On the contrary - a go around is quite likely to be a very safe way to avoid a potentially hazardous situation.
Huh. Well, that makes Taiwan’s China Airlines look all the worse then, I guess; within a decade it twice had massive fatal crashes in just that situation, IIRC. And that Korean airliner in San Francisco just recently too, I believe.
Well, a go-around isn’t all that useful when you’ve already managed to point the plane at the ocean instead of the runway.
No, the reason was that we were dropping like a stone. I thought I was going to die. Then the plane leveled off. The flight attendants and passengers truly were terrified.
Never. Unless the plane is upside down. Most injuries on a turbulence would actually be avoided if PEOPLE LEARNED TO USE THE FUCKING SEATBELTS. The planes are designed to withstand turbulence, so everything will be fine. A flight here in Brazil had some strong turbulence and quite a few people got hurt because they were not wearing their seatbelts. But the one who suffered the most was a very unfortunate guy who had some terrible timing and a bad case of diarrhoea.
Yes. All turbulence I’ve experienced falls under this category, because I get motion-sick easily and I have an extreme fear of all turbulence.
That wasn’t a go-around. The pilots lost track of their approach, and got low enough that they touched down just short of the runway.
1000x this.
I’m a “nervous” flyer on takeoffs, and everyone I tell that to thinks I’m weird. “Oh, the takeoff is the best part! That rush of power and the ‘vroom’ feeling of taking off! Wheee!” and “Landings are scary, all that drag and engines revving up and down!”
All I’m thinking the whole time is “Rotate.” followed shortly thereafter by “Please god, don’t lose an engine.” I don’t start to relax until the drink cart is being unlimbered.
However, at cruising altitude (even during some turbulence) I’m kinda fine with it.
WORST takeoff I ever had; Taking off in early afternoon in late June from Reno, after a bowling tournament, on a less-than-new 737. Airplane is packed. It’s hot. It’s got tons of bowling equipment on board. We’re at the gate and just as they switch over to internal power, there’s a “pop”. I happened to be looking right at a male flight attendant when it happened and his eyes got big for a second and he looked around, which set my heart racing (again, not hard to do on a plane readying for takeoff).
I try to steady myself, knowing that I’m already strapped in and whatever will happen will happen. So, passengers start messing with the air blowers and commenting on a weird smell. Great. Plane pushes back and we head for takeoff.
We start trundling down the runway (trundling, not sprinting). The ride is really rough and I notice the overhead seams in the cabin seem to be twisting oddly (now bear in mind, my imagination is good but this wasn’t imagination). Other people around me are uneasy as well, which doesn’t help. I think maybe the runway is rough for some reason and we’ll be better once we’re off the ground.
Of course not.
We lift and I hear the gears come up with a thunk and the plane start banking to the left (the side I’m sitting on of course, window seat - stupid). And it keeps banking. And banks more. Pretty soon I’m almost literally on my side staring down at the ground maybe 3-4k feet below. And it’s still bucking. I’m thinking this damn plane is going to wing over and I’ll have a ringside seat for it.
FINALLY it levels out (I assume the outbound leg had to bank sharply to miss the mountains, but it’s only in hindsight). It’s rattling, it’s shaking, it’s bucking. The whole way to Albuquerque it’s nothing but white-knuckle funtime for me as we hit every single thermal over the Southwest. My then-wife thinks it’s hilarious, and my friends try to distract me with card games - no such luck.
Once we touched down for our layover, I was told “I’m surprised you didn’t kiss the ground when you got off the plane!” My response - “Why? I have to get back on another one of those fuckers in an hour and a half!”
The second leg back to Dallas was smooth sailing the whole way. I’m convinced that old 737 was about to be retired (or by god should have been) because it truly SUCKED, in oh so many ways.
So - yeah. Fun. Remind me to tell you about MD-80’s sometime…
To be fair, they did attempt a go-around, but it was too late to do anything.
Fatigue cracks are a serious concern in anything made of aluminium. Aircraft just happen to be at the pointy end of the concern. It isn’t limited to commercial aircraft, or aircraft in general. Any stressed aluminium structure cracks. This is the deep flaw in the metal. Unlike most other metals there is no crack propagation free strain value. So, aircraft have an airframe lifetime which is mostly determined by crack propagation. Once the cracks are past a given size the airframe is no longer flight-worthy. A month old plane has cracks, it is just that they are tiny. A 20 year old plane will have bigger cracks, but if they are within the design specification, the plane remains flight-worthy. You can recondition an airframe, and it may involve replacing a lot of structure. Unless it is a B52 it might not be worth the effort.
Maintenance means watching the cracks. Cracks can start to propagate faster in different circumstances, and depend partly upon the cyclic loads on the structure - so it isn’t easy to predict exactly how much cracking is present without actually looking. Failure to realise that the cracks are growing faster than expected is not a happy thing to have happen to your aircraft.
We get the same issues on our off the beach catamaran. The dolphin striker (aka kingpost) strap is high grade aluminium, and is easily the most stressed element of the boat. And has awful cyclic loads. It develops cracks right from the start, and if not replaced when the cracks get past a critical size, it will fail. Failure of this strap usually leads to loss of the entire platform after a cascading set of failures leaves you with shards of fibreglass and bent aluminium where you once had a boat. So we take it seriously.
American Airlines flight 587.
The tail section of an A300 was sheared off due to wake turbulence. Pilot error was blamed but the plane design allowed for excessive rudder deflection at higher speeds. the plane tore itself apart as a result of pilot rudder input.
While planes are not flying tanks they are designed to compensate for the stress of of normal flight. That includes flying in turbulent air. Pilots are trained to avoid severe weather.
What was difficult in the past to deal with was wind shear during landing. Delta Air Lines Flight 191 crashed in Dallas in 1988 after flying through both sides of a storm down draft. This causes the airspeed to rise and then fall creating a situation where the pilot reduces power because of the increase in air speed and is then caught behind the power curve when air speed drops. Most major airports now have sensors that indicate wind shear.
Unless it was another pilot who recognized the situation then the answer is no.
It wasn’t a function of a stall warning indicator being ignored. What happened is that they lost ALL their airspeed indicators. All the pitot tubes froze due to a rare occurrence of rapid icing. The pitot heaters could not keep up with the situation. Without any indication of airspeed the plane can only be flown at that altitude by applying specific engine input against specific trim settings. They had a limited time frame to work with after recognizing the situation. We’re talking seconds and minutes before things get out of control and the pilots would have no feedback from gauges to tell them what’s going on.
I never worry about turbulence unless I am the pilot.
If there is no solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it. If there is a solution to the problem then don’t waste time worrying about it.
Most scary situation I’ve been through was on a night landing. Pillot approached the runway and flew low over it for a good half of it, and then realised what he did, threw the plane with a hard THUD and landed. Still have no idea of what happened.
It wasn’t that he used excessive input, it’s that he used alternating full left and right rudder in quick succession. NO airliner will handle this. There was, and still is because some pilots refuse to learn the lesson, a misconception that the manoeuvring speed on an aeroplane, known as Va, is the speed at which you can do anything to the controls and you won’t break the aeroplane. This is not true and has never been true. Va is the speed at which the aeroplane will stall before the wings would be stressed if you pull back on the control column, it gives no protection from excessive rudder input. In a jet with a yaw damper there is no reason to touch the rudder except to keep it straight on the ground during take-off and landing, to maintain directional control following an engine failure, and for very very gentle inputs to maintain balanced flight in a turn if you are exceptionally pedantic about balanced flight.
The engine failure after take-off scenario is the most practiced and well rehearsed sequences out of everything that can go wrong. I would be the least concerned about the guys up the front handling an engine failure than I would about any other abnormal.
Yes exactly. The stall warnings are biased because the anti-ice system is on. It assumes there is ice accretion on the wings regardless of whether there is or not. In the Colgan accident there was no ice on the wings but the stall warning activated early (it shakes the control column rapidly) and in response the captain yanked back on the column which put the aircraft in to a real stall, and he continued to yank back on the column until they hit the ground. I’ve been in a similar situation in the simulator. We had an engine failure and carried out an instrument approach with a bad weather circuit. While on the base leg of the circuit we got a little slow and the stick shaker activated unexpectedly because we’d forgotten to turn off the anti-ice system. However, in our case, instead of pulling the aeroplane into a real stall, my captain just said “oops” and bumped the power up 10% or so, corrected the speed and continued the approach. In other words, handled correctly it was a complete non-event.
The chances of a fatal accident will always be greater when you are operating close to the ground, however it is the approach and landing phase that has the most accidents, not the take-off phase. If I’m reading the statistics correctly you do have a better chance of surviving a landing accident than a take-off accident though.
I once sat next to a fighter pilot on a commercial flight from the USA to England. We were in bad turbulence and I noticed that he was white-knuckling the armrest. I guess that would have been a good time to be scared.
But why? There isn’t much you can do about it so might as well enjoy the rollercoaster-like ride.
The pitots did indeed ice up. But they de-iced less than a minute later, and worked properly until the plane hit the water, almost 4 minutes later.
There’s compelling evidence that they never recognized the situation.
Well, all aircraft systems were functioning normally for several minutes prior to impact. If at any time* during the descent the pilots had figured out they were in a deep stall (one clue to which would have been the numerous audible “Stall!” warnings), they could have easily flown away from the problem.
*Actually, during the final 20 seconds or so they were too low for a recovery.
Wait, what? Are we talking about American Airlines, the outfit that ignored the airplane maker’s instructions to remove a DC-10 engine and pylon in two steps, but instead they flatrated it using a forklift in one step, cracked the pylon and this was the result File:Aa191 ohare.jpg - Wikipedia
Or my personal favorite these guys went to service a 767 at LAX a number of years ago, forgot to chock the wheels, depressurized the brake system and went home for the day. The next day they came in to work only to find their nice shinny 767 through the fence on Aviation Blvd. oops.
You buddy might be the greatest A&P guy on the planet, but as a group AA is very underwhelming with their maintenance and why in over 750,000 miles of airline travel I can count on the fingers of one hand my trips on AA. I don’t trust them.
Airbus made changes to the A300-600 over it’s predecessor that significantly changed the feel of the rudder pedals. 1.2" of pedal travel and 32 lbs of force versus older models that had 4" of travel and 125 lbs of force. NTSB cite.
according to the same cite: Compared to other airplanes:
A300-600 has lightest pedal forces.
A300-600 has among the shortest pedal travel.
The vertical tail plane on this aircraft is attacked with 6 composite tongues fitted into mating receivers. These failed.
IMO the plane was poorly designed and destined for the structural failure that occurred. The pilots had no pedal feel relative to allowable inputs and the airplane did not sufficiently limit rudder travel in reference to air speed. The pedal feel they did have varied substantially from earlier models and other commercial aircraft.
I don’t want my plane to do that. Ever