If you read the article I cited, PIA is simply typlical of probably 50% of the countries out there.
From the linked article:
Pakistan’s state-run airline said Thursday it will ground 150 pilots, accusing them of obtaining licenses by having others take exams for them, an accusation that followed a probe into last month’s crash that killed 97 people in Karachi.
Faking exams is bad enough, but I was wondering just how much of their aviation knowledge was completely faked. If it was just a matter of send in 2500 bucks or so, get an ATP cert in return?
LSLGuy, if I’m understanding you correctly, and this level of fraud is endemic to 50 percent of foreign flag airlines, should those airlines be denied access to, e.g., US airspace out of safety concerns? Or are pilots who fly within US airspace for foreign carriers, a step above those foreign carriers acting within their own region? Or was it a comment—that I’ve heard from other US commercial pilots—that many foreign professional pilots are trained only well enough to manage the autopilot and other automation, and if a situation arises outside normal bounds of operation, they are ill equipped to work through the issue?
[Part 1 of 2 due to post length limits]
IMO/IME there are several different but loosely connected things going on. And you might enjoy the article I cited.
There are societies where graft and corruption affect a small fraction of the society and most people go a lifetime never giving or taking a bribe, majorly cheating on something, or engaging in white collar crime.
And there are other societies where what we would call “white collar crime” or “bribery” they would call not only “business as usual”, but “business as it must be done to accomplish anything.” whether as a individual citizen or as a business owner or manager.
Said another way, some societies largely believe “Honesty is the best policy (even though 100% of people don’t follow it 100% of the time)”, whereas other societies largely believe “Honesty is like the tooth fairy: a cute idea for kids & ingenues. Only chumps or losers aren’t cheating all day every day. After all, everyone else is.”
e.g. When I lived in Panama in the 1980s it was fully understood by all that every traffic stop ended in $20 cash changing hands and no citation would ever be written. If I tried that here in Florida I’d be taken directly to jail.
A completely different issue is that some societies favor rote learning and blind obedience vs really understanding how something / everything works and applying logic based on understanding, not mere memorization, to any situation whether it be novel or routine.
Rote is fine for situations with a high degree of certainty and a limited list of possible scenarios. But it falls apart in largely unconstrained and/or uncertain environments. And especially falls apart when you get both those plus a time constraint to boot.
The aviation safety culture that developed during and after WWI is all based on the ethos and thought processes of the post-WWII European, Commonwealth, and North American cultures. After all, those were the only countries with a meaningful aviation industry either as manufacturers or as operators.
But now over half of all employees, flights, airlines, and regulatory agencies are based in honesty-optional and/or understanding-optional cultures. And substantially 100% of the (pre-COVID) industry growth is and will continue to be in those non-“Western” cultures. So-called “Western cultures” are a rapidly shrinking minority of the total commercial aviation pie.
Meanwhile the products are still coming from Boeing in the USA & Airbus in western Europe. As are the engineering, training, and regulatory assumptions about who flies them, maintains them, manages them, and oversees them. Those assumptions are increasingly at odds with reality.
[Part 2 of 2 due to post length limits]
When the honesty chain breaks down bad shit happens at every level: pilots with fake licenses, mechanics who fake fixing things, companies that fake giving training, governments that fake giving oversight, etc. And of course, honesty in the inevitable accident investigations is completely out the window.
Separately, when the understanding vs. rote chain breaks down you get people trained only for routine operations and only to the most limited degree possible.
Put both of those cultural problems together and you have a recipe for a real mess.
I personally have no experience with the “pilots who can’t really fly.” But I do have many friends and co-workers who have flown jets for airlines in China, Southeast or Central Asia, Africa, etc. Whose collective experience in those environments amounts to centuries and whose stories are remarkably consistent despite widespread diversity in country, employer, or aircraft type.
They tell me it’s a horrific problem. It’s not that some pilots are good and some are bad. It’s that they’re all cookie-cutter identically bad and only about 10% of what traditional Western practice would consider minimally capable.
Particularly in this month’s febrile atmosphere let me make clear I’m not making a racial argument. This is about culture. There are certainly countries in Europe full of Caucasians that have a highly corrupt culture. And most probably fly that way too. In addition, culture is much more malleable than race. As a casual glance at TwitFace (or CNN!) will show you, the USA can choose to squander much of its culture of honesty and integrity in just a few years.
To answer your specific question about US/EU regulators shunning these problem operations, they have done that sometimes. But it’s a blunt and nuclear weapon. And still leaves the problem that Boeing and Airbus continue to sell these folks airplanes. At what point does e.g. FAA become complicit w Boeing in selling what amounts to a deathtrap to a carrier patently unable to operate it safely? That is a large can of worms a lot of people are trying real hard to look away from.
This sounds a lot like you’re saying that had the pilots been from Western culture, the recent 737 Max accidents would not have happened.
Or am I inferring what you were not implying?
Langewiesche is excellent. I have his father’s book on stick and rudder flying, and the apple didn’t fall far from the tree. Normally, I detest trying to circumvent the Times’s assorted paywalls, but since you recommended it (twice), and he’s usually that good of a writer, I’m giving it a go.
I obviously am not speaking for LSLGuy, but in as many words, the pro pilots I’ve listened to discussing, e.g., the Ethiopia crash of the 737Max, had that impression of foreign jet transport pilot training, and the products of same. I’m not a pilot; I’m just repeating what I’ve heard from pilots.
@LSLGuy, your writing in this thread has been brilliant. My hat is off to you.
Yes. And also a fine example why the 3,500 character limit is utterly idiotic.
IMO your conclusion is a little too black-and-white; anyone, certainly including me, on any given day, can screw up what ought to be a fairly routine situation. Once enough confusion and/or fear sets in, the situation can snowball on almost anyone. Emergencies are inherently unstable and exponentially so; the key is to be sharp enough at the outset to contain the snowball while it’s still tiny. A lot like managing a national COVID response actually.
I’ve flown the runaway MCAS drill more than once in the sim, without being specifically warned that it was coming. It’s a few seconds of “What the heck??!!? Oh yeah … fly the jet & switch it off.” and then 20 minutes of flying around by hand with your usual instruments all messed up and a bunch of VERY distracting noisemakers going off. I’d much rather face that on a sunny afternoon than in the middle of a snowstorm at the end of a 14 hour workday, but other than that IMO it’s about as Boeing originally thought: a brief but manageable challenge to somebody who’s paying attention and can actually fly a jet.
Of course flying a sim is different than flying an airplane; you’re sorta keyed up for stuff to go wrong and even when it does there’s not the same sense of possible imminent violent death intruding on your thoughts.
As well, I now know what an MCAS is. Which the Lion Air guys did not but the Ethiopian guys did. Or at least should have, assuming the records showing their airline gave them the bulletin are reliable and that the guys actually read and understood what it said as their administrative procedures manual directed them to have done.
My personal belief (and worth every penny you paid for it) is that if the Lion Air event had happened to an equally MCAS-naive crew at some first world carrier instead, maybe 1 in 1,000 crews would crash and a couple more would have had a close call with the ground before reasserting full control. At Lion Air the event actually happened twice; one crew handled it safely and one crew crashed.
So based on that random sample their failure rate is probably much higher. Though we have no way to know if the next 10 hypothetical Lion Air crews to be similarly challenged would have gone 0 for 10 on crashing, 5 for 10, or 10 for 10.
We’ll never know. But my bet is that if in the early days there had been 2 or 3 of these bad-AOA-triggers-MCAS-runaway events that all happened to 1st world carriers, nobody would have crashed, Boeing would have designed a mod to prevent the problem, the mods would have been installed by now with little or no fanfare outside the industry, and the MAX would be seen by the public to have had a mostly trouble-free introduction to service. And about 600 of them would have been flying just before COVID threw a different monkey wrench into our world.
The problem now is Boeing can’t say that, the FAA can’t say that, and the corrupt people at the Indonesian and Ethiopian governments and airlines are whitewashing their own responsibility as aggressively as they can.
I finally got around to reading the preliminary accident report on PIA 8303 linked by txtumbleweed.
Sorry we ended up with a big hijack about MAXes.
Back to PIA and A320s:
About 10 miles out they lowered the gear and partial flaps to improve their descent angle to try to salvage the arrival. It was a reasonable decision albeit too little too late. The “too late” part apparently wasn’t obvious to them yet. At that point they had a mess on their hands, but not (yet) an unsafe mess, just a very unstylish mess. And they were trying gamely to salvage this mess while it continued to deteriorate.
At about 5 miles from the runway it’s apparent the crew got majorly confused. ATC sort-of directed a go-around but using non-standard terminology. At that time the pilots sort-of changed their mind about landing and retracted the gear, which is one of the first steps in going around. But instead of climbing or doing as ATC had said, instead they continued descending towards the runway. Almost like one of the pilots was trying to go around and the other (or HAL) was boresighted on landing. And they weren’t talking to each other, or at least whatever was said wasn’t being heard and acted on.
That’s how they ended up in the schizophrenic aircraft state txtumbleweed posted above that I based my initial response on.
It will be fascinating (for appalling values of “fascinating”) to read the CVR transcript when it comes out, see how the final report settles out, and how much the authorities play it straight.
It seems safe to say that learning how to communicate effectively is a vital part of pilot training?
The one pilot doing one thing, the other doing something else reminds me of Air France Flight 447 and the disaster in the Atlantic. The Truth About Air France 447: The Black Box Transcripts
This kinda stuff happens all over. Illinois governor George Ryan went to jail, for among other things, selling Class D licenses to would-be semi-truck drivers. A van full of kids died before it was uncovered.
@Fiendish_Astronaut
[Part 1 of 2 due to post length limits]
Communicating well and aggressively is part of learning to operate as a crew. But in times of extreme mental stress it tends to fall away. Such is the wiring of an overloaded human brain.
Part of the reason the various aural warning devices are so overpowerinly obnoxious is the number of accidents where the recodings show them going off and the pilots are not acting as if they even hear them. In extremis “tunnel vision” blots out audio stimulation.
Another cultural issue is some national cultures are highly status conscious while others are more egalitarian.
Often times the pilot who’s actively controlling the airplane (so-called “pilot flying” = PF) is more confused than the other pilot who’s helping & watching (so-called “pilot monitoring” = PM because that task is properly to monitor both the airplane and the other pilot). All else equal, the PM is in a better space mentally to see the total picture and to detect big and small discrepancies. The PF is so busy with a myriad of trees he/she sometimes struggles to see the forest. And the more overwhelmed with increasing trees, the less the forest can be seen.
Even in the highly individualistic / egalitarian USA the industry statistics clearly show that when the Captain is PF the crews commit significantly more uncorrected errors than when the First Officer is PF. Despite the two roles being split very close to 50/50 across all flying.
These “errors” range from minor switchology errors or temporary state confusion up to full-on wrecked airplanes and dead people.
The difference isn’t that Captains are lousier pilots than FOs. It’s that they’re better = more willing, to speak up earlier about things that appear “off” to them. A little of that is (typically) greater experience. A lot more of it is social and job role related.
We’re exposed to teaching, testing, briefing, bulletins, videos, etc., ad nauseam trying to combat this issue. The statistics over the last few years are improving, but there’s a ways to go yet.
Other cultures where it’s all but unthinkable to even hint that a superior is messing up have a much tougher row to hoe. Despite what you’re told to do at work, overcoming a lifetime of culturalization isn’t going to happen easily. Success also requires that a) the superiors (Captains, managers, etc.) are themselves willing to accept corrective inputs without attacking the juniors, and b) the employer is actually pushing this issue, not just talking about pushing the issue. Or worse yet, pretending there is no issue.
50 years ago in US aviation the Captain was God. We learned that wasn’t a smart way to go and began to train to a much more juniors-be-assertive model. But a lot of progress in the actual cockpit had to wait for the Gods to retire. As a newbie I got to fly with some of the last of those guys. Good riddance. Many other parts of the world are just beginning down this journey or are still talking about whether to enter the starting gate towards the journey.
[Part 2 of 3 due to post length limits]
Another possibility:
This accident is actually pretty typical of Airbus accidents. At a very high conceptual level, the pilots appear to have been trying to accomplish one goal and the airplane ended up doing another goal.
Whether that’s due to computer malfunction where the airplane refuses to do as commanded, or the UI design is confusing enough that pilots can’t tell what is happening, or the training procedures are such that pilots can’t correctly perform the steps required is an open question.
But so-called mode confusion is a fertile cause of Airbus accidents.
Not that Boeing is immune. The Asiana 777 that landed just short of the runway at SFO a few years ago was a combination of crew inattention and mode confusion. They mistakenly thought HAL was managing their airspeed. He wasn’t. Which mean nobody was, they got slow, & fell out the bottom of the approach. Oops.
The relevance here is the deep cause may indeed be a communication problem. But one across the man-machine interface, not the pilot-pilot interface.
Yeah. Agree completely.
Lest I sound too culturally superior, even the MAX accident I cited above involved defectively remanufactured parts with dubious-at-best paperwork and flaky worker procedures. The shop in question was located in Miami, and the flaky worker procedures were approved by the local FAA office.
Was that due to corruption, sloth, incompetence, who-gives-a-shit attitudes, or profits-before-safety?
Probably some of each and the good 'ol USofA is certainly not immune to all of those maladies. It’s all a matter of degree, not of kind. Our glass house (mostly) has thicker glass. But it’s still glass.
[aside]Kinda like doctors and priests, eh?[/aside]
I’m not a pilot and don’t even like to fly (Lift? Ha! You’ve got to be kidding!) but I’m reading your posts with great interest. Did I understand correctly that at some point there will be available a recording or transcript of the cockpit conversation that took place as this incident unfolded? When that happens, I hope you’ll come back and discuss/analyze it for us.
Thanks @LSLGuy for the interesting insights in this thread.
Per international accident investigation standards, the final report will contain a timestamped transcript of what was said in the cockpit and across the radios. That report is typically released to the public 18-ish months after the accident. It takes about that long to do a thorough job of accident investigation. Some are a little quicker, some a little slower.
Excerpts or preliminary reports may emerge along the way on no particular schedule. The actual recordings are never released.
Sometimes the transcript is highly informative. Oftentimes it raises as many questions as it answers. People who wreck airplanes are generally increasingly overwhelmed by the pace of events as the process unfolds. And just like they tend to stop listening, they also tend to stop talking.
So divining their mental state from their words becomes increasingly difficult as the shit gets deeper.
As well, a lot of semi-verbal communication occurs in normal ops. E.g. “Hey look at that!” ends up on the recorder.
What the recorder doesn’t capture is that one pilot is pointing to a light or gauge on the panel and the other is looking at his/her fingertip. Folks aren’t deliberately narrating for the recorder. Sometimes the stimulus is obvious based on other aircraft data recorded. Other times it’s totally guesswork what the import of any given sentence was at the time.
Nowadays the audio quality is pretty good. Assuming the recorder was working at all, survived the accident, and was located. So being able to construct the transcript itself is generally not a limiting factor. Unintelligible audio recordings certainly were a limitation back in the 80s and before.
FWIW, in June 30th the European aviation authority (EASA) banned PIA from flying in Europe for 6 months (extendable, depending on whether Pakistani authorities clean up PIA’s act or not in that time).
Link to the “Independent” with the news: