[HN Gopher] Southwest flight came within 400 feet of crashing in...
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Southwest flight came within 400 feet of crashing into the ocean
Author : BostonFern
Score : 71 points
Date : 2024-06-15 17:45 UTC (5 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.cnn.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.cnn.com)
| adastra22 wrote:
| _On approach_. I think that's an important detail missing from
| the headline. Still a shocking near-miss, but it's not like it
| dropped from 35,000 feet to 400 feet before correcting.
| nscalf wrote:
| On approach, and dropped from 600 feet to 400 feet at a rate of
| 4000 feet per minute. So a 3 second drop. I don't know much
| about what is normal here, but that seems like important
| framing.
| pbhjpbhj wrote:
| 60-180 fpm (foot per minute) is a typical vertical speed at
| touchdown for an airliner. I think the glide slope is 600fpm
| (?).
|
| Eg. https://aviation.stackexchange.com/a/47430
| MadnessASAP wrote:
| 1000-2000 fpm would be a typical climb/descent in most
| situations. 4000 fpm would raise an eyebrow or two but is not
| generally alarming (that is, it's well within the performance
| envelope of most aircraft).
|
| However, at 600' any loss of altitude without a suitable
| runway beneath you and an aircraft ready to greet it is a
| very alarming prospect.
|
| As for this incident, it sounds like a junior pilot
| accidentally hit the control column while going for another
| control. It's only notable for having occurred at the very
| moment you don't want such things to occur. I suggest a
| corrective action of briefing pilots not too hit the control
| column.
| sofixa wrote:
| To be fair, most aircraft accidents are on or just after
| takeoff, or just before, during or after landing. Those are the
| most critical minutes when the most things can go wrong.
| mrb wrote:
| Just making sense of the numbers to give a perspective:
|
| While at 600 feet, the "newer" first officer inadvertently pushed
| forward on the control column for about 3 seconds. In the span of
| 3 seconds the plane dropped from 600 to 400 feet. Then the
| situation was corrected and the airplane climbed. So if the first
| officer had kept the same rate of descent for 6 more seconds, it
| would have crashed. The article quotes the rate of descent as
| 4000 feet/minutes.
|
| Some more details here: https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/southwest-
| plane-plunged-within-4...
|
| Edit: for the curious here is the flight data:
| https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024...
| and the track log:
| https://www.flightaware.com/live/flight/SWA2786/history/2024...
| you can see at around Thu 4/11 at 10:12:47 PM PDT the airplane
| made the rapid descent, then climbed back up quickly. However the
| ADS data shown by flightaware is too granular (one data point
| every 16-18 seconds) so we see the minimum altitude as 875 feet,
| but in reality the plane went lower. Apparently some other site
| (ADS-B Exchange) has more granular data, but I don't have access
| to it and am too lazy to create an account (is it free?)
| roomey wrote:
| Well keep in mind with the stick forward the rate of descent
| would increase, and also the speed making pulling up much
| harder
| yieldcrv wrote:
| That 3-6 second time gap seems similar to what I do in a car
| every day, not coping just an observation.
| vundercind wrote:
| TL;DR from the article is a newbie pushed the column forward by
| accident and corrected very quickly. Dropped from 600 feet to 400
| feet at a rate of 4,000 feet per minute. That's about three
| seconds of too-fast descent at a constant 4,000ft/minute, though
| it wouldn't have been constant so it may have been a bit longer
| that that, mostly at lower rates of descent.
|
| Not some huge plunge. Worth an investigation but the headline's
| clickbaity.
| jnwatson wrote:
| It was a particularly bad time to make that mistake.
| weaksauce wrote:
| > TL;DR from the article is a newbie pushed the column forward
|
| that newbie has at least 1500 hours of flying in order to
| qualify as a first officer. not exactly new to flying. in
| europe(and used to be in the US before one accident that was
| not really related to their experience flying) it's something
| like 300 for FO but the captain is much more experienced.
| sgjohnson wrote:
| > it's something like 300
|
| It's actually 0 in Europe.
| fotta wrote:
| per https://avherald.com/h?article=519ee0ab&opt=0
|
| > What happened in these 16 seconds is described in an internal
| memo circulating in Southwest Airlines stating, that during the
| go around due to weather conditions the first officer, pilot
| flying, inadvertently pushed the control column forward while
| monitoring the power settings causing the aircraft to descend to
| about 400 feet MSL before the aircraft started climbing again.
| cityofdelusion wrote:
| The first officer made a mistake and the captain quickly
| corrected, per other articles on this. A lot of the headlines
| around this have been very click-baity, trying to imply that it
| is a Boeing or Max problem when it is just old-fashioned pilot
| error.
| dv_dt wrote:
| It's notable though that airlines have been probing trying to
| reduce flight crew sizes - if this incident occurred on a
| single pilot flight, the outcome could have been catastrophic.
|
| https://www.thedrive.com/news/airlines-are-pushing-to-legali...
| etse wrote:
| I can imagine. An AI "copilot" could mean quick error
| correction... or maybe a snowballing of tiny errors into
| something catastrophic.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Yes, this is an issue. It hasn't been that long ago that
| DARPA ran the challenges that led to the proof of concept
| for self-driving, autonomously navigating robot vehicles.
| Some of the technology became the selling point for various
| automobiles with some of the promises still lacking in
| deliverable results. You have to test all this to know
| whether it will work and eventually some of the tests need
| to shift from a workstation to the real world. Like the Air
| Force and their recent conversion of some fighters to
| unpiloted planes, this will all happen and one day it will
| be the norm. If we're all lucky all the test failures will
| happen on a server somewhere instead of out here in real
| life.
| doodlebugging wrote:
| Pretty funny that the railroads have also been trying for
| years to cut crew sizes to one. All this while building
| extremely long trains which require a lot more finesse to
| manage over complex terrain and in and out of railyards, many
| of which are not designed to accomodate trains of that
| length. Place all that responsibility on a single point of
| failure. Luckily the union was able to stifle that effort in
| their recent agreements.
|
| There is a real danger when bean-counters with no practical
| experience run a company and look at every component,
| including the employees, as a cost center that can be trimmed
| as needed to tailor results for quarterly reports that
| guarantee that investors will remain engaged.
| darth_avocado wrote:
| > Luckily the union was able to stifle that effort in their
| recent agreements.
|
| While most extreme of the measures were cut, railroads are
| still far away from operating safely. There is a John
| Oliver episode on Freight trains. You know things are bad,
| when he has an episode.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| The same phenomenon is visible at businesses that do not
| need quarterly reports, like the largest railroad business
| in the US, wholly owned for more than 14 years by the
| famously long term thinking investor Warren Buffett:
|
| https://www.vice.com/en/article/pkp9m8/what-choice-do-i-
| have...
| patmorgan23 wrote:
| BNSF is owned by Berkshire Hathaway, which is publicly
| traded and is required to file quarterly SEC reports.
| tracerbulletx wrote:
| It would be cool if executives and large shareholders could
| literally just run a world where all us little peons only
| work reasonably hard but not so hard that we are mentally
| breaking and everything is falling apart and you still get
| to be extremely rich.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yeah its a scary headline for a scary but quickly caught and
| corrected incident. Every flight I've ever been on has came
| within 400 feet of crashing! Even dozens of feet! Thankfully
| the pilots have all landed the plane on the runway instead of
| crashing into it.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| There's also alot of PR behind making Southwest sound as bad as
| possible. The press is awful these days.
| jasonlotito wrote:
| I have not seen a single one that implied that it was as Boeing
| or Max problem. I've seen people making that assumption, but
| not a single headline that read as such.
|
| Care to share some of these?
| _moof wrote:
| Yeah, this sounds like classic somatogravic illusion. When you
| experience forward acceleration with no outside visual
| references, your vestibular system produces the sensation of
| tumbling backwards. The natural response in an airplane, it you
| are not well trained, is to shove the stick forward. I've seen
| trainees do this in this exact situation (a go around in
| instrument conditions) and I've had to take over the airplane
| to keep us from auguring in (just like this captain did).
|
| In other words, this has absolutely nothing to do with the
| aircraft. This is a deficiency in the first officer's
| instrument flying.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| This is not an uncommon mistake for pilots in training to make.
| It sounds strange, but you have to keep in mind that this
| maneuver is done with no outside visibility (that's the reason
| for the go around). So the pilot is only looking at his
| instruments.
|
| The first officer had to do several things at the same time, and
| for a few seconds did not monitor the aircraft pitch attitude
| well enough.
|
| In a jet the difference between a normal (about 600 to 700
| ft/min) descend or this rapid descend is only something like 5
| degrees. So it's easy to get this wrong if you look away from the
| instruments for just a few seconds. Especially if you're changing
| configuration (flaps) and power at the same time, because both
| have an effect on pitch.
| Rygian wrote:
| > this maneuver is done with no outside visibility (that's the
| reason for the go around).
|
| A go-around is the right call whenever the approach is not
| stabilized, even if visibility is perfect.
| t0mas88 wrote:
| Absolutely, but in this case it was a go around from a non
| precision approach due to weather, according to Avherald.
| gnabgib wrote:
| Discussion (34 points, 23 hours ago, 26 comments)
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40684560
| blackeyeblitzar wrote:
| This incident occurred in April not now, and was pilot error in
| pushing the controls too far forward. Looking at the various news
| articles about this incident, I find the reporting is a bit
| deceptive in some of the other articles that lead with emphasis
| on the make and model of the plane (Boeing 737 Max), even though
| it is not relevant to the incident which is purely pilot error.
| kadomony wrote:
| What happens to the pilot in error in this case? Learn from
| mistake and keep flying? Grounded? Fired?
| m463 wrote:
| But was it boeing or airbus???
| mjcl wrote:
| If you're serious, Southwest only uses Boeing 737s.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| My last flight came within 40 feet of crashing into the tarmac.
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