That dude is both seriously lucky and unlucky at the same time. Glad he’s relatively OK.
Right - it’s about the worst possible combination. Which is why a professional (or indeed any) pilot should be at extreme pains to maintain a safe airspeed.
Based on the OP’s article and vid, I’d say they were already into the beginnings of a stall/spin by the time the entered the dashcam’s field of view.
As to the 3 minutes, looking at the reconstructed flight path I’d suggest they’d been airborne a minute or so, then the engine failed, they struggled with it for a minute or so = about 2 miles at ATR speeds, then finally lost control & hit the ground 15ish seconds later.
Depending on specifics of speed, turbulence, weight, nature of engine failure, whether or not auto-feather worked, coolness of the pilot flying, etc., there are a lot of ways for an engine failure shortly after liftoff to go badly.
Funny enough, historically the US big jet airline industry spent a lot of time in the sim having pilots practice these things, but always, always having the failure happen before liftoff but after the max abort speed. About 5 years ago they did some sim research, throwing in failures 20 or 40 or 60 seconds after liftoff when you’re starting to turn out of traffic, raise flaps, changing radios, updating nav computers, have already activated the autopilot, etc.
The (lack of) success rate for these sim scenarios was not a pretty picture. Folks had moved out of the mental state of *hyper-vigilant for engine failure *and into the mental state of busy business as usual doing a routine climb-out. The elapsed time to recognize, understand, and react was long enough that the situation usually deteriorated very, very far before an effective response was begun. Some folks snatched victory from the jaws of defeat. Many did not. Understand we’re talking fairly few seconds to transition from normalcy to “it’s almost too late.” Nobody was asleep at the switch for minutes.
That training shortfall has long since been addressed here in the US.
Turboprops airliners are typically in a more critical state during takeoff / climb-out than are jets. So it typically takes more cool, not less, for the turboprop driver to save the day.
Clearly these guys/gals were handed more problem than they could handle that day. How & why that came to be is the question the investigation will eventually uncover.
A split second slower and his car might have escaped unscathed entirely. A split second faster and he might have died.
The plane looked like it was falling all through the video. The turn to left meant they ran out of rudder or attempted to lift the wing with aileron which would accelerate the stall.
I don’t know what was in front of the runway but they were flying past buildings so their only option might have been to slam it on the airport grounds knowing it would tear up the plane. That is one whopping big decision to make in a nanosecond. But once in the air the nose has to come down to gain control of the plane. Of this, there is no option.
I can’t imagine how terrifying that must have been for the passengers. Terrifying.
It’s looking like they had an engine failure and then shut down the wrong engine, leaving them with nothing. Oops.
Even before I clicked the link, I thought of Kegworth.
What’s disturbing is that he SLOWLY reduced power on the good engine. that would have produced a loss of power, climb rate and rudder pedal force needed to maintain level flight. The plane was giving all the feedback needed including which way it yawed after takeoff.
They never wavered from their believe as to which engine failed despite all the input they received.
news report says that retraining is going to happen.
Retraining will certainly help but it may or may not be the underlying problem. This appears to be a straightforward engine failure that was made worse by pilot error.
There are similar examples in other airlines but there still remains the cockpit culture of top down decision making that negates the first officer.
You mean compared to an “ordinary” crash?
Not all crashes involve the passengers being aware that something is horribly wrong prior to the crash.
I am not a pilot, but when I heard this, I guessed that the pilots on the plane may have felt that the good engine was pulling them over on their back (obviously they were in that process in the video) and in a desperate attempt to keep from flipping over they reduced power. Bad idea, but perhaps they felt that was the only way to avoid trying to fly upside down. Again, not a pilot and don’t understand these things, but seeing the plane standing on one wing as it hit the bridge made me think of this possibility.
what you saw in the video (the fuller version) was a plane about to stall. It was falling out of the sky like the space shuttle. The last second drop of the wing looked to me like a classic accelerated stall. By that time the plane was already done.
About the only time you would pull power would be a failure at rotation and the plane was hovering at VMC (Minimum control speed) or a failure of the props to feather.
This plane had been in the air for I believe 35 seconds before loss of power. It would be too high and far to land so the pilot would have relied on opposite rudder and full power with the remaining engine. It would be clear by the way the plane yawwed which engine failed. This plane had auto-feather which is a big deal given the 6 monster size propellers. They would create a massive amount of drag if they weren’t feathered.
I’m giving a basic synapses of flight so the commercial folks can fill in the gaps.
Update: It was pilot error.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/01/transasia-plane-crash_n_7710286.html
It’s hard to believe that confusion as to what engine is running can happen, but it does. These pilots even managed to figure it out, but at low altitude and speed they ran out of time to do anything about it.
Here’s the cockpit recording for a US Air Force C5 Galaxy that crashed at Dover. They had shutdown their number 2 engine and were returning to land. At one point they bring all the engines to idle and when they advance the throttles, they leave engine 3 at idle and advance engines 1,2,4. Since engine 2 was shut down, they are now only flying on power from engines 1 and 4.
You can hear the 3 pilots talk about the landing, the 2 flight engineers discuss the flap settings, but nobody notices anything wrong with engine settings. There is no voice of concern until seconds before the crash when one of the pilots pipes up: “Guys, I’m concerned, we’ve got nothing left.” Fortunately, they all survived.