I know that ILS isn’t needed to land a plane in good conditions, but ILS inoperability reduces the safety level by a notch. It appears, at this point, that if they had had a glide slope to use, and they used it, that this accident would never have happened.
OTOH, when I last landed a plane, ILS didn’t exist (at my airport), but I didn’t crash, either.
This will be a fairly easy accident or the NTSB to figure out accurately since you have surviving flight crew, flight data recorder and the CVR. The physical cause of the accident may be harder than the why though.
If it is straight failure of both engines then it will be pretty easy but if it is pilot error it gets more complicated.
Here is one possible scenario:
Lets say the pilots were high on glideslope. In order to correct this, they pull the power back and increase their rate of decent. The pilot flying realizes that he is still high and pulls the power back even more and increases the decent rate. He is pulling the power back as he increases the decent because he wants to maintain the proper airspeed. Perhaps he has pulled the throttles back all the way to idle and is descending rapidly to maintain his airspeed.
If a pilot has the engines all the way back at idle it takes a while for them to spool back up and start providing any notable thrust. The pilot would rapidly be approaching the proper glideslope and should start pushing the throttles back up so as he pulls the nose up to get back on glideslope there will be enough thrust available to then maintain that glideslope.
Now, if the pilot was late adding power or the decent rate was far to high to easily overcome the aircraft would quickly go below the glideslope. A natural reaction now is to push the power up and pull back on the yoke. Pulling back on the yoke, (steering wheel if you will) will bring the nose up which will increase the drag on the aircraft and rapidly bleed off airspeed IF the engines are not producing enough thrust to compensate for the increased drag. This will cause an extremely high angle of attack, (AoA or basically a nose high/tail low position.) At a certain angle of attack the drag on an airplane increases exponentially until it stalls but even before a stall it will take extremely high throttle settings to compensate for the rapidly increasing drag on the airplane. Even if the pilot was able to achieve level flight the tail is now hanging lower than the landing gear and bang, hits the seawall.
That is just one of many possible scenarios but I it was crew error, then there will be many links in the chain of events that caused this accident and the question will be why each of those links in the accident chain, or contributing factors, happened. Were both pilots unaware of what was happening? If the non-flying pilot saw it developing why was nothing said? If something was said, was it ignored? Did Air Traffic Control hold the airplane up above glideslope too long and put them in the situation to begin with? Were the pilots distracted? Did the water create a visual illusion here? Were the pilots using the GPS to monitor their glidesope if the visual indicators were out of service? If not, why not? Did they ignore the EGPWS warnings? Was the EGPWS not working? If they ignored the warnings, why?
There was an Air Force C-5 that got into the exact scenario I described above but luckily they had enough altitude to recover the aircraft. They were shaken and had no idea what had happened until the near accident was recreated from the flight data recorder.
Even very experienced crews can get themselves in trouble and if this was human error, the recommendations from the NTSB will focus on preventing it from happening again.
Even in perfect visual flying conditions, don’t pilots rely heavily on instruments for their approach?
The airport ILS was out, but altitude is still available to the pilot from his instruments.
IANAP, and may have this all wrong, but if the instruments were working, doesn’t the pilot have the true altitude (through radar?) available to him with a fair degree of accuracy?
K, you are correct in all your assumptions.
One caveat though. Pilots don’t necessarily rely on their instruments for glideslope information on a clear day though they should be watching their airspeed and decent rate as well as their altitude.
Even if no instruments were available on the airplane a competent pilot should be able to manage a safe landing. The instrumentation are aids, they help, but in clear daylight they are not essential.
As mentioned, even with the ILS/PAPI/VASI/whatever out of commission (they are all things actually based on the ground, independent of aircraft) a modern airplane like that would still have things like GPS and yes, possibly radar if so equipped (I am not an airline pilot so my information on that sort of thing is a bit spotty). Beyond that, though, given weather conditions and time of day any competent pilot should make a good landing just using eyeballs alone to determine position and glideslope.
No disrespect intended to the NTSB, but can they really do much about pilots from other countries, if it does turn out to be pilot error?
The word you want is “descent,” (accent on the first syllable) not “decent,” (accent on the second syllable). If you’re “decent,” you’re not naked, or
oops, yeah, my spelling really sucks with words spell check doesn’t catch.
Sorry.
Gaudere’s Law strikes again. In post #67, I had the accents backwards. Decent is accented on the first syllable, descent, on the second.
This is exactly what I told my non-flying buddy last night as we watched some coverage. Something diverted his attention from the glideslope and he just got below it with no room to recover. It’s pretty damn hard not to pull back on the yoke when the ground is coming up fast!
I haven’t seen any animations of the crash, but imagine this planeabout 30 feet lower on landing…
Here are some stills taken at St. Martin of landing aircraft. Notice the AOM DC-10 is about 12 feet above the fence. The KLM 747 looks lower. Looks like he’ll set down before the threshold, which is still over 100 yards away. There is a good deal of variation in the glide path of every plane.
Truly amazing what an extra 20-30 feet of altitude can do for you sometimes!
Yes and no.
When it comes down to it, the NTSB recommendations are not mandatory even within the US. They simply advise.
Those recommendations would be made available to the International Civil Aviation Organization (ICAO) as well as the FAA. The incident that really brought Crew Resource Management or CRM into the limelight was the Tenerife airport disaster. The lessons learned from such disasters are distributed far and wide and recommendations are often adopted by regulators regardless if they are mandatory.
Current headline at MSNBC: Flight 214 survivor: ‘There was fear and chaos’
Ya think? :eek:
There are reports coming out that the glideslope signal on the 28L ILS was inoperative. That fact should still have been in the NOTAM’s and Approach should still have notified them, though, and even so, it was a clear day with no reason not to be visual.
A failure to stabilize the approach, perhaps due to unexpected absence of vertical guidance, followed by a cycle of overcorrecting inputs (Pilot-Induced Oscillation, or PIO, is a standard term), combined a determination not to admit having screwed up and go around until it was too late does seem to fit, I agree.
There’s also been a behavioral pattern among Korean pilots, noted in other crash reports involving KAL, where the captain is given absolute deference no matter how badly he’s screwing up, with junior crew members deathly afraid to speak up. Virtually all of them are ROKAF veterans or still serve in the reserves, and military culture persists in the cockpits, no matter how much CRM training they all receive. FWIW.
I think you have nailed it, because there were two interesting eyewitness reports: one from a passenger who thought they were too high on approach, and one from the ground who said the plane’s attitude (nose high and tail low) looked odd.
I thought it odd that the passengers observation of “too high” resulted in a crash by flying too low, but JC explained it very well.
Yupp, and it has been a factor in past crashes, notably the KAL 747 that crashed on approach to Guam.
has the best picture of the crash site i’ve seen. one engine went way, way, off to the side and forward of where the plane rested. the picture is the last bit of the article, and clearly marks the main plane pieces.
Not directly; the NTSB only investigates and makes recommendations. But the FAA makes regulations, often relying on what the NTSB says. And the FAA can (and has) banned foreign carriers from operating in the US when they feel their safety standards are not adequate. They’ve actually done that to Korean carriers before because of lax standards in the Korean government.
Where is the port engine? I watched yesterday on CNN and never saw it, and looking again at pictures today, I can’t locate it. Even in the wide field pictures, I don’t see it.
Photo 1
Photo 2
Photo 3
On the other hand, what is the object in the water? Look just above the word news.
there is eyewitness video just up on cnn from fred hayes. the video is at a distance, you can see the plane strike, the dust plume as it skids across the ground, it does catch a wing and comes up but thankfully doesn’t go over. the wing catch was at the end of the slide, and fire erupts and the plane comes back down and the flames intensify. the plane spins in a nearly complete circle before coming to rest on the belly.
i’m sure they will have the video on the internet very soon.
from this video i can see why people thought the plane may have gone over, or the wings come off.
one engine was tucked up next to the wing in front, photo 2 shows it nestled. the other was flung, up and to the right, of the black square in picture 3. i believe that is a piece of the tail in the water. try the bbc link above.
the video is on the front page of cnn now. www.cnn.com
