I’ve never understood why they don’t mist the brakes with water. Pretend it was a bad landing during rain.
Some airplanes offer electric powered brake cooling fans to blow ambient air through the brake packs. That reduces the cooling time. Which can become a limiting factor for airplanes that fly through lots of short runways with quick turns. For more leisurely turnarounds from less demanding runways the brakes naturally get down to a baseline temp during the normal course of taxi-in, unloading, reloading, and re-launching.
All of that componentry is designed to be long-term happy at a couple hundred degrees F. The whole reason to want it cooled off before the next departure is that the total energy absorbtive capacity is tied to the difference between the starting temperature at the low end and the “stuff catches fire” limit temperature at the high end.
So cooler doesn’t produce any meaningfully less wear and tear or greater durability. It’s all about not starting out so hot that by the time you get to the runway having heated them up some more during taxi-out, you’re not already so hot that your remaining absorbtive capacity is less than you might need for a rejected takeoff.
I (and dad) just didn’t use brakes. Forty degrees of flaps, power off, and we could make the mid-field turn-off. Maybe even add power during taxi.) 
(I love Skyhawks.)
Even in a big airplane you can use proper on-speed touchdown, a lot of reverse, and never touch the wheel brakes until you need to slow the last 20-30 knots to make a 90 degree turnoff.
Beyond that brakes are generally needed intermittently during taxi to prevent runaway speeds from the rather high idle thrust of jets.
But yeah. Hamfists burn up brakes on every flight and real aviators use very little on a routine basis. Runway lengths permitting
The article seems a bit confused / mis-edited. But it’s certainly less confused than whatever went on that day in the cockpit. Methinks there might be some selective memory going on amongst the crewmembers.
What this does demonstrate is that flying a big fast airplane is a bit like standing on a beach ball. As long as everything is stable, everything stays stable. Once you start careening way off one way or the other, the flail to restore normalcy can quickly make the problem worse. Add in some probably rusty hand-flying skills, a misconfiguration / miscommunication, and some startle, and suddenly you’re off to a very bad day at the races.
Glad it wasn’t me.
If they set the flaps to the wrong setting wouldn’t the aircraft indicate an impending stall before it got out of hand?
The wrong setting was a safe one. Take-off was planned and conducted at Flaps 20, then the Captain called for Flaps 5 as part of the clean up process. The FO selected heard and selected Flap 15 instead. As Flap 15 is more than 5 there is nothing wrong with doing this aerodynamically, the problem was that the captain then became distracted by the speed limit presentation on the Primary Flight Display (PFD), expecting to see the F5 limit rather than the F15 limit, and stopped effectively flying the plane.
'Zactly.
If the article is to be beleived, the Captain then over-prioritized not overspeeding the flaps and chopped power. Which in a jet with underslung engines produces a massive trim change towards nose down. As deceleration kicked in, that produced a further somatogravic illusion of even more nose down pitch. Meantime they’re bouncing around in turbulence and heavy rain.
About then there’s real confusion setting in since the PFD looks nothing like it’s supposed to 1 minute after liftoff. About then the GPWS and the FO start shouting at the guy to “pull up!”.
Sanity is restored, but not after WAG 30 seconds of utter confusion and effectively uncontrolled flight as the guy is pushing and pulling yoke and throttles in response to whichever anomalous item caught his eye most recently.
When you fly 80 hours a month, but only hand fly 5 minutes per month and have done so for a decade or more, your ability to actually manage a fucked up situation really deteriorates. Management is slowly coming around to recognizing this risk and re-prioritizing hand-flying the more dynamic parts of daily ops. Which still aren’t very much time or very dynamic for the big boys doing long-haul.
I’ve written many times in this and other threads about how between ever-growing automation and ever less skilled piloting, the worldwide industry is building in lots of these brittle failure modes. Everything is fine while the computers are driving until the crew is suddenly and unexpectedly called upon to be really good, and they really aren’t. And perhaps never were. Only in the movies do people rise to the occasion.
Like I said upthread: glad it wasn’t me. Do this enough years and you’ll have a bad day where you’re not at your best. If that’s the day you get unlucky too, well, now your an unwilling celebrity. At least in this case they’re alive unwilling celebrities. You can’t always count on being that lucky.
So the captain adjusted airspeed with throttle and it caused a nose-down pitch. That must have been interesting. Why didn’t he just pull up and retract the flaps?
I’ve read at the usual sources that the long delay before the investigation provided ample opportunity to align on a sanitized story. According to the rumors, a major contributor to the situation was that the captain was distracted by his need to conduct an exceptionally lively “discussion’ with the FO about that person’s failures as a pilot and human.
The answer to any “why” question is simply that he didn’t for reasons good or stupid.
Your implied question is really “Shouldn’t pulling up and/or retracting flaps have been the smarter solution?” To which I would answer, “Yes, it would have been.”
Once the original confusion about why the airspeed limits were displaying wrong had been resolved. One of the first ways a flap / slat anomaly will manifest is the airspeed bugs won’t be moving as expected. Yes, you’ll get a caution light and EICAS / ECAM message soon enough. But the unexpected bugs on the airspeed tape you’re looking right at will probably be the first thing that catches your eye. And once the flaps are acting up, a time honored rule is “don’t change nuthin’ until you have time to settle the flightpath and airspeed down, settle your minds down, and get out the book.”
I’ve never flown a 777. I looked up my carrier’s clean-up procedures which are pretty much Boeing stock and are likely to be the same as UAL’s procedures that likely also reflect Boeing guidance. More and more the major airlines are converging on operating the same way, the manufacturer’s way, rather than according to whatever legacy habits became enshrined as differing procedures at each carrier over the decades.
For a Flaps 20 takeoff, the normal flap retraction sequence is 5, then 1, then up. Looking at the speeds, you’d expect to make those 3 changes at about 15-20 second intervals in otherwise smooth air with nothing weird going on. There is no takeoff procedure to raise flaps from 20 to 15. Neither is that part of the go-around procedure. Nor the windshear escape procedure.
So how and why the FO would have thought the Captain asked for Flaps 15 is a bit of a mystery. And if the FO thought that, why did they not question it before doing it, on the grounds that something that odd was likely a mistake by one or both of them. A LOT of what we do as a team is match our mental templates to the “script”. Any mismatch says one or both of us are confused. It doesn’t identify who is confused, just that we collectively have a discrepancy that needs to be resolved pronto, not swept under the rug with a shrug.
I have read nothing on the topic, but yes, the whole article smells pretty sanitized to me.
There are some unpleasant intergenerational dynamics at several carriers and UAL is rumored to have a bad case of that and other challenges to boot. I don’t have enough personal knowledge to be comfortable saying more.
Here’s the report itself.
That would violate the “sterile cockpit” rule:
It would. Doesn’t mean it didn’t happen.
We also see things now where the cultural difference between somebody my age who retired from the military using pretty strong language in rather minor situations is perceived by a 25yo from a very different much “softer” background to be a totally outré attack on their very humanity.
I personally haven’t had that problem but this a common whine of the crustier old farts around here:
Gotta walk on eggshells or these young crybabies will freak out. And Og forbid if they’re not white cis-male or else you did it because they’re a [whatever].
Of course crusty old jerks who’ve listened to Faux news for the last 20 years will have been hypersensitized to extreme contempt of anything they see as “woke”. Which includes basic human courtesy and quality personal management skills.
If indeed the UAL Captain lit into the FO “What the fuck are you doing setting the god damn flaps to 15? I called for 5 stupid!” the FO may well have all but tuned out at that moment in a white-hot rage themselves. Meanwhile nobody is minding the store and the ocean is fast approaching.
Just because you get a paycheck to do this doesn’t always mean you’re being professional. Would that it weren’t so.
I’m not so sure about the pitch down. I didn’t see mention of it in the report, though admittedly I haven’t read it thoroughly, and my copy of the B777 flight manual says the flight control system automatically compensates for changes in engine thrust. Like @LSLGuy I’ve never flown one for real so I can’t say how well the aircraft actually does this.
The PFCs automatically position the elevator and the stabilizer to generate the commanded maneuver. The PFCs constantly monitor airplane response to pilot commands and reposition the elevator and stabilizer to carry out these commands. Airplane pitch responses to thrust changes, gear configuration changes, and turbulence are automatically minimized by PFC control surface commands.
My bolding above. “Minimized”. I’d suspect that the pitch down played a roll but wasn’t nearly as dominant as it would be on a more conventional aircraft.
Edit: “PFC” = Primary Flight Computer.
A privately owned MiG-23UB Flogger crashed Sunday at the conclusion of the Thunder Over Michigan airshow in Ypsilanti, Michigan.
A Twitter video in the article shows both occupants ejecting before the crash.
@Richard_Pearse. Hmm. I knew the 777 has a bunch of fly-by-wire enhancements, but I didn’t know the PFC would automatically counter thrust-related pitch changes. They are a large, and annoying, factor in the Jurrasic 737. That info makes the 777 descending quite so steeply even more surprising.
@Johnny_L.A. WTF??? I was at nearby Nellis while all this was going on at the then-secret Tonopah Test base:
I had no part in any of it, and it was super secret then. But what came out clearly in that book was that the airplanes were horribly unreliable and virtually unmaintainable even on a monster budget.
Nowadays (at least pre- the Russo-Ukrainian war) one might be able to buy parts somehow. But that does nothing for the inherent short lifespan of Russian equipment. Of all the foolhardy sorts of warbirds to try to maintain, a MiG-23 just about takes my cake.
I sat in one once or twice. Damn glad I didn’t have to try to start it, much less fly it, or try to fight with it. And that was young me, the testosterone-powered fool, talking. Old me is just horrified.
Although I do like the idea of a pilot named “Flier”. 
I read an article several years ago, that the Soviet Union intentionally made shoddy engines for a particular export aircraft, so that the client country would have to return the worn engines (ISTR TBO of 1,000 hours or less) and get new ones since they weren’t field-reparable. I’m thinking Su-25s, but I honestly can’t remember.
That book is on my shelf too, and IIRC they held the MiG-21 in high esteem but felt the 23 was a deathtrap. Upon being asked for recommendations on how we should counter it, the squadron supposedly suggested encouraging enemy nations to procure as many of them as possible because it would quickly decimate their pilot corps.
I actually flew a MiG-15 once. There’s a lot of BS out there about the quality of Soviet aircraft, but in my research for that ride I found a lot of context. That plane was designed quite sensibly for where it was going to be deployed, and who would be flying and servicing it. It’s successors were improvements, but the 23 was just too complex for it’s own good. And the canopy tended to implode when you reached a certain speed. I wouldn’t have accepted a free flight in one.
Wow, I just saw them at Oshkosh a few weeks ago. Someone looked up and said there as a swing-wing jet approaching and it took me a few seconds to identify it as a Mig 23. I talked to them in the War Birds section later and discovered it was the only private one flying.