IANAP, but I bet that this will turn out to be the crux of the matter – overdependence on electronic aid systems, eroding some pilots’ feel for simply touching a plane down at the right spot on a runway.
I’ve been to SFO many times, and it doesn’t seem to me particularly dangerous. My one odd experience is being on a plane coming in from Sydney (after 14 hours across the Pacific), getting within a couple of metres of the runway, and the pilot suddenly aborting the landing. We were told a bit later, as we circling for a second approach, that there was something on the runway ahead of us. However, apart from a delay while we went around in a circle before making the second landing, it really was not a problem.
(But I’m flying Asisana later this year, from Chicago to Sydney via Seoul-Incheon, so I’m hoping that they’ve used up their quota of accidents this year.)
SFO landings are not particularly dangerous. For some passengers who are not accustomed to the approach, it can be a little disconcerting to look out the side window and watch the water get closer and closer during descent, only to have the runway appear in the last few seconds before touchdown.
After watching several plane crash investigations, it appears that systems like the ILS being out of order are all too frequent, even at major runways like SFO.
The ILS might be less important on clear days with good weather, but if it’s totally UNimportant, why not shut it down under such circumstances? My point is that it is critical to keep critical systems working at all costs.
Sure, equipment failures and downtime for maintenance are inevitable, but in this day & age when almost any part can be obtained overnight; parts are standard and can be stockpiled; and technical help is available most anywhere; it makes me wonder why the uptime is so poor. If my ISP said, “We’ll be down for a few days, sorry for the inconvenience,” I’d certainly find another ISP that knows how to keep things running.
The current NOTAMs for KSFO show the ILS out of service for specific times each day which would suggest it is scheduled. Sometimes it’s not actually the ILS that is getting the maintenance. I fly regularly into Sydney, Australia, during curfew hours. They often use this quiet period to do runway works. At the moment about a third of the only open curfew runway is closed for works during curfew hours. This means the runway threshold is displaced by 1500m so they have a temporary PAPI (visual slope guidance) for the new threshold and the ILS is not available as it is not set up for the displaced threshold. An ILS is not a critical system though, it is nice to have, and safer than doing some other instrument approaches but pilots fly into runways with no ILS all the time and don’t have any trouble. Here in Australia, all but the major airports don’t have an ILS, we don’t have aeroplanes landing short all the time though, so there’s more to it than just a lack of ILS.
I’m just looking at the CNN pics. The wings are attached, the tail is sheared off. The unusual damage seems to be port side flaps & ailerons, which seem gone at the mounts. I can’t see any crumpled metal or parts and it seems odd that they’d break off so uniformly w/o visible damage to the rest of the wing (this is why that wing looks thinner). It seems like the plane did a tail-hop which broke off the tail section before the start of the runway, but I’m not sure what would have caused the flaps & ailerons to shear so cleanly on one side and not at all on the other.
Looks like the engines are off, too.
Coming in over water provides fewer visual cues as to height than coming in over land, which may also factor into this.
I heard the 2 dead are Chinese schoolgirls. There were at least 70 Chinese students and teachers on board.
Is that airport like the one in Nice? I had the feeling we were going to land on the water at that airport too.
The SO wouldn’t let me watch the coverage. She’s not a news junkie, as I can be, and said we’d get the story later. This morning, in this thread, is the first I’ve heard about the landing gear hitting the sea wall. Shortly after reading that, NWCN showed an animation depicting it. I wondered how in the name of hell an ATP could make such a mistake. Overdependence on electronic aids? Maybe. But as has already been pointed out, an ATP should be able to land without them.
I do not fly heavies, but I understand that the picture is a bit different when you’re sitting 10 or 20 feet in the air than it does when your butt is two feet off the ground. Put me in the left seat of a heavy, having only flown piston-engine singles and helicopters, and I’d definitely come in too low. An ATP with thousands of flight hours would – or should – know what the picture looks like out the front window. I wonder if landing on a runway that has water off the approach end is like making a ridge landing or pinnacle landing in a helicopter. It’s a different picture, and you come in higher and steeper than you would for a landing in a flat field. I was taught that the reason for the higher, steeper approach is because you want a margin in case of adverse winds. Indeed, one of the helicopters I’ve flown was lost (only abrasions and bruises to the pilot) when the pilot came in too shallow for a ridge landing and couldn’t climb out of the downdraft on the lee side. (The R22 is not very powerful, and SoCal is hot.) From my own experience flying over the desert, and from the SO’s experience flying Black Hawks in Iraq, I know that it’s possible to get closer to the ground than you think because of the lack of other visual cues. It occurs to me that coming in over water, it might be a good idea to come in higher and steeper if there are no visual or electronic aids.
I am not instrument rated, so I have not made an ILS approach except as a passenger when flying with dad. For visual aids, I have no experience with PAPI; only VASI.
EDIT: I see that as I was typing, Broomstick touched on the lack of visual cues when flying low over water.
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i believe the report of the wings coming off, are when the engines came off. many people who saw it crash said the wings came off or came away. the engines did leave the wings along with bits and pieces of the wings.
I will take a guess and say Richard is an ATP licensed pilot as his comments are spot on.
There are witness comments that indicate the engines were spooling up when the tail stuck the jetty BTW.
Oh, it did not cartwheel or roll over as many reports and even witness accounts state. If it had the wings would no longer be attached and very few people would have survived.
It did ground loop but there is a big difference between rolling and cartwheeling and merely spinning around in a more or less level position.
Exactly.
From the pictures, starboard engine ended up off the pylon but in front of its wing (and from the looks of it, that damage may have been the source of the spreading fire). Port engine can’t be seen in the videos in the immediate vicinity of where the airframe came to rest. Perhaps a left-downward hit takes out the engine, pylon and maingear and these in turn wedge under the flaps and rip them clean off?
The airspeed alone is a huge indicator of a dangerous situation. The PIC has nothing to work with on a go-around.
On long final the view of the runway should be the same as any other runway and would remain in the same position (visually) to the PIC. Unless there is a mechanical it was a really bad landing. He was low and slow.
Also, The GPS system in the plane should have been able to establish a better glide slope than the ILS system. You can get that kind of accuracy now with less than $10,000 worth of equipment in general aviation.
I would have to believe that it’s a mechanical because that means both people in the cockpit screwed up.
PIC = Pilot in Command? Pilot in Control?
I’ve used both PAPI and VASI as a piston-engine pilot. They certainly are useful and under certain conditions give you a more reliable glideslope than without such aids. I especially like them at night, low visibility (though obviously as a VFR pilot what I call “low visibility” and what IFR pilots call that may be two entirely different things) and when the landscape gives fewer cues for approach, such as coming in over water.
You would think that ATP’s with significant experience would have the skills to make a daylit VFR approach to a runway with no problem but clearly something went wrong. Over-reliance on aids with a corresponding deterioration of bare-eyed VFR skills might be a factor, along with plain old pilot error and a host of other possibilities.
Pilot In Command.
Could mean either.
Accident investigations are moving more towards saying “pilot flying” vs. the one that isn’t flying because either person in the front seats could be the one managing the approach. I’m pretty sure **Magvier **meant “whomever was doing the actual flying at the time”.