I’ve been a pilot since I was 17 years old, and I can tell you this as a certainty:
pilots are weather guys. The sky, the atmosphere, and anything you see up there is of vital interest to us all. Now, granted I’m a bit of an amateur astronomer as well, but I don’t know a pilot who can’t pick Venus out of a night sky.
It’s been in virtually the same postion for months. Last month it was framed with the moon and Jupiter quite nicely for a few days. Coming out of a restaurant with my family last month, my SILs and MIL asked me - natch - what that was in the sky.
I told them without rolling my eyes, because they haven’t spent, say*** 14 years flying jets above the clouds***!
Even after the second officer pointed out the the “oncoming C-17” was below them, he still goes all Stuka with the stick and sends passengers and items bouncing around like beachballs at a concert.
My vote? Fire his dumb ass. This kind of decision-making has no place on the flight deck…
IANAP, but Venus sure can look like a big ol’ somethin’. Obviously this wasn’t a great move on the pilot’s part, but better safe (well, not so safe, considering the injuries) than sorry. Imagine if it had gone the other way…hearing the black box recording, seconds from disaster, one pilot say to the other, “Don’t worry, that’s just Venus”…and BLAM!
There’s “better safe than sorry” but shouldn’t a trans-Atlantic 767 have TCAS?
And yes, as the OP said, pilots are intimately aware of everything in the sky - weather, birds, stars and planets. My ex was a commercial pilot, and he was a walking planetarium.
There are some other pertinent facts related to regulated controlled rest on the flight deck procedures and fatigue management in general.
The official report states it was the First Officer who, upon waking from a nap, was prematurely briefed by the Captain on the operational situation including approaching traffic (at the time, the Captain had full situational awareness of the approaching traffic visually and on TCAS). The briefing was premature in the sense that the SOP states an awakening pilot should not be briefed and engaged as a pilot for a period of time to allow the pilot to fully wake up.
The report states the first officer recognized the approaching airplane, but reacted out of fear and misperception that the approaching airplane was actually above their plane and on a collision course. The report does not say the first officer mistook Venus for the other airplane and reacted on that basis.
Was there human error? Of course. But there are other factors that contributed to the incident.
After reading the report, I believe the First Officer, in the moment, reacted to a perceived threat. The Captain erred in engaging the FO immediately after the FO woke up. Some passengers were not wearing seatbelts while the seatbelt sign was on. Air Canada fatigue management procedures, while not followed completely in this case, require review and modernization - the same can be said generally of Canadian Aviation Regulations to ensure that flight crew receive appropriate rest prior to and during long flight operations, especially at night.
Yea, the CNN report is pretty misleading. The mistake was the pilot misjudging the position of the other airplane, not confusing it with Venus. He saw the other plane but thought it was descending towards them instead of already being below them.
He apparently briefly confused it with Venus when he first got up but the Captain corrected him. When he made the rapid descent, he had correctly identiifed the other plane, he just got confused as to where it was relative to him.
Moral of story, if pilots are going to take naps they should get some coffee and walk around to make sure they’re fully awake before they start trying to fly again.
I saw on the news this morning an interview with one passenger who claimed that when that plane began its descent she was launched out of her seat and collided with the ceiling. In other words, she was not wearing her seat belt.
If I was that stupid, I don’t think I would admit it on national TV.
On one flight in the early evening, I could see on the ground a perfectly straight road going way off into the distance. I was really impressed by how straight this road was, until I realized the plane was banked and I was looking at the horizon.
My faith in the painstaking accuracy of CNN’s aviation reporting was also shaken by the fact that they used a graphic of what appeared to be a B-1 Lancer bomber to illustrate the passage of the Boeing 767 across the Atlantic.
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