I’m afraid I couldn’t suppress a morbid chuckle when I read this from a recent AAIB accident report:
“The pilot recalled that shortly after takeoff from Runway 28 the instructor’s head rolled back. The pilot knew the instructor well and thought he was just pretending to take a nap whilst the pilot flew the circuit, so he did not think anything was wrong at this stage. He proceeded to fly the aircraft round the circuit. As he turned onto base leg the instructor slumped over with his head resting on the pilot’s shoulder. The pilot still thought the instructor was just joking with him and continued to fly the approach. He landed normally on Runway 28 and started to taxi back to the apron. However, the instructor was still resting on his shoulder and was not responding, and the pilot realised something was wrong.”
Yup, the poor instructor had arrested during flight and could not be revived. Perhaps it was just as well the student pilot didn’t realise until after landing (and more importantly, lucky they were a competent pilot and it wasn’t someone’s first lesson).
This is one of the reasons I think we’re dealing with data readings of transient short term conditions impressed on top of the larger / longer trend of an undesired 1500 foot descent over a span of 10s of seconds.
Had there really been sustained 2.5+ G flight there would have probably been a lot more social media posts about it at the time. So far it seems none of the passengers had much to say online about their adventure. At that point, just after takeoff, everybody would have been awake and alert. That they all didn’t freak out, in fact few to none of them did, suggests the reality was less exciting than the FlightAware data make it sound.
For damn sure a windshear at low altitude is dangerous. Had they continued down all the way to sea level the outcome is obvious.
We fly simulated windshear recoveries in every sim training event. The modern version of these scenarios are taken from actual flight data recordings from actual near-disaster encounters. We have one now based on a real world very close call that is so severe that a sizeable fraction of every sim attempt ends in a crash. And this with pilots that know exactly what event they’re doing next and why. The only winning move with that one is to recover very skilfully with little wasted energy and to start early, before it’s obvious the shit is already hitting the fan. It’s sobering to say the least.
The relevance of that anecdote to this story is that I find it implausible 300 people could ride through one of those scenarios, and nobody thought to tell their TwitFace friends / followers about the horror show they just experienced.
Having said all that I’ve said, it could also be that it felt from the inside as just some kinda-scary turbulence that lasted a couple minutes with a couple of big jolts in it.
And meanwhile some less-than-good piloting converted what should have been a minor flight path deviation in turbulent conditions into an unnoticed descent and a brief but too abrupt recovery to the climb.
I wonder if we’ll ever get much more data on this story. So far all the news articles seem to be mostly telling the same small story. IOW, they’re all citing each other.
That article is the first one I’ve read (and I’ve not read all that many) that gives a cogent description of how it felt in the cabin and the collective passenger reaction. Which is more significant than I expected. Which in turn makes me wonder how much social media “noise” there is every day about scared passengers screaming over turbulence on various flights.
Said another way, right now I’m more confused about the severity of the experience versus the fact it remained a social media non-event for ~2 months than I am about any other aspect.
So the FAA has taken notice of the recent spate of near misses. Here’s what I wonder…
Are we at the point, at least at the major airline hub airports, where we have reached simply reached peak safety? When we are landing planes at O’Hare or JFK at a rate of one per minute at busy times there is very little slack in the system. Maybe so little that even the smallest errors can’t be allowed to take place.
Which means… we’re due for a catastrophe. Even with all the hugely successful gains from CRM over the past decades, when we’re depending on nearly split-second timing to have planes cross runways (at some very confusing intersections) maybe we’ve reached the point where we’ve done our best. Maybe we need to accept that and try to build some slack into the system in certain places, at certain times. Seems like it’s getting out of hand. Maybe another thread?
But off the top of my head, the quickest thing to implement would be slowing the pace / adding some slack. Any revised procedures or new hardware would be the work of a decade.
A serious problem being talked about in hushed tones is that between roughly 2018 and 2028 we’re going to replace about 2/3rds of all airline pilots with new folks. That is a major replacement of “wetware”. The new(er) folks will have different formative experiences, different attitudes, and different experience levels. They may have a higher or lower total tendency to error, but they’ll certainly have different tendencies to different errors.
ATC is undergoing / has undergone a similar wholesale replacement of older bodies w newer bodies.
The passenger has some more details in a Facebook post (note you don’t have to log into Facebook):
WHY DIDN’T ANYONE POST TO SM?
I’m being asked why nobody shared about it on social media, why this “flew under the radar”.
While this was much more than just turbulence, I think nobody really knew how low we were. In fact, being still in the clouds, I figured we were under 10,000 feet but had NO idea we came to just within 750 +/- feet. Again, that “silver lining” of not being able to see, perhaps a simple layer of protection from the man upstairs.
There’s got to be more to this because they could have converted it to a freighter. It still had plenty of worth. Too late now. Must be more money in parts than selling it as a refurbished freighter.
For many airplanes right now the part-out value exceeds the in-use value.
It won’t be scrapped like you’d take a car and put it in a crusher. Instead it’ll be largely disassembled and most of it by dollar-value will be reused as parts. The remaining hulk then gets cut up, but lots of aerospace-quality aluminum & titanium will be extracted and resold as raw metal to non-aerospace users like raw material suppliers to the automotive industry.
The uber-fancy cost-is-no-object 100% custom interior? Probably 100% land-filled.
I kind of wonder if that particular 747 was an oddball in some way, in other words the Saudi government ordered it with a different set of options from what most cargo carriers ordered. No one wants an oddball plane in their fleet, since that complicates maintenance, and possibly pilot training.
Preliminary report on the ATR that crashed in Nepal.
A brief summary. It would appear that when the pilot flying called for flap 30, the pilot monitoring may have accidentally moved both propellor condition levers to the feather position. Without going into the finer details, this essentially gave them a double engine “failure” that could have been fixed by moving the condition levers back to where they should be. A bit of a head-scratcher.
Many years ago as an FO on the 727 the captain was flying a night visual approach w me assisting. He called for the first notch of flaps: “Flaps 1”. I had just been thinking that we were a bit high on energy and his call was a bit later than I would have preferred. Somehow I heard “gear down”, repeated back “gear down” as I grabbed the gear handle and lowered the landing gear. Oops. He was not amused.
Lowering the gear with flaps still up was not the normal sequence of configuration events, but was a common tactic for recovering gracefully from being a bit high on energy.
That was more a matter of me doing exactly what I thought I heard based on what I would have done had I been flying right then, not him. This was not me simply grabbing the wrong knob(s) / levers. But wrong knob / lever errors happen too.
The fact the right-seater was an instructor adds some spice to the mix. Swapping seats from flight to flight depending on whether you’re training an FO or a captain really invites muscle memory errors. I’d be curious to learn what other aircraft type(s) the right seater had flown before the ATR or maybe even was still qualified on at the time.