This one has been well established. Because of clouds they were in whiteout conditions making the mountain invisible.
I’ve read many accounts of that crash. They were NOT in clouds. They have photographs from cameras on board, taken right before impact, showing perfect visibility. You can find some of them online.
What is theorized is that the pilots might have been confused by the white of the mountain blending with the white of the landscape beyond.
I can happen. Some chip detectors are monitored to give warning if a certain amount of metallic matter completes a circuit and throws a warning. Lots of other chip detectors are there but not monitored electrically, but rather removed and checked for metal periodically, or if a condition is suspect.
There are a couple instances when things like that happened.
There have been two instances of airplanes running entirely out of fuel at cruising altitudes but still making safe landings. One, the first, was the Gimli Glider already mentioned. The second was the Azores Glider or Air Transat Flight 236 that ran out of gas over the Atlantic and glided to a safe landing in the Azores. Again, one of the pilots was rated in gliders.
Another incident involved a British Airways flight entering a cloud of volcanic ash which stopped all the engines for 18 minutes. The crew did eventually get them going again. Several other aircraft were also damaged by the eruption and had to make emergency landings.
I never said they were in clouds did I? I said because of clouds.
The clouds in front of them created an optical illusion that not only hid the mountain but also made it look like they were exactly where they should have been. It’s called sector whiteout.
He’s a great advocate. I have a number of friends in medicine, one of whom is kind of a big wheel as both a doctor and a pilot. He has been working for years to bring CRM to medicine and is rather frustrated at the pushback.
A lot of it is inertia, he says. Also, doctors are reluctant to give up any of their power. But the biggest reason, according to him, is that there’s no FAA for medicine. Not a body that acts in the same way, anyhow. And he says it’s relatively easy to conceal many medical errors, even from other practitioners present. In any case, there hasn’t been as much buy-in for CRM within medicine, unfortunately.
I find his point about the ability to hide errors both plausible and frustrating. In aviation there are certainly mistakes happening every day, but the big (and thankfully rare) ones end up with smoking craters that are difficult to conceal. But even the small stuff gets attention. Example…
I was involved in an altitude deviation a few years ago that endangered nobody, caused no conflicts and didn’t even really bother ATC. The proximate cause was a common problem (similar call signs). That event, benign as it was, resulted in weeks of paperwork, reports, meetings with our chief pilot and FAA point-of-contact, etc. As it should be. Nothing ended up happening to me or my partner, but the data gathering inherent to these procedures is crucial. I wish the medical field was more amenable.
In theory yes, aircraft in emergency situations (and being on fire would certainly qualify for that) are supposed to be able to land pretty much anywhere without penalty. Not sure it always happens that way in practice.
At night in a storm over the ocean a human pilot can not maintain orientation without reliable instruments. Their instruments failed them. Confusion and disorientation were inevitable in that situation.
I don’t know how you could say it was caused by the Grand Canyon. It’s not like either pilot was maneuvering or changing altitude to give the passengers a better look or anything.
Plenty of aircraft have had one instrument act up in such situations; they had lots of functioning instruments they sadly failed to use correctly.
I have read that the plane did not have anything that showed the pilots the angle of attack, which is a design flaw I find so weird I wonder if those reports weren’t wrong.
Adoption of checklists in surgery has been widespread - at least, in developed countries.
“The checklist has been adopted in almost 90% of operating rooms in countries like the U.S. with a high human development index, a measure of health, education and standard of living. In poorer countries, a checklist is used only about a third of the time, according to the report.”
“Worldwide, the study found that health facilities in 70% of the world’s countries report using the checklist. Its use was found to be associated with a nearly 50% reduction in mortality and a 36% reduction in postoperative complications as well as improved teamwork and communication among members of the surgical team…”
"The uptake of the WHO Surgical Safety Checklist in just 10 years is a significant global health success story,” said (Atul) Gawande, the surgeon and writer who helped promote the checklist to improve surgical safety. “I am stunned to see how rapidly and enthusiastically the checklist has been adopted.”
I made that post about those two terrible air crashes because there is a sort of chilling fascination about the circumstances. I didn’t make it to start an argument, nor am I interested in starting one now. I am well aware of what is entailed in flying IFR. AF447 did not lose their instruments – they lost one set of sensors such that they lacked reliable airspeed indication, nothing else. The BEA final report identified no less than five separate and major pilot errors, all of which were preventable.
Checklists are just one part of CRM. They are a technique. I think it’s fair to say checklists are the easy part.
My cohort laments the lack of CRM culture within medicine. Many doctors are apparently still loathe to be questioned, or listen to the opinions of others on their teams. I have nurse friends who talk about how they are routinely ignored, and others are afraid to speak up. That’s the real success of CRM within aviation - the change of the entire culture. Another example:
I was in the jumpseat of an airliner a few years ago. The crew consisted of a very senior captain (who struck me as rather old school) and a young lady first officer. It was the FO’s leg to fly, and the weather at our destination was quite windy. She briefed the approach and added, “Feel free to jump in if you don’t like how this goes.”
Sitting just behind them, I had to stifle my laughter. This sort of interaction would have been unheard of before CRM. An FO, a young woman no less, flying a challenging leg and suggesting the captain “feel free” to do something. But she felt comfortable giving that brief, and it was well received. That’s success. That’s a culture change. Hard to do, and supposedly medicine isn’t there yet.
Apparently it is true, there was no dedicated angle-of-atack warning indicator in that cockpit – similar to how it was optional on the 737MAX and if you did not have that then neither did you have the warning indicator for when the sensors were not reading right.
True, I don’t think I implied otherwise.
Pick it up at 23:00.
You can see, they had to sign off. They trusted that the cargo was as listed but of course, it wasn’t.
They said in that video that in the early days, the skies were pretty open and they could go from A to B via a number of routes. In order to generate enthusiasm for the mode of travel, they’d do things like flying over the Grand Canyon. Both wrecks fell into the Canyon so I suspect both flights drawn to the same place to have a look instead of using the huge expanse of open sky. But IIRC there were also clouds contributing, and ATC wasn’t in effect yet.
Years ago I saw one that had pitot tubes cause problems as well. IIRC they had landed someplace warm and the plane sat, maybe for a couple days. They figured later that insects had gotten in. Maybe it was this one:
Until I saw one of these programs, I’d never heard of these, which are uber cool:
Just to add, culture was a major factor in the collision of a KLM 747 and a Pan Am 747 at Tenerife in heavy fog, still l believe the worst air accident ever in terms of loss of life. There were a number of contributing factors, but ultimately the fault was with the captain of the KLM. He was not only a senior captain, but also the face of many KLM advertisements – IOW, not just senior, but essentially a rock star within KLM. The first officer had concerns about the takeoff, saying to the captain at one point, from what he had picked up from the radio communications, “So he is still there, the Pan Am?” which was indeed still taxiing up the runway looking for their exit. The rock star captain told him no it wasn’t, and basically told him to shut up, and advanced the throttles for takeoff. Seconds later, as KLM was on their takeoff roll, the Pan Am 747 loomed out of the fog, still on the runway. The KLM tried to leave the ground, the Pan Am tried to swerve off the runway. Neither moved fast enough to avoid the worst airline disaster in history.
Incorrect.
They had numerous instrument/indication problems in that cockpit which had a lot to do with why the pilots were so damn confused and had trouble functioning.
I am, by the way, basing this on my reading of the report and analysis for the accident from BEA, the French equivalent of our FAA/NTSB investigations. They did publish an English translation of the report back in 2011.
But from the wikipedia link, some highlights of things that impaired the crew:
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Temporary inconsistency between the measured speeds, likely as a result of the obstruction of the pitot tubes by ice crystals, caused autopilot disconnection and flight control mode reconfiguration to alternate law
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The crew’s lack of response to the stall warning, whether due to a failure to identify the aural warning, to the transience of the stall warnings that could have been considered spurious, to the absence of any visual information that could confirm that the aircraft was approaching stall after losing the characteristic speeds, to confusing stall-related buffet for overspeed-related buffet, to the indications by the flight director that might have confirmed the crew’s mistaken view of their actions, or to difficulty in identifying and understanding the implications of the switch to alternate law, which does not protect the angle of attack.
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The cockpit’s lack of a clear display of the inconsistencies in airspeed readings identified by the flight computers.
I’ve long felt that the French authorities played “blame the dead pilots” rather than admit to possible design flaws in the Airbus, but that is admittedly my opinion. It would hardly be the first time a government scapegoated a deceased flight crew rather than make the changes that would provide better information to the pilots in such circumstances.
Nope, it’s correct. It is vanishingly rare for any airplane to have an angle-of-attack indicator. The airspeed indicator (when it’s working, that is, when the pitot tube isn’t iced over) and stall indicators are reasonable proxies for the information such a device would give. It’s not a design flaw, it’s industry standard practice not to have an AoA indicator. Now, whether or not they should be standard is something people have discussing for decades…
The BEA also claimed that the passengers wouldn’t have noticed/been aware of anything unusual, either, which is bullshit because there’s no way they would NOT have been aware of some of the wild gyrations that airplane went through prior to belly-flopping into the Atlantic.
Much of the “pilot error” was connected to problems getting proper information to the pilots.
Certainly, it was a circumstance where if the pilots HAD an AoA they might have been more situationally aware and not crashed. It’s not “pilot error” if the pilots had no way of knowing what was wrong because they weren’t provided with an instrument that would give them that information
Wincing because I hate to differ…
My last three jets all had AOA indicators. They are more common than you think these days.
And that sensor loss lasted only about a minute - normal airspeed sensing resumed at around 38,000’.
You are quite correct: This accident was precipitated by a brief equipment problem, but required an impressive sequence of errors by three pilots to become a crash.
I’ve heard it said that if all the pilots had decided simply to get up and walk off the flight deck, the plane would have recovered by itself.
At least one person upthread said that we investigate crashes thoroughly and that helps us learn and prevent future disasters.
But what can we make of MH370, which disappeared in March 2014?
On a more uplifting note, Lenny Skutnik rescues drowing woman from icy Potomac after Air Florida 90 crashes into 14th street bridge:
