Oh absolutely! An inspection to determine what likely works and what doesn’t, including lots of functional and operational tests. Repairs on-site by mobile repair teams for critical systems. Then establishing limitations under which the aircraft can still fly for a ferry flight (note from a legal perspective the aircraft isn’t “airworthy” but it can still be operated under alternative procedures and limitations). Then the plane would be ferried to an appropriate repair shop (if one isn’t at this particular airport, naturally that’s a better choice) for complete repairs and return to a certified and airworthy state.
Using an example I’ve supported for a customer, you can’t dispatch normal operations without a functional total fuel quantity indicator. But you can ferry the plane by ensuring you have extra fuel in each tank, by prohibiting fuel cross flow between tanks, by monitoring each engine fuel burn, by limiting bank angles to avoid an undetected weight imbalance in each wing, etc. The plane requires more attention, but can still fly under a ferry permit.
I’d have to spend a lot of time inventing a hypothetical and coming up with allowances for this type of paint spray, but it can be done and is done pretty frequently because shit breaks!
I don’t doubt that they have all the automated bells and whistles, but are they as reliant on them as modern airliners? If you didn’t trust the sensors that were sending data to the autopilot, could you fly a bizjet purely by hand and backup gauges?
(Yeah, the backup gauges probably can’t be trusted, either.)
There’s quite a range of equipment in the bizjet world. Planes manufactured more recently generally have more modern automation, as one would expect. But one of the planes I have experience in was built decades ago, though many have been upgraded with very modern avionics suites. So it’s an interesting mixture of an old airframe blended with newer instrumentation.
So in that plane any failures would be more or less the same as in most modern aircraft. The pitot tubes and static ports send their data to redundant air data computers, although some raw data is also sent to standby instruments.
I remember not long ago poking my head into a bizjet built in the 1950s that was mostly unchanged. On the one hand, that creates burdens for pilots nowadays who are used to more help from their avionics. But OTOH, failures were probably a bit more straightforward because they didn’t have computers standing between them and the raw data.
Remember, even great automation adds complexity. That Airbus that went down over the Atlantic some years ago was a case in point - without going into details I suspect it might not have happened in a Boeing. A lot of faults I encounter these days as a pilot are automation / instrumentation related, and it requires some real parsing of the checklist and knowledge of the systems to figure out what’s happening.
Edit: I didn’t really answer the last question. Yes, you can fly a modern jet by hand on backup instruments. It’s no fun though, I can tell you that. In the simulator I’ve had occasion to hold a flashlight on the backup instruments so my partner could see what they were doing. Thankfully, I’ve never encountered that situation in real life.
They often share technology actually; when looking at new tech you often get adapted instrumentation (from a software and computer hardware perspective) that’s existing in the commercial sector. When Collins or Honeywell says “this is the unit we have, we can adapt these parameters” you kind of design from there (yes, there’s more customization possible, but there’s starting baseline implementations for a bunch of stuff).
There aren’t any “gauges” on a Global 7500. There isn’t even a CB panel, they’re electronic circuit breakers. I have no idea how that works though, electricity is magic as far as I’m concerned.
The cockpit of a late Challenger 601 is pretty much the same as that of an early CRJ-100/200. They’re siblings, from a design perspective.
I’m not a pilot - trust me, you wouldn’t want me to be one - but the “reliance” on tech is the same if not higher because all the tech is available.
Whoo boy, I’ve flown one plane that had a mixture of physical and “virtual” circuit breakers and I didn’t like it. Quick story for those who are interested:
We were on the ground getting ready to fly passengers and the computers were throwing a fault of some kind. The checklist was no help, and neither was the in-house troubleshooting document we had that contained tribal knowledge on what to do in certain situations.
It wasn’t looking good. Even a complete restart didn’t clear it. While my partner was on the phone with maintenance I began paging through the virtual circuit breakers. There were many dozens of them and none seemed relevant. On about page 8 I found one that was flagged as tripped. I called over my partner over, pointed to it and said I hadn’t made any changes yet.
He nodded and I told the computer to reset it. It did and suddenly the fault cleared. Maintenance decided it was kosher and we flew the trip. But we never did find out why that fault occurred or why that particular virtual breaker was the problem. But only a manual search found it, and no checklist directed us there.
I hope you/maintenance reported it to the OEM so that they could create a procedure and update their manual! I’ve also supported lots of that - and raised my own comments several times too!
Two days ago I rode in a light plane, a 172, for the first time since about 2005. That previous event ~19 years ago was two rides in a Cherokee Six, up to a business meeting and back home the same day. The time before that was flying my own plane, a Twin Comanche, back around 1998 shortly before we sold it.
Evidently lightplane GA is not gonna survive on my use of it. But it was fun and nostalgic. And really, really rickety and primitive.
To put some closure on this Allentown GA fatal accident:
The final report came out this month (June 5 2024) for the September 28 2022 accident. Bottom line: they don’t know what the root cause was (severe post-accident fire damage), but the proximate cause is believed to be simply insufficient engine power.
Reading through the NTSB narrative reconstruction of events, my ancient low-time pilot assessment is: if you’re on a takeoff roll and things don’t seem right, and there’s runway left, ABORT!.
Recap:
KXLL paved 4,000 ft runway, Piper PA-28 single engine, instructor 1350 total hours and student 51 total hours; plane crashed about a mile from the end of the runway, where it burst into flames; student killed, instructor severely injured.
The report is a downloaded PDF so not easy to link, but here are some snippets (bolding mine):
The below I just don’t understand:
Late September in Allentown, a temperature of 18 degrees C (64 F), below 1,000 feet AGL, presents a serious risk of icing? Granted, I learned to fly in Florida; carb icing maybe, but the text didn’t make it clear. Not sure if this model (-140) is carburated; even if it was, my belief is that carb icing is mostly a concern during low-power (approach, for example) situations.
Given the presence and actions of the instructor, the below shouldn’t be a factor, but including it for completeness:
The official finding is: “A partial loss of engine power for undetermined reasons.”
From my limited piloting experience, and especially if accompanied by an instructor, if I’m only 200 (or less) feet airborne, which should’ve only taken up a quarter to a third of the runway, and engine/climb performance is concerning, I’m setting 'er back down. But: hindsight and all that.
“The engine seemed weak” translates to not being able to reach normal power RPM’s. A Cherokee 140 is an easy plane to fly especially with only 2 people in it. And I never experienced carb icing in one.
And I agree with Raza, the instructor should have aborted takeoff if there was runway left. I have experienced an impulse coupler failure on that engine (during run-up) in a different plane. I don’t know why it wouldn’t run on the other mag but the more I fiddled with it the worse it got and that was on the ground.
On Google Maps sat view (or equivalent), look at South Ranchwood Ave.,just SE of the town of Yukon. Where it meets I-344 (in a patch of woods), it looks rather like the runway they were supposed to land on, several miles beyond (and I-344 looks kinda like the longer N-S runway of the airport).
I find this hard to believe as the cause, though, because: 1. The boulevard lacks those special lights at the end of (and extending beyond) any runway; 2. Even under visual flight rules, commercial
pilots (as I understand it) are still supposed to use nav aids (capturing glide slopes, say? Or PAPI lights, at the very least!) to verify their location during approach.
Yes to all your questions. There are a lot of overlapping indications regarding a proper approach and visual recognition of a runway.
I haven’t seen any information regarding Southwest flight 4069 incident (LAS/OKC 12:05 AM 6/19/24). I would have expected release of tower communications but I’m not good at surfing FAA investigation. All I’ve seen so far was that they were 9 miles out and the tower alerted them to a low altitude situation.
Not sure why my post didn’t take so I’m re-posting it.
Yes to all your questions. There are a lot of overlapping indications regarding a proper approach and visual recognition of a runway. But I don’t think they had gotten to that point of the flight.
I haven’t seen much information regarding Southwest flight 4069 incident (LAS/OKC 12:05 AM 6/19/24). All I’ve seen so far was that they were 9 miles out and they were alerted to a low altitude situation.
The audio I found started with Approach Control contacting the crew about a low altitude issue. They started to climb and were asked if they still wanted runway 13 and they said they would take 17R.
The audio I linked to said it was Approach Control and not the Tower so that implies they weren’t cleared to land or had switched over to Tower to coordinate the landing.
Thanks. Very odd, then. Perhaps an altimeter malfunction (unlikely); or perhaps they set the barometric pressure incorrectly on the altimeter (possible, but it would only cause an error of a couple hundred feet, not a thousand).
Perhaps both pilots were distracted trying to troubleshoot some unrelated problem, and neglected to monitor their altitude and/or position? I can think of two fatal accidents over the last 40 years where this was the cause (in both cases, the distraction was about the landing gear).
But precisely because those accidents (and others like them) have drilled into all pilots’ heads the importance of CRM, I doubt this was the issue in this case.
Very odd! I look forward to learning the cause. Probably not “meaty” nor unique enough to merit a MentourPilot video, so I’ll rely on you folks to enlighten me, once more is known.
They could have been distracted. But they perked right up and started to ascend right after Approach contacted them. I hazard a guess that the internal conversation started with “oh shit”.
. No criticism from me; your posts are always enlightening and welcome.