Hard to see how this is relevant.
Here’s the low pass that impresses me.
IAMA pilot, but don’t you usually have the landing gear down when you take off or land?
Sure, but you get good at judging how high you are off the ground. A straight and level low fly past at 20 feet with the gear up is a no-brainer, it’s generally manuevering at low level that kills people, turns, aerobatics etc.
Cathay Pacific is free to hire and fire whoever they wish. However, airliners are not museum pieces that have to be handled with kid gloves. How do you think every airline flight in the world ends; the pilot points the nose toward the airport, puts the wheels down, and prays? It’s not like this pilot was lucky to survive. He was doing what he’s been trained to do, and what the airplane was built for.
Does anyone know how fast he was going?
I don’t know. It’s relatively slow though, he’s flying with quite a nose up attitude which is a sign that it’s flying slowly.
A clarification: The ‘100% certain’ was a play on threemae’s ‘95% certain’ wording. What I was saying is that I’m certain that the last I’d heard about the A320 crash was that it was caused by a fly-by-wire failure; not that I was certain that was the cause. Just that that’s the last I’d heard about it.
If you mean this one, it apparently was a human/computer interface design problem, not a software failure as such.
This one looks like hotdogging.
Usually, yes - with what I fly you don’t have a choice anyway, since the gear is fixed in the down position. Thing is, the landing gear being down adds a lot of drag, which in some ways (notably in maintaining speed) is arguably more hazardous than a fly-by with the gear up. That is, however, splitting hairs. A landing is a landing. A fly-by is a low altitude maneuver with no intention of touching the ground. It’s more hazardous largely because if something goes wrong you have less time to deal with the matter, not because something is somehow more likely to go wrong in the first place.
Latest (from a register site, sorry, - avweb.com) is that the Cathay chairman was right there in the cockpit with him. Look for the union to bring up what they conversed about before the maneuver.
That’s all true, but the difference is that takeoffs are mandatory and low passes for show are not. It’s an unnecessary risk irrespective of aircraft and crew capability. That doesn’t mean it’s a big risk, but unecessary all the same.
I’m not too sure what the regs have to say about low passes in particular. A buzzing pilot could claim to have been on a landing approach that was then aborted. But if the FAA doesn’t buy it, they could probably violate you for recklessness. I’ll check the book.
By regulations I mean the company operations manual, which is a document approved by the local aviation authority and is effectively an extension of the regs. It has been stated in the news articles that a fly-by requires prior company approval. Approval that his passengers were not authorised to give.
My comment on aircraft performance was in response to your commment that you may not be able to climb out after an enfine failure. He’d be able to climb out just fine provided the failure wasn’t compounded by other problems. I do agree though that in general and aside from landing, the lower you are, the faster you should be going as that gives you a lot more margin for error.
The silly thing is, in an aeroplane that big, it would probably have looked quite impressive doing a high speed pass at 500’ which would probably not have resulted in him losing his job.
The official CX position is that he was fired for failure to get approval, not for violating the FAR’s. But he was a damn sight lower than 500’ while not intending to land.