It sounds absurd but it’s not as surprising as it might seem. Programming an FMC is something they do all day every day and flying a pure visual approach is, for some operations, quite rare. The less you do something the less capable you get at it. If you were never that confident with it to begin with then you might avoid opportunities for practice (choosing an instrument approach over a visual approach when offered) and then you become even less capable. Visual approaches are not something that flight simulators excel at either.
That said, I don’t know that I’d classify this as an inability to fly the plane, but more like a failure to realise they were flying the plane. If the pilot had realised the thrust levers were his and not the auto-throttle’s he may well have done a perfectly good approach and landing. It seems to be a combination of a lack of autoflight mode awareness (knowing what modes are and aren’t active), a lack of monitoring of the flightpath and speed, and being slow to do anything once they realised there was a problem.
None of that negates the fact that there was a very simple fix to their situation, grab the thrust levers and move them forward.
The situation they ended up in is a bit like if you are driving a car on the highway with the cruise control engaged. You’re approaching your offramp and it has a lower speed limit than what you’re doing so you click the cruise control speed down from 100 to 60. Then you realise it’s not slowing down enough so you put your foot on the brake. This disengages the cruise control and puts you in charge of the gas pedal. Cruise control is still armed though in that you can push the “resume” button and it will take control of the throttle again and maintain the speed you set. In their case they didn’t monitor the speed adequately, didn’t recognise that the cruise control was armed but not engaged, and let their car get so slow that they got rear ended by a big semi-trailer.
Not being comfortable with it in the first place is so removed from the skills required to fly that it qualifies as a skill set non-sequitur.
From personal experience I’ve had an instructor take control (and I’ve personally taken control) of a plane when something bad was about to happen. The decision point was not measured in seconds. It was immediate, like raising your hand up to catch something thrown at you. There shouldn’t be a thought process involved.
It should have gone down like this: check ride pilot: “you’re descending too fast and your airspeed is too slow” with near simultaneous screams from the other 2 pilots to add power followed by “I’ve got the plane”. The culture of deferring to the captain was suppose to have ended with the Tenerife airport disaster and the introduction of Crew Resource Management.
This specific kind of accident should never occur.
Yep, all valid points. Unfortunately it doesn’t always work out that way. CRM only works for those who want to learn it and can’t be expected to change the culture of a country.
If you’ll allow a nitpick, it wasn’t a check-ride pilot but a training captain. Given that he was new to training he almost certainly wasn’t a checker. It doesn’t change your point though.
OK, this article explains the situation better. The FO spoke up once at 1500 feet AGL and that was it. The flaps were extended at that point. The PIC wasn’t up to the task and was expecting the training officer to initiate the go-around. That’s one powerful cultural atmosphere to conquer when someone is staring at death and doesn’t just push the throttles forward in self preservation.
There were three pilots in the cockpit. Two captains and one FO. The captain in the left seat was under training, very experienced in general but inexperienced in the B777. The other captain was in the right seat. He is a “training captain”, a captain who trains other pilots how to fly the aeroplane, he does not necessarily do any checking. The training captain was new to training (this might have been his first student). The first officer was sitting in the jump seat. His role on the flight was to relieve the other crew members in the cruise so they could have a nap.
It is a complicated set up from a CRM perspective. The captain in the left seat is acting as the pilot in command but legally isn’t. The captain in the right seat is acting as a first officer but is legally the pilot in command, the first officer in the jump seat is along for the ride.
The training captain needs to let his students make errors and fix them but shouldn’t let a situation deteriorate too far. Meanwhile the captain in the left seat is probably expecting the training captain to speak up if anything goes wrong.
If you ask me, they seemed to be passengers more than pilots. I’m not sure you can call watching and waiting and failing to act while the airplane slows down and sinks to be “flying”.
CRM isn’t new though, so presumably the industry has experience dealing with this exact sort of training configuration. Given that CRM dictates cooperation and the explicit-but-diplomatic communication of concerns, Shouldn’t the training officer have been behaving like a subordinate officer would on any other flight, e.g. shouldn’t he have been expected to say “captain, I’m concerned about our airspeed and I think we should add throttle” long before it became an emergency?
Apparently, Korean autocratic cockpit culture still persists. This long-standing tradition of silently deferring to He Who Is In Charge has been implicated in multiple crashes over the years. See KAL flights 801and 8509, for examples where their strict adherence to heirachy has been a contributing factor.
Check out Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers.” He devotes a chapter to the impressive turnaround of Korean Airlines. They used to have a terrible safety record, and it was finally acknowledged in the mid-1990’s that Korean culture was playing a major role in hindering cockpit crew communications during crises. Two major details that I remember from the book:
-In Korean culture, subordinates are strongly discouraged from any gesture or utterance that may be interpreted as a challenge to authority or stature of their superior. In other words, even when you see the captain making a potentially lethal mistake, it’s really hard to bring yourself to say anything about it.
-Korean communication style is (IIRC) “listener-oriented”. The typical American hold the speaker to be responsible for being understood, but the Korean style holds the listener responsible for correctly interpreting what is said by the speaker.
In KAL cockpits prior to the mid-1990’s, the sum of those two factors tended to result in subordinate crew members often providing vague hints in the moments prior to impact. Instead of “Captain, I’m concerned that we’re headed straight into that thunderstorm; I think we should divert”, you get a cryptic remark like “the weather radar has helped us a lot so far,” and then the sub just hopes the captain takes the hint and acts on it.
KAL finally saw fit to train these behaviors out of their cockpit crews: subordinates were taught to voice their concerns clearly and fearlessly (but diplomatically), and superiors were trained to accept and consider such remarks without feeling their authority or reputation were being threatened. It worked: KAL now ranks among the safest airlines in the world.
I wonder whether Asiana has gone through something similar. If not, they really ought to consider it.
I can’t believe anyone could fly the hours those folks had and NOT instinctively set up a visual approach - the image of a runway stretching out at each certain distance/altitude is something you should have pretty well nailed before SOLOING!
This guy can’t handle a visual landing, let’s put him in the left seat!
Of course, if anybody was paying attention to that interview, he just damned every Korean air crew that ever was, or ever will be. “The Korean culture…” is why the PIC can’t fly the damned plane. Gottit. No Korean flights for me. Now, about those Japanese - well, they seem Westernizes enough, maybe we can trust them. The Chinese? Which China?
Remember the PRC fighter jockey who flew into a prop?
(I know, not fair - fighter jockeys are an entirely different breed of pilot)