It seems an odd hill on which to make a stand.
It’s pretty much the purpose of Unions to stand behind their members. “the knife with my client’s fingerprints on it was stolen while they were in church giving CPR to a baby being baptized”.
It is. I would expect that to involve a lawyer and / or a union representative at the interview rather than flat out refusing to do it. The union obviously have issues with the process and are choosing this incident to make their case. I just hope the crew don’t get dragged down by union stubbornness.
NTSB aren’t happy about it.
After some Googling …
Here’s the AA pilot union’s press release on the interview issue. It’s a bit more nuanced than NTSB makes it sound. Allied Pilots Association Statement on NTSB > Allied Pilots Association.
But not much.
I don’t get it. The union is ok with a stenographer but not an actual recording? Why would someone give “less candid responses” because there is an electronic record? As a former criminal investigator, I understand a recording device might be more intimidating to a witness than note-taking. They were often reluctant to go on the record so formally. They understood that there would be no denying their cooperation to a defendant. Not being recorded offered at least a bit of, “That’s not what I said!”. But a stenographer who is trying their best to get everything word for word? That’s really no more deniable than a recording.
Can pilots be forced by either the employer or NTSB to submit to questioning? What happens if they flat out refuse to answer questions? Police can be forced to answer questions but the answers may not be used in criminal court (Fifth Amendment), only for administrative purposes - suspension, firing etc. Anything similar with ATPs?
They have the audio of the A/A crew and all the evidence of their actions. The FAA could bring their certification into question.
I don’t know if they can make it harder on them for not cooperating,
Correction.
They have the radio traffic of the AA crew (and the Delta crew and ATC) as it was recorded by the recorders in the tower. The NTSB preliminary report says the CVR data of both aircraft was overwritten by the time they got to their destination. So there is not, and never will be, a recording of what went on in either cockpit before, during, or after the incident.
CVRs only hold IIRC 2 hours of audio that’s continuously overwriting the oldest data with current data. By the time either airplane arrived at their destination, the audio recording data from the departure phase of their flight had been overwritten at least once.
The flight data recorders’ capacity is much longer now, IIRC 25 hours. So that data is available to NTSB but won’t have too much interesting to reveal versus the questions uppermost in everyone’s minds.
NTSB has been asking FAA to update the certification standards to record much longer amounts of CVR. But so far FAA has declined to act, and even if they did, it would be a decade or two until the whole fleet would be re-fitted or replaced.
@MikeF’s legal question is interesting and certainly worthy of a quality answer.
It’d take me a bit more research to say something definitive and I’d rather not go on memory for something that probably depends on some legal hair-splitting.
For sure the FAA and their employer have a very large hammer to whack them with. FAA can rescind their licenses to work with only a retroactive opportunity to defend oneself. Ditto their employment can be terminated until / unless the union or some other attorney persuades the employer to take them back or persuades some judge to force the employer to take them back.
Winning either of those retroactive battles gets difficult if one refuses to testify.
It’s a decent bet the AA captain is near enough to retirement age that he could just bow out. Figuratively speaking, just send the FAA his license, send AA his ID card, and file for retirement. Refusing all the way to deal with NTSB or anyone else. By the time any censure later came his way, it’d in effect be a sentence in absentia.
Correct, I didn’t make that clear enough. But the radio traffic is not on their side. They read back the instructions correctly and then proceeded to roam around the airport of their own accord.
Granted completely.
I’ve been pretty unequivocal from the git-go that there’s no way to excuse what happened. It’s appropriate to learn the whys and see if there are lessons for the rest of us mistake-making mortals, but whatever we do learn is not going to excuse the whats of that day.
After some research …
It’s pretty similar conceptually. Officially the NTSB does not assign blame. Any proceeding to sanction pilots, controllers, maintainers, airlines, or manufacturers would come from FAA who’d have to develop their own chain of evidence and use their own tribunal system.
As always in the USA employers are free to be as beastly to their employees as they want. Net of pushback from a union. For darn sure if the FAA suspends or revokes a pilot’s license to fly, that pilot will be placed on leave or terminated. Many careers have survived short-term (<6 months ?) suspensions. Very few have survived multi-year suspensions or revocations. Although I personally first-hand know of one such (not me). About which I can’t / won’t say more. But it’s definitely an out-there exception that proves the rule.
The relevant tidbit on NTSB compulsion is in here: eCFR :: 49 CFR Part 831 – Investigation Procedures. Which says the NTSB has the right to issue federal subpoenas backed up by the federal courts. The rest of NTSB’s governing laws/regs are right nearby from that ref. For those who may be interested …
I expect NTSB has a bunch of internal procedure documents which define how they do whatever they do when facing an uncooperative witness or interested party. That info doesn’t seem to be readily available to the general public.
Video of the SWA incident in Austin. Apologies if posted before, I look a bit. https://twitter.com/DocumentingATX/status/1623745063388958720
Arrrrgh! Apparently that’s a simulation???!!! Impressive though.
Yeah it just looks like a mock-up someone has done in Microsoft flight sim. The problem with it is that I don’t believe there is any publicly available data that could have been used to create the video accurately.
I’ve long been amazed at this shortcoming, which has prevented full analysis of a host of aviation mishaps. It’s especially strange in an age when the cost of digital memory is negligible.
It’s not how you fly a go-around either. The FedEx plane is portrayed as flying pretty much level for a long time while the gear is going up, in reality they would’ve pitched up to 15° or so immediately, then with a positive rate of climb confirmed, retracted gear. That would have got them a lot more vertical clearance than portrayed in that video.
So Straight Dope pilots: have you ever taken your passengers on a wild ride like:
The incident, which appears to have escaped any commentary on social media, came the same day 25 people were injured, six seriously, aboard a Hawaiian Airlines flight from Phoenix to Honolulu during severe turbulence in the vicinity of Maui. That same Pacific storm spawned a massive ice storm that stretched across the western and central U.S. in the days that followed, triggering the Christmas meltdown at Southwest Airlines.
Looking at the graph the ground speed dropped as they descended so maybe they hit the backside of a microburst and lost lift. If that’s the case they would have reported it to the tower and there would be a copy of the radio exchange.
8,000 fpm descent. Those pilots must have been pulling buttons off the seats. Must have been a hell of a wind shear, if that’s what it was.
There sure have been a lot of near-catastrophes lately.
It’s a darn shame the graph in that article covers an hour of flight and 6 miles of altitude, when we care about 30 seconds of flight and 2500 feet of altitude.
God bet it was pretty chaotic there for a few seconds. I’d take any of the maximum recorded values with a smidgen of salt. There are lots of ways for single samples to be an inaccurate picture of the actual experience.
Bottom line: however bad that was, it definitely was not good.