Yah, sounds like he needed to take his feet off the brakes so the sensors could kick in and engage the antilock system.
Yep. But if he was good enough to think to do that, he would’ve been good enough to have avoided the whole situation in the first place.
I particularly like how the blame was assigned to the non-flying captain and the navigator. “How could you let him fly so badly?”
That blame us justified. The captain is responsible for the plane. If the FO is making errors that aren’t being corrected then the captain must take over, regardless of who the FO is.
I often wondered if I would react fast enough to take a plane away from another pilot. Self preservation works wonders for indecision.
I’m sure it gets more complicated if the other pilot is vastly more qualified. Or is royalty.
Here’s a similar scenario involving pilot qualification that I never thought of until it happened to me:
I was hired to be the “right seater” for a guy who owned his own small jet, in which I was qualified as a captain, for a weekend trip of three or four legs. While I did the work of filing flight plans, weather and other arrangements, the owner / pilot was listed as the PIC.
So we get in the plane, and he was… ok. By which I mean he didn’t overtly scare me, but he obviously wasn’t a professional either. Had a looser way of doing things, but hey, it’s his airplane.
So when we do the approach on our first leg he’s flying about 25 knots faster than what you’re taught in the sim. It was reasonable weather, dry long-ish runway, but still not the kind of thing a pro would accept. As we passed 1000’ I made the callout, “Ref plus 25…”, curious what he would do.
“It’s OK, we have a big runway.”
What do I do? It’s way beyond what I would accept as a professional, but probably won’t come to grief under the current conditions. And it is his plane, and I’m being paid a lot to sit there and pull the gear.
So I stayed quiet. Didn’t like it. And I would certainly have intervened if I thought the outcome was in doubt, but the owner flying the plane is a dynamic I’d never encountered before (except as a flight instructor, in which the relationship is very different). I never took that sort of contract trip again.
Lots of people in aviation like to pretend there are no grey areas. Not true.
You have to wonder why someone would fly 25 knots faster on a landing. Was a hatred towards brakes or tires?
You have to wonder why someone would fly 25 knots faster on a landing. Was a hatred towards brakes or tires?
He didn’t touch down at that speed, but certainly faster than was recommended. And he flew the approach at a speed way faster than it should have been.
Why?
When you’re the owner of a plane that costs multiple thousands of dollars per hour to operate, every minute you save actually adds up to real money. I’ve seen people do that in prop planes - rush some actions just to save on the Hobbs meter. Had a student I warned about that nearly fail a checkride as a result.
That sort of thinking is both somewhat understandable, and really insidious and dangerous. And it’s why we develop high standards for airmanship, and CRM and all the other things we do for safety.
Also, I’ve seen a fair number of people just not care very much about developing and practicing any precision. Makes me sad, it’s contrary to how I do things both in airplanes and in life, but there’s a lot of it.
Oh I get it, but talk about a rock and a hard place.
You can’t really react fast enough if someone flies a nice approach and then just completely fails to flare, or something like that. You might be able to save it a bit, but not properly. Landing 30 knots fast is a bit different, it would’ve been going wrong from a long way back in the approach.
For sure.
Actually this is exactly what happened to me. It was a new partner to the plane and it was a grass strip landing. We were feet away from a nose wheel landing. It would have torn the nose gear off and wadded up the plane.
I have no clue why the PIC pushed the nose down 10 or 15 feet above the ground. We weren’t going to stall. The go-around landing went fine without any input from me.
Since it was a recip the engine response was immediate so it became a mulligan. A turbine might not have spooled up in time to keep it in the air.
I’m not a pilot, but the approach to H. Hasan Aroeboesman Airport, in Indonesia - especially when flying in one of the disaster prone local airlines - was particularly exciting.
On final approach, the plane does a hard left turn, banking to allow passengers to look directly down into the lava filled crater of a smallish volcano right next to the airport.
Wow, that would be a great view when landing.
He was in a Cessna 172, but the article doesn’t say if he was the pilot.
What did “flight engineers” do back when commercial planes had them?
I know he/she (probably he) sat in front of a big panel of gauges but of what use was it? Clearly two pilots can assess issues with the plane looking at their gauge clusters (even before glass cockpits). A third person telling them they lost hydraulics or an engine is out kinda seems like a “no shit” thing for the pilots.
B-36 engineer’s panel. None of those switches operated the coffee maker.
Engineers were the FADEC system before there was a FADEC system. They were the computer that monitored the mechanical systems of the plane.
Is there a reason propeller driven aircraft never seem to get above 350mph in speed (or near enough)?
If we look to WWII the very fastest planes did about 350 mph (piston).
If we look today the very fastest propeller driven planes do about 350 mph (turboprops)…give or take but close enough.
If in 80 years we have not improved on that can we assume there is a hard limit around this speed when using a propeller?
F6F Hellcat - 380 mph
P-51 Mustang - 437 mph
P-38 Lightning - 443 mph
Even the Germans had faster planes:
FW190 - 426 mph
Do335 - 413/477 (w/boost) mph
You have to remember that aircraft are compromises. There comes a point where a jet engine is more cost-effective than a piston engine or turboprop. There’s only so much pitch you can have in a prop. Why not just spin it faster? Because then you have the problem of the tips reaching the speed of sound. Make it shorter (to stay away from SoS)? Maybe add more blades to compensate for shorter blades? Eventually your propeller will start looking like a turbofan.