I would assume that a go-around on a clear problem-free day would be a huge loss of face. Would there be consequences to the pilots? The passengers would certainly be surprised, and presumably lose confidence in the pilot. Could proper caution be clouded? (My impression, however, is that pilots were simply unaware of problem until way too late; no?)
Those planes sometimes taxi at deceivingly high speeds. If it had to slam on the brakes for some reason, you might find yourself on the floor if your feet couldn’t catch you. Just saying.
Yupp, and heaven forbid you are not wearing your seatbelt on a Southwest flight while they are taxiing and they have to stop suddenly. They are paid by the leg and not by the minute and are known to taxi a touch on the fast side. That is fine so long as everyone is following the rules and have their belts on.
Yupp, you read my mind on this one.
When I flew in the military it was no big deal and we practiced them on a regular basis and did them for real quite often.
Now, when you are flying an airliner, there is extra pressure. First it is expensive to go around. Extra fuel costs, maintenance costs on the jet, pay for the crew and possibly rebooking missed connections. Then there is pride. In the pilot’s mind he is probably thinking, crap it is clear and a million with no wind issues and I can’t get this thing down. Oh, and I am flying with an instructor so how is this going to look on my training record? “I can fix this” he more than likely thinks. Meanwhile, the instructor pilot is probably thinking I need to let him make his mistakes so he can learn from this but “I can fix this” if he goes to far is probably also running through his head. NONE of this should be a reason to go beyond what is safe and as you can see from how safe it is to fly means it almost never gets to the point where it is a safety issue.
At some point, the airspeed drops out of both of their crosschecks. I do not know if the third pilot was in the jump seat watching but he should also have seen it too but would he speak up or assume the IP knew what he was doing?
Then there are the aspects of Asian culture that may come into play as well. Respecting the authority of the crew members senior to you may well still be more prevalent there than it is in US carriers. It is worth noting that it used to be that way here too and while it has been a while, there have been crashes involving US carriers because a junior flight-deck crew-member was not assertive enough in making the captain aware of the impending doom.
Here, it might have turned out better had the weather been downright poor. A clear and a million day can lull some into a false sense of security.
The auto-throttle isn’t the problem here, the problem is that they weren’t monitoring their speed. You can’t really have a checklist item to check that the auto-throttles are engaged because you might not want them engaged. It’s just not the type of thing checklists are designed for. They are designed for gear down, flaps down, altimeter set, etc. Items that are changed once at a particular phase of flight. As JCFindley said, procedure items as opposed to technique.
The problem with auto-throttle mode awareness is well known and is a side affect of how one of the autopilot modes works. I believe it is much the same as on our aircraft, the RJ100. If you use Level Change (FLCH on the B777) to descend, the auto-throttle retards the thrust levers then goes into the arm mode and the autopilot pitches to maintain the speed selected while you are free to move the thrust levers to adjust the rate of descent. If the autopilot then captures the selected altitude or an ILS glide-slope or you change the vertical mode from Level Change to Vertical Speed, the auto-throttle automatically engages and controls to the selected speed while the autopilot pitches to maintain the required flight path.
If you disengage the autopilot and flight director though (which turns off the autopilot modes), and hand fly the aircraft, the auto-throttle will remain in the armed mode and won’t engage to control to the selected speed. The typical trap is descending in Level Change on a visual approach, getting to the point where it is no longer practical to fly the aeroplane via the autopilot, disengaging the autopilot and flight director so you can manually fly, and forgetting that the auto-throttle won’t hold your speed for you (after all, you didn’t disengage the auto-throttle, that has been engaged since take-off.)
All going well you and your off-sider should be monitoring your flight path and airspeed and notice that the airspeed isn’t being maintained, realise why, and fix it. On a better day you wouldn’t have been caught out in the first place because you would have had better “mode awareness”, but people being people, mistakes will be made. This type of minor error and correction happens all day, every day, on airliners all around the world and is no big deal.
Being caught out to the point that you fly into the ground is simply a failure to fly the aeroplane.
Yes, no doubt. But I was merely likening how fast I would have been out of that particular plane to what is a common occurrence.
ahem…Bruce Springsteen
Slightly more on-topic, our son flew out of San Francisco yesterday evening…and the airport is still a total mess. Not physically (though I imagine the runway involved probably is), but from a scheduling standpoint. It seemed like 20% of the flights on the board were cancelled, and more than half were delayed, many by several hours.
He was supposed to fly out of Sacramento, to SFO, and then transfer for a flight to Tuscon, but his first leg (which was a commuter that starts the morning at SFO, then goes up and down the state before returning in the evening) was delayed so long that we ended up having to drive him to San Francisco to catch his flight.
I guessed Koreans were old school. 
Here is a great video of a https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=k3HKN-FWNq0landing at SFO.
Well worth watching.
Yes it is…
And another United Airlines Flight 173 - Wikipedia
That was awesome.
Very impressive video production – dozens of camera angles. This should be mandatory viewing for all Korean airline pilots.
I was intrigued enough to Google this flight (Alaska 60 in 1976). No voice recording or transcript showed up. There is a pdf of the NTSB report which states
Was the duck/co-pilot joke from someone’s memory?
It would seem that this is “what if it happened like this” fiction.
If you look at page 28 of the linked document, the FO did not remember anything about the events leading to the accident. Here is what the NTSB document states:
“Because of the extent of the captain’s departure from prescribed procedures during the approach and landing, the Safety Board attempted to determine whether either of the other flight crewmembers alerted or advised the captain that the flight was being conducted in a manner which could compromise safety, or if either recommended a missed approach.
The first officer could not remember any events leading to the accident; however, the second officer stated that the first officer called out airspeeds and descent rates after the aircraft descended through 1,000 feet, and that after the landing gear was extended, the first officer remarked,“We’re high,” and lowered the flaps from 30” to 40". No other evidence of additional efforts was found."
UAL173 is not an example of a junior crew member not being assertive enough toward a senior crew member. Instead, the entire crew was preoccupied with a landing gear problem and nobody was watching the fuel level.
Well crap then, my memory must be getting murky. I thought the FE was aware of the situation but never pushed it.
Reading the transcripts, the FE did call out the fuel situation more than a few times but then got caught back up in the fiasco so may not have been aware of it either.
Because there was an instructor in the right seat and he was also the PIC, this would not be a typical “scared to speak up” scenario either.
An animation of Asiana 214’s crash sequence, likely based on eyewitness videos we’ve all been seeing in the news.
The blue “ghost” plane is, I guess, what a standard 3-degree descent profile and touchdown would have looked like.
Very interesting, thanks.