[HN Gopher] Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incide...
___________________________________________________________________
Boeing 777 departing Dubai nearly had a major incident after
takeoff
Author : lsllc
Score : 738 points
Date : 2022-01-01 20:31 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (onemileatatime.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (onemileatatime.com)
| mikotodomo wrote:
| This is really cool, I've never seen an article (and commenters)
| go into such detail on a plane incident.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| I cannot imagine how unbelievably loud and damaging having a 777
| fly _75 feet_ above my house would be.
| ghaff wrote:
| Planes taking off from Boston Logan can fly as low as 300 feet
| over the neighboring town of Winthrop--and average about 700.
| I've kayaked in the area and you basically have to stop talking
| every few minutes when a plane takes off. Arriving flights are
| even a bit lower (although not as loud).
| easton wrote:
| There was an episode of Cheers about this, where Carla buys a
| house extremely cheap and then believes it is haunted. After
| sleeping a night there, she finds out it's because it is
| close to where planes land at Logan Airport, which calms her
| nerves.
| ghaff wrote:
| Ha. Don't remember that.
|
| I was kayaking with a long ago girlfriend and we were in
| the parking lot for the Winthrop boat launch. And I do
| remember we got into some conversation with a local and HE
| TALKED VERY LOUDLY. Which was something we joked about for
| a time.
|
| You could actually land your boat at the end of Logan
| airport from there. But I assume if you were to do so,
| serious people with serious weaponry would pay you a visit
| very quickly.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Following up from another thread, excluding reflections and
| what not, a plane at 75 feet should be 16x louder than the
| same plane with the same throttle settings at 300 feet. Sound
| follows the inverse square rule, where a change in distance
| of X reduces the perceived noise to 1/x^2. Since 300/75 = 4,
| you get a factor of 16 in perceived difference. Yikes.
| quickthrower2 wrote:
| I have trees that tall near me. I assume near airports they
| prune back tall trees though.
| jakub_g wrote:
| I live on the coast, 15km from major airport and sometimes in
| the summer planes fly directly over my apartment, including
| really huge ones, just a few storeys above (I'd say 100-150 ft,
| maybe more). With open windows, it's madly loud. With closed
| windows it's a loud but somehow tolerable.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| Perhaps an order of magnitude more? You'd expect an airliner
| at about 4000 ft at 15 km from the airport, assuming it's
| trying to land. It's also illegal to fly lower than 1000 ft
| above inhabited areas in most of the world.
| ashtonkem wrote:
| Typically sound follows the inverse square rule, so the
| difference between the same plane at 1000 feet should be a
| 1/169th (1/13^2) of the noise at 75 feet. So two orders of
| magnitude.
| jakub_g wrote:
| The airport is sea level, I live on a little hill in a
| 3-floor building and the airplanes cruise over my head at
| what feels like 15th-20th floor max.
| markdown wrote:
| I wonder if a contributing factor is that they have local noobs
| flying. I know quite a few very highly experienced pilots (15+yrs
| at Emirates) were sent home due to the pandemic.
|
| The only pilots in the middle east with absolute job security are
| the locals, and they get away with shit that would see any expat
| fired on the spot. You can hear stories about this from all the
| airlines in the region... Emirates, Qatar, Oman, etc.
| 2143 wrote:
| > local noobs
|
| What's that supposed to mean?
|
| UAE doesn't have a high local population to begin with.
| Majority of people living there are expats. And among that low
| population only a few choose to become pilots.
|
| You know, from the rest of the world American pilots flying in
| America also look like "local noobs".
|
| Let's wait until the relevant authorities release their final
| report.
|
| Maybe those particular pilots are questionable, but I don't
| think it's fair to blame the entire carrier.
|
| Emirates is very responsible and it's definitely in their
| interests to run a safe airline.
|
| ----
|
| (I'm probably going to get flagged but I don't care)
|
| I've seen it again and again in HN. Whenever something goes
| wrong in Asia or Africa everyone's like "the noobs over the
| don't know what they're doing".
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| You put your life in many other people's hands every time you
| step into an airport. If you use Chickens, Goats, and Passengers
| Airlines, expect not to make it to your destination in one piece.
|
| 737 NG (-6xx (736), -7xx, -8xx (738), -9xx (739)), MAX, and 787
| are reasons not to fly on Boeing equipment. They have both
| obscure (Ducommun) and well-known history of cutting corners in
| design, testing, manufacturing, and who knows where else.
| Furthermore, Boeing pilots have huge cognitive dissonance issues
| around these matters because their salaries depend on it
| (remember Upton Sinclair's quote). They will overconfidently
| swear on their mother's graves that their equipment is "safe" on
| blind faith while unable to face the overwhelming evidence to the
| contrary. Boeing isn't as bad as kit planes made in someone's
| backyard or Tupolev's, but the cutthroat profit-obsession culture
| is different than at Airbus in terms of priorities.
|
| Human-piloted aircraft for routine transportation makes no sense.
| In terms of safety and ecology for long-distance travel, trains
| will dominate in the end because flying adds inherent risks and
| consumes much more energy.
| mdoms wrote:
| > Human-piloted aircraft for routine transportation makes no
| sense. In terms of safety and ecology for long-distance travel,
| trains will dominate in the end because flying adds inherent
| risks and consumes much more energy.
|
| OK cool I'll just take a train.... uhhh absolutely nowhere as I
| live on an island with extremely limited inter-city rail.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Are you deliberately ignoring the catastrophic, multiple-
| fatality train wrecks over the history of rail transportation?
| josephcsible wrote:
| Even the fastest passenger trains are quite slow compared to
| average airliners, and there's a lot of places connected by air
| that don't have train tracks between them. Air travel should
| stay dominant until both of those things change.
| jhugo wrote:
| Only beyond a certain distance -- there are a few routes in
| China and Europe where the train will get you from A to B
| faster than an aircraft due to the aircraft's speed advantage
| mostly being in cruise flight. If you take into account the
| time spent in the airport at either side, there are actually
| a lot of such routes.
| thethimble wrote:
| I disagree with so many things in this post...
|
| 1. Commercial airline travel is significantly safer than
| driving on a per mile or per hour basis
|
| 2. This flight was from Dubai to Washington. I don't think
| there's any train routes between these two cities.
| errcorrectcode wrote:
| Then you're making a strawman just to be disagreeable without
| adding anything constructive:
|
| 1. I never recommended driving. It's awful for the
| environment and extremely unsafe.
|
| 2. Transoceanic train lines. Hyperloop or similar.
|
| Do you have anything else to add?
| josephcsible wrote:
| > Transoceanic train lines
|
| These don't exist, and probably won't for the foreseeable
| future. What should we all do until then?
| Cookingboy wrote:
| Teleportation, duh!
| ohashi wrote:
| internet shitposting?
| [deleted]
| anaganisk wrote:
| Oh yeah, lets jump the Musk bandwagon, and wait for 100
| years before he figures out how impractical it is and then
| go back to flying again.
| anticensor wrote:
| Did you forget BFR, which is a variation of Starship to
| do intercontinental commuter trips?
| chrissnell wrote:
| You, clearly, have never flown EK. I have six flights in EK
| first class under my belt. I've taken showers on their
| airplanes. I've enjoyed $1,500 bottles of 1964 port wine and
| cognac poured generously. I've eaten caviar and socialized at
| the onboard lounge.
|
| Believe me, EK is nothing like a "chicken and goat airline".
| It's world class all the way.
| umanwizard wrote:
| The fact that their service in first class is luxurious
| (which nobody is denying) doesn't necessarily imply that
| their pilots are good.
| jhugo wrote:
| Sure, but the reference to chickens and goats in the parent
| comment indicates a severe lack of knowledge about
| Emirates, the UAE, and (I would venture a guess) perhaps
| most of the world outside the USA...
| anaganisk wrote:
| What makes you think emirates doesn't have good pilots? Do
| you have any source for that? Emirates is not even a budget
| airline, like RYAN AIR. I mean unless you are the one who
| trained all emirates pilots, I don't think you should be
| calling them a goat airline because an incident happened.
| If you look deep, every airline and even Airbus had issues.
|
| >The maiden flight of A320 Air France 296: Official reports
| concluded that the pilots flew too low, too slow, failed to
| see the forest and accidentally flew into it. The captain,
| Michel Asseline, disputed the report and claimed an error
| in the fly-by-wire computer prevented him from applying
| thrust and pulling up. In the aftermath of the crash, there
| were allegations that investigators had tampered with
| evidence, specifically the aircraft's flight recorders
| ("black boxes").
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| At least this sounds like pure human error, failure to follow
| pre-flight checklists, and not a Boeing engineering/mechanical
| problem.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| But engineering/mechanical problems can be identified,
| analyzed, and eliminated (or mitigated). Human error still
| finds a way around our many attempts (training, checklists,
| standardized procedures, etc) to prevent it.
| bmitc wrote:
| > engineering/mechanical problems
|
| These problems are often due to human problems or errors.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| Indeed. You can design some mechanisms as failsafe, but there
| aren't any failsafe pilots.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| This seems to be a good summary:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=23fiDj8Uy6Q
| Daishiman wrote:
| Why are knots used in aviation over kph?
| cmurf wrote:
| From nautical roots, hence aeronautical. Quite a lot is
| borrowed by aviation from maritime.
| NikolaeVarius wrote:
| Convention, smaller numbers, everyone that it matters to knows
| it
| pc86 wrote:
| I can't imagine "smaller numbers" plays any role at all.
| ghaff wrote:
| Historical reasons mostly. For the same reason that various
| units are used in all sorts of different industries. And guess
| what? If you changed you'd probably end up with some accidents
| in the transition as a result.
| realityking wrote:
| Both aviation and marine navigation generally use nautical
| miles for as it's a little easier to use for long distance
| travel (plus tradition and inertia). Measuring speed in knots
| make things like dead heading calculations a lot easier.
| nradov wrote:
| Using knots made navigation calculations easier with paper maps
| marked in degrees and minutes. A nautical mile is the same as a
| minute of latitude, and a knot is one nautical mile per hour.
| Now with electronic navigation systems kph would be just as
| easy, but aviators are all used to thinking in knots so
| changing would be difficult.
| jillesvangurp wrote:
| It's partly true. However, a lot of planes outside of the US
| would have used kilometers per hour historically. For example
| German WW II planes did that. Likewise a lot of Russian cold
| war era planes did the same. And lots of modern planes (e.g.
| French ones) still do. And some planes in the US actually use
| miles per hour instead of knots; especially in general
| aviation.
|
| It's just that post war, the US aviation industry was very
| dominant and the metric system never was popular there. For
| the same reason feet are used instead of meters for measuring
| altitude. And unlike with nautical miles, there's not much of
| an advantage for that. However, the units for altimeter
| settings are metric (i.e. millibar instead of inches of
| mercury) in much of the world except in the US.
|
| For flight controllers and procedures they had to pick a unit
| for flight levels that everybody understands in the same way
| and since the US aviation industry after WW II pretty much
| dominated, a lot of planes would have used feet.
| Internationally, flight levels are used everywhere above
| certain altitudes. Those are basically feet divided by 1000
| (kilo feet?, LOL). So, FL 29 would be 29000 feet at 29.92
| inches of mercury in the US and 1013.2 millibars in the rest
| of the world.
|
| The Russians actually used meters until very recently
| apparently and only switched to feet a few years ago after of
| course first supporting flight levels. And apparently, the
| Chinese still use meters:
| https://ivao.aero/flightops/divprocedures.php?id=CN and
| planes must actually be capable to switch their altimeters to
| using meters to fly in China. Likewise, North Korea uses
| meters apparently.
| supernewton wrote:
| A nautical mile is equal to (about) one minute of latitude,
| which probably made calculations easier back in the day, with
| the tradition carrying forward.
| jleahy wrote:
| History is surely one thing, but another key point is that
| these speeds are always KIAS (indicated air speed). This is a
| measurement that doesn't correspond to either true ground speed
| or true air speed (but is far more useful for flying than
| either of these).
|
| Certainly I would find kph/mph slightly confusing as you might
| expect it to correspond to some actual velocity, rather than
| something to do with air pressure.
|
| Maybe we should measure airspeed in mbar instead?
|
| (ofc navigation is a different matter, and there just history
| prevails)
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Other commenters say it's historical are, well, mostly right,
| but there is a distinct advantage to knots: a knot is 1 NM per
| hour, and 1 NM was historically defined as one arc minute
| latitude. So if you are looking at a chart and doing
| calculations by hand or in your head, NM and kts are very
| convenient. It lets you mostly do chart -> distance -> time and
| fuel measurements/calculations in your head.
|
| Of course this is not perfectly accurate in several ways but
| given chart projections it's usually Close Enough.
|
| The speeds given in the article are a little ambiguous in the
| details, the number given in the text is probably KIAS (but
| maybe not?) and the numbers from FlightAware will be ground
| speed.
| thinkingkong wrote:
| When you translate maps with vast distances down to units, a
| nautical mile equals a minute of latitude. With long distances,
| you refer to lat/long over following a road.
| Someone1234 wrote:
| From my understanding there are two advantages:
|
| - So that when kph/mph is heard a pilot knows they're
| referencing ground speed, whereas knots is air speed.
|
| - Pilots use latitude/longitude, and a knot is "exactly equal
| to 1/60th of a degree of latitude. A 1/60th of a degree of
| latitude is known as a minute of latitude. Therefore, a knot is
| equal to one minute of distance. There are 90 degrees from the
| equator to the pole."
|
| But reality is that changing international standards is very
| hard, and nobody wants to have the battle when knots works
| "well enough." It likely started because existing nautical maps
| were used for over-ocean flight planning and stuck.
| mulmen wrote:
| Knots is used for ground speed as well I thought?
| adamm255 wrote:
| I've never heard Knots used on land. Sea and Air yes!
| V-eHGsd_ wrote:
| the ground speed of an aircraft is reported in kts.
| anamexis wrote:
| Knots are indeed used when taxiing at airports.
| mulmen wrote:
| Ground speed is speed over the ground. This includes when
| the aircraft is in the air. Airspeed is the speed of the
| plane through the air. These are _not_ the same thing.
| Both are reported in knots.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Really depends on the context. Usually things that were
| designed for pilots to use will display ground speed in
| knots since it's likely the pilot will be comparing against
| calculations done in knots. Things that were designed for
| the general public usually show mph since most people don't
| have a good sense of how fast a knot is.
|
| Taxi speeds are always written in knots, so I suppose you
| could say it is "official" (in terms of aircraft handbooks,
| airfield directories, etc) to use knots for ground speed.
| Of course the situation of an aircraft's ground speed while
| on the ground is sort of an edge case.
|
| On the topic of odd units, the operating handbooks for jet
| aircraft often use mach number for limits, which has some
| of the same properties as KIAS as far as being density
| dependent but is a little more precisely defined.
| mulmen wrote:
| > So that when kph/mph is heard a pilot knows they're
| referencing ground speed, whereas knots is air speed.
|
| Who is using MPH/KPH in the course of flying a plane? Why
| would this ambiguity resolve to "that must be ground
| speed"? Why would there be ambiguity in a speed readout
| at all? Surely context and procedure should disambiguate
| this rather than units?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| I'm not actually sure where that quote came from, but
| yes, there's not likely to be much confusion. Ground
| speed is usually displayed by some kind of computer,
| could be a glass panel or just an aviation GPS unit, and
| is usually marked "GS" or "Kts Ground." And it's sort of
| considered, philosophically, to be more a navigation
| thing than an actual flight instrument, since you only
| really pay attention to it in flight if you're doing
| navigation calculations.
| mulmen wrote:
| That quote came from the post I replied to originally.
| Beyond that I'm unsure of the source.
| leetcrew wrote:
| seems slightly odd to use an angular unit for airspeed; the
| linear equivalent would technically depend on altitude. I
| guess airplanes don't actually fly high enough for that to
| matter.
| yesenadam wrote:
| What seemed odder to me is GP's talking about speed as if
| it's the same as distance:
|
| > a knot is "exactly equal to 1/60th of a degree of
| latitude. ...Therefore, a knot is equal to one minute of
| distance."
|
| I'm not sure what that quote is from, but it's is akin to
| saying "A metre per second is equal to one metre." Um, no.
| The units don't match.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Oh, I think I didn't even read that correctly since it
| seems like it's just a mistake. A knot is, for historic
| reasons, a term for NM per hour. An NM is defined by
| latitude.
|
| I believe that the term knots originates from a method of
| measuring speed at sea by use of a twisted rope and a sea
| anchor, but perhaps that's apocryphal. Presumably though
| the definition in terms of NM was a later improvement.
|
| While I don't have any real evidence for this, I would
| speculate that part of the reason for the enduring use of
| knots in aviation is that, much like the old twisted
| rope, it links the unit to the instrument. The speeds
| usually quoted for aircraft are in KIAS, Knots Indicated
| Airspeed, a measurement which is basically defined by
| what the instrument shows. It is intentionally
| uncorrected for various errors in the instrument design.
| This happens to be convenient because many of the same
| factors that affect the instrument calibration also
| affect the aircraft handling, so handling at 100 KIAS
| tends to feel similar even though the actual speed varies
| by altitude etc. KCAS and KTAS, Calibrated and True
| Airspeed, are both KIAs after correction for various
| errors and are useful for certain calculations but not
| nearly as often as KIAS. My point is that it might be
| helpful to use Kts rather than MPH or KPH because it
| helps keep these factors in mind and helps to reduce
| ambiguity about whether a number is indicated or true,
| although people very frequently just write knots when
| meaning KIAS.
|
| Of course for ground speed none of this matters but
| ground speed isn't really a "flight" concern per se, more
| just used for navigation calculations.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| It was only ever approximately accurate anyway, a NM is no
| longer an arc minute because that is inconsistent even
| along lines of latitude, so it had to be pinned to 1.852km.
|
| Aviation, broadly speaking, inherited all of its navigation
| techniques from the maritime world. In particular, prior to
| radio methods and to some extent today aviation navigation
| is based primarily on dead reckoning periodically corrected
| by observations, which is a technique that was pioneered in
| marine navigation. Since early pilots learned to navigate
| from seafarers, their units and conventions became strongly
| embedded in the field. It is, after all, still not unusual
| to refer to an aircraft as a ship, especially informally.
| [deleted]
| usrusr wrote:
| Ironically the metric system suffers the same theoretical
| "error" as the not-an-arc-minute-anymore NM because the
| meter was originally defined by taking the distance from
| pole to equator (to the best of their knowledge at the
| time) and then shifting the decimal point to get
| something human scale.
| mulmen wrote:
| > to the best of their knowledge at the time
|
| I think it was actually extrapolated from a survey of the
| length of France. No idea how they did that
| extrapolation.
| kergonath wrote:
| Initially, yes. The story itself is quite fascinating,
| and the Wikipedia page on the metre is a good starting
| point.
|
| This was a hot topic during the 19th century as different
| improvements in the techniques and devices used to
| measure the Earth showed that the first measurements were
| imperfect, however good they had been at the time, and
| that the whole idea is not workable because the Earth is
| not a sphere. This lead to the formal definition of the
| metre as the length of a prototype in 1889.
| usrusr wrote:
| I imagine that the mental adjustment from sphere to
| almost but not quite a sphere must have been harder than
| a switch from flat earth to spherical. You just _expect_
| reality, if it matches a certain mathematical principle,
| to match perfectly.
| kergonath wrote:
| This has not been the case since 1889, when the metre was
| formally defined as the length of a prototype metre bar.
| So the metric system has not suffered the same error for
| more than a century.
|
| Of course, the metric system has not been in use since
| 1960, but this is also true for the SI.
| _s wrote:
| Pilot here, all distance and speeds are in nautical miles /
| hours. Mach numbers are also used often for faster / higher
| aircraft.
|
| Weight / volume changes from gallons to litres to cubic
| meters to cubic feet depending on US/RoW.
|
| Height is always in feet.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| At the very beginning, aviation had to solve the very same
| problems that sailors used to encounter at sea (navigation,
| precise position), so they naturally used the same algorithms
| and equipment.
|
| That is how naval terminology entered the lexicon.
|
| By now, it is so deeply ingrained that switching the entire
| world (well, there are exceptions) to the metric standard would
| likely cause some preventable loss of life.
|
| At least the knot/mile system is fairly internally regular. We
| tolerate a much less regular one, with a lot of weird
| exceptions (the Gregorian calendar) out of inertia.
| chrisseaton wrote:
| Because the Earth is a non-Euclidean surface, and knots make
| more sense for navigating a sphere.
| mulmen wrote:
| Maritime navigation techniques were adapted to aviation.
|
| For a similar reason airplanes have _captains_. A few decades
| ago they also had _navigators_. With a dedicated position in
| the cockpit.
|
| It's also customary to measure altitude in feet. Except in
| China (except Hong Kong), Kyrgyzstan, Kazakhstan, Tajikistan,
| Uzbekistan and Mongolia. Russia is actually moving _to_ feet at
| some altitudes. Turkmenistan similarly uses feet or meters
| depending on altitude.
|
| The units themselves are irrelevant as long as everyone uses
| the same ones. Switching costs are significant both in terms of
| training and equipment.
| munchler wrote:
| Why is it even possible to enter a desired altitude of 0 feet
| into an automatic pilot? As a layman, it's hard for me to imagine
| why anyone flying a 777 would want to maintain an altitude of
| zero at full speed for more than a few seconds (if that).
| bener wrote:
| Just a guess, is that the target altitude? Meaning they set it
| to zero during landing approach?
| jacquesm wrote:
| If true that would get you a hell of a surprise when trying
| to land at Schiphol.
| kerneloftruth wrote:
| I'm guessing it's done on approach so that the autopilot won't
| keep the plane from landing -- which would beg the question of
| why the autopilot would even be on during takeoff or landing.
|
| As one would guess, it shouldn't have been on. Insight comes
| from a comment in TFA:
|
| "I'm a captain at a U.S. major airline with a lot of time in
| 777s. Something this doesn't mention is the that even if ground
| level was set into the mode control panel, the aircraft
| wouldn't have descended if it was being hand flown. That means
| that the flying pilot here selected the autopilot on
| immediately after takeoff. This is unusual at Western carriers
| as we like to hand fly. To me this indicates a lack of
| experience or confidence or both."
| young_unixer wrote:
| Lots of landings are done on autopilot.
| taffronaut wrote:
| Interestingly I found that a few airports are below sea level
| [1], so flying at or below sea level is possible.
|
| [1] https://expertworldtravel.com/lowest-airports-world/
| fy20 wrote:
| The lowest is just over 1000ft below sea level. You probably
| don't want to be flying full speed at 0ft sea level there
| either.
| twistedpair wrote:
| The Germanwings Flight 9525 tragedy [1] was effectuated by the
| suicidal pilot inputting an auto-pilot target altitude of
| 100ft, while flying over high mountains. The plane dutifully
| flew into the mountains, murdering 150 people.
|
| While there are airports with elevations lower than 0ft, this
| is a good design question to ask. In general, it's assumed the
| pilots will do the right thing to save the day, if needed.
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Germanwings_Flight_9525
| argvargc wrote:
| This seems a very important question, and I'm not finding
| answers to it satisfactory.
|
| To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the
| aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight?
|
| It seems completely mad that an automated flying mode could be
| engaged in such an obviously suicidal way on a modern bulk
| carrier aircraft, without so much as a blaring warning and red
| flashing lights.
| krisoft wrote:
| > It seems completely mad that an automated flying mode could
| be engaged in such an obviously suicidal way on a modern bulk
| carrier aircraft, without so much as a blaring warning and
| red flashing lights.
|
| You are assuming that there weren't blaring warnings and red
| flashing lights. Probably there were many.
|
| > To elaborate, why isn't an autopilot "aware" of whether the
| aircraft is taking-off/landing or in-flight?
|
| Autopilots are much simpler systems. I don't know how much
| you know about them, but people in the general public believe
| they are some AI which flies the airplane from A to B. In
| reality they have much more common with a thermostat than an
| AI. You set a target heading and the plane will bank to match
| it. You set a target height and the plane will pitch to match
| it. Yes yes, they have many modes, and some modes can do much
| more complicated things than these, but it is not there to
| replace the pilot. It is a tool to alleviate dead simple
| piloting tasks so the pilots fatigue less on long flights.
|
| Just as an example how simple stupid they are: You can
| command the autopilot to climb, and if you don't adjust the
| throttle appropriately (either manually, or by enabling the
| autopilot to adjust it) then the plane will use up all the
| airspeed during the climb and the autopilot will happily fly
| it into a stall.
|
| Also just a general rule about aviation incidents/accidents:
| It is a good idea to wait for a proper investigation report
| before running far with all kind of assumptions about what
| happened, and therefore what you think should be changed.
| vultour wrote:
| You're talking about a GA aircraft autopilot, modern
| airliners go way beyond that. I don't know about the 777
| but I believe all newer Boeings are FBW. Airbus has been
| FBW since forever. I'm mostly familiar with the A320 but
| that things is pretty much impossible to stall under normal
| operation no matter how much you misconfigure the
| autopilot.
| krisoft wrote:
| No I am not only talking about GA aircraft. What do you
| think is going to happen if you turn off the
| autothrottle, manually set the throttles to idle and set
| the AFDS to vertical speed mode with a positive climb
| rate?
|
| Here[1] is an NTSB report detailing how the AFDS and the
| A/T work together in a Boeing 777. They enumerate several
| different combinations in which the autothrottle does not
| provide stall protection.
|
| It also calls out as contributing factor the crew's
| mistaken belief that the airplane is pretty much
| impossible to stall.
|
| 1: https://www.ntsb.gov/investigations/AccidentReports/Re
| ports/...
| vultour wrote:
| As I said, I was talking about the A320. You get alpha
| floor protection which triggers TOGA thrust even with the
| autothrottle disabled. I would have hoped newer Boeings
| offered similar protections, the 737 always struck me as
| being super "analog" compared to the A320.
| neycoda wrote:
| When the rich and powerful start feeling the bad effects of
| corporate greed and lack of safety oversight, they'll start doing
| something about it.
| belter wrote:
| Read what is the current top comment in the article linked above,
| from a U.S. captain also flying 777's, for the list of checks the
| crew apparently missed.
|
| Biggest flag is flying pilot apparently selecting autopilot on
| immediately after takeoff. Emirates note to their crews,is even
| more bizarre. Like an hospital reminding Anesthesiologists to
| check if patients are fully knocked out before operations.
|
| Incident still under investigation but it looks bad.
| jacquesm wrote:
| More like a hospital telling anesthesiologists not to
| disconnect their lines because the next anesthesiologist might
| be an incompetent.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Exactly.
| cmurf wrote:
| https://avherald.com/h?article=4f24b2d7&opt=0
| usr1106 wrote:
| This! While the maintainer of the site is a "strong character",
| I would trust him for timeliness of updates and correctness of
| the information provided.
| twistedpair wrote:
| <3 to Simon Hradecky for all his hard work over the years.
| Such a great AV safety resource.
| vultour wrote:
| How is he a strong character? The only strong characters I've
| ever seen were other people in the comments, and I'm
| surprised he hasn't disabled them years ago.
| usr1106 wrote:
| The style of the web site has not changed for 20 years,
| insisting on his conventions of writing airline names
| (France instead of Air France), not allowing links in
| comments. The list goes on, but I haven't followed the site
| for a while so I don't remeber the details.
|
| Not that I would have a problem with that. It's his site, I
| have not paid, so he can do things his style. It must be an
| unbelievable effort to gather all the information.
| mempko wrote:
| So there was some damage from that departure. Yikes.
| lisper wrote:
| Double yikes:
|
| "The aircraft performed the return flight EK-232 on schedule"
| [deleted]
| jakub_g wrote:
| Can someone ELI5 why the plane was not gaining altitude despite
| higher-than-usual speed? (The physics behind it)
|
| The autopilot set to the lower-than-current altitude effectively
| set the flaps into descent mode so it needed higher speed than
| usual to start climbing up?
|
| Also how come it finally started getting altitude even with
| destination altitude being zero?
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| Roughly speaking, if you push forward hard enough the plane
| goes down. There are limits to that of course, but in this case
| the FD wanted to maintain an altitude of 0 so it was
| "suggesting" a downwards pitch to the pilot, and the pilot was
| doing as told. The FD is only an advisory system, it basically
| lets the pilot choose a goal and then it shows on the attitude
| display where to point the nose to achieve that goal. It helps
| pilots to be more efficient and precise and, in theory, avoid
| errors. In this case though it was misleading and apparently
| the pilot did eventually realize that and stop following it,
| but very very late, after other indications like high airspeed
| and the view out the window would have strongly suggested that
| the climb was not going as intended.
| caf wrote:
| Never mind the passengers, this would have been pretty scary for
| those in the houses being overflown by a 777 at treetop height!
| twistedpair wrote:
| Biggest jet engines ever made, at tree top level, running @
| TOGA power. Yeah, that woke up the neighbors.
|
| Too bad this was at night. Would have been some wild Nest cam
| footage during the day.
| caf wrote:
| Probably could have made out the panicked expressions on the
| faces of the aircrew!
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| USA is one of Emirates key markets, I wonder why they didn't
| mandate higher quality pilots for the routes. I've flown quite a
| few times and remember hearing American-sounding pilot names on
| several occasions so I know they have them on staff.
| Havoc wrote:
| How do you know these weren't American pilots?
| anaganisk wrote:
| You are so close to imply US pilots are superior in flying? I
| have many incidents where US pilots failed and pilots from
| other countries heroically landing a damaged plane on US soil.
| But if yo didn't mean that. You must understand Emirates
| doesn't train pilots from their childhood. Who know/ the pilots
| might've been perfectly capable and even extraordinary. He
| might be under fatigue, may be he went into shock. Until FAA
| comes back we must avoid this talk. Recently people started
| making fun of pilots on Boeing 737 max, until they found out
| the plane had issues.
| umanwizard wrote:
| Why would Americans be any better pilots than people of any
| other nationality?
|
| Presumably what matters is the standards of pilot experience
| and training that an airline demands, not what country the
| pilots are from. Perhaps some of the Americans working for
| Emirates do so because they couldn't get jobs at a US legacy
| carrier. (I don't know whether this is indeed the case; I'm
| just claiming it's plausible).
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| > suggesting [...]the previous flight crew had left the altitude
| setting at [...] 00000 feet
|
| Does the system really display as "00000"? That seems like an odd
| design choice, I'd have thought just a single "0" would be far
| more legible in this scenario, especially if it's on a 7-segment
| display.
|
| I don't think passengers would have noticed this as anything
| other than a regular takeoff, because ATC does request slow
| climbs (ie. slower rate of ascent) every now and then.
| pilot7378535 wrote:
| Speaking of bad UX choices, the FAA is constantly dropping one
| or two or more digits from numbers like altitudes, runway
| lengths, heading, timestamps, etc. For example, "the runway
| from 180deg is 5200 feet long" becomes "RWY18 52" which I
| suppose you get used to, but it's just begging for mixups.
| wjossey wrote:
| As a student pilot, this drives me nuts. The volume of
| abbreviations, especially in NOTAMS, METARs, etc, is a bit
| obscene.
|
| What's wonderful too is that the abbreviations are often
| based on non English words as well, so they aren't intuitive.
| As an example, instead of typing "mist" in a METAR it is "BR"
| based on the French word brume.
| jdavis703 wrote:
| And yet, on a general interest site you write in acronyms
| only pilots and aviation buffs will understand.
| ahefner wrote:
| Exactly.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| AIUI it is a holdover from the days when such reports were
| sent by telegraph/teletype, and saving characters mattered.
| The abbreviations became standard convention and changing
| them now would be more disruptive than teaching new pilots
| how to decipher them.
| oceanplexian wrote:
| It still matters since most communication is over the radio,
| and in many areas it's highly congested.
|
| When there are 50 pilots on the radio and things are moving
| fast there isn't time to slow down and spell things out, and
| doing so can actually be more dangerous when extraneous stuff
| ends up on the radio and is misinterpreted.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> I don 't think passengers would have noticed this as
| anything other than a regular takeoff_
|
| It looks like the aircraft didn't leave the runway until the
| runway safety area at the end. That is something any passenger
| looking out the window could notice. A normal takeoff has the
| aircraft leaving the runway well before the end.
| diebeforei485 wrote:
| > That is something any passenger looking out the window
| could notice.
|
| I don't think so, because the departure was at 3:10AM local
| time (23:10Z). It would have been too dark to perceive.
| ipython wrote:
| You can see the lighted markers along the side of the
| runway indicating the number of thousand feet of runway
| remaining. I'd definitely be concerned as we pass by
| 2...1...and still not rotated.
| pdonis wrote:
| The runway lights and taxiway lights would be on. Sure, you
| wouldn't be able to see the ground itself outside the range
| of the lights, but you would be able to see enough to tell
| that the plane had not taken off at the end of the runway.
| [deleted]
| alkonaut wrote:
| Why did it take so long to correct? The computers must have been
| beeping and screaming about "overspeed" and all kinds of
| warnings.
|
| Sensory overload?
| anaganisk wrote:
| I don't think you get an overspeed warning on ground. Also by
| the time pilot realised he was already over-speeding, there is
| no way he is going to bring back the throttle, once he is up
| and climbing, until he crosses the transition.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| Some warnings are inhibited below a certain altitude or on the
| ground. I don't know if "overspeed" is one of them, though.
| aronpye wrote:
| Is this a cultural problem where some areas of the world tend to
| defer to authority even in the face of obvious error on the part
| of the authority? In this case the flight computer?
|
| I thought this was solved by training none-western pilots, in
| particular co-pilots, to be empowered to challenge decisions by
| another pilot instead of just doing nothing.
| robjan wrote:
| The pilots haven't been identified so we don't know about their
| cultural background
| lmilcin wrote:
| I am not a pilot, but here some very fundamental rules of flying
| a plane have been broken and from my point of view I can't
| classify this as a simple error.
|
| The crucial job of the crew planning/taking off is to
|
| a) calculate the decision points (speeds, distances) at which
| they have to decide to take off or not
|
| b) monitor speed and progress along the runway
|
| c) abort if they can't take off safely before the decision point
|
| What they did suggests to me a complete breakdown of discipline
| and process in the cockpit.
|
| The autopilot settings have absolutely nothing to do with it.
| shsbdncudx wrote:
| Turn it off and on again. Shouldn't these things have a standard
| baseline that they reset to? I would have thought you'd reset
| everything after a flight / first thing you do when you get in
| the pilot seat . The plane shouldn't have memory or the previous
| flight.
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| The article made me wonder if weather could have been a factor
| (although this seems sort of far fetched anyway). NCEI's archive
| is, well, 503ing, but Iowa State has a METAR archive and it shows
| good VFR conditions for the whole day of the flight with only
| moderate winds at most.
| johnnymonster wrote:
| Watched a caribe engine explode a few days ago in Saint Marteen.
| Was a lot more crazy than this one! Didn't seem to make national
| news either.
| anaganisk wrote:
| Its a Boeing and a major airline. Thats what matters for media.
| marcodiego wrote:
| For the first 24 seconds, the plane didn't leave the ground.
| Then, while a "normal" departure goes from 2000ft to 2875ft in 30
| seconds, this flight went from 1050ft to 3000ft in the same
| amount of time. Not only the take-off was scary for being to slow
| to gain altitude, when it started gaining altitude, it did so
| very quickly.
|
| For passenger who are knowledgeable, this was certainly
| frightening. Ignorance is bliss for most of us.
| dehrmann wrote:
| I'm surprised commercial planes don't do full software reset
| before each flight, and especially before a new crew takes over.
| Checklists only get you so much.
| twistedpair wrote:
| It takes a while (think like 10min+) to reboot these planes.
| Checkout "cold start 777" on YouTube [1].
|
| There are a ton of computers (FADECs for engines, fuel
| management computers, FMS (flight management), PFC (flight
| computers), weight and balance computers... and much more). All
| of these have state. Which way is up for the gyros. Proper
| direction for the compasses. Proper location on Earth for the
| navigation system... etc. Basically, a 777 has the mother of
| all POST sequences, so frames in line operation are rarely
| restarted, for operational efficiency.
|
| Reminds me of the navigation systems for some rockets (Atlas,
| IIRC), that require 24 hrs sitting level on the pad to fully
| initialize their starting ground state (super precise gyros).
| This ain't like restarting your internet connected juicer.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6UCD0o0NCU
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I'm surprised they don't do a full reset then set every
| checklist variable to an invalid state, in which the aircraft
| will not permit starting until all have been set by the flight
| crew.
| throwaway984393 wrote:
| This is the way. Like a computer-enforced Pointing and
| Calling.
| anaganisk wrote:
| I mean if you are able to do that, why to even have a
| checklist. I mean the computer must be able to complete the
| checklist, unless specified, no? Or is the checklist
| important because the pilots must know what they're dealing
| with?
| proactivesvcs wrote:
| I can't say I have much of an idea of what goes on in a
| cockpit but presumably not everything is related to
| something a computer knows, or can change. Clean
| windscreens, functioning levers, coffee cup filled ;-)
|
| Also having to poke the computer also helps check that the
| computer isn't obviously broken.
| hugh-avherald wrote:
| It takes too long and would achieve little. Flight turnaround
| times are very tight. The process for updating software on
| aircraft is, understandably, tightly controlled and only takes
| place via physical access. Pilots wouldn't know how.
| [deleted]
| wpearse wrote:
| The checklists bring the aircraft back to a known state.
|
| One 777 pilot commented to say that this issue should have been
| caught by at least two checklists, implying that neither
| checklists had been followed.
|
| Tangentially: if my 2006 Mercedes is reset (battery
| disconnected) it needs to idle for 20 minutes to re-learn the
| idle pattern. The vehicle then needs to be driven around for a
| bit to re-learn driving patterns. I wonder if there are similar
| settings on a 777 that would need to be preserved between
| 'resets'.
| nomel wrote:
| > The checklists bring the aircraft back to a known state.
|
| No, it doesn't, clearly. It provides a procedure that _can_
| be followed to put it to a known state, but its existence
| does not put it into a known state, with certainty. A reset
| puts it into a known state, with certainty. That known reset
| state probable wouldn 't be useful, but can be set to be
| least-damaging, where a checklist can then be used to then
| put it into a "good" state.
|
| My assumption is that many planes don't allow a reset to be
| trivial, since levers and whatnot are involved.
|
| I also assume the FAA/military has done research into this
| and, probably, found that requiring a manual checklist
| resulted in stricter adherence to the checklist.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| > My assumption is that many planes don't allow a reset to
| be trivial, since levers and whatnot are involved.
|
| I think you are correct -- not everything is a software
| setting. There are physical switches and dials and other
| mechanical controls involved.
| [deleted]
| ketanmaheshwari wrote:
| So if the altitude was set to zero, why did the aircraft even
| took off at all (I am thankful it did though)?
| krallja wrote:
| The plane took off because the pilot pulled back on the stick.
| There was no automation involved. The flight director is a
| suggestion, just like GPS navigation in a car. If you can't
| turn right because the road is flooded, you go straight, and
| ignore the GPS which is telling you to go right.
| dboreham wrote:
| I'm not a pilot and have never touched the controls of an
| aircraft, but I always mentally call out in my head: V1, rotate,
| V2 when I'm in a window seat.
| anaganisk wrote:
| How? V1 is based on many factors. Or is it just a fun thing you
| do? Because I do the same.
| supernova87a wrote:
| I am reminded for some reason about an Air Asia (?) flight a few
| years ago that departed SYD/MEL for KUL (?) where by some fat
| finger accident one of the pilots initialized the plane's
| location (while on the ground), skipping or misplacing one
| decimal point in the lat/long somewhere.
|
| He had to do it manually because some FD/GPS system was not
| correctly functioning or was inop, and then after doing this
| there was no warning that the plane's current position was
| suddenly registered as several hundred miles away from its last
| position. (correction, there were some warnings that were noticed
| but disregarded as they were very short and disappeared
| momentarily)
|
| On takeoff, the autopilot was engaged and dutifully turned its
| heading to the course believed to be from the current (erroneous)
| position to the first desired waypoint -- throwing the plane into
| an unexpected large turn in a low altitude risky phase of
| takeoff. The pilots correctly saw some problem, but incorrectly
| then carried out a series of mistaken recovery steps leading to
| full disengagement of the plane's normal coordinated flight
| controls ("normal law", etc) to try and get it to behave.
| Apparently, everything except just shutting A/P off.
|
| Well, one thing cascaded on another, the plane couldn't be reset
| back into normal flight control mode, there was fog, etc. and
| they couldn't land back in MEL and had to divert several hundred
| miles to SYD or wherever and a whole incident. It could have been
| even worse.
|
| Seems that complicated systems... can get complicated easily if
| you overlook or start off unsure of what has gone wrong.
| supernova87a wrote:
| Ah, here it is:
|
| https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2016/sep/07/airas...
|
| http://www.atsb.gov.au/publications/investigation_reports/20...
| twistedpair wrote:
| Varig Flight 254 was another similar case [1].
|
| Bad FMC data entry during preflight caused pilots to fly west,
| rather than east, until they were too low on fuel and crashed
| into the Amazon rainforest. Sun was setting, so cardinal
| direction was obvious, leading some passengers to ask flight
| attendants why they were flying the wrong direction, but they
| were brushed off.
|
| [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Varig_Flight_254
| dynjo wrote:
| I know who the pilot was on this flight and I'm damn happy she
| won't be getting near the controls of a plane again anytime soon.
| Coworkers were astonished she didn't rip the flaps off.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Pilot (piston engine, with only around 20 hours of light jet
| dual). As a pax on this flight, I might not have noticed much
| unless I was looking out the window.
|
| This seems like a fault of the crew (obviously), but probably
| more on the PNF (pilot not flying) than the PF (pilot flying).
| Article says 4 pilots were on board, but fails to mention that 2
| of them (relief pilots) were likely not in the cockpit on the
| departure.
|
| It's hard for me to imagine that a qualified crew would fly such
| a non-standard departure with "we were following the flight
| director" as an excuse. There's nothing above you to hit on
| departure; get away from terrain! Fly the calculated airspeeds.
| Where was the Vr callout?! That rotation to a pitch angle is what
| takes you off the runway, not the FD command bars.
|
| Once they made the mistake and corrected it, I don't have much
| concern with the continuation. 262 knots indicated isn't that big
| of a deal that I'd worry about shedding parts from departure
| flaps and leading edge devices or stressing the gear (they likely
| pulled the gear up well before breaking 250 KIAS anyway). I'd be
| more concerned with the safety of an overweight landing than
| continuing. (A 777 can dump fuel, but the crew that just moments
| ago couldn't fly an entirely routine departure isn't the crew
| that I want to be calling an audible and figuring out how to
| safely dump fuel at night and return for a max weight landing.
| How would they program the FD for that?! ;) )
|
| My prediction is that almost every pax had no idea how close to
| dying they came until they read about it later.
|
| I catch heat every time I mention that air crew training and
| certification standards are not uniform across the globe and that
| I am reluctant to fly on many foreign-flag carriers. (However,
| Emirates and most EU-flag carriers are ones that I would not
| hesitate to fly on.)
| jdavis703 wrote:
| > My prediction is that almost every pax had no idea how close
| to dying they came until they read about it later.
|
| This is why you should keep the window shade open during taxi,
| takeoff and landing (a handful of airlines require this, but
| IME it's the minority). In the event of a crash or other
| incident you also want to know what's outside the plane. Maybe
| there is burning debris on your side, so you want to exit from
| the other?
| beef-supreme wrote:
| I'm pretty keeping the shades up outside of cruising altitude
| is required.
| sokoloff wrote:
| That depends on the airline. El Al used to require them to
| be closed for ground operations (I assume from some I'll-
| conceived "security" reason.)
|
| It's common for daytime ops from desert airports for the
| cabin crew to ask you to close them at the gate to minimize
| heat gain on the aircraft.
| s0rce wrote:
| I've routinely been asked to close them once we've landed
| when its hot out (mostly in hot areas of the western US).
| dvlat wrote:
| I also had that impression until a flight attendant of
| Virgin Airlines insisted on me keeping them closed during
| takeoff.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| All European airlines I've been on always required then up
| for takeoff and landing
| FL410 wrote:
| > It's hard for me to imagine that a qualified crew would fly
| such a non-standard departure with "we were following the
| flight director" as an excuse. There's nothing above you to hit
| on departure; get away from terrain!
|
| My understanding is that the 121 guys train to fly the FD and
| not "wing it." I think it's easier for us 91 guys to jump to
| the "just fly the plane" mentality.
|
| That said, still a pretty baffling situation all around,
| especially the seemingly lackadaisical attitude towards post-
| exceedance inspection.
| [deleted]
| [deleted]
| dataflow wrote:
| > I catch heat every time I mention that air crew training and
| certification standards are not uniform across the globe and
| that I am reluctant to fly on many foreign-flag carriers.
| (However, Emirates and most EU-flag carriers are ones that I
| would not hesitate to fly on.)
|
| Has anyone made some sort of a rough list of which carriers one
| can feel safe on?
| jdavis703 wrote:
| I'm probably going to get downvoted for this, but focus on
| large, legacy airlines based in countries that have a long
| safety record (not just in terms of crashes, but also just
| general approach to safety).
| inglor_cz wrote:
| This is the list of airlines banned from flying into the EU
| on safety grounds.
|
| https://transport.ec.europa.eu/transport-themes/eu-air-
| safet...
| redis_mlc wrote:
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| My personal list is Tier 1 US, Canadian, British and German
| carriers as well as Qantas. Probably throw Air France and KLM
| in too. In Africa, Ethiopian would be the only airline I
| would fly if I had to fly an African airline.
|
| I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the
| list before I did a project with them last year. After that,
| I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.
| ComputerGuru wrote:
| > I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the
| list before I did a project with them last year.
|
| Does this include One World/Star Alliance members?
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| I honestly don't know enough to have an opinion. I'm
| personally a fan of Star Alliance, but I don't know
| enough about the middle eastern airlines.
|
| I DO know that even the airlines in NA/Europe etc. have
| their own share of... Challenges.. And a lot of those are
| saved by the regulatory / operating environment /
| culture, and those safeguards don't necessarily always
| exist elsewhere in the world.
| deepspace wrote:
| In Africa, South African Airlines also has an exemplary
| safety record.
|
| Air France dropped of my list of airlines to fly on after
| AF447.
| mardifoufs wrote:
| I've heard Royal Air Maroc is pretty good when it comes to
| African carriers but I'm not sure. I know they have (or at
| least used to have) experienced crews and good airframes,
| but I don't know anything about their maintenance standards
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| Royal Air Maroc had a senior captain bounce an ATR-72 off
| the surface of the ocean through pure bad flying in 2018.
| Literally the belly of the plane scraped the ocean.
| Basically avoided killing 50 people by a few inches.
| Wasn't gonna report it, but the damage gave him away.
|
| Look up air Maroc flight 439
| Redoubts wrote:
| https://admiralcloudberg.medium.com/madness-in-morocco-
| the-n...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Thanks I looked it up. Very interesting but scary story.
| ThePowerOfFuet wrote:
| That's wild. Thank you for sharing that with us!
| azth wrote:
| > I probably would have had a middle eastern airline on the
| list before I did a project with them last year. After
| that, I learned a lot that made me stick to the list above.
|
| Are you able to elaborate? My email address is in my
| profile if you want to share in private.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| Sure, in vague terms, there is a giant cultural problem
| in the Middle East where locals don't have the education
| or training or (more importantly) drive to actually do
| work, so most good employees are expats, but almost all
| leadership is locals because of hiring rules and
| nepotism.
|
| Companies are actively trying to change it, but they
| aren't there yet and it's an uphill battle that has to
| start basically at the kindergarten level.
|
| That culture also drives a major "image" focus, where how
| things look is more important that how things actually
| operate. I'm not from the Middle East, but this is what
| was communicated to us by our client / locals we
| interviewed.
| JshWright wrote:
| > Article says 4 pilots were on board, but fails to mention
| that 2 of them (relief pilots) were likely not in the cockpit
| on the departure.
|
| The 777-300ER has two jump-seats in the cockpit. I believe
| standard practice is for the "off duty" crew to be in the
| cockpit, in the jump-seats, for takeoff and landing (basically,
| any time the "sterile cockpit" rule would apply).
| cm2187 wrote:
| And apparently they were also fired. You don't fire someone
| who isn't even in the cockpit.
| hindsightbias wrote:
| Maximum Flap (Placard) Speeds for 777-300 Flaps KIAS
|
| 1 255
|
| 5 235
|
| 15 215
|
| 20 200
|
| 25 190
|
| 30 180
|
| 262 is way high for 30 degrees with slats.
| HeavenFox wrote:
| You don't take off with 30 degrees of flaps though,
| fortunately.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Correct. This was likely a flaps 15deg (or maybe 20deg)
| departure (being a heavy departure).
| dylan604 wrote:
| 262 is still too high for either of those flap positions
| according to the above list. So while you may be correct
| with your comment, it is pretty much without point???
|
| Edit: At least for the topic of this discussion. However,
| I'll now be able to win a bar bet when someone aks what
| flaps position for a heavy take off of a 777 would be
| sokoloff wrote:
| Sure. The question becomes "given an airplane that's had
| a limit airspeed exceeded by about 22% (so aerodynamic
| loads typically less than 1.5x the placarded limit),
| what's then the safest course of action for a crew who
| just minutes ago demonstrated that they were incapable to
| perform an uncomplicated, utterly standard takeoff
| procedure?"
|
| Do you want them declaring an emergency, dumping fuel,
| flying around at night, and coming back for a max weight
| emergency landing? Or do you want them continuing the
| flight, sending someone back with a flashlight to look
| over the wing trailing edge, and continuing on as
| normally as possible to DC? If my butt or a family
| member's butt is on that airplane, I don't want these
| yoke holders trying to figure out and execute the
| emergency procedure after flunking the standard day one
| of flight school procedure, while flustered from almost
| milking themselves, and knowing that they're looking for
| a job in the new year. Take a few hours; paint a magenta
| line all the way to DC and fly it.
| vultour wrote:
| The 777 has a flap load relief system and should retract
| the flaps at 216 knots. Don't know if it works this early
| during takeoff.
| jacquesm wrote:
| On another note: I think that having Boeing 777 in the title here
| is a bit misleading, this was an Emirates aircraft and Boeing had
| nothing to do with this incident.
|
| Suggest replacing 'Boeing 777' in the title with 'Emirates
| aircraft'
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| The first question people will ask is what kind of plane it was
| as it has a huge relevance on describing the incident and its
| potential for disaster.
|
| Or you could put:
|
| "Random plane had random incident. Somewhere. Airline."
|
| /s.
| itisit wrote:
| Or use the article's title: _Emirates' (Probably) Terrifying
| Boeing 777 Flight To Washington_
| nexuist wrote:
| I'll play devil's advocate and suggest that it is a systems
| error that the 777 accepted an altitude of 0 without sounding
| an alarm or at least requiring prior confirmation. It shouldn't
| be that easy to almost total the airplane.
| kortilla wrote:
| There are all kinds of airports at altitude 0. You're arguing
| for vastly more complexity in the flight director for it to
| know what altitudes are valid for particular locations.
|
| > It shouldn't be that easy to almost total the airplane.
|
| It's not, the pilots are complete fucking morons who ignored
| multiple checklists and basic knowledge about flying (210
| knots on the ground is insane).
|
| This wasn't autopilot or anything like that. It's just hints
| for an already manual operation.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > You're arguing for vastly more complexity in the flight
| director
|
| The airplane should already have a terrain database in the
| ground proximity warning system, so triggering a warning in
| this case doesn't seem entirely unreasonable, should have
| very low false positives, and could improve flight safety.
|
| Should it be necessary? Theoretically not, but pilots are
| human, and we have to choose whether we want to be smug
| about their stupidity while piecing together 300+ charred
| corpses, or account for humans doing human things.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| I don't understand why the automation feature in question is
| even available during takeoff. What would be a situation in
| which use of the FD at this point in the flight would be a
| preferable option?
| woofcat wrote:
| IFR?
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| IFR doesn't mean "Let go of the controls and let HAL sort
| it out." This equipment seems like it's meant to assist
| with pilot duties, not dictate to them.
| jacquesm wrote:
| It can go a lot lower than zero, and there are quite a few
| airfields where this matters:
|
| https://aviation.stackexchange.com/questions/56894/why-
| is-0-...
|
| Besides: you can't fix stupid, if someone switches on the
| autopilot seconds after wheels up without checking what
| altitude it is set for it could be _anything_ , including
| below ground level. Autopilots aren't magic, and pilots have
| a very large amount of discretion in how they fly the
| airplane, but these pilots weren't really prepared to fly the
| plane for one second more than they had to.
|
| There is a reason they got sacked. Oh, and as to this being a
| Boeing issue: this setting can be entered on any autopilot.
| I'm all for giving Boeing shit when they are the ones that
| messed up but here they didn't.
| jackweirdy wrote:
| Bear in mind there are airports in the world at less than 0ft
| sea level. Very complicated to validate what a valid input
| actually is
| manojlds wrote:
| The plane can't know by itself what altitude it is and at
| least provide warning to override what it thinks it is?
| nexuist wrote:
| While true, my understanding is that the altimeters
| automatically calibrate themselves to air pressure as well
| as use auxiliary readings from the radio altimeter to
| provide an altitude system where 0ft is sea level, always.
| However given that the pilots seemingly didn't follow the
| pre-flight checklist it's possible they did not calibrate
| the altimeter either.
| jackweirdy wrote:
| Altimeters are only pilot calibrated to ensure planes
| travelling in various directions can trust their vertical
| separation is constant even amid rising or dropping
| temperatures and pressures. In that context an altimeter
| that calibrates itself is quite undesirable
|
| There is the radio-altimeter which uses ground based
| radar but that is for spoken-aloud altitude readouts and
| terrain warnings and as far as I'm aware doesn't factor
| in Boeing or airbus autopilot.
|
| At least in the U.K., the lingo has us refer to this
| always as height (ie, above the ground) and not altitude
| (within the air above a hypothetical sea level)
| thurn wrote:
| do they not have GPS and the ability to look up airport
| elevations on a map?
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Amsterdam represent! :)
| jacquesm wrote:
| Amsterdam is pretty mild in comparison to Bar Yehuda,
| which is a good 375 meters below sea level.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bar_Yehuda_Airfield
| l33tman wrote:
| AV Herald thread about this:
| https://avherald.com/h?article=4f24b2d7
| zoomablemind wrote:
| Scarry as it already appears, it also looks as if the flight were
| considered overloaded. Thus longer speedup, shallow climb. Was
| their landing profile also out of ordinary?
|
| Wrong details keyed in, or some undisclosed and supposedly heavy
| cargo? Though such a Bond-style mystery may not make any reason
| to it, as the destination was IAD. Well, the pilots should feel
| lucky that everyone is safe and sound.
| stelliosk wrote:
| More details here:
|
| https://avherald.com/h?article=4f24b2d7&opt=0
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| Why is the American FAA investigating a fight in another country?
| speedgoose wrote:
| 75 feets is 22.8 meters.
|
| 234 knots is 433km/h.
| pc86 wrote:
| Which is irrelevant, given this is about aviation where feet
| and knots are standardized in all but a few former Soviet block
| countries.
| anaganisk wrote:
| And we're talking about it Hackernews not on Avsim or
| aviation herald. People here would better understand in a
| language they know.
| punarinta wrote:
| I'm flying an ultralight in Europe and my IAS is in km/h. And
| to be frank, probably all UL and PPL aircraft I've seen
| nearby use km/h, not knots. Not sure why it is so, but it's
| definitely easier for my brain. :)
| chki wrote:
| As somebody who doesn't regularly interact with aviation I
| don't have an intuitive understanding of knots and feet so to
| me it is helpful to have these translated to units that I
| "understand".
| ycIsGarbage wrote:
| Still, helpful for the large majority of people who are not
| pilots.
| argvargc wrote:
| Entire countries-worth of aviators are irrelevant?
| twistedpair wrote:
| For reference, the max allowed GA airspeed by the FAA under
| 10,000 ft (3km) altitude is 250 knots. Doing so at 175 feet is
| wild.
| avhon1 wrote:
| 234 knots is also equal to 269 miles per hour.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah knots are just nautical miles per hour
| a-dub wrote:
| "You'll want to look at the right two columns, with the left
| column being the altitude, and the right column being the speed."
|
| actually i think i'd rather look at plots rather than images of
| tables of numbers. smh.
| hanspeter wrote:
| So did you produce the plot from the data presented?
| pfdietz wrote:
| I wonder if this will show up on the Mentour Pilot Youtube
| channel. There's some interesting stuff there.
| anaganisk wrote:
| It definitely will after the final report is available.
| onphonenow wrote:
| The memo from Emirates about not setting altitude in system to
| airport altitude is so weird. I really hope that's not the actual
| message Emirates is putting out there.
|
| It doesn't matter was in system. You run your checklists and
| configure for your own flight / your own departure etc. Memo
| should be to training / recruitment - where did you find these
| pilots to fly a 777?
|
| So they obviously didn't pre-flight the flight. And they don't
| seem to have used their takeoff checklist either? That should get
| them through flap retract and 2,000 feet or so.
|
| Takeoff checklist might have rotate at 160 or so. Then you get to
| positive climb and V2. You then clean up the plane (flaps / gear
| etc), maybe hit 2,000 feet / 210kts?
|
| This is all checklist stuff. I've no idea what's Emirates has as
| checklists, but this is like 101 entry level flying stuff. What
| was pilot monitoring doing during all this?
|
| They still on ground at 215 kts? 262 kts at 175 feet?!
| rectang wrote:
| From a top comment on the article by "Mark D":
|
| > _I'm a captain at a U.S. major airline with a lot of time in
| 777s. [...] Also, this is something that SHOULD have been
| caught by at least two separate checklists, which they
| obviously didn't do._
| cybertronic wrote:
| Adding at the end: " ... So, these pilots were ill trained
| and negligent. Don't fly on these types of carriers. I
| don't."
| ytdytvhxgydvhh wrote:
| I wonder what "these types of carriers" means here. I know
| there are low-cost carriers and I wouldn't be surprised if
| they had less-experienced pilots, etc. But to me Emirates
| strikes me as a well-funded, reputable operation. Does he
| mean Middle Eastern carriers?
| quacked wrote:
| If the country you're in:
|
| - Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above literal
| accuracy - Has lower-level officials that accept bribes -
| Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades
|
| Assume any complex high-risk engineering system run by
| that culture will occasionally fail in major ways.
| azth wrote:
| > - Has lower-level officials that accept bribes
|
| How many countries does that leave? And why only low
| level, why not also high level? Doesn't that rule out the
| US as well?
|
| > - Has had airlines and planes for fewer than 5 decades
|
| Also sounds arbitrary.
| jrochkind1 wrote:
| I'm gonna say 'Prioritizes "face" or "reputation" above
| literal accuracy' is definitely the US too.
| quacked wrote:
| I concur that there are places where this is true, but
| not at all to the level that it's true in Asian and
| African countries
| rectang wrote:
| It's true enough in western societies that we
| specifically needed Cockpit Resource Management as a tool
| to overcome deference to senior officers. A classic
| example being KLM captain van Zanten from the Tenerife
| disaster.
|
| I hate that this thread descended into chauvinism and
| generalized cultural value judgments. The problem of
| excessive deference to authority plagues all cultures. By
| not being obsessed about saving face for our own society
| and acknowledging our own flaws, we make it easier for
| all of us to learn together.
| throwaway898989 wrote:
| I am expat in south east asia and his comment is correct
|
| low level officials taking bribes means you can do stuff
| like never wear a seatbelt, just pay the cop $20 USD if
| you get pulled over. get pulled up for smoking indoors?
| $20 USD. run over an illegal immigrant and kill them? USD
| 1000 to have their records completely erased. Sim card?
| $5 USD cash. rape? what? the police here hung up on my
| friend on a 911 call because they spoke english and not
| the 'national language' (police do speak english here).on
| a different note, it is legal to rape your wife here
|
| low level corruption causes immense problems and
| injustices in society. here, everyone drink drives.
| driving a car while extremely drunk here is default
| behaviour.
|
| ye high level official bribery will cause probelms, but
| the low level stuff is what completely craters the system
| and causes the catastrophic failures in complex
| engineering systems.
|
| i am in the country of mh370
| [deleted]
| quacked wrote:
| You said it better than I could. I am a US citizen, and
| most of my middle/upper-middle class colleagues simply
| cannot imagine that their society is the result of many
| hundreds of thousands of people following totally
| arbitrary rules, and that if people don't follow those
| rules their society will collapse. They think that US
| cops (who for the most part can't be bribed by citizens)
| are normal, and non-US cops who accept bribes are somehow
| exotic or abnormal.
| inside6 wrote:
| throwaway898989 wrote:
| my frend catch lionair flight , indonesian borneo to
| jakarta
|
| the plane acting funny on landing in jakarta, sort of
| jumping around, weird turbulence
|
| when it land, he look outside and see that one of the
| major aileron has fuselage completely missing and had
| been replace with electrical tape
|
| the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron was
| replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by
| international airline technician
|
| importantly, if this plane crash, nobody will ever admit
| this, cctv record deleted, etc. they will just blame
| beooing
| jhugo wrote:
| > the plane was flying funny because one of the aileron
| was replaced with electrical tape from dollar store by
| international airline technician
|
| This is wild speculation, based on second-hand
| information from your friend, who, given that they
| referred to it as electrical tape when anyone in the
| industry would know it's called speed tape and has no
| similarities with electrical tape, probably doesn't
| actually know which part of the aircraft is the aileron.
|
| Speed tape on the wing is quite common anywhere in the
| world on any carrier, and is safe if done properly.
|
| Lion Air and Indonesian aviation has a lot of problems in
| general, but I doubt this issue was genuinely a safety
| issue. Your friend probably felt some turbulence on
| landing.
| Toutouxc wrote:
| > see that one of the major aileron has fuselage
| completely missing
|
| Sorry, but that doesn't mean anything.
| iancarroll wrote:
| While I don't know the specifics here, many people
| mistake tape on airplanes for normal tape, when it is
| usually aluminum speed tape[0] that is (in the right
| scenario) safe to use on airplanes.
|
| [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Speed_tape
| [deleted]
| la6471 wrote:
| rectang wrote:
| I omitted that bit because I thought it was the least
| interesting part of Mark D's comment. The subthread which
| it has inspired here has reinforced my impression. :(
|
| There was actually lots of additional interesting technical
| detail from Mark D which I also left out; the part that was
| germane to the comment I replied to was the bit about the
| checklists, since that backed up the notion that the
| Emirates notice was messed up and weird.
|
| The conclusion though, "Don't fly on these types of
| carriers", can easily be interpreted as a sociocultural
| swipe, even if I'm inclined to believe Mark D meant
| something else and just botched the wording.
| nradov wrote:
| The incident description seems incomplete. With the high
| takeoff speed and slow climb rate, is it possible that the main
| error was an incorrect flaps setting?
| sokoloff wrote:
| 777 has a takeoff configuration warning system, so unlikely.
| Far more likely is the pilots simply failed to command
| sufficient pitch up (higher pitch gives a lower airspeed and
| higher climb rate [at least in the airspeed and pitch regime
| we're talking about here]).
|
| Takeoff configuration warning can be silenced, but is an
| abort before the 80 knot callout.
| csunbird wrote:
| Disclaimer: My experience in piloting is just a couple of
| hours flying planes in kerbal space program.
|
| Wouldn't that much speed cause the plane to ascent
| naturally, even with zero pitch, just by the body lift?
| (Although, it is quite possible that real life planes have
| negative body lift, I have no idea)
| LordFast wrote:
| Fellow kerbal space program attendee here:
|
| I believe that while smaller planes will naturally pitch
| up as speed increases, jumbo jets are much more lumpant
| even with the correct flaps. That's the terrifying thing
| in my understanding: the plane basically had no manual
| pitch due to incorrect config values, and were barely
| gliding off the ground from minimal natural lift.
| Meanwhile the two potatoes at the helm were fiddling with
| the config values instead of pulling on the yoke.
| AlexAndScripts wrote:
| Yes, but not fast enough to be safe in this situation.
|
| *also someone not particularly experienced, just a bit of
| messing about in DCS. Correct me if I'm wrong!
| selectodude wrote:
| They probably were given a command to stay at 4000 above
| ground (AGL) level after takeoff. The plane was to level
| off until further instructions from ATC. Since the plane
| was set to sea level on takeoff, the plane tried to level
| off at 4000 ft above sea level which...is not good. The
| plane was pitched down to descend.
| csunbird wrote:
| Oh no. So, the computer was actually trying to keep the
| plane pitched down to avoid ascending naturally and keep
| the altitude stable. This is really, really bad.
| jackweirdy wrote:
| Well, the autopilot was disabled, and the flight director
| (which at a 1 sentence level is a visual indication of
| what the autopilot would do) was trying to keep the plane
| level at the configured altitude
|
| The flight director did the right thing -- displayed how
| it would manage level flight
|
| The pilot did the wrong thing - copied the misconfigured
| flight director instead of flying the plane
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Pilot here. This is completely wrong, nobody ever gives
| altitude instructions above ground level. That doesn't
| exist in ATC terms.
| elihu wrote:
| Isn't the airport in Dubai barely above sea level
| anyways? I mean, if the difference between ground level
| and sea level is less than a hundred feet, then it seems
| like it wouldn't account for a plane thinking it was at
| 4,000 feet when it was really at about 200.
| sokoloff wrote:
| The airplane will seek its trimmed speed (which is
| adjustable via a very powerful adjustable pitch
| horizontal stabilizer).
|
| If there's more power than needed for the trimmed speed,
| the airplane will climb. If there's less, it will
| descend.
|
| 262 knots is well within the trim range, so it's
| impossible to say without knowing the trim setting, but
| if the airplane was programmed to hold an altitude at 262
| knots, it could (by driving the stab angle of incidence
| higher or lower, as needed)
| harha wrote:
| Wow this looks like a classic corporate response, though in a
| place where it may actually affect lives.
|
| Let's not fix the actual issue (not following the proper
| procedures) but something further down the line which looks
| like the cause if you have no clue what's happening.
| yosito wrote:
| > What was pilot monitoring doing during all this?
|
| Wouldn't there also be a copilot who is double checking this
| stuff?
| goodcanadian wrote:
| There is a pilot and a co-pilot. At any given time in a
| flight, one will be the "pilot flying" and the other will be
| the "pilot monitoring." That is exactly the point of the
| quote: there are two in the cockpit, and one should always be
| checking what the other is doing.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Isn't there some sort of reset settings button when you start a
| new flight? Like is there any setting set by the previous crew
| that should be left as is by the new crew?
| lmilcin wrote:
| Nope. The crew is responsible for verifying anything and
| everything important for the flight safety.
|
| A button like that would be pretty dangerous. Just imagine
| somebody pressed this in an emergency...
|
| In general flying a plane is already complex. You need to be
| able to understand what is going to happen to the plane when
| you press a button. Something that resets a lot of other
| settings would have extremely complex consequences.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Most of the switches are physical selectors and dials that
| aren't motorized so it would be impossible to reset those.
| And a partial reset would probably be even more confusing.
| p_l wrote:
| The flight computer isn't controlled by physical dials, and
| that's where you do pre-flight calculations (including the
| V1 and V2 speeds for given takeoff mass)
| [deleted]
| jefftk wrote:
| _> I really hope that 's not the actual message Emirates is
| putting out there._
|
| It is; there's a picture of it on
| https://www.godsavethepoints.com/emirates-flight-231-takeoff...
| jbirer wrote:
| Sounds like a desperate attempt at saving face.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| It's unbelievable that the pilot's didn't realize they were
| doing 215 knots while still _ON THE GROUND_ and only decided to
| pull back on the yoke once they were nearing the end of the
| runway. They should have at least seen the end of the runway
| coming up and wondered why they weren 't airborne yet. The ends
| are colored in amber and red as it gets closer to the end, it
| should be pretty obvious something is wrong. Pull back and get
| airborne, you're far past the point you are going to be able to
| stop.
|
| Where's the basic pilotage here?
|
| I'm a US CPL holder and there are numerous basic airmanship
| systems in place to prevent this. For one, you note your
| acceleration rate and how far down the runway you are. Then you
| have V1, V2 speeds where you rotate.
|
| How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is far
| beyond my understanding.
|
| Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the computer
| is telling them instead of flying the actual aircraft. You
| don't fly the flight director command bars when they are
| telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215 knots.
| You ignore them and figure out what went wrong when safely in
| the air.
| gambiting wrote:
| >>Where's the basic pilotage here
|
| I think the article was spot on about this - everyone was
| focused on managing the computers rather than actually
| flying. I wouldn't be surprised if no one was actually
| looking out of the window, but instead looking at the screens
| and wondering why the numbers aren't correct.
| _moof wrote:
| _> Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the
| computer is telling them instead of flying the actual
| aircraft._
|
| Can confirm. I flew with someone recently who has a very
| fancy integrated glass cockpit, and shortly after takeoff he
| turned the controls over to me. The flight director was very
| clearly giving incorrect indications, turning us onto a track
| 90deg from our intended course, so I ignored it and flew what
| I knew to be correct before turning my attention to getting
| the radios set up right. It took an unbelievable amount of
| arguing to convince the owner that the aircraft was
| configured incorrectly, and that I was in fact flying the
| airplane correctly. And all I had to do to notice this was
| _look outside._
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| > It's unbelievable
|
| This applies to most catastrophic failures, not just in
| aviation but in any other place that puts reasonable effort
| into preventing them. Usually there are plenty of safeguards,
| which means that most of the times, when something goes
| wrong, one of the safeguards prevents a catastrophic outcome
| and you don't hear about it.
|
| But when you do hear about it (due to the catastrophic
| outcome or a very near miss), it'll usually be a tale of many
| mistakes, very egregious misbehavior, multiple failures etc.
| - because it generally _has_ to be to cause a bad outcome or
| even get close to it.
|
| Keep in mind that despite this, _nothing seriously bad
| actually happened here_. It was a near miss that needs to be
| addressed, of course, but nobody died, there likely was no
| serious equipment damage, etc. Ultimately, the system worked.
| toss1 wrote:
| >>Keep in mind that despite this, nothing seriously bad
| actually happened here.
|
| This is the exact wrong way to think about it.
|
| With substantial experience with managing risk, the most
| important thing I know is that you MUST UNDERSTAND the
| difference between managing risk with knowledge,
| technology, planning, and skill, vs rolling the dice and
| getting away with it.
|
| With risk management by knowledge, technology, planning,
| and skill, you can make an ordinary practice of very risky
| activities very safely.
|
| But when you are rolling the dice and getting away with it,
| you may get away with it for a long time, long enough to
| think you are safe, but it WILL bite you, and hard.
|
| "Near misses" are very clear indications that your risk
| management has a failure mode you didn't account for - and
| you are now in the zone of rolling the dice. If you do not
| attend to that, you are about to get bitten.
|
| So, just because no one was hurt or died -- this time --
| does NOT mean you can be relieved.
| PicassoCTs wrote:
| Crew Resource Management should have kicked in and the
| Pilot Monitoring should have taken over on rotating the
| moment the Pilot flying did not steer after V1.
|
| That this did not happen, and nobody actually
| concentrated on flying the plane, while the other party
| went through the corresponding checklists and diagnosis -
| thats cultural rot and a major issue.
| hluska wrote:
| Flying was one of my most irrational fears until Westjet
| introduced me to a pilot. He went into a truly massive
| amount of detail on their systems (both manual and
| automated) that prevent things like this.
|
| I'm not a pilot (I'm still very scared) and it's been a
| long time so forgive me if my language isn't correct.
| However, my understanding from that conversation is that
| this sort of thing is a system failure. Nobody got hurt and
| there may have been no damage, but they would consider this
| an overall system failure.
|
| Several people made mistakes here. There was the pilot who
| made the near fatal entry. And many pilots failed to spot
| the error. They didn't perform their pre-flight properly
| and would have had to forget a checklist.
|
| They apparently didn't even figure it out when the runway
| lights changed to signify "you done fucked up." (Can a
| pilot weigh in?? Is that an aviation term?) :)
|
| This system failed. It's pure luck that everyone survived.
| captainredbeard wrote:
| > nothing seriously bad actually happened here
|
| Incorrect! They exposed their pax to unnecessary risk. You
| do not think like an aviator.
| bumby wrote:
| I think the OP was focusing on the consequence, not the
| probability. Since risk is often defined as consequence x
| probability, I think you are both talking about distinct
| but related things
| MarcoZavala wrote:
| jjav wrote:
| > How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is
| far beyond my understanding.
|
| I don't fly, but what I hear from my commercial pilot friends
| is that many carriers are emphasizing pilots to run on auto-
| everything so their actual fly-the-plane skills deteriorate.
| And much worse, the newer generation of pilots never acquired
| those skills to begin with. due to relying on automation.
| dd36 wrote:
| This seems a lot like the young people in my family not
| knowing how computers work despite using them daily.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| There is a well known video among commercial pilots called
| "Children of the Magenta Line".
|
| The magenta line refers to a line on the display you can
| just "follow" around that is calculated by the computer.
|
| The video is all about how young pilots are just following
| around the magenta line and not having the "big picture" of
| what is going on in their heads.
| phil21 wrote:
| And this video is _exactly_ what happened here from my
| limited understanding. Due the the desired altitude being
| set at zero, the magenta line the pilot flying was aiming
| for was... well, set to 0ft.
|
| I can see a longer-than-usual roll-out, but not going
| rate positive when you are well past V2 and hitting amber
| runway lights is an unforgivable mistake.
| raverbashing wrote:
| > Where's the basic pilotage here?
|
| > How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is
| far beyond my understanding.
|
| Well, training that emphasizes automation rather than manual
| flying and thinking (an even bigger issue in Eastern
| countries, see Asiana on SFO) but that carries over to the
| top levels.
|
| People that train on the subject because it "pays well" or
| because of fame rather than because they like it.
|
| People that have some other favourable attributes to flying
| Emirates.
|
| Lack of CRM on the cockpit.
|
| But anyway, these are contributing factors. You could argue
| that checklist are an automation step and those guys missed
| it. Apparently 4 people were fired, and I really can't
| disagree with this.
| kayodelycaon wrote:
| I thought all takeoffs were manual. Is auto-takeoff out of
| testing already?
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| They are, but there's a system that almost shouts "VEE
| ONE!" and "VEE TWO!" over a loudspeaker in the cockpit, at
| least if the flight director is configured properly.
|
| I'm grossly simplifying but V1 is the point where you go
| "okay, are we SURE we're ready to go flying, y/n?" Around
| V1, if there are problems with the plane not conducive to
| flying (engine failure, fire, control surface malfunction
| especially), you reject the takeoff. On a loaded/fueled
| commercial jet you run a chance of tire/brake damage
| because the braking system will be at nearly its limit, and
| the heat might cause some of the thermal/pressure fuses in
| the tires to blow.
|
| At V2, that's where you are going flying whether you damn
| well like it or not, with the only exception being (I
| believe?) a loss of control surface authority, because in
| that case, you're not flying, period. Plane on fire? You're
| going into the air, because if you don't, you're crashing
| because the plane won't stop before the end of the runway.
|
| Then there's Vr, the point at which you go flying (rotate.)
|
| Just about the only thing on the pilot/copilot's mind
| around V1/V2 is "does everything feel / sound / look OK?"
| and then getting as much altitude as quickly as possible
| once Vr is hit, because altitude is potential energy. Until
| you have enough altitude such that your glide distance is
| enough to circle back to the airport and land, you are
| _completely boned_ if you lose both engines.
|
| The runway is long enough to handle the plane rolling out
| from V1 to a stop. That means at Vr you aren't anywhere
| even remotely close to the end of the runway.
|
| Going into the runoff area, but then also failing to climb
| at a normal rate even after you've finally taken off, is
| mind-blowingly incompetent. I would think it would almost
| be a career-ending mistake for both officers. If the first
| officer was flying the plane but the captain was PIC, the
| captain should have taken control a second or two after the
| first officer failed to rotate at V2.
|
| My guess is that the captain was flying and the first
| officer didn't speak up; especially on the least desirable
| route people are looking to get promoted out of that hell,
| and arguing with the captain often isn't conducive to that.
| Lot of the captains know each other, and even if you get
| promoted, you stand a good chance of running into one of
| his buddies.
|
| Edit: forgot to mention, the plane was likely screaming at
| them for overspeed on the gear and/or flaps, as well.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Not quite.
|
| V1 is the takeoff abort decision speed; beyond V1, you
| are going too fast to stop safely in the runway length
| still available to you. If the plane is on fire and
| you've lost an engine and the computers and screens all
| die, but you've passed V1, you are still taking off
| anyway.
|
| V2 is the safe single-engine-failure climb-out speed.
| This is the speed you pitch for after rotating, so that
| you're not flying too slowly that an engine failure would
| be dangerous.
|
| Vr is almost always at V1 or a little bit higher; by
| definition, it cannot be before V1 (if you were rotating
| before V1, you wouldn't have to worry about whether you
| have enough runway left to not rotate) or after V2 (if
| you're at your single-engine-failure climb-out speed, you
| should've already rotated).
|
| The V2 speed is entered into the autothrottle before
| takeoff (but the autothrottle won't maintain that speed;
| it will maintain a thrust setting instead). The flight
| director will command you to pitch up to maintain at
| least that speed at the current thrust, but only if
| you've correctly entered an altitude for it to take you
| up to (which did not happen in this case).
|
| Essentially, they were relying on the flight director to
| command them to rotate, instead of rotating when Vr was
| called out. This is a catastrophic lapse in judgment.
| throwanem wrote:
| The takeoff isn't directly automated, but there's a system
| called the "flight director" [1] that provides indicators
| on the pilot flying's display that correspond with a
| configured trajectory. In this case, it sounds like the
| flight director was badly misconfigured and the pilots not
| only omitted to reconfigure it, but followed the erroneous
| indication far past any point at which it was remotely
| reasonable (or remotely safe!) to do so.
|
| [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_director_(aerona
| utics...
| encoderer wrote:
| So this is the airline equivalent of Michael Scott
| following his gps into the lake?
|
| Insane
| throwanem wrote:
| I mean, you say that as if it were a joke, and yet I
| can't fathom any other explanation for this kind of event
| but that the pilot flying assumed the automation "knows
| where it's going". Unfortunately, without Rainn Wilson as
| the PNF...
| lisper wrote:
| Private pilot here. Yes, that is exactly right.
| _moof wrote:
| It is precisely that, and it is inexcusable.
| MertsA wrote:
| For context on the reference to following gps into a
| lake: https://youtu.be/DOW_kPzY_JY?t=20
| MertsA wrote:
| Why does it not have basic sanity checking to make sure
| the configured flight path is not going unreasonably
| close to terrain? Is it solely controlling heading and
| altitude or does the flight director incorporate
| waypoints and topology?
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| It's heading, altitude, and speed. For example, if you're
| currently accelerating to a target speed _and_ climbing
| to a target altitude, it won 't command you to pitch up
| so much that you stop accelerating.
|
| The autopilot follows the flight director, and the flight
| director is dumb.
| throwanem wrote:
| The autopilot wouldn't have been in use for the takeoff
| roll, though, would it? The question of automation smarts
| seems like a bugaboo in what I understand to be a highly
| manual flight regime.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| Correct, autopilot isn't engaged until at least several
| hundred feet AGL; varying by airline. Some airlines don't
| engage autopilot until reaching transition altitude or
| even cruise altitude. Still, the flight director is
| giving you the same information, and most pilots will
| just follow that because it's the most accurate way of
| getting you to where you need to go... if you've set it
| up correctly.
| throwanem wrote:
| It's not _controlling_ anything, just providing steering
| cues for the pilots along whatever route it 's set up
| for. Setting it up for the flight's intended route is a
| checklist item, which appears not to have been performed
| on this flight. Also on the checklist is identifying the
| correct airspeed for current conditions, called "Vr," at
| which to "rotate" and bring the aircraft off the ground
| during the takeoff roll.
|
| Actually _doing_ that is a memory item, intended to be
| prompted by a "Vr" call from the pilot not flying. As
| far as I know it's not yet clear whether the PNF gave
| that call, but the PF certainly waited to rotate until
| well after reaching Vr. This is where the "sanity
| checking" appears to have failed, with the PF heeding the
| misconfigured flight director when it disagreed with
| other instruments and the situation visible out the
| cockpit windshield.
| paganel wrote:
| > You don't fly the flight director command bars when they
| are telling you to stay on the ground and you're doing 215
| knots.
|
| This reminds me of the (in)famous "take a right" sketch from
| The Office [1]. Granted, that was a TV show and they were
| "piloting" a car, not a 777.
|
| [1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DOW_kPzY_JY
| dehrmann wrote:
| > How you get to this level of incompetence flying a 777 is
| far beyond my understanding.
|
| The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.
| EMM_386 wrote:
| > The article said--it's the smallest plane Emirates flies.
|
| What does that have to do with anything?
|
| The 777 is a huge aircraft. It has a maximum passenger
| capacity of 550 people.
|
| If you can have 550 people lives in your hands and are
| making mistakes like this, it doesn't matter if it's the
| smallest aircraft in their fleet.
|
| And before anyone bothers to point it out, I know this
| particular airframe was not configured for 550. But being
| the smallest in the fleet means absolutely nothing.
| KennyBlanken wrote:
| It's the smallest airplane and a very long route which
| means it gets the least promoted pilots; it's the
| shittiest route. The article discusses this.
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| Even the least promoted pilot shouldn't be this
| incompetent in an airline like Emirates. I could perhaps
| understand it from some small airline in developing
| country where the pilots got their licences through
| bribery.
| gorgonzolachz wrote:
| I thought based on how pilots were paid, longer routes
| were more desirable? And shorter routes would be in lower
| demand, since airlines don't typically pay for time spent
| on the ground?
| kewrkewm53 wrote:
| The error we're talking about here is something that
| shouldn't happen even to a rookie straight out of flight
| school. Hell, even a kid flying flight simulator knows that
| something is wrong if you're still on the ground at 200kts
| on a 777.
| deepGem wrote:
| Well, I wouldn't doubt one of the best airlines on the
| planet. However, the article claims that they hire pilots
| with lower flying hours as they cannot find experienced
| pilots like American or United does. I fail to understand
| this. Can't they just hire experienced pilots from other
| airlines instead of hiring the inexperienced ones ?
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| Comes down to a few things. First, money. Second,
| location. Third, skill.
|
| The Middle East doesn't have nearly the pool of pilots to
| start with compared to North America, and even NA is
| suffering from an extreme shortage of pilots. (Wonder why
| the airlines no longer fly to your small town? Probably
| because of a shortage of pilots)
| ecshafer wrote:
| Is there _actually_ a pilot shortage, or is there a pay
| shortage? Most of the people I know who wanted to be
| pilots bounced off of the extremely low salary for a very
| long time. Unless someone does military and gets a lot of
| hours, and even then not always, they are stuck paying
| for their own license then making a bit above minimum
| wage flying between cleveland to nashville or something
| like that. If the airlines paid more money I think the
| shortage would probably disappear quickly.
| labcomputer wrote:
| Some of both: An early-career pay shortage leads to an
| actual shortage of experienced pilots to fly big jets.
|
| You can, of course, easily solve the problem by raising
| wages for regional jet pilots, but it takes a few years
| for the excess pilots to propagate to the major carriers.
| throwawaygh wrote:
| Pilots for large airlines are paid very well
| (100k-200k+). The training is expensive and time-
| consuming, but not _that_ expensive or _that_ time-
| consuming, if we compare to e.g. medicine or science.
|
| There is a low-paid and debt-heavy portion of the career.
| However, Medical students aren't paid and even the
| lowest-paid pilot is making more than the average phd
| candidate.
| raverbashing wrote:
| The fact that medical students have it hard doesn't
| justify it being bad for the pilots.
|
| Also it's probably easier to get student loans for
| medicine than it is for piloting.
|
| Maybe the regional carriers should pay more and have
| better conditions but funny how they describe it as a
| "pilot shortage". It's just supply and demand.
| nopzor wrote:
| new commercial pilots who are flying small airplanes for
| large airlines in the usa (eg "united express" pilots)
| barely crack 50k usd salary. and this is after big pay
| rises the last year.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| They can't, because their working conditions are terrible
| compared to those other airlines. Nobody with thousands
| of hours of jet time would ever switch from a US or EU
| legacy carrier to someone like Emirates.
| deepGem wrote:
| This is pretty sad. Emirates, for all their glory doesn't
| pay their pilots well. I mean, what's the point in
| spending on stuff like fancy first class seats and all
| that without paying pilots well. True irony. Fanciest and
| the most comfortable airline for the passengers, the
| exact opposite for the pilots.
| namdnay wrote:
| It's more a question of Emirates being a relative
| newcomer with no strong unionization, and therefore not
| having to align with the absurdly high salaries the
| legacy carriers are saddled with. Compared with other new
| airlines (EasyJet, Ryanair etc) Emirates pay quite well
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It's not just pay, it's also very demanding schedules
| (which is a safety concern, many incidents happen due to
| crew fatigue) and zero labor protection in UAE laws. I
| know a few ex-Emirates pilots that got fired during the
| pandemic, they were treated like trash almost literally
| thrown out of the country.
| konschubert wrote:
| Even for the rich, there are benefits to living in a
| society that treats workers well.
| homami wrote:
| I've been a frequent flyer of Emirates for the past ~ six
| years. From my perspective, the airline suddenly changed
| about three years ago. The quality of their service
| dropped and still every time that I take an EK flight, I
| notice something else is missing from the service. Flying
| Emirates does not have any glory anymore.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| They still have some of the brand association of luxury,
| but indeed it's a very normal airline just like all the
| others. With similar service, legroom and food. But with
| no direct flights, which is less comfortable.
| kortilla wrote:
| Plane size has zero relevance. The point is that you
| shouldn't be flying any jet, even some tiny CRJ, with such
| basic mistakes.
| manuko83 wrote:
| You shouldn't be flying a Cessna 152 if you can't follow
| a checklist. Although I would wait until the
| investigation is finished...it's hard to know what goes
| on in the cockpit until all the data is gathered and
| analysed.
| nsonha wrote:
| I think some countries have this problem of fake pilot
| degrees, is UAE one of those?
|
| Also wonder what kind of training did pilots receive during
| downtime in COVID to make sure their skills won't decay
| AmericanChopper wrote:
| Pakistan is the only country I've ever heard about having
| that problem. I doubt an advanced economy like UAE would be
| having this issue.
| EdwardDiego wrote:
| They hire a lot of international pilots.
| nwallin wrote:
| There are more Pakistani citizens living in the UAE than
| there are UAE citizens. So if Pakistan has a problem with
| fake pilot licenses, then so does the UAE.
| jhugo wrote:
| This logic makes no sense. First of all, the citizenship
| of Emirates pilots would not mirror the citizenship of
| the UAE itself. Most Pakistan citizens coming to the UAE
| are not coming to work for Emirates. Secondly, Emirates
| is able to do their own due diligance on pilot licenses,
| and since the problems with Pakistan licenses are well
| known throughout the industry, they would receive extra
| scrutiny.
|
| The problems that occurred here are neither unique to
| Emirates nor likely to have anything to do with fake
| pilot licenses. Over-reliance on automation and
| complacency are global issues.
| nsonha wrote:
| > Over-reliance on automation and complacency
|
| this is a training issue, is it not? So related to
| qualification to some degree
| jhugo wrote:
| Complacency creeps in alongside experience, which holders
| of fake licenses tend not to have...
| nickjj wrote:
| > Pilots are getting far too comfortable flying what the
| computer is telling them instead of flying the actual
| aircraft.
|
| I'm not a pilot but this stuff does concern me.
|
| If you Google around for GPS related accidents with cars the
| results are pretty mind boggling. There's a number of cases
| of folks driving straight into a lake because GPS told them
| to go that way. This plane incident reminds me of that.
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I would hope I would not drive into a lake or any other
| obvious hazard, but I have driven the wrong way onto a one-
| way portion of a street when I was following Google Maps.
| carlmr wrote:
| My gf once asked me why I wouldn't just park on the
| street, it was night, it was Delft (Netherlands), it was
| very still standing water in one of the canals with
| leaves on top.
|
| It did look surprisingly like a street, but I knew I was
| in Delft.
| Markoff wrote:
| that's just very bad design keeping water at same level
| with street, I was under impression channels in
| Netherlands are always below ground level for many
| obvious reasons
| jasonkester wrote:
| Sometimes the water decides to do that on its own.
|
| I've ridden through Chiang Mai after a heavy rain when
| the streets were all a foot deep, so you'd get a nice
| foot wash riding along and despair for your flip flops
| when stopped.
|
| And if you strayed too far from the car in front or cut a
| corner, you'd find the 4 foot deep drainage ditches and
| 12 foot deep canals along the sides of the main roads.
| wcoenen wrote:
| It wasn't designed that way. In other locations in the
| city, street level is at least 150 cm above the water.
| But because of natural subsidence, ground water
| extraction, construction and peat oxidation, some parts
| of city's peat soil have subsided in the last few decades
| to only 25 cm above the water.
|
| https://www.delft.com/routes/delft-waterways-and-the-
| compart...
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| This reminds me of a story when I was a kid.
|
| We used to have a big pond in the frontyard. One day it
| was completely covered in duckweed (kroos in dutch) and
| one of my friends just walked straight into it, not aware
| of the water underneath.
|
| Glad you didn't try that out with your car!
| PKop wrote:
| This is exactly why the mass delusion propagated by Elon
| that Tesla's have full self driving is terrifying, and why
| "self driving" in general is a sinister lie that endangers
| the public.
| u801e wrote:
| The premise behind self driving cars that can handle most
| situations themselves relies on the assumption that a
| human operator is paying attention and can take over in
| situations the computer can't handle. I'm not a pilot,
| but it's likely that assumption can hold while flying at
| cruising altitude, but not so much when driving in
| various inconsistent road and traffic conditions.
| PKop wrote:
| >human operator is paying attention
|
| Think of how silly this is though. You offload driving to
| a car, then...demand passenger give absolute attention
| every second that car operates itself. For one, this is a
| pointless tool if you have to monitor it all the time.
| For another, it is impossible that humans will be able to
| focus their attentions fully when they aren't really
| doing anything to drive the car. The _better_ self-
| driving gets (say, safe and effective 99.999% or any
| incremental level higher), the _less_ the human monitor
| will actually be watching. Thus the more likely _any_
| error will be catastrophic.
| cm2187 wrote:
| My own experience is that I tend to snooze as a car
| passenger on a long trip while I do not when I am the one
| driving. No need for speculation, I know I would be
| incapable of taking over on a short notice if the car
| does something bad.
| rocketbop wrote:
| > My own experience is that I tend to snooze as a car
| passenger on a long trip while I do not when I am the one
| driving.
|
| I would hope not. :)
| onethought wrote:
| It doesn't follow that errors will be catestrophic. It
| could be the car just fails to handle edge case
| situations and just stops... granted on a highway that's
| bad but everywhere else, that's a hassle to traffic at
| worst. Also highway full self driving is much closer to
| being a solved problem.
|
| Even the failures you see in the beta of Tesla FSD,
| aren't catestrophic. The worst I've seen is a curb
| strikes in terms of actual "accidents"
| dncornholio wrote:
| I just looked up a random video of someone testing FSD
| 10.8 and in the first few minutes, it failed to signal
| before changing lanes and it almost caused an accident.
| All the while the driver is saying how good it is and how
| comfortable he is.. The car drives not smoothly at all
| and does random braking when around pedestrians.
|
| The car also features a yoke instead of a wheel. Which
| makes holding the yoke while autopilot is driving almost
| impossible.
|
| Autonomous driving is a mess.
| tjoff wrote:
| What you are describing is level 4. And if tesla were
| anywhere near that that would be freaking brilliant.
|
| Tesla FSD has many deaths and countless serious accidents
| under it's belt. Which doesn't necessarily have to be
| that bad, but as expected a computer doesn't make the
| same kind of mistakes that a human does and the kind of
| mistakes that tesla does doesn't inspire confidence (but
| rather nightmare fuel that you just can't wake up from).
|
| They should be banned until they have level 4 and take
| responsibility for their cars actions. Blaming it on a
| human driver and calling it a day is ludicrous.
| yissp wrote:
| > a computer doesn't make the same kind of mistakes that
| a human does
|
| I think this is particularly problematic because with
| other humans, we can at least develop a sense of what
| types of mistakes they tend to make and try to adjust our
| driving accordingly. Things like not driving in another
| person's blind-spot, etc. but also more subtle stuff. I
| feel like there a sort of hive-mind that develops amongst
| drivers and probably makes things safer than they would
| otherwise be.
| hoppla wrote:
| I almost crashed into a tesla on the highway when I
| changed lane right behind a Tesla. The Tesla was going
| much faster than me, and when I changed to its lane a bit
| too close, it started breaking for no reason, forcing me
| to jump on the brakes as well. I do not believe it was
| the driver, but the automatic brake assist that did not
| like me coming in too close...
| VBprogrammer wrote:
| You understand that you made the mistake in that case
| right?
| ddalex wrote:
| why do you say that? sounds like he was braked-checked by
| the tesla
|
| of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from
| behind is at fault, but brake-checking is problematic
| macintux wrote:
| Problematic and _completely_ unexpected. No one speeding
| past you is going to brake check you for moving into
| their lane, so this kind of behavior from a computer is
| inevitably going to lead to accidents.
| mbreese wrote:
| You can't know what is in front of the other car or why
| the Tesla braked. It could have been passing a slower car
| or truck (likely given the situation as described). If
| that car swerved a bit into the Tesla's lane, braking
| could have been the right choice.
|
| The car behind is _always_ responsible for maintaining
| distance.
|
| Realistically, if the tesla felt squeezed by a car it was
| passing, going a bit onto the shoulder would have been
| what I would have expected from a human driver. But no
| auto steering, tesla or otherwise, is going to do that.
| useerup wrote:
| > of course, in a large sense, the one that hits from
| behind is at fault
|
| I don't know where you live, but where I live (Denmark)
| brake-checking is a serious traffic offense which can
| lead to loss of license. While the driver behind has to
| keep distance, you cannot brake for non-traffic reasons.
| I.e. you cannot simply brake-check someone on the freeway
| because you think the driver behind you is driving too
| close (also a serious offense).
| onethought wrote:
| I think that is not really related. Following a "guidance
| system" that's using gps (and altitude in the planes
| case) is very different from having a neural net
| interpret the surroundings visually and make decisions
| based on that.
|
| I don't know where/why you are attributing sinister
| motives here... it seems a very understandable motive to
| make transport better.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| After working in the industry, I can safely say self-
| driving is a massively profitable lie. It can work in
| limited instances, but I don't think we'll have full self
| driving aka level 5 in urban environments until
| infrastructure changes. You simply need 5G/V2X for that.
| Just relying on cameras will not work. On that page, I
| have my concerns about EVs in general, who knows what the
| long-term health effects are for sitting on top of a HV
| battery and being surrounded by that electro-smog.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| _who knows what the long-term health effects are for
| sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by
| that electro-smog._
|
| A fellow named Planck knew, when he used the expression
| E=hv to describe the difference between ionizing and non-
| ionizing radiation. You just missed class that day, I
| imagine. Fortunately it's never too late to learn.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23337237/ I will accept
| an apology.
| CamperBob2 wrote:
| Ah, the ubiquitous rebuttal, "Here's a link to an
| unreproducible result with pubmed in the URL. You lose,
| sir." I know when I'm beat!
| ricardobayes wrote:
| You are right, the study is inconclusive.
| bradleyjg wrote:
| > Just relying on cameras will not work.
|
| If it's good enough for us (two small cameras and two
| microphones all mounted right next to each other) why is
| it inherently infeasible for a computer?
| kxrm wrote:
| I think there is more senses being used in driving then
| just eyes and ears. I am not the best driver in the
| world, but I use a lot of senses while driving, abnormal
| vibrations that are felt cause me to be more alert.
| Constant awareness of hills and road conditions are felt.
|
| Saying it's just cameras and microphones vastly over
| simplifies what driving involves for a human.
| ozfive wrote:
| It's interesting that you talk about using more senses
| while driving. I always crack the window to listen to the
| road noise as it helps me guage what the other cars are
| doing and has helped several times in avoiding collisions
| with other drivers that weren't paying attention since I
| could hear the change in noise within the standard noise
| of the road.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I find that argument being thrown around once in a while,
| but let me ask you this. Why are we spending billions of
| dollars in research that we can vaguely hope to reach
| human perception levels in one distant day. This whole
| thing is just not worth it. That's why I said especially
| for dense urban traffic driving, we need extra sensing,
| and need from the environment so it can help the car.
| Imagine if the car knew there is nothing coming from a
| junction we don't need to stop all the way etc.
| dividedbyzero wrote:
| Those cameras are backed by processing that's so far
| ahead of anything silicon can do it's not even funny.
| It's not inherently infeasible, but it seems computers
| will need a huge leap in certain capabilities before they
| will be able to act as a drop-in replacement for human
| drivers.
| gspr wrote:
| > On that page, I have my concerns about EVs in general,
| who knows what the long-term health effects are for
| sitting on top of a HV battery and being surrounded by
| that electro-smog.
|
| Say what? Is this some kind of industry joke that I'm not
| getting?
| ricardobayes wrote:
| All I'm saying is there's a possibility of discovering
| the power electronics affecting us in an adverse way.
| Similarly how we thought lead, asbesthos, radium were
| harmless at first.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| Lead is a bad example, unless you mean long forgotten
| times. Even Romans knew:
|
| > The Romans were aware that lead could cause serious
| health problems
|
| https://archive.epa.gov/epa/aboutepa/lead-poisoning-
| historic...
|
| Asbestos, likewise, was being used 80 years after the
| discovery of ill effects: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L
| ist_of_asbestos_disease_medic...
|
| Radium's danger was known 2 years after its discovery
| according to Wikipedia:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radium#Hazards
|
| I think your examples support the thesis that we're
| actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we
| don't mind them.
|
| But they don't support the thesis that we might find
| something unpleasant about power electronics that we
| don't yet know about.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| Yeah but we happily painted our walls with it even just
| 20 years ago.
| corin_ wrote:
| > _I think your examples support the thesis that we 're
| actually decent at discovering harmful effects, but we
| don't mind them._
|
| I think it's less that we don't mind them, and more that
| it unfortunately is a slow process to go from first
| research realising there's a problem to general
| scientific consensus to then one or both of public
| awareness becoming big enough that companies have to
| respond and stop choosing profit over safety, or
| government concern needs to become great enough to
| enforce it through regulation.
|
| I think we're seeing it with plastics at the moment, it
| seems very likely that in 50 years we'll a) know much
| more about the harm micro-plastics do and b) look back at
| now and think "there was enough evidence, why didn't they
| ban it immediately?" Well, because it's really convenient
| and cheap, companies don't want to give up profits,
| people like me don't want to give up convenient packaging
| etc, and governments don't want to piss off consumers and
| businesses at the same time by banning it too fast.
| Similar story for the climate crisis.
| rhn_mk1 wrote:
| We already know that microplastics are dangerous (BPA,
| leeching of random compounds, plankton overpopulation,
| animals with stuffed stomachs), there's no need to wait
| 50 years more.
|
| Otherwise I agree with what you say, and I'd say it
| agrees with what I said: we're pretty good at detecting
| harmful effects, and good at not taking them into
| account.
|
| But that's not what the parent implied.
| vianneychevalie wrote:
| I don't think you've followed completely the phases that
| need to be gone through: the fact that microplastics are
| still being produced is the most straightforward
| demonstration that can be had on the fact that companies
| are still to be forced by the general public to stop
| producing them
| dd36 wrote:
| Worse than inhaled gasoline and diesel exhaust? Doubtful
| em radiation is worse than particulate matter.
| gspr wrote:
| This line of reasoning makes littke sense. The fact that
| certain things were incorrectly labeled as harmless
| should definitely inform how we go about determining id
| something is harmful. But the leap that we should expect
| harmless-seeming things to be harmful is unhelpful.
|
| It's not far removed from
| flatearthers/qanon/911-truthers/moonhoax people defending
| theie stance by naming conspiracies thought false at the
| time but later revealed as true. Such events, and your
| speculations, are merely examples of the fact that we're
| sometimes wrong. Not that we should live our lives
| expecting that every accepted fact is wrong.
| quartesixte wrote:
| I'd be less worried about long term effects and more
| worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very
| flammable. It's bad enough that airlines ban lithium of
| quantities no more than a single smartphone from entering
| the cargo bay of a passenger airliner.
|
| And then you have an entire car's worth just strapped to
| the bottom of your chassis.
| eatbitseveryday wrote:
| > more worried about the fact that lithium-ion is very
| flammable
|
| As is standard fuel used in combustion engines (which you
| know) so how does the argument of flammability hold
| stronger here?
|
| Ford Pinto blew up due to tank puncture during an
| accident.
| kortex wrote:
| Metal fires (class D) are much harder to fight than
| petroleum fires (class B). They can burn way hotter,
| reignite after seemingly going out, and of course react
| to water to produce hydrogen.
|
| Current fire fighter directives for putting out BEVs is
| either dump a loader bucket of sand on it (which most
| don't have yet), or drag it some place safe and let it
| burn out.
|
| Also gasoline just sits there until ignited. Lithium
| battery packs can have various failure modes which send
| them into thermal runaway. Chevy Bolt EVs are being
| recalled en masse and owners told not to charge overnight
| or in a garage, least it go off unattended.
|
| I'm very pro EV but lithium is spicy.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I'm also very pro EV. Working in self-driving and
| hybrids/EVs driving around in prototype vehicles I often
| found the on-board GPS jammed. I just found it unnerving
| to drive around in a vehicle emitting such strong EMF
| even on-board devices go haywire. That made me think.
| quartesixte wrote:
| As the sibling post said, lithium fires are a completely
| different class and beast than a petroleum fire.
|
| Material science improvements won't overcome the
| fundamental fact that the third atomic element on the
| periodic table just really wants to light things on fire.
| ricardobayes wrote:
| I'd argue those issues are very well researched and
| material science fixed these.
| th3_nsa wrote:
| The phenomenon is called Death by GPS. Explained very well
| in this article :
| https://arstechnica.com/cars/2016/05/death-by-gps/
| ImaCake wrote:
| I've just gone from a 2004 Corolla to a 2020 Serrato. It's
| a low end car but it has lane assist, braking detection
| when a car slows in front, cruise, speed limiter, etc.
| Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy for
| me to see how you could get complacent driving a new car
| and make mistakes.
|
| All these features work well most of the time, but they all
| notably fail on, still frequent, edge cases.
| ozfive wrote:
| > Combine all those settings with google maps and it easy
| for me to see how you could get complacent driving a new
| car and make mistakes.
|
| This along with the fact that in my 2020 Toyota Corolla
| those features can more than likely get you into an
| accident is the reason I have them turned off. I don't
| actually feel safe with them on after experiencing their
| performance. Also notice a stutter in acceleration due to
| fuel injection timing and response from the gas pedal
| that concerns me.
| ngcc_hk wrote:
| Using a Hyundai hybrid and it got all these. It helped
| quite a lot as long as you consider yourselves a driver
| and in control.
|
| Still it is very weird when the car turn the wheel for
| you with your hand being guided.
|
| No hand up display and not sure if just voice to tell me
| to drive to lake would I do that.
| [deleted]
| bagels wrote:
| What is a Serrato? I've not heard of this kind of car. If
| it's a typo or something, apologies, I don't know what it
| could be. I'm not trying to be snarky, just genuinely
| curious what it is?
| ImaCake wrote:
| Woops yes a typo on a Kia Cerato. At least that is what
| it is called here in Australia.
|
| https://www.kia.com/au/cars/cerato/features.html
| RexM wrote:
| My guess is a Kia Sorento
|
| Edit: Ah OP replied. It's the Kia Forte in the US.
| PKop wrote:
| Yes and as with Tesla "FSD", supposedly the driver is to
| devote full attention to monitoring the car whenever
| activated. But this is silly because as these tools get
| better, the driver will inevitably monitor less. But it
| won't any time soon (ever?) avoid random errors every now
| and then. But now these will be catastrophic failures.
| xattt wrote:
| Driver training should be updated to include what to do
| when self-driving modes are used (ie what do you actually
| do to supervise the vehicle, which checks to do, etc).
| temac wrote:
| I don't really see how the needed monitoring would be
| more interesting than fully driving the car, maybe with a
| few convenience and safety assistances. Planes can use
| autopilots because there are not litteraly surounded by
| traffics 2m away. If a car needs monitoring, and they
| will probably need it for a very long time, you should as
| well drive it.
| PKop wrote:
| > If a car needs monitoring, and they will probably need
| it for a very long time, you should as well drive it.
|
| This is the crux of the intractable problem of AI/self-
| driving marketing vaporware, and why until this nonsense
| is shut down, the situation will probably have to get
| scandalously worse before it gets better (better meaning
| regulating fake "self driving" off the road as a public
| safety travesty).
| grog454 wrote:
| > But this is silly because as these tools get better,
| the driver will inevitably monitor less.
|
| And for good reason. The main benefit to FSD, as I see
| it, is the ability to do something more productive with
| my time while getting from A to B. Most wealthy people
| end up paying for drivers not because they want an
| exceptional driver, but because once you reach a certain
| threshold of income it is more profitable to work (phone
| calls, laptop, w/e) or sleep, and pay to be driven
| everywhere than to drive yourself. FSD lowers that income
| threshold tremendously and could be a significant boon to
| overall human productivity. If it ever happens.
| PKop wrote:
| >is the ability to do something more productive with my
| time
|
| Seems to miss my point, I may have not stated clearly.
| Yes I understand the sales pitch of self driving cars
| stated above...the "marketing" / "hype" of AI/self
| driving cars/ Tesla FSD evokes the idea of completely
| offloading the responsibility to the car and doing
| whatever you want with your time during commutes, as if
| it was public transit.
|
| But my point was anything less than this is a complete
| waste of time and useless as a product because until you
| are completely hands and attention off, you have to be
| _completely_ hands and attention on /ready... _no matter
| how good or near actual FSD it gets_.
|
| Because 99.9, or 99.9999, or 99.999999% effective is
| effectively 0 percent effective given the catastrophic
| outcome of _any_ error if you aren 't devoting full
| attention to monitoring the car.
|
| But aside from all of this theorizing, the actual product
| is _NOWHERE_ near high 9 's reliable. As it gets better,
| attention will drop but errors will still be pervasive.
| And with this as backdrop, the fact the marketing has
| ever even hinted at being general-AI type FSD (the name
| itself for example) is a scandal. The videos of people
| riding in the backseat, or any other instance of not
| monitoring the car fully because they think it can drive
| itself. I predict there's going to a be an endless stream
| of accidents from these cars then FSD will be shut down
| until fully proven, which won't be technically possible
| for a long long time if ever in our lifetimes.
| dheera wrote:
| Not to mention the GPS doesn't do half the things I want it
| to do.
|
| "OK Google zoom in the map by 2X"
|
| nope
|
| "OK Google don't hide all the businesses while on
| navigation mode"
|
| nope
|
| "OK Google show all street labels don't hide them from me"
|
| nope
|
| "OK Google rotate the map to the right 30 degrees for 5
| seconds"
|
| nope
|
| "OK Google show me satellite maps instead"
|
| nope
|
| "OK Google pause notifications from Facebook while driving"
|
| nope
|
| ... I bet most people have to fiddle with their screens due
| to OK Google's utter incompetence.
|
| Meanwhile the people on the OK Google team are busy
| figuring out how to arrange a damn haircut which I never
| needed.
| taneq wrote:
| Would you like to see a map of the nearby roads with no
| lables on it? I fyou zoom in to the point where a road is
| half the width of the screen I'll deign to add a label on
| one of the little side roads you don't care about.
|
| Never will I ever tell you what the arterial route you're
| currently on is called though. Sucker.
| gambiting wrote:
| I just disabled Google assistant and all of its
| functions, it's beyond useless and probably the most
| frustrating thing I have ever used on my phone. And I
| don't mean just the voice controls, but all the "helpful"
| tips and suggestions are just bad and I can't stand them.
| jbverschoor wrote:
| siri's worse than google's voice system... Siri
| understands what I'm saying, and then CHANGES the correct
| words into something stupid.
|
| I just risk a fine and use my hands for a short moment
| instead of spending 2 minutes being distracted by siri.
| corin_ wrote:
| When driving I don't bother to use Siri for anything
| other than "call <person>" or "text <person>".
|
| The most hilarious example of how bad Siri is for me, is
| that literally 100% of the time that I'm playing
| something on Apple TV, if I say "Hey Siri, pause the TV"
| (or any variation, calling it Apple TV, including the
| name of the room, etc.) it always replies that there's
| nothing currently playing. And if I tell Siri on my phone
| to play on the Apple TV, all it can do is start Apple
| Music playing a random song on the TV. It can however
| respond OK to "resume on Apple TV" which restarts
| whatever I was watching that had been paused.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| OK Google is awful for me, it repeats back exactly what I
| said but rarely interprets it, at all. "Don't know how to
| help with 'navigate home'", "'send a message'", "'find a
| supermarket'". Bleurgh. This is via Android Auto. Next
| minute it's reading me a text and asking if I want to
| reply by "SMS or WhatsApp".
|
| None of these systems show you enough 'under the hood' to
| know why it's failing and so react. Clearly, here the
| voice recognition, tts are working well; some optional
| visual feedback would be great - like show on screen a
| list of responses:
|
| - Keyword heard
|
| - OK Google responding
|
| - Voice1 recognised
|
| - Input "navigate home"
|
| - Input sent to maps
|
| - Maps didn't understand
|
| - Reporting failure
|
| I guess Google know all this, at the time of the query,
| but as they don't know what I'm trying to do (though
| 'navigate home' is pretty clear, perhaps I was actually
| saying 'buy a gnome') ... doesn't seem like there's a
| proper feedback loop to help direct/correct the system?
| phil21 wrote:
| The sole thing I use it for is setting alarms/timers, or
| starting the process of a calendar appointment. Those are
| the two use-cases I've found useful.
|
| Say "navigate to X" also can kinda work with less
| fumbling than typing half the time but it's a bit messy.
| sundvor wrote:
| That's brilliant, and so funny because it's true.
|
| I've been wondering why we haven't really had any
| advances in our voice commands for nearly a decade -
| things like zooming and such are actions I've long wanted
| to be able to perform.
|
| Even that rotate map.. when your car is shown at the
| bottom and map is hard locked to _current_ heading, when
| navigation is about to do a sharp right you end up with
| zero visibility of the rest of the route as they still
| haven 't bothered doing a projection and modifying
| rotation dynamically - they're not even trying.
|
| All your examples are exactly the kinds of things that an
| intelligent system should be able to respond to, in order
| to be useful.
|
| Getting that haircut ordered is the _last_ thing we need.
| aenis wrote:
| Because it takes a dedicated team reviewing commands all
| day, every day, and dev team implementing event handlers,
| coordinating with other product teams. It takes lots of
| dedication.
|
| I used to run a chatbot that screened people. We thought
| we were asking simple enough questions, and yet two
| million chats in, we still discovered at least a Dozen
| unexpected/misdetected intents that required care. A day.
| And here is the problem: management will ask: "so if we
| add handling for 'rotate the map 30 deg', how many people
| will appreciate it?". The answer is usually "one person
| every 400k sessions". For an MbA trained manager that
| means there is no reason to do it. And its the same with
| every other similar discovery.
|
| Running an NLP based tool requires staffing a 10-20
| people full time, telling them to keep the quality high
| and leaving them the fck alone. Thats anathema for most
| companies that proclaim to be "metric based". Google is a
| prime example of this behavior.
| grog454 wrote:
| > The answer is usually "one person every 400k sessions".
|
| But you control that to some extent. If more people are
| aware of the command and believe it will work (I
| wouldn't) then you'll probably get higher incidence
| rates. I wouldn't believe it would work because like the
| person two parent comments above, less than half the
| novel crap I try works. So I try novel crap less and less
| frequently compared to things that I know will work.
| rapnie wrote:
| > they're not even trying.
|
| Wasn't their core business Advertising? Guess they are
| just not into these sidetracks much.
| ghaff wrote:
| It's not just Google Maps though. Also Apple Maps, Music,
| Podcasts... I find it so frustrating to use voice
| commands on my phone in the car that I mostly just don't
| even try. I set things up before I head off as much as I
| can and mostly stop somewhere before I make changes.
| morsch wrote:
| Last time I tried, I couldn't even figure out how to
| _exit_ navigation using voice. I 'm sure it's possible,
| even easy, but the combination of not knowing the right
| incantation, car noise, language issues (does it expect
| German or English commands?) and overall stress meant I
| just ended up muting the sound system, which is a
| physical button.
| omegant wrote:
| It goes way beyond checklist stuff.
|
| Imagine having an intermediate system in your Tesla, one
| between fully manual and the autopilot. This system uses the
| navigation capabilities of the autopilot to draw in the big
| screen some squares that guide you to your destination without
| the need to look outside. Something you may find in a
| videogame. This system is helpfull and easy to use, and allows
| you to pay attention to more important matters.
|
| Well, now imagine getting so used to this system that you
| forget how to drive without the squares telling you what to do
| every single moment. So used that if the squares guide you to
| drive straight to a wall at 100mph you do it without
| hesitation.
|
| This is what supposedly happened in this case. The flight
| director is there to help you, but you are supposed to know how
| to fly without it.
|
| When you rotate an airliner the initial pitch is around 15
| degrees nose up, that way your rate of climb and the optimal
| climb speed is maintained.
|
| They kept the nose almost horizontal, against any natural
| instinct for a pilot. They almost overrun the runway without
| rotating, and they barely rotated just enough to be able to
| keep the flight director centered in their screen.
|
| It seems that the speed went beyond the structural limit of the
| tyres (around 200 kts) and if they didn't retract the flaps,
| beyond their structural limit too. And then they proceeded to
| fly almost scratching the obstacles in their path.
|
| Why does something like this happpens? Because in an airline
| like Emirates actual piloting skills are actively punished!.
| You are not allowed to fly the plane manually, nor disconect
| automatic systems if they are available.
|
| They expect robot like precission applying procedures, modern
| airliners log dozens of instruments and have automatic reports
| when procedure limitation are exceeding (is a big brother like
| work environment). This may seem a good philosophy, but it
| actually creates an situation where pilots loose necessary
| skills, and when computers or procedures fail, as they often do
| in airplanes, pilots are not able to react properly anymore.
|
| I'm sure Emirates will punish the pilots and will set new
| procedures over the current ones, to try to avoid this kind of
| situations in the future. They will solve nothing, they will
| only make it worse. Is a culture of fear and punishment. This
| also happens in other middle east airlines like Qatar. Airlines
| in Asia are making this mistake too.
|
| In contrast airlines in the US and Europe (except Ryanair and
| some other British carriers) give pilots much more freedom
| regarding manual flight, which helps them to keep their skills
| honed.
|
| Hope this gives a different perspective on the problem. The
| wrong altitude selection is the minor of the problems in this
| case IMHO.
|
| I am an Airline captain with 22 years of experience (737, MD88,
| A320, A330 and A340) and more than 14k flight hours.
|
| Edit, some typos and making a couple of sentences more clear.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Good point about the tire v-max, that wasn't mentioned
| elsewhere as far as I've read on this.
| nobodyandproud wrote:
| Some good lessons there for automated driving; or any skills
| that once acquired, are lost when taken for granted and not
| actively cultivated.
| vt240 wrote:
| Testimony given during the Asiana NTSB Sunshine hearing is
| probably a good place to start, for anyone who wants more
| detail on your comment here.
| Simon_O_Rourke wrote:
| I would like to know what the Ryanair pilots are ordered to
| do by their higher ups. Been on a few of them in Europe and
| they all hit the runway pretty hard coming back down.
| smilespray wrote:
| That's just to shake loose any spare change you might have
| in your pockets. Pays for the crew's busfare.
| jrs235 wrote:
| Maybe they prefer Navy pilots? /s
|
| An old running joke I've heard is if the pilot has a nice
| smooth landing then if the pilot had a military piloting
| background they must be from the Air Force, hard set downs
| meant Navy. Navy does hard set downs because when you are
| landing on an aircraft carrier you only have so much runway
| and you have to get the hook down.
| alamortsubite wrote:
| Navy pilot vs Air Force pilot.
| p_l wrote:
| Ryanair is not exactly recruiting from USNavy
| throwawayboise wrote:
| I think GP is saying that Ryanair demands that pilots use
| the automation to the fullest extent, and disallows "hand
| flying" (with an exeption, one presumes, for when the
| automatic systems fail, and a hope that the pilots remember
| how to hand fly).
| jacquesm wrote:
| Try KLM. Drop it down from 3' up and ensure firm contact
| with the runway, rather than those endless landings where
| nobody knows if you've touched down or not. Better to avoid
| the ambiguity. You have to break ground effect somehow and
| the decisive way is the best, then at least you know you're
| no longer flying but rolling.
| redis_mlc wrote:
| FYI: firm landings are actually correctly done, especially
| with rain or drizzle. It should not feel like a crash
| though.
|
| The worst landing I ever had was when I landed with no
| sensation of touching down on the runway (a zero feet rate
| of descent.) Both myself and my CFI went nuts trying to
| figure out if we were down, or still flying along the
| runway and about to bounce.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Is there no contact indicator or anything?
|
| I've never flown anything where I couldn't just look out
| of the window to check so I don't know but it feels like
| there should be :)
| redis_mlc wrote:
| No there isn't.
|
| This was at night also.
| kchoudhu wrote:
| This rings true. I live in Doha and a very good family friend
| is an instructor in the local flag carrier's training
| program.
|
| He was recently bemoaning the following situation:
|
| 1. There was a go-around on some flight or other (for good
| reason!)
|
| 2. Management interpreted this as a failure, and announced
| that every go-around will now have a full post-mortem with
| involved pilots requiring more sim time.
|
| 3. Pilots now think go-arounds are now off-limits. Oops!
|
| This is a very, very common pattern in the Middle East. When
| the waterfall goes as planned, service is excellent. When
| exceptions happen, management freaks out and adds more layers
| of regulation to make sure the exception can't happen again,
| failing to recognize that exceptions are sometimes good. For
| benign stuff like customer service, you get frustrated
| customers. For important stuff like air safety... well, you
| end up with close calls or crashed airplanes.
|
| Centralized decision making is a hell of drug.
| Aeolun wrote:
| Ooh, it's like internally reporting security
| vulnerabilities!
| kchoudhu wrote:
| The parallels are legion (unfortunately).
| jacquesm wrote:
| On that note: I have had a triple go-around and even though
| everybody was super happy about making their connections on
| time I personally thought that that was an extremely unsafe
| landing with the port side wing coming uncomfortably close
| to the tarmac. Severe windshear, ours was the last flight
| to land before the airport was closed. The pilot stood at
| the door to say goodbye to the passengers and was visibly
| upset.
|
| Any kind of pressure on pilots to make connections or to
| reduce the number of go arounds or even alternates should
| be pushed back against hard. It can only lead to more
| accidents.
| azalemeth wrote:
| This rings very true. My dad is a retired commercial
| pilot and has _a whole evening 's worth_ of rant about
| this, albeit mostly in the 1970s-80s, before pilot hours
| were regulated to quite the same extent they are now (and
| with less automation). He said that his absolute worst
| was a "double washington" (i.e. London to Washington
| twice in "a day"), and that on the return leg either him
| or a co-pilot would really be operating at their
| physiological limits, at the stressful approach to
| Heathrow. Turnaround time and load factors are basically
| _the_ thing that airlines compete on, with the net result
| that they were _strongly_ encouraged to "man up" and
| "power on through".
|
| After falling asleep for 10 minutes over the mid-atlantic
| at some point before I was born, apparently _all_ the
| pilots in the airline agreed to sleep in shifts for
| safety reasons, and never told management about it...
|
| He also has a story about a frozen Canada goose coming
| through the windscreen at FL300 above a dark cloud, but
| that's a story for another day...
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Wow that Canada goose thing must have been some story.
| With the decompression and -60C air coming in at 700
| knots. Wow
| jacquesm wrote:
| The interesting thing about that flight is that I don't
| think the pilot knew how close to crashing we came
| whereas I had a 'front row seat' to what would have been
| a wingtip ground strike if we had been just a tiny little
| bit lower. I've flown 100's of times per year for a
| decade and I've never had a landing that bad. This was a
| short hop from Berlin to Amsterdam on Lufthansa.
|
| I'd love to hear your dad's stories, there isn't a pilot
| that I know that doesn't have an evening's worth of
| material, so if you have the time to write that one up
| that would be great.
| WalterBright wrote:
| My dad flew for 20 years in the Air Force. He more than
| once defied procedure that would have put him in jeopardy
| on a flight. He told me he was not going to die because of
| a bureaucratic rule written by someone whose ass was safely
| behind a desk.
|
| One was when formation flying, pilots were to keep both
| eyes on the lead, and mimic his flying. This led to several
| crashes where the whole team died because the lead flew
| into the ground. He said he'd be damned if he was going to
| do that, and kept one eye on the lead and the other eye on
| the ground.
|
| He spent some years as a flight instructor, who sits in the
| back seat. There were incidents where the student would
| panic and crash the airplane. That wasn't going to happen
| to my dad, either, and he kept a length of iron pipe at
| hand to beat the student into letting go of the controls.
|
| (That Airbus that crashed into the Atlantic a few years ago
| was an example of the junior pilot panicking and holding
| the stick back till it crashed.)
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yes about the airbus but the problem there is also that
| there is no feedback, so the second pilot can't feel what
| the other one is doing.
|
| But in that case (I think you mean AF447) there was a lot
| more going on with confusing warning indications. They
| did however fly a perfectly functioning aircraft straight
| into the sea.
| nate_meurer wrote:
| It wasn't quite perfectly functioning. The pitot tubes
| had frozen, depriving the crew of reliable airspeed
| information.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| That's true, I just meant that there was nothing
| technical stopping it from remaining airborne. But I
| should have said that.
| nopzor wrote:
| you're correct that the pitot tubes had malfunctioned,
| and this was a significant factor.
|
| but the gp point has validity.
|
| if the controls were physically linked, like they are in
| boeing aircraft, the pilots who were putting in opposing
| inputs would have realized what was going on pretty
| quickly.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Yeah, that one. I was too lazy to look it up. Thanks!
| azth wrote:
| > That wasn't going to happen to my dad, either, and he
| kept a length of iron pipe at hand to beat the student
| into letting go of the controls.
|
| That's awesome haha. Hope your dad is well.
| p_l wrote:
| The Instructor's Stick is well regarded tradition all
| over the world.
|
| One problem AF447 faced was that the closest thing to
| instructor who could whack the panicking pilot returned
| to cabin too late to fix it...
| WalterBright wrote:
| > Hope your dad is well
|
| He is two months older than Betty White! Sadly, he passed
| at 93. I sorely miss him. But thanks for the kind
| thoughts, I appreciate them.
| emptybottle wrote:
| When you say an airline like Emirates, what do you mean? Are
| they in a certain category of airline?
|
| I'm wondering how to avoid flying on airlines who have bad
| practices but at present I'm not sure how to tell.
| omegant wrote:
| Yes Gulf carriers, but not all of them, Emirates and Qatar
| are the most important.
|
| They really have high standard and try their best to have
| the best safety standars. Is not for lack of trying. Is
| that their system has gome far too much in one direction
| that is now backfiring.
|
| Absolutely you may have an airline that allows too much
| manual flying and too low procedure standars (it is what
| happened at first in commercial aviation). There is a sweet
| spot between standart procedure and manual proficiency, and
| some airlines have been going way beyond that spot for some
| time.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Gulf carriers in general share that reputation for bad
| working conditions for crews and bad safety practices.
|
| Your safest choice is a US or EU legacy carrier. But for
| example in Asia you will not have that choice for local
| routes. Then there aren't that many things you can see on
| the outside. But one thing that can help is going with a
| large airline that also operates long haul flights into the
| US and Europe. There is a list for example of airlines
| banned from operating into Europe. You get on that list by
| having questionable safety or maintenance practices. So
| being allowed to operate flights to Europe is a small
| positive signal.
| bencollier49 wrote:
| Out of interest, which British carriers? Am British so would
| like to know so I can avoid.
|
| I thought Ryanair were Irish?
|
| Also, why are Ryanair et al doing this? I mean, obviously
| Ryanair have a bit of a reputation.
| hammock wrote:
| The systems you describe exist. Backup cameras, blind spot
| indicators, etc
| WalterBright wrote:
| Interesting comparing this with the 737MAX crashes. There, I
| regularly get excoriated on HN for suggesting that the pilots
| not knowing to turn off the stab trim system when it goes
| haywire is unreasonable, despite it being a "memory item" and
| despite Emergency Airworthiness Directives reiterating this.
| bumby wrote:
| It's because from a safety standpoint, procedural controls
| are not preferable to engineered controls. PPE controls are
| lower still.
|
| It would be like alleviating a motorcycle manufacturer from
| responsibility of a bad design by claiming riders wouldn't
| be hurt if they were wearing all their protective gear. It
| may be true while also being sub-standard design practice
| for a safety-critical system.
| MBCook wrote:
| Isn't that exactly what Tesla does? Deflect all
| autopilot/FSD blame on users because they were supposed
| to be "in charge"?
| WalterBright wrote:
| Exactly? No. Tesla drivers are not trained in emergency
| procedures. They're not trained at all.
|
| Pilots are.
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Yeah and at the same time marketing it as "Full Self
| Driving". :x
| jquery wrote:
| I made that same point repeatedly, to mixed reception.
| Boeing is absolutely at fault but the airlines that had
| crashes were also guilty of cutting corners. Boeing is
| (rightly) held to a high standard. I try to fly on airlines
| that have similar high standards for the operations.
| WalterBright wrote:
| Of course Boeing shares blame for this. But so do the
| parts suppliers, the installers of the bad part, and the
| pilots. All of that had to fail for the crash to happen.
| LordFast wrote:
| Seriously. Did these pilots think they were playing Microsoft
| Flight Simulator or something?!
| drited wrote:
| Sounds like they had their holiday period B team both in the
| crew that flew the plane and in the department that wrote the
| memo.
| topspin wrote:
| > I really hope that's not the actual message Emirates is
| putting out there.
|
| Why imagine there is hope of that? Is there some question as to
| the credibility of the reporting here? If this memo claim were
| fake I imagine Emirates would deny the report and initiate some
| lawsuits. The story linked here is based on the reporting[1] of
| one Gilbert Ott of godsavethepoints.com over five days ago
| which includes a image of the 'memo' Emirates issued, so
| someone has actually put their name on this story, including
| the report about the memo.
|
| Blatant dysfunction should not be discounted through false
| hopes. This airline is clearly operated by incompetents, both
| in the cockpit and among its management. Someone will doubtless
| feel compelled to cite some safety record or another; this
| carries no weight if you cannot eliminate the contribution of
| aircraft designers and the automation they've provided. And you
| can't.
|
| [1] https://www.godsavethepoints.com/emirates-
| flight-231-takeoff...
| jacquesm wrote:
| You'd hope a regulator would turn their wandering eye to this
| airline, both from a hiring, operations and management
| perspective. There are errors on all of those.
| topspin wrote:
| Emirates is a Flag Carrier for UAE, apparently owned by
| Dubai's government via 'Investment Corporation of Dubai.'
| There is, therefore, no meaningful distinction between it
| and its regulator, so don't hold your breath on that hope
| either. The FAA will demur; bet the rent money on that.
| We're talking UAE money here, and that means most of the US
| Senate is on speed dial. No FAA functionaries will be
| troubling UAE over this.
|
| The only hope one may legitimately cling to is that the
| problem space is mostly solved by the automation and the
| autopilot operators occupying the cockpits of these
| aircraft continue to not interfere with it too much.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Airplane manufacturers and regulators being too close is
| not good, see the MAX MCAS issue, airlines should be
| completely firewalled from regulators for very obvious
| reasons.
|
| That's pretty bad. Here in NL was have a similar
| situation where the state is shareholder of KLM/AF
| leading to all kinds of bizarre decisions in recent
| times. But at least I'd hope that some people at the
| regulator would resign rather than avoid doing their jobs
| when safety is on the line.
| bumby wrote:
| > _airlines should be completely firewalled from
| regulators for very obvious reasons._
|
| Then we need to be prepared to fund the regulators
| appropriately. I think part of the problem is they are
| stretched so thin it becomes impossible to know enough
| about each system an individual regulator is expected to
| verify/certify.
| jhugo wrote:
| In NL you do have some somewhat-external oversight in the
| form of the European Aviation Safety Agency. This does
| _sort of_ apply to UAE as well, in the sense that EASA
| and FAA do some oversight of Emirates because they use
| their airspace and airports. But obviously that doesn't
| rise to the level of oversight that a proper arms-length
| local regulator would be able to provide.
| nilsbunger wrote:
| The "black hole effect" is one mitigating factor - if you take
| off on a moonless night, it is surprisingly disorienting, and
| can become debilitating. These pilots missed a bunch of very
| basic things like rotating at V1. Maybe they got totally
| disoriented and it incapacitated them? Good training is
| supposed to prevent that. This wasn't a "missed an item on a
| checklist" story.
| stereo wrote:
| We're talking about Dubai, which is probably one of the
| brightest places in the world at night.
| kylehotchkiss wrote:
| It's a very narrow city on the coast and you take off
| towards the water. It'll get dark pretty fast.
| rurban wrote:
| If you look at the map, you'll notice that the plane was
| at 60m altitude in Downtown Dubai, at overspeed (600km/h)
| with highly lit skyscrapers of 200m left and right of
| you. Almost another 9/11. You cannot make that up even in
| desaster movies.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| The black hole effect applies to visual flight, mostly the
| landing part. Not accelerating on a runway with runway lights
| and completely forgetting to look at the basic instruments.
| SkyMarshal wrote:
| _> It doesn 't matter was in system. You run your checklists
| and configure for your own flight / your own departure etc._
|
| I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I read
| the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for the
| next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior flight's
| crew. Train each crew to assume the plane they're prepping for
| their next flight is FUBAR in every way, checklist everything,
| fix it as necessary, and go from there. Don't rely on the prior
| crew for anything.
| amelius wrote:
| Perhaps this game should be part of the UX of cockpit
| controls: find the error, or lose your permits.
| jacquesm wrote:
| Hehe. Gamification for the win... I really don't want to
| think about the red team version of that.
| dghlsakjg wrote:
| In the US this is explicitly part of training for major
| airlines. They will line up failures in The simulator and
| have the pilots solve/fly through the issue. You can't fly
| until you pass these checks
| wiedehopf wrote:
| Is it really unexpected failures or do they discuss
| scenario / do you expect one of a few typical scenarios?
|
| Really throwing failures at pilots without them knowing
| what's going on seems to mean too many fail or rather
| there is not enough time to train pre-discussed scenarios
| and do scenarios that aren't announced.
|
| I'm not sure it's really what you'd want.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| It's exactly what you want, because it simulates reality.
| Unexpected failures are by definition unexpected.
| wiedehopf wrote:
| Yeah i know it is what you want.
|
| I'm just asking if it's really a reality as i previously
| got the impression airline training wasn't quite at that
| level. As in mostly you get an engine out because that
| needs training every time. And if the unexpected scenario
| is an engine out most of the time ... it's not really
| unexpected.
|
| I wonder how often stuff like static port blockages and
| even maybe the flight director being wrong during takeoff
| are trained in an unexpected fashion. I'd expect quite
| rarely if at all. That's ok i suppose as it's rare
| failures, but the descriptions here kinda suggested a
| level of random scenarios being thrown at pilots ...
| which isn't quite realistic i think due to limited
| simulator time alone.
| hungryforcodes wrote:
| I just fly small planes, so I don't know much about
| commercial airline sims except from what I've read -- but
| I think if you have just a limited time in the simulator
| then for sure you'd want to be hitting up flight failures
| more frequently to test yourself. These things are
| complex, so I'd imagine there would be discussions after
| of how it could have gone better etc, rather than just a
| pass /fail.
| andruby wrote:
| My father is a retired airline pilot and instructor.
| Everything that can fail in the simulator is fair game.
| Pilots have recurrent trainings all the time during their
| career. They get tested every X months. They have medical
| exams.
|
| And that is how it should be. Pilots must be able to
| handle every possible failure. They don't need to know
| every single procedure by heart, they've got the manuals
| in the cockpit for non-urgent procedures.
|
| My father loves _flying_. He's from a generation that
| trained on airplanes with little automation. He often
| talked about younger pilots relying too much on
| instruments. He would get annoyed with pilots that didn't
| appreciate manually flying a plane.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| It's not that unexpected, because you do recurrent
| training in the simulator every 6 months. And there is a
| set of emergencies that is done every time, for example
| engine failure / fire during takeoff must be done.
|
| All pilots are trained to know the immediate actions
| required for a whole set of scenarios (we call these
| memory items) the point of the sim check is not to learn
| them but to check that you know all of them and to keep
| some recent experience. Because these things happen so
| rarely in real flights.
|
| I've had for example only once had an engine failure
| after takeoff and it was a partial failure without fire.
| In the simulator I think I've done it at least 100 times
| and most times they put it on fire for good measure so
| you're in a hurry to get on the ground. The real world
| one was very uneventful, return to the airport, taxi
| back, do a lot of paperwork.
| Pasorrijer wrote:
| It's truly unexpected failures,in the context of flying
| the plane. Basically every failure state in flying has a
| procedure, and as a pilot you're expected to memorize
| some, and know how to find and follow the checklist or
| red page for all emergency situations. Beyond that, you
| have to know how to assess and evaluate any emergency
| because that's your job.
| [deleted]
| jacquesm wrote:
| Yes, assuming that the previous crew left you a 'perfect and
| ready to fly plane' is one hell of an assumption to make.
| With tiny little pieces to collect if it ends up being wrong.
|
| Emirates has a pretty good rep but this doesn't help.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Emirates may have a good score on some passenger metrics
| but they don't have a good rep with most pilots.
|
| There has been another incident where an Emirates crew
| lacked any kind of basic aircraft handling:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emirates_Flight_521
|
| Their main problem is a very bad rep for working
| conditions. Crews being overly fatigued, arcane labour laws
| in UAE, that makes it harder for them to hire pilots and to
| retain experienced pilots. Combined with a local market
| that doesn't have a big aviation history so less people to
| build on.
| 3825 wrote:
| > Yes, assuming that the previous crew left you a 'perfect
| and ready to fly plane' is one hell of an assumption to
| make. With tiny little pieces to collect if it ends up
| being wrong.
|
| This is very bizarre. I once had a morning flight out of
| Denver (not too long ago, August 2008?) and talking to
| people there apparently the plane had an electronics
| malfunction of some sort. They said they would fly us out
| as soon as the plane was ready but about ten hours later,
| they gave up and flew us out on a plane with a different
| airline (which I assume was not free for them, I doubt
| American Airlines would fly a plane for free for United).
| Point is the initial problem, at least what they told us,
| was some lights failed to turn on but they refused to fly.
| I thought flight crew were very risk averse but clearly not
| everyone.
| jacquesm wrote:
| That's proper procedure. When in doubt: fail safe.
|
| These guys even flew the plane _back_ instead of being
| replaced by another crew, and that 's with a plane that
| has just been used way in excess of its design parameters
| on more than one measure.
| Zak wrote:
| I've heard pilots put this as "it's better to be on the
| ground wishing you were in the air than to be in the air
| wishing you were on the ground".
| GekkePrutser wrote:
| Or "take-off is optional but landing is mandatory" :)
| Diesel555 wrote:
| Some settings in airplanes are last left. And this is okay.
| If you had to reset every setting at all times it would cost
| time. Sometimes you find one that you go "man I wish that
| wasn't last left." Then software updates fix that.
|
| > I am not a pilot, but that's exactly what I thought when I
| read the memo too. They should be putting responsibility for
| the next flight on the next flight's crew, not the prior
| flight's crew.
|
| It's not a matter of responsibility, it's a risk mitigation
| measure. Adding the additional check is common in aviation.
| Yes, it is the next crew's responsibility, however if you can
| mitigate a risk by adding some procedure to what the previous
| crew does, at little or no cost until a software update is
| released fixing the issue, you do that every time.
| tshaddox wrote:
| I'm not a pilot either but I am shocked that there's not some
| standard "reset" procedure so that each flight starts with
| the plane in a consistent clean slate. It seems bizarre for
| any process to rely on the previous flight coincidentally
| leaving the plane in a certain state.
| manigandham wrote:
| It doesn't matter what the previous crew configured,
| because you reconfigure for the conditions and scenario
| you're about to fly. And this is all part of the preflight
| checklist.
|
| Even if something was missed, it's very strange to not
| realize that the plane is still on the ground when you can
| see the end of the runway, despite what the computers are
| saying. Usually pilots have trouble trusting the
| instruments over their own senses, but in this case it's
| like the opposite.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Is there a reason for these checklists not to be
| automated? I would expect the pilot to set the plane in
| takeoff mode with destination and weight (if the plane
| cannot measure the weight itself) and the plane to run
| the checklist itself, calculate v1 and v2, check there is
| enough fuel to the destination, check all the control
| surface positions, etc.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| The Boeing 777 (the plane in this incident) does have an
| integrated electronic checklist, which can automatically
| tick off items that are already completed, but the pilots
| still have to actually use it.
|
| Nothing can help you when you refuse to operate the plane
| correctly.
| op00to wrote:
| It doesn't. The pilots didn't do their preflight checklist
| which would have caught a poorly set up flight computer.
| atonse wrote:
| Then I do fully support firing them. (If they didn't
| follow the checklist)
|
| At first I saw they might have been fired and thought
| damn that is strict.
| JimBlackwood wrote:
| They are responsible for flying a plane full of
| passengers. Strict would be fair.
| tshaddox wrote:
| Right, but what I mean is that it shouldn't be possible
| to skip those steps and have things coincidentally work
| because of the state the plane was left in. I'm not a
| pilot or even much of an aviation geek, so maybe I'm
| misunderstanding the description of this incident, but it
| sounds to me like this crew did what they always do, and
| that normally works fine, but this time it didn't.
| op00to wrote:
| There's a lot that goes into deciding how and what tasks
| to do, how quickly, at what points in flight, and those
| numbers change as winds, weather, traffic, and fuel burn
| changes. Each flight, the pilots need to basically take
| all the factors going into the flight (# passengers,
| bags, cargo weight, routing, taxi time, and so on) to
| figure out how much fuel to use, what particular climb
| profile they'll use, and a bunch more.
|
| It makes sense that there'd be a "clean cockpit" magic
| button to push, but not only would the magic button need
| to be tested in every aspect of flight, in every
| configuration, in every combination of working and broken
| sensors... but airplanes are flippin' complex, and flying
| modern airliners as part of an airline is even more
| complex.
| [deleted]
| nilsbunger wrote:
| There isn't much in these planes that works
| "coincidentally" because of a previous flight -- almost
| all important state has to be reconfigured each flight.
| The article is over-indexing on the flight director's
| altitude setting. These guys missed many basic things,
| like rotating at V1 speed and in general monitoring the
| plane's situation.
| aaronmdjones wrote:
| You rotate at Vr, not V1. Vr is almost always close to
| V1, though. The 777's flight computer can calculate all 3
| (V1, Vr, V2) for you, put them on the speed tape (on the
| left of the Primary Flight Display), and audibly call
| them out.
| nilsbunger wrote:
| Doh you're right! I was still closer than these pilots
| though :)
| crooked-v wrote:
| That's what pre-flight checklists are for. Even a "simple"
| one for a small plane like a Cessna 172 comprehensively
| covers setting or resetting literally every control in the
| plane.
| thewarrior wrote:
| I know nothing about aviation but it seems to me like the
| auto pilot software could use a lot of improvement.
|
| Why on earth would you give the pilot an instruction that
| would almost certainly lead to a crash ? It seems like there
| aren't enough sanity checks. Any such dodgy situation should
| trigger an alarm and disengage the auto pilot imo.
| sitharus wrote:
| Auto pilots disengaging and sounding an alarm in unexpected
| situations have lead to multiple crashes, also the
| autopilot wasn't engaged at the time, but the pilot was
| following a computer created flight path.
|
| Commercial aviation is designed around highly trained
| people following defined procedures. Auto pilots are not
| supposed to second-guess the inputs because that adds to
| confusion and cognitive load on the pilots. Pilots tell the
| computer what to do, not the other way around.
|
| What _should_ have happened here is the pilot monitoring
| should be watching the instruments and calling out flight
| stages. When the pilot flying didn't initiate a proper
| climb they should have called this out, or taken over
| control until a safe altitude was established. This wasn't
| an autopilot issue, this was a breakdown on crew resource
| management.
| teeray wrote:
| By my reading, auto pilot was not involved. Flight
| Directors are basically an overlay on the instruments
| showing where the pitch, roll, etc. of the plane needs to
| be to achieve the programmed navigational fixes.
| lovasoa wrote:
| Is there any situation when it would make sense to have
| the flight director set to an altitude of zero before
| takeoff ? If not, then maybe it shouldn't stay switched
| on and set to zero after landing when the crew leaves the
| cabin ? Couldn't it be reset automatically ?
| teeray wrote:
| Yes, if the field is below sea level. They do exist!
| behringer wrote:
| That's what the memo the airline company put out said
| about this.
|
| It's hard to say if it's a good thing or not, imagine an
| incorrect flight plan is entered but non 0, you could fly
| straight into another flight path or an obstacle, like a
| mountain.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Setting autopilot immediately on takeoff is very tempting because
| it massively reduces workload vs hand flying during a critical
| flight stage (high workload). So there's a strong temptation to
| do this. But if you miss a few checklist items and don't fully
| understand the systems, this is the result. The numbers seem to
| indicate they didn't immediately recover the situation either I.e
| immediately switch to hand flying and adjust throttle. At 1000 ft
| they're still 80 knots too fast.
|
| I also wonder about the decision to continue on after
| overspeeding the flaps. Takeoff flaps with full load on the
| 777-300ER is 15 degrees. Max airspeed with that setting is 215.
| They hit 260 at 175ft.
| jacquesm wrote:
| All hail engineering safety margins I guess. Hope they check
| out that plane, especially anything related to flap mounting
| and actuating as well as the flaps themselves. That's a lot of
| force.
|
| edit: omegant points out that the tires have been over-speed:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29763515
| kortilla wrote:
| This wasn't an autopilot problem. The problem occurred while
| still in takeoff roll.
| YPPH wrote:
| >This wasn't an autopilot problem. The problem occurred while
| still in takeoff roll.
|
| Just an amateur here, I could be wrong.
|
| It is true that according to the article, autopilot was not
| engaged and the pilot was following the flight director
| during the take off roll. However, had the pilots obtained
| positive climb, and satisfied autopilot activation
| requirements, and turned it on, wouldn't it be catastrophic
| if the altitude had not been set properly? [0]
|
| [0] See, eg, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-46137445
| oceanplexian wrote:
| I have an autopilot in my small single-engine GA aircraft and
| don't even think about touching it until long after takeoff
| when I'm comfortably at pattern altitude. The reason being I've
| read way too many NTSB reports when the pilot engages the thing
| 50ft after takeoff, it has a mind of its own and the plane goes
| careening into the ground. There are "failsafes" built in, for
| example you can easily overpower it with control forces or
| disengage it, but that's one more problem you don't want to
| deal with during a critical phase of flight.
| mmaunder wrote:
| Yeah I got into that nasty habit in sims using pilotedge
| because it's easier to switch to departure/approach on the
| climb. Had to break that for real life. (I'm also a GA PPL)
| [deleted]
| fnord77 wrote:
| from the comments
|
| > this is something that SHOULD have been caught by at least two
| separate checklists,
| blinkingled wrote:
| TL;DR - Don't screw with the defaults (MCP) after landing,
| especially when it's unnecessary and when the next takeoff crew
| likely will not remember to set it to proper value before
| takeoff.
|
| I wonder if this is not a detectable condition for the flight
| software - maybe in some cases you want the MCP to be set to low?
| Otherwise autopilot could either auto correct it or issue a
| warning?
| ohazi wrote:
| This was 100% pilot error. You don't ever "follow the flight
| director" to determine when to rotate, you use the airspeed
| indicator.
| blinkingled wrote:
| Sure, but the TL;DR was the approach Emirates took - they
| literally communicated that to the crew and I can't say I
| disagree with it - why add to process/work if you can leave
| it at a sane default? (Unless I misunderstand - which is why
| my question.)
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| > the next takeoff crew likely will not remember to set it to
| proper value before takeoff.
|
| If the takeoff depends on it, the next takeoff crew had better
| remember to set it. What's more, there better be at least one
| checklist that _requires_ them to set it. And they had _better_
| follow the checklists.
| sokoloff wrote:
| Standard takeoff procedures would have them rotating at a
| calculated airspeed and pitching for a climb target before
| transitioning to follow the FD. This crew's issues went way
| past a pre-select mistake.
| kens wrote:
| > While it would be standard to return to the airport to assess
| damage when something like this happens, the pilots made the
| decision to continue to Washington
|
| That reminds me of Air India Express Flight 611, where the plane
| hit the antenna at the end of the runway and the brick perimeter
| wall(!) Even though ATC notified the pilots that they hit
| something, the pilots decided to keep flying for 4 hours. On
| landing, the plane was found to have a bunch of damage including
| a hole in the underside.
|
| (The underlying problem was the captain's seat backrest collapsed
| during takeoff and he accidentally yanked back on the throttle,
| reducing their takeoff speed.)
|
| The point is that pilots can hit something during takeoff, do
| severe damage to the plane, and totally not realize it.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Air_India_Express_Flight_611
|
| Interesting video on the incident:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9kA6m1U0QUA
| belter wrote:
| No, the point of this one is that pilots can hit something
| during takeoff, be told about it, and decide to continue and
| climb only to be forced to land at the request of their own
| airline company! What is wrong with people?:-)
| anaganisk wrote:
| You missed the best part, their own airline asked them to
| return to Mumbai, probably to avoid bad press from
| International media, thats the general approach from anything
| Indian Govt. > Shortly thereafter, the company contacted the
| flight crew and instructed them to divert to Mumbai, despite
| the stricken aircraft being much closer to Dubai. AI made it
| more dangerous and made them fly back another 3 hours.
| trhway wrote:
| >Emirates is telling pilots not to set the altitude to zero on
| approach, for fear of the next crew not changing that.
|
| that sounds like a typical result of Six Sigma/5 Whys/<whatever
| spawn of the PM/MBA methodology hell they are practicing there>.
| If one thinks a bit (note: not a part of any such methodology)
| there is a reason why previous - ie. landing - crew sets the
| target altitude to that of that target airport... I wonder
| whether there is a narrow specialization - ie. the managers doing
| safety analysis of take offs are different from that of landings
| :)
| zeristor wrote:
| So does someone monitor each and every flight for anomalies like
| this?
|
| Or is there some software that takes in the data from each flight
| and spots differences like this, there could be several more
| instances in the global data if this is a manual process.
|
| Could be an interesting little project, although I guess the data
| isn't publicly available.
| [deleted]
| jcrawfordor wrote:
| There aren't any traffic police of the sky per se but at least
| in the US controllers can and do report unusual and potentially
| violating events like this, I would assume the UAE has similar
| provisions. For the most part though commercial pilots are
| assumed to be adequately supervised by their companies, which
| have various means of doing so.
|
| From a research perspective, the US has a strong model of
| voluntary reporting of safety events to NASA ASRS which is used
| by researchers. This is all human-generated rather than
| automated, but that's probably a good thing since am explicit
| goal of ASRS is to not be viewed as a punitive or disciplinary
| system. It has long been found that if people think safety
| incidents will be used for discipline or evaluation, then they
| won't report safety incidents - which is the origin of NASA
| acting as a neutral non-regulatory party to collect this data.
| rpeden wrote:
| That's what FOQA tries to do:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flight_operations_quality_assu...
| https://www.alpa.org/-/media/ALPA/Files/pdfs/news-events/tra...
| habeebtc wrote:
| It is funny to see this guy in the comments:
|
| > This sort of safety event will become more common as airlines
| hire based on equity, not skill.
|
| I meet these people frequently in tech. It is never the Rockstar
| engineers making this complaint. Good to know it is not just a
| tech thing.
| croisillon wrote:
| (2021)
| aurizon wrote:
| Arab societies are intensely hierarchical = orders from down from
| the top, there is no counterflow upwards. This is exacerbated by
| the political appointees that populate the top ranks. With an
| incompetent's political appointee as captain, his authority can
| not be challenged - even as planes crash. This manifests in quasi
| military groups, the the civilian air forces, which have a
| preponderance of ex-military officers at the top.(it has been a
| long time since the last war, so the older air force people move
| into the civilian fleet and retain their culture) These political
| appointees pay competent pilots to pass exams, even flying ones.
| This forum discusses this culture as it manifested in Arab armies
| repeated losses to an enemy with fewer men and less equipment,
| but with a culture that demanded a win with no hierarchical
| encumbrances. https://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars
| kingofpandora wrote:
| Sad to see clap trap like "Why Arabs Lose Wars" used to explain
| anything, but especially an aircraft incident.
| aurizon wrote:
| Bear in mind that the cultural difference that exists in the
| military, which the air force is part of, has demonstrably
| spread to the command hierarchy where junior flight crew DARE
| NOT raise any issue that is at all critical of the Captain or
| other senior crew members. These hierarchical differences are
| well known in Arabic as well as Asian flight crews. Hard to
| see why the demonstrated dismal failure of the Arab armies
| and Air forces against the Israelis is called clap trap. It
| is the dismissal of a serious introspective analysis of how
| the army and air force failed even when they outnumbered
| their enemy almost 10 to 1 as clap trap that speaks to the
| ineffective state of those forces.
| bandyaboot wrote:
| Without knowing much about this Flight Director system, it's
| surprising to me it would even attempt to operate in such a
| configuration--taking off to an altitude of zero feet. I would
| think it would just display some sort of message or code that's
| the equivalent of "you people are on your own with that shit".
| amelius wrote:
| This is what you get when an "Autopilot" is not 100% implemented.
| zaphirplane wrote:
| I am assuming pilots have had less flight hours over the last
| couple of years due to Covid
|
| Are pilots making it up in simulators or are they rusty (no
| offence)
| anaganisk wrote:
| I may be wrong but we just don't forget how to drive or how to
| code after a vacation? It just takes some time to get used to
| work again, but that lasts for few days. And we opened back
| months ago. That was a weird statement to read for me.
| [deleted]
| jhugo wrote:
| I'm surprised fatigue is not mentioned more in the discussion of
| this incident. The takeoff was at around 3AM local time, and
| Emirates is well known for pushing their pilots hard (many pilots
| take a job there specifically to build hours quickly, despite the
| unpleasant working conditions, with the intention of moving to
| greener pastures once they've done that).
| avh02 wrote:
| While I agree with you, I remember that 3 a.m. was also quite
| busy in Dubai, it's not an usual or quiet time there.
| rsync wrote:
| "The thing that stands out here the most is the complete lack of
| control that the crew had over the plane. _The crew was managing
| the computers rather than flying the aircraft_. "
|
| Perhaps they are "Children of the Magenta":
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5ESJH1NLMLs
|
| ... and I cannot recommend this video enough.
|
| I am not a pilot and I have no interest in flying nor any
| particular interest in aviation, generally ... and I find this
| talk to be _fascinating_.
|
| EDIT: you can jump to 3:35 where he gives a specific example of a
| situation where pilots need to choose between automation
| dependency and dropping down a level of automation. He's a really
| good speaker and you can tell the audience is very engaged.
| sbolt wrote:
| This video is excellent, thanks for sharing!
| themaninthedark wrote:
| Wow, that is a great video thank you for sharing!
|
| Still watching it but wanted to comment.
|
| So taking this away from aviation,the reactions and issues he
| shares are exactly my concerns with self driving cars.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| As I went through my pilot training (even for just single
| engine piston planes) there was so much focus on decision-
| making and interpreting automation and info from the plane
| that it absolutely has made me even more skeptical about the
| current state of self-driving cars. In the flight world, you
| get trained so much about how to properly monitor systems and
| how to be a step ahead of it at all times, and how to react
| to failures, etc.... It seems like we're completely not in
| the vicinity of that kind of thinking with self-driving
| cars... its as though for cars we are to just trust the
| automation and the law of large numbers will take care of
| things assuming it is safe enough!
| rpeden wrote:
| There's another version of the video here with restored audio:
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WITLR_qSPXk
|
| Might be easier to watch for anyone using a device with crappy
| speakers.
| bambax wrote:
| Great video, thanks.
|
| I find it weird that we learn so little about aviation when the
| industry has so much to teach us. _The checklist manifesto_ was
| a great attempt to try to implement checklists in the hospital
| and other places, but from CRM to workload management there is
| so much to benefit from what the airline industry has
| pioneered.
| bronco21016 wrote:
| As someone who works in the airline industry I find it
| infuriating when other industries don't match my
| expectations. I saw behind the curtain at a couple of medium
| sized online retailers. The lack of process and procedure was
| just astounding to me. I know some airline pilots have had
| success in consulting in hospitals but maybe there exists a
| broader market for that service.
| landemva wrote:
| Unfortunately, it is difficult to get senior management to
| engage. If it's just a botched order they let the cowboys
| be cowboys and consider it a cost of business. Rigorous
| process requires too much painful self-reflection, so it
| only happens maybe after they get sued. Even in hospitals,
| death from improper dosing is surprisingly high.
|
| Regulators play an important role in life safety
| situations. Beware of regulatory capture (737MAX not
| getting new type certification).
| dehrmann wrote:
| You can get a way with a lot when accidents don't cost a
| billion dollars.
| markdown wrote:
| The closest thing I can think of is HACCP (Hazard Analysis
| and Critical Control Points) in the food industry.
| ChicagoBoy11 wrote:
| If you do find this video fascinating, I'd encourage you to
| take a few flight lessons, especially if you find an instructor
| that can be on board with your goal of not really learning to
| fly per se but exploring some of these more nuanced issues
| around task saturation and automation -- on several single
| seater prop planes today you have just as many avionics bells
| and whistles like you would in an airliner. As I've learned to
| fly, the mix of psychology, HCI, systems design, etc., has been
| awesome to contemplate. Nothing I've ever done has made me so
| keenly aware of my own way of processing information, how to
| deal with stressors, etc. It's an absolute blast, and if you
| have any interest in any of these areas and are so aware of it
| as to really like the magenta video, I promise you you'll like
| it too!
| throwawayboise wrote:
| More discussion (ostensibly by pilots) here:
| https://www.pprune.org/rumours-news/644395-ek-231-20-decembe...
| jacquesm wrote:
| So instead of telling the _next_ crew to configure the system
| properly they are instructing the _previous_ crew not to set it
| wrong? I really can 't follow that. Of course it should be
| checked, every time.
| lvs wrote:
| I think there's currently a pilot shortage, and that leads to
| scary thoughts...
| FabHK wrote:
| But the next crew has been told to configure the system
| properly many many many times (training, checklists, recurrent
| training). Telling them once more won't achieve anything. On
| the other hand, telling previous crews not to set it wrong
| might achieve something, removing one failure mode and adding
| another level of redundancy.
|
| The ghastly Helios accident [1] was also triggered by a
| misconfiguration (by maintenance staff). Sure, you'll tell the
| pilots again to actually run their checklists, but you'll also
| tell the maintenance crew not to screw up the standard
| settings.
|
| Counterpoint: if you have a checklist item, and it is _always_
| in the desired /expected configuration already, you might start
| to skip it (with the concomitant consequences if one day it
| isn't).
|
| Maybe flight crews/maintenance staff should configure the
| machine randomly after a flight/maintenance, so as to force the
| next crew to actually run the checklist carefully?
|
| [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Helios_Airways_Flight_522
| _jab wrote:
| Reminds me of a pistol class I once took. The instructor said
| he didn't believe in using the physical safety, because
| people tended to use it as a crutch to ignore other safety
| measures.
| caf wrote:
| _Maybe flight crews /maintenance staff should configure the
| machine randomly after a flight/maintenance, so as to force
| the next crew to actually run the checklist carefully?_
|
| This reminds me a little of Adam Langley's advice for keeping
| software protocol extensibility points well-oiled:
|
| _You might want to define and implement dummy extensions
| once a year or such, and retire old ones on a similar
| schedule. When extensions contain lists of values, define a
| range of values that clients insert at random._
| (https://www.imperialviolet.org/2016/05/16/agility.html)
| zarzavat wrote:
| Is there no functionality to reset the computer between
| flights? It seems insane that the first item in the checklist
| isn't "press the reset button". And the computer shouldn't
| let the aircraft take off if some required setting hasn't
| been set. Imagine if you were on an e-commerce website and
| you had to delete the previous customer's billing details
| before checking out!
| ComodoHacker wrote:
| This would take substantial time.
|
| Would you _manually_ reinstall and reconfigure your
| workstation every morning?
| wiedehopf wrote:
| There are checklists for configuring everything as
| required.
| tgsovlerkhgsel wrote:
| And as we just learned, people make mistakes or skip
| steps when following those, so maybe the button would be
| better.
| twistedpair wrote:
| A similar incident happened to Qatar Airways Flight 778 (another
| 777-300ER), from Miami in 2015 [1].
|
| Incorrect runway lineup led to the plane only getting airborne
| after the end of the runway, after smashing through the ILS
| antennae. They then continued onto Qatar (13.5 hours away), with
| bits of antenna embedded in the tail.
|
| [1] https://avherald.com/h?article=48c78b3a
___________________________________________________________________
(page generated 2022-01-02 23:01 UTC)