Fatal crash of a commercial flight (freighter) of a Caravan.
This video gave me the willies.
Interesting video, but a bit clickbaity (or whatever the video equivalent is). These are not direct quotes, but it was something like:
“Stay tuned to hear the real mistake that got Brittany killed.”
then near the end:
“We’ll never know why Brittany lost altitude just prior to the crash…”
Is that that Hoover guy? I find him a bit irritating for some reason. Mentor Pilot can be a bit click baity with his titles and stills but I find him to be an easier listen / watch at least.
Yes. I don’t think I’ve seen him before. The whole thing was and still is an accident waiting to happen. Vent stacks that change the approach angle and produce water vapor that can obscure them in poor weather conditions. No tower to warn them.
All I could think of is why didn’t they put strobes on the stacks? The ATIS should have some fancy warning that sums up “plane eating obstructions at the end of runway 20”. 100 ft isn’t much of a separation on a non-standard approach…
I was watching a war movie where the carrier pilot was giving Lat/Lon a position of an enemy ship. I wouldn’t think that possible while flying a plane in a combat situation. I would guess that ships triangulated on the radio transmission to plot out where the plane was. At best the pilot would have given a heading and duration of flight.
Thoughts?
Presume the movie was a pre GPS era. They had to be able to find the way back to a carrier that was moving while they flew, so they had a pretty good idea where they were. Wind would be blowing them off course the whole time, so you can’t just fly back the opposite direction you flew out on.
Carrier based bombers usually carried a navigator whose main job was knowing position. Those types were more often used for reconnaissance over single seat fighters.
My main thought is that’s a pretty lazy question without you mentioning what era you’re talking about. If they had radios and carriers it had to be after about 1935. And before 2025. That covers a lot of ground.
For naval reconnaissance purposes identifying the target lat/long to with 1 degree so ~60 miles is plenty good enough. A ship needs to drive for 3 or 6 hours to get to the next degree.
Almost as important is what course and speed they’re making and whether you think they spotted you and so might maneuver to confuse what you think is their course.
Assuming a WW-II ish prop plane, they were only making 180 kts at most, and probably more like 150 while searching. So 2 degrees per hour of flight. A recce mission would also have a bounding box of coordinates to search in. Not that the pilot & nav (if any) will hit the box precisely, but they’ll tend to offer their sighting coords relative to where they think they are within their assigned search area
Are they right about those coords? Maybe close enough for the fleet to find the enemy, and maybe not. In the story it’ll be whichever better advances the plot.
In the real world, oftentimes coords were laughably bad, leading to missed opportunities as surface fleets or subs hurried off for someplace 100 miles from where the enemy really is.
Starting in about the F-4 era so mid 1960s jets had INSes that were initialized on the ship before launch. Not great by modern standards, but accuracy within 20 miles was pretty well guaranteed, with 5 miles being perfectly plausible. Which even at 20 miles is plenty close enough to send more planes, subs, or ships with enough accuracy to find the target on their own from there.
I was aware of dedicated navigators in bombers who had the room to work. But that stirred me to change my search criteria and I found this on celestial navigation.. It talks about Lindbergh using equipment by himself while flying.
Yep. I forgot to mention it was WW-II. It was an American pilot relaying information on Japanese carriers.
WWII era carrier fighters rarely flew at night (there were dedicated night fighters, but a tiny minority). So celestial navigation wouldn’t work. Based on reading lots of pilot memoirs from the period it was mostly time and heading with wind corrections. The carrier could do radio direction finding and give them a heading to fly if they got lost.
Thanks. I wondered if they could triangulate off the plane from multiple ships that were spread out.
Also. I was wrong about Lindbergh. It was his wife who used one in a float-plane they named Tingmissartoq. It was used to navigate to the Far East.
In airplanes like the SBD dive bomber the crewman seated in the middle was a bombardier. Enroute to/from the target his job was being the navigator.
The various torpedo bombers were similar. Yes they’re “bombers”, but not the same as the larger multi-engined naval bombers someone may be thinking of.
All the fighters of that era were single seat.
That makes sense. I see the SBD plane listed as scout and diver bomber.
The NTSB has released the preliminary report on Bill Anders crashing his Bonanza into Puget Sound. Not much we didn’t already know but all laid out nicely. @PastTense cited a news media copy in the RIP Anders thread, but here’s a direct link to the NTSB CAROL Search Results - Prelim Report. For future CAROL searches, the NTSB event number is WPR24FA184.
Weather was severe clear, making any variation on spatial disorientation unlikely. The fact there appears to have been a concerted effort to recover the situation but too late in the game suggests permanent incapacitation is unlikely. Handy that somebody was video-ing this to provide that detail. Otherwise it’d just be a smashed plane at the bottom of the water with almost no idea how it got there.
Leaving distraction, malfunction, structural failure, or some very temporary incapacitation is the best of an unlikely lot of causes.
The fact Anders was an aviation celebrity suggests maybe NTSB will make more of an effort on this one than is common on GA mishaps. We’ll see.
Why do modern, fly-by-wire, commercial jets from Boeing and Airbus “average” the control inputs from each pilot?
I have watched far too many videos of plane crashes and, more than a few, mention one pilot is trying to climb the plane and the other is doing the opposite and trying to make the plane go down. The flight systems average out the inputs and so, basically, nothing happens.
Why would they do this? Why is there no switch which says, “Pilot A or B has control?” Averaging the inputs seems a mess with no good purpose. One pilot or the other is flying and the plane should listen to that person only. If something is going wrong the other pilot could flip the switch and take control.
Since both huge plane manufacturers do it the average way I would guess they have a reason for it but I cannot think of what that is.
In theory (and with conventional mechanical systems) the coupled movement is so that each pilot can tell that the other pilot is doing something. “I’m pulling back but I have resistance, hey, you, why are you pushing?”
It’s possible to disconnect the controls from each other, in the event that one gets jammed or broken, but to my knowledge there’s nothing to tell the plane which one is “correct”. The crew should be using only one anyway.
It’s a bit of a failsafe against poor verbal communication and cockpit noise. Improved Crew Resource Management training and procedures should contribute to reduced occurrence of pilots giving opposite inputs. As I understand it, the pilot flying is the pilot flying, until they hand controls over (or are incapacitated).
Fly by wire systems have to guard against several failure modes:
- One stick is stuck signalling neutral no matter what that pilot actually inputs.
- One stick is stuck signalling full deflection no matter what that pilot actually inputs.
- Equivalently to the above two one pilot is mistakenly, or maliciously, making a significant but inappropriate input.
- The two pilots both mistakenly think they are the only one flying and both mistakenly think that the other person is just sitting there hands in lap.
The “averaging” logic deals with the immediate second-by-second response to the first four faults. After which checklist procedures or normal crew coordination will isolate the fault or correct the confusion.
The fifth fault is in human factors, not in the automation. Procedurally, there is never a time two pilots should both be actively using the controls. The flyer flies, the monitor watches closely and with hands nearby to intervene in critical phases (IOW close to the ground) if stupidity starts happening.
IANA Airbus guy but there IS a switch up among the rest of the flight control automation switches on the center glareshield which controls which stick is primary and can take charge, versus which is secondary. What follows is the gist of my general understanding, never having flown a Bus; @Richard_Pearse can give us much better info.
Once the switch-selected take-charge pilot pushes their take-charge button on their stick, the other pilot’s stick is locked out. The routine change of aircraft control involves also resetting that switch. In effect the airplane knows who is supposed to be the pilot doing the flying.
The problem comes in when both pilots are confused and task-saturated and semi-panicked and just grab the controls. In that case neither is thinking clearly and the computer has no idea who to trust and who to ignore. Until the priority pilot pushes their button saying “I know we’ve been confused, and my counterpart may still be confused. But I’m not confused. Listen to me and only me.” Which the computers then do.
Here’s hoping the guy pushing the button isn’t the confused or malicious one.
FWIW the two-seat variants of the F-16 had / have the same basic switch. Inputs were averaged until whoever the switch favored hit the “cut out the other guy” button on the base of their stick. In the F-16 case the “who’s in charge switch” was in the front seat so that guy always won any real disagreement. In the Bus both pilots can reach it with equal ease.
An advantage to either mechanical or FBW systems with large moving yokes is the other pilot can touch their yoke to feel what it’s doing. And as @mnemosyne said, If I’m supposed to be the guy flying and I’m pulling but I feel unexpected resistance that’s either a jam or the other pilot shoving on their yoke. So the mixed-input case is very readily apparent.
With the F-16 & Airbus aircraft, the stick is just pushing against a dumb spring. You have zero tactile (“haptic” in the argot) feedback about what the other stick is or isn’t doing.
So it is much easier, both in calm times and in crises for both pilots to think they are flying simultaneously. With sometimes disastrous results. These confusions have certainly happened on old-fashioned mechanical airplanes too. The two-uncorrelated-sticks design just make it a lot more likely.
The latest top-end bizjets have sticks that provide actual computerized resistance, building in both a lot more feedback about airspeed and such, but also clear feedback if the other stick is being used too.
Those will probably be required on the next clean sheet design FBW airliners. But not yet. And probably never for retrofit.
FWIW here is one example (queued to the right time in the video but, if it doesn’t go there then jump to @23:55_.
Averaging is dumb. Obviously, the pilot on the left should control the left side of the plane, and vice versa.
I don’t think Boeing FBW averages the input. The controls are connected so you can just fight it out physically.
In Airbus there is a switch to take over control from the other pilot, and that is what you would use if you need to take over.
The summing of inputs is just what happens if you don’t use the take-over button and if you think about it, it’s not that different to what happens if the controls were physically connected. If one pilot is pushing forwards with 10 lbs force and the other is pulling with 10 lbs force, the control will stay neutral.
That is referring to a system designed to cope with control jams. If one column is jammed you can pull/push hard enough on the other one to disconnect the two circuits and allow the aircraft to be flown safely to a landing. In a conventional aircraft the separate control circuits would be connected to separate control surfaces (the jam might be further down the control circuit) and so with the controls disconnected you don’t have full control of all surfaces. Summing the inputs in a FBW aircraft mimics this behaviour.