Scary airline strory

[LCHIEN]

Remember a few years ago, Air France 447 crashed over the atlantic. There was a lot of hulabaloo about it because the crew could not identify that the pane was ina stall and applied the wrong corrective measures for 3.5 minutes while the plane fell 35,000 feet intothe ocean killing all aboard.

Here's another alarming story about pilot inability to understand how planes fly. Two pilots for Air India were suspended. They took off in a nearly new Airbus 320 AND FORGOT TO RAISE THE LANDING GEAR. Gear down make a lot of noise, and they make a lot of air drag that robs power like crazy which is why all airliners have retracting gear.. Whats worse is that they could not climb more than 24,000 feet to their assigned usual altitude of 35,000 feet and could not reach normal speed of 500 knots, unable to fly more than 230 knots. That apparently didn't bother them much. Finally they did notice that the normally fuel efficient Airbus 320 was nearly out of fuel only halfway to their destination and requested permission to make an emergency landing.

So how can they fly like that for 90 minutes and not figure it out?

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/travel/news/air-india-forgotten-landing-gear-low-fuel/

[Slik Geek]

Stunning. The pilots should be fired for gross negligence and incompetence - lives should not be entrusted to them. There were indications of pilot ineptitude on many levels:

• Failed to complete the "after takeoff" checklist, which includes bringing the landing gear up and retracting the flaps
• Failed to notice the gear status indicator on the main panel (right of center) - three green triangles (gear extended), red triangles when gear retracted
• Failure to notice the large handle in the gear down position on the main panel
• Inability to feel that the gear were extended. The aircraft handling and turbulence when gear are extended is significantly impacted (that is why the fuel consumption was so rapid). It is often called "flying dirty".
• Lack of understanding of the importance of flight dynamics. If the aircraft can't climb to the normal cruising altitude and is unable to accelerate to a normal cruising speed something is seriously wrong and needs to be resolved immediately - not settle for less and fly for 1-1/2 hours until fuel runs low.
• Failure to repeat checklists when something was obviously wrong

Yes, I understand that it is a complex process to fly the aircraft. But that is why being a commercial pilot isn't for everybody. If the pilot cannot follow procedure, is unable to read the control panel for proper status indications, fails to successfully debug serious anomalies during otherwise nominal conditions, the pilot is completely unqualified to handle adverse situations when mistakes like this kill people.

[leehljp]

I have read some crazy things similar but this is a first on the landing gear. 3 or 4 years ago, two pilots were either asleep or playing on their iPads and overflew Minneapolis; ON occasion I read about a landing of a commercial airline at the wrong airport!

[LCHIEN]

Not that I'm biased, but it is on note that the two pilots were both women.

[LCHIEN]

I have read some crazy things similar but this is a first on the landing gear. 3 or 4 years ago, two pilots were either asleep or playing on their iPads and overflew Minneapolis; ON occasion I read about a landing of a commercial airline at the wrong airport!

Not paying attention when everything is going smooth is one inexcusable thing, but inability to recognize a problem and correctly deduce in this case what should be a glaringly obvious problem is completely another thing.
To me the lack of flight awareness is alarming; the ability to recognize key warning signs (not lights and buzzers) but failure to fly right and troubleshoot obvious errors they made is symptom of airline flight schools turning out autopilot enablers and not pilots.

I'd really like to hear the cockpit conversation transcripts for that 90 minutes. I wonder if they even noticed anything wrong, and if they did, how they convinced themselves it was just OK and not to be worried about it. Or if they worried about it what kind of troubleshooting procedure they went though to figure it out.
They really didn't know what was wrong until the emergency landing approach when the checklist said lower landing gear and they said, hey, that's strange, it seems to be down already.

[leehljp]

Not paying attention when everything is going smooth is one inexcusable thing, but inability to recognize a problem and correctly deduce in this case what should be a glaringly obvious problem is completely another thing.
To me the lack of flight awareness is alarming; the ability to recognize key warning signs (not lights and buzzers) but failure to fly right and troubleshoot obvious errors they made is symptom of airline flight schools turning out autopilot enablers and not pilots.

I'd really like to hear the cockpit conversation transcripts for that 90 minutes. I wonder if they even noticed anything wrong, and if they did, how they convinced themselves it was just OK and not to be worried about it. Or if they worried about it what kind of troubleshooting procedure they went though to figure it out.
They really didn't know what was wrong until the emergency landing approach when the checklist said lower landing gear and they said, hey, that's strange, it seems to be down already.

Agreed!

My mind went in another direction: I am not a psychologist by any stretch of the imagination but I did take 16 hours of psychology in college back in the dark ages. I have always been a "studier of people and personality types, not to "manipulate" but to understand people and learn quickly their strengths and weaknesses. Once this is understood, there are certain personality types that I would be wary of in certain situations, especially two of the same type.

Loring, for you and me, and some others here, trouble shooting is second nature to the point of being instinctive. I know people that I would NOT put in certain positions of of certain responsibility even if they had a PHD in the subject. It is not necessarily the degree of their training but their total lack of awareness in normal or difficult situations - which tends towards certain personality traits in many instances.

A second idea is that these sound like a few typical millennials I know. I am not sure if the millennial attributes cross all culture (country) lines.

[LCHIEN]

I hear stories all the time about people who, have a smoking, sputtering car with check engine, overheating and oil pressure warnings on, and the car won't go over 40 mph and protesting mightily, keep driving as if nothing was wrong. Eventually the engine seizes and the car is totalled. But at least it didn't fall out of the sky.
We expect (or at least I do) that pilots are taught the basic fundamentals of what makes their plane stay in the air, and that if you lose those you fall down go boom, not like pulling off the side of the road. Airplane pilots should understand stalls, why they happen and how to pull out of stalls; they should know why they raise landing gear and what happens if they don't - why flaps down and gear down serve to slow the plane. What flying conditions eat up fuel, coffin corners, lift vs altitude and temperature etc.
Aw heck I can't go on. Pilots should know why and how planes fly because when they don't people die.

[cwsmith]

I'm surprised that the audible warning/alarm system wasn't telling them the problem. There are so many audible warnings and cautions on a modern airliner, I would think that the pilots would have to purposely ignore the warnings, especially with a system like the landing gear, which would have not only lights on the panel, but also 'audibles'. One of the problem with many aircrews is that the pilot is in total command, the co-pilot and any other crew members are completely subservient to the pilot. As such, the pilot and his actions are not generally questioned, and this is especially so in many foreign airlines. In the U.S. the crews generally work as a team, but not always.

Several years ago there was a devastating crash in the Buffalo, NY (don't remember the airport), but the FAA reported that the pilot had spent most all of the flight conversing with the new, young female co-pilot. He had put the aircraft on auto-pilot, silenced the audibles, and evidently paid little attention to airspeed and throttle setting, letting the auto-pilot handle everything. On approach, he switched the auto-pilot off, and the plane, now on manual was neither at proper throttle, airspeed, or attitude. The plane almost immediately stalled and was unrecoverable. IIRC, everyone on board died in the crash.

I took lessons when I was in my late teens, but I ran out of money. Flying is an expensive proposition, both as a student pilot and certainly later if you want to own your own plane. The flying part is fairly easy (at least I thought so) but its the rules, traffic control, and other issues that are very challenging. VFR (Visual Flight Rules) are rather intuitive, you can see the weather, the position of the plane relative to the ground, the horizon, etc. But flying on instruments is very challenging, especially if you don't understand the dynamics of flight. Your senses can't be relied on and there have been many a pilot who have flown themselves into the ground, thinking they were climbing when in fact they were in a dive or had stalled. That is basically what happened to John Kennedy Jr, and far too many other pilots who just didn't believe what their instruments were telling them.

Understanding the theory and dynamics of flight is essential. Just in the few lesson I took, in a single-engine private, the pilot/instructor would put you through some tests, like getting you out of stall, spin, engine failure on approach, and there were the occasional verbals, like, "Your engine just died... where are you going to put down?" With a commercial licensed pilot, I cannot imagine that anyone not having even more stressful and thorough training. A pilot needs to know everything about the plane and how it's going to operate under almost any condition.

The last time I was at my optometrist's office I was reading "Flying" magazine (my Doc is a pilot), and read about the family that was killed when the father had bought a high-performance twin engine jet. Ignoring the 'overspeed' warnings, the pilot with several family members on board, flew the plane well beyond the maximum operational air speed and the plane disentegrated, first loosing the left wing and part of the fuselage, which pulled one of the family member out, the plane then went into a spiral and crashed from several thousand feet. FAA investigation revealed several warnings that the pilot either ignored or simply didn't understand. Reportedly this pilot was experienced and had owned other airplanes in his lifetime. But this particular airplane was new to him and apparently he wasn't properly checked out to fly it. Pilots need to checked out and rated for the type of aircraft they intend to fly.

CWS

[leehljp]

I read an article last year about one of the highest percentages of plane crashes are to lawyers and doctors. These fellows who come into more disposable income early in life buy single engine and twin engine planes, get a license and fly 4 to 10 times a year. They run into trouble that they are not equipped to handle; often it is weather related.

Here is a link to a pilot (Turkish airline) who took off, flew immediately into a hail storm, turned around and landed blind. Windshield smashed; nose cone pulverized.
https://eblnews.com/video/flying-bli...dshield-171431

Concerning doctors and crashes - back in the early 80s I went hiking and camping up Guadeloupe peak in west Texas with a couple of buddies. We spotted something yellow about 50 yards off of the beaten path that leads to the top. With curiosity, we investigated and found what was left of a 20 year old plane crash. A young doctor and his family left Carlsbad NM, flew south under very low clouds following the highway, and bound for El Paso. As they got near Guadeloupe peak and El Capitan, there was a black top road that veered off to the right, about 4 or 5 miles before the highway veering to the right to El Paso. Because it was low clouds and somewhat foggy there, the pilot followed the first road to the right, which ran out in less than a mile. He was flying straight into the mountain between the El Capitan and Guadeloupe Peak. Beyond El Capitan is a several mile wide mountain free pass to El Paso.

[Tom Slick]

A few years ago a B-1b bomber landed gear up due to crew negligence. The plane tells you "landing gear, landing gear, landing gear" when you are too close to the ground.

[LinuxRandal]

This makes me think of here is your sign, and they walk among us.

[cwsmith]

I spent ten years in the Civil Air Patrol in my younger years (joined when I was 14 and got out a year after i got married at 23... just not enough personal time to dedicate myself. In the continental U.S., CAP at the time had a primary responsibility for air search and rescue here in the lower 48. I used to spend a lot of time in the field, training, and took part in several official searches. As part of that I had a lot of interest in crash investigations and would routinely read the FAA reports. In almost all of the final reports, "Pilot Error" was the final determination. It was that the pilot didn't do a proper "pre-flight" inspection or on occasion would ignore it altogether. Distraction while in the air and failure to recognize conditions was also prevalent in many accidents. As if things weren't bad enough in such accidents, the failure to properly file a flight plan was quite high among such pilots.

I remember one flight in which an entire family perished... a couple in the actual crash but the others of exposure after the crash. They had deviated from their flight plan and were more than a 100 miles off course. One daughter had left a note, with the final statement being "Civil Air Patrol, where are you?" This was in the southwest as I recall, and I'm up in the northeast.... but I took that personally. Pilots all too often just don't do their job and/or get too caught up in the fun of flying I guess.

I've lost some acquaintances over the years. Not really friends per say, but people I knew of. It's a tragedy when someone hits a hillside, because they were a mile off their approach and the weather blinded them and they were ever so slightly off course, or like the last fellow I knew who took off at before dawn and hit a tree... he was overloaded, with friends, luggage and their golf equipment. His climb was just too shallow and he was flying blind, hitting trees out beyond the runway... too dark to see and too full of adventure and fun to properly analyze his departure. This fellow was a veteran pilot for decades and well known in our community as a great pilot and good Ham radio guy (how I knew of him).

New pilots are special problems. You get your license after hours and hours of education in the classroom and in the air with a licensed pilot instructor. Then you go through the solo process of gaining hours under supervision. Finally you earn the private pilot's license and then you go for "ratings" to improve you skills. Eventually you want your IFR (Instrument Flight Rules) so that you can fly when the weather is slightly inclimate... but that doesn't give you the right to fly off into a storm. All kinds of rules, and once you have your license you just can't go fly any airplane... you have to be checked out first as each plane flies slightly different than another model; and there's single-engine, multi-engine ratings etc. I'm sure so much has changed since I had that yearning, but still there was always the fact that some pilots just reached beyond their experience and that can prove fatal, both the pilot and for the friend or family member they have taken onboard.

CWS