover the voice recordings to see if they hear any hint of a struggle, a takeover, or what.
Ah, so the system designers figured, “at the point all these things X, Y, and Z are happening, the pilots will be busy solving it, let’s not interrupt/distract them further”?
I don’t think it’s any mystery who did it. The slightly strange thing is that he would presumably look for an opportunity to lock the other two crew out of the cockpit. But it happened at the top of the final descent, when regulations mandate that everyone be in the cockpit. Maybe it played out that the others both took a final opportunity to leave the cockpit on a bathroom break, knowing that regs prohibited them leaving the cockpit after this point. Or perhaps one did, and he decided to take his chance and attacked and killed or disabled the other one.
Alternatively, perhaps one or both of the other crew were in the cockpit and it would just be difficult to counter a sustained deliberate hard nose-down input. You’d probably have to have the presence of mind to hit the guy over the head with a fire extinghuisher or something, and then attempt to regain control. Perhaps @Richard_Pearse can speak to this.
I don’t know what the rules in China are, but in the US when I’ve been seated close to the front of the plane whenever a crew member uses the bathroom one of the flight attendants goes into the cockpit.
Exactly so, for the decluttered displayed mode (they since changed it so that particular visual warning doesn’t disappear).
With the stick shaker, it was because the system would think “these sensor values are so weird, something really unusual is happening, so maybe the plane is stalling, or maybe not.” This, too, was fixed — best not to “reward” a pilot for going even further extreme.