Air Asia Pilot Response Leads To Plane Crashing (wsj.com) 226
hcs_$reboot writes: The investigation took a year, but we finally know why Air Asia Flight QZ8501, en route to Singapore from the Indonesian city of Surabaya on December 28 last year, crashed into the Java Sea, killing all 162 people on board. The crash was caused by a combination of system malfunctions and improper pilot responses to cascading electrical and rudder-system problems. A cracked solder joint on the Airbus A320 resulted in an electrical interruption that caused computer-generated warnings of a rudder malfunction. The problem occurred four times during the flight. The first three times, the flight crew responded according to standard procedure, investigators said. The fourth time, however, the flight-data recorder indicated actions similar to those of circuit breakers being reset. That led the autopilot to disengage. Investigators said the crew was unable to react appropriately to "a prolonged stall condition," ending in the crash. The investigation points to weaknesses in pilot training in dealing with upsets, or when an aircraft is angled greater than 45 degrees.
Trying to disable the warning? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Trying to disable the warning? (Score:5, Informative)
Re: Trying to disable the warning? (Score:2)
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23 times (Score:3, Insightful)
They had the problem 23 times in the last 12 months it says. For real? Maybe it might have been a good idea to fix it?
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Re: 23 times (Score:3)
Air lines have to pay out of their own pockets to get something fixed, if the plane falls out of the sky, the insurance will pay for it.
While that is cynical boiling down of the issue, the airlines do try to squeeze out every penny out of their routes and that does include (well documented across the business) lack of training and lack of maintenance.
Complain about the lack of qualified candidates and churn out as many pilots out of schools regardless of their passion or grades as you can so you can pay the
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You made me think... I can't think of any major airlines that have had that happen to them in a long time. I can't even think of any smaller ones with just one exception and that was the Concorde and that wasn't *entirely* to do with the crash. There might be some puddle-jumper companies that have just two planes and one crash results in their going out of business but I can't think of any and Google's not being very helpful. Am I missing something? You said "often" and "single incident" and I really can't
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Sure but by that point the bits of management that made the cuts have a good chance of working for someone else.
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Say what? (Score:2)
I don't think I've ever been in a passenger jet where any angle ever reached 45 degrees (or more). It seems insensible to train for unlikely scenarios, and even less sensible to expect a pilot to respond properly to very unlikely scenarios quickly and accurately. I'm not sure I can google "proper procedure for A320 rudder malfunction" and get a response before I'd be dead....
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Especially since the first 2 minutes would be spent trying to enter your credit card information for the wifi while trying to keep the laptop (and credit card) from falling to the back of the plane...
Re:Say what? (Score:4, Informative)
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Sure I am aware of that, and clearly they have tested this plane in its ability to handle that. But the precise procedures for handling the condition would appear to vary from plane to plane, and it seems the role of a passenger pilot would reduce the operating range of the plane from "anything it can do" to "anything it would reasonably do". Clearly the imaginations of everyone involved didn't conceive of this scenario, and clearly the procedures required for the A320 are very different that require more t
Re: Say what? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Training for unlikely scenarios is the whole point of having human pilots. If we were willing to accept a crash every time something went wrong, we'd just let the computer run the whole show.
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From TFA:
The lazy humans don't want to learn a skill that can be done by a machine.
It wouldn't be surprising if this kind of accident were to occur when automated cars are here because the driver won't know how to drive and the automated car can't hand
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Same things happen in nuclear power plants. Operator, "That can't be right, that would mean we will get a melt down. That simply won't happen on my shift, clearly the instrument is wron
Reporting bias (Score:4, Interesting)
I love how the headlines on CNN (and now WSJ) lead with "Pilot Error" but the BBC leads with
Faulty equipment was a "major factor" in the AirAsia plane crash last December that killed all 162 people on board, Indonesian officials say.
AirAsia crash: Faulty part 'major factor' [bbc.com]
Yes the crew were not fully trained, but according to Airbus the plane couldn't get into the situation it was in, so why train pilots for that? Also the faulty part had been faulty for a significant amount of time. This flight was not the first flight that had issues with the particular equipment.
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Re:Reporting bias (Score:5, Insightful)
The plane can't get into that situation while the computer is in control. The Airbus flight computer has a final mode where it basically tells the pilots, "I give up, you fly the plane." Usually this mode kicks in when the computer is getting contradictory information from the instruments (AF447 where one or more of the pitot tubes clogged, causing simultaneous overspeed and stall warnings). So since it's possible for the pilot to end up in full control of the plane, it is imperative that they train for every likely situation. (AF447 crashed because while in this mode, one of the pilots continuously pulled back on the control stick almost the entire time the plane was in a stall, thus keeping it in the stall.)
That said, several of the recent automation accidents seem to be caused not by the automation itself, but by the crew misinterpreting what mode the computer is in and/or misunderstand what the computer will and will not do when in that mode. Asiana 214 [wikipedia.org] crashed because the pilots thought the computer was in a mode where it would auto-throttle to maintain altitude, when it was in a different mode. TAM 3054 [wikipedia.org] crashed because the thrust reverser on one engine was inoperative so the pilots relied on the autothrottle to slow that engine to idle. But when they moved the other engine control to idle then reverse (to deploy its thrust reverser), that disengaged the autothrottle which caused the other engine to spin up to the full throttle setting it was set at.
It would probably be worthwhile for the major airliner manufacturers to get together and standardize the automation modes and what is/isn't controlled in each mode. Then pilots can be trained against a consistent standard instead of having to re-learn all the automation when they change aircraft (what the second pilot was doing in Asiana 214 - if both pilots had been experienced in the 777, one of them may have noticed the error). The way it is now, it's like on one plane pulling back on the stick makes it pitch up, while on another plane pulling back on the stick sometimes makes it pitch down.
Imagine a programmer who can't debug (Score:5, Insightful)
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This is an uninformed and incorrect opinion.
Airline pilot training has a huge emphasis on 'debugging'. Twice a year (I think - not 100% sure) they have several days of simulator training/testing where sadistic trainers throw dozens of complicated failure scenarios at them.
Airliner safety has improved hugely in recent decades. (The USA recently went over a decade without a passenger jet airliner crash either on USA soil or USA flagged carrier.) New technology has played a large part, yet the proportion of cr
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You don't want pilots to debug in mid-air. That's what often causes these accidents. You want them to follow procedure.
Japan's high speed rail network, the Shinkansen, has never had a fatal accident, despite being the first such network in the world (started running in 1964) and having to deal with regular severe earthquakes and extreme weather. One of the reasons is that drivers are taught not to do anything but follow procedure. They aren't even allowed to work from memory. When a fault occurs they have t
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I agree entirely with that, but with one caveat: with all due respect, Sullenberger couldn't have done what he did without the Airbus autopilot making sure his inputs didn't make the situation worse.
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It was clearly not written by a bunch of tiny-minded xenophobic assholes.
Apple response (Score:2)
Is It My Imagination (Score:2)
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Are you sure it cracked because of lead-free solder? Instead of, say, poor soldering process, impurities in the solder, wrongly designed PCB, stress from bad installation? Or perhaps that the should redesign the PCB specs for a new solder composition, but didn’t? It sure could be specifically because of lead-free solder (hard to get the same elasticity or such) but I just don't see that from The Fine Article linked above.
Re:Cracked solder joint (Score:4, Insightful)
Avionics were excluded from the initial lead-free requirement. And even if they aren't now, unless the plane was literally brand new, it will be using leaded solder because chances are the equipment predates the exclusion removal, if not RoHS.
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Crappy soldering causes cracked joints. It is just as achievable with lead.
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This has nothing to do with RoHS.
Firstly, avionics were excluded from RoHS.
Secondly, I've seen dozens of cracked solder joints on boards made with leaded solder. Any boards subjected to heating and cooling are prone to it (power supplies are an obvious candidate, I've lost count on how many pre-RoHS power supplies I've repaired due to cracked solder joints). I've yet to have to fix a cracked solder joint on a RoHS compliant board, but this is probably merely a function of all RoHS based stuff being much new
Re:Cracked solder joint (Score:5, Informative)
I believe avionics is still exempt from RoHS rules. It was in the original regulations but the EU has removed exemptions as new versions have been adopted.
Trouble is: There are very few shops left that will do lead solder work. And if they do, the price will reflect the dedicated production tooling and handling procedures needed. Since there are no FAA or JAR [wikipedia.org] requirements to use leaded solder, some avionics equipment is built on RoHS production lines.
But think of the children! How about you keep the kids from chewing on the flight controls instead?
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Of course, piston-engine propeller planes still use LEADED fuel.
Options exist, but pilots don't seem to care.
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Of course, piston-engine propeller planes still use LEADED fuel.
Options exist, but pilots don't seem to care.
Pilots don't care? Right. They could pay $30k for a new engine that would run diesel instead of Avgas on their model. Or in many cases that there are simply no alternatives to upgrade to because nothing has passed certification yet.
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Options exist, but they're not cheap. When an engine replacement costs over $30K, this is a lot of money (most pilots are middle income - and spending even $5k to replace a part can be expensive).
And it's changing. First. leaded fuel is extremely hard to get - there's only ONE supplier of tetraethyl lead, and they're in the UK. Next, there's only a few refineries around the world who can handle leade
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Options exist, but they're not cheap.
When I drove a 1960 Dodge, I put cheap lead substitute into my engine to protect the valves. Why are aviators so special that they can't use lead substitute? Tolulene? Isooctane?
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For every great success story there are horror stories of engines being ruined by new fuels. It happens pretty much whenever any fuel changes even if the compositional change is minor (e.g. the introduction of low-sulphur diesel caused the destructive end to many Ford Territory engines).
Blended fuels (avgas avcat and petrol) are quite complicated mixes that need to meet all sorts of critera, not just octane rating. Aviators aren't special, and one of the unleadded fuels in trial 100SF has a large component
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It's just very important to resolve all the issues on the ground before they go to the air.
I agree, but this has taken a very long time. It's been decades since we took the lead out of everyone else's fuel, and we were forced to adapt. There's no special reason why aviation shouldn't also be forced to adapt. It's not like there aren't aviation engines which don't require avgas, like those turbocharged subaru conversions. I realize you can't just glue one of those into place on every plane, but there's been (once again) goddamned decades to work this out.
I realize a lot of people would be grounded
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It's not the lead, it's the octane rating. Most aviation engines can already run on 91UL avgas and the manufacturer has approved 91UL for them. (For many smaller Lycoming/Continentals, 100LL has far too much lead and actually causes problems for these engines). However, there is a small percentage that needs the 100LL (certain geared and turbocharged engines) to prevent detonation. While these engines only make up a small percentage of the GA fleet, they fly a LOT of hours and are thirsty. Airfield operator
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Nearly all aircraft engines will run just fine on 91UL avgas (and certainly in the case of Lycoming, most of them are approved). The problem is that there are certain large turbocharged and/or geared engines that will detonate on anything less than 100LL, and while these make a very small percentage of the fleet they actually burn a disproportionate amount of the avgas (they fly a lot of hours since they tend to be more likely used for business/commercial use, and they are thirsty). Airfield operators are o
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Options exist, but pilots don't seem to care.
Options don't exist. The alternatives are still undergoing various stages of testing with the goal of phasing out lead in avgas by 2020.
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Actually pilots DO care. Without even getting to the poisonous nature of TEL, it's not even good for my engine.
The trouble is that there is *no* other avgas available to me than 100LL, and since they started putting ethanol in petrol (gasoline) I can't use normal car fuel any more. (They don't even label ethanol-tainted fuel here).
91UL is available by try to find an airfield that sells it.
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There are still plenty of places that can do leaded soldering work. It's used in all sorts of areas, including test and measurement equipment, medical equipment, some vehicle electronics, military applications etc. Until maybe a year ago the place I was using for PCB prototyping charged extra for RoHS compliant work, and they continue to offer it.
RoHS is more about not putting lead into the environment than into children's mouths.
Re: Cracked solder joint (Score:2)
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Yes. There are photographs in the official accident report.
http://kemhubri.dephub.go.id/k... [dephub.go.id]
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So one cracked solder joint made the entire plane unflyable? Who designs these things!
While it is entirely possible that there is some weird idiot design choice that made this so, it is much, much more likely that the pilots were totally incompetent and did not know the first thing about flying. The co-pilot was French and apparently held the stick hard back. That is the same idiot mistake that a different french pilot made some years ago over the Atlantic.
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Planes at cruise altitude and speed often fly pretty close to 'coffin corner' where stall speed and transonic conditions intersect.
That is, the air is so thin that they need to fly fast to maintain lift, but if they fly too fast parts of the wing will start exceed the speed of sound at that altitude, which makes a plane that's not designed for it very tough to control.
And stall recovery of a large commercial jet aircraft can soak up tens of thousands of feet of altitude, so if the crew was distracted, or a
Re:Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:5, Informative)
The AirAsia pilots had not been trained for that scenario, [the investigator] added, because the manual provided by the plane's manufacturer said the aircraft, an Airbus 320, was designed to prevent it from becoming upset and therefore upset recovery training was unnecessary
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It amazes me that neither of these pilots owned a license for a light aircraft which is mandatory for all Airliner pilots in my country (Australia)
The other issue on the airbus is if you pull the stick back until the stall warning goes off then keep it there until the aircraft pitches further up, the stall warn
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The same thing happened in this crash, that's the point.
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In the EU you do like a uni degree in commercial airlines and 3 years later your rated for the big stuff. Out
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A friend of mine recently went through the BA (i.e. in the EU) ab-initio pilot training scheme. The training involved quite a lot of light aircraft hours (single and multiengine). About a year was spent flying light aircraft, including quite an intensive session in Arizona because the weather is reliable enough that you can pretty much guarantee to get several hours a day in a Piper Seminole without being grounded by icing or convective activity.
Your speak-n-spell is set to Oirish (Score:2)
As they say, "if you pay peanuts you get monkeys". Or possibly squirrels.
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Hmm... But, on the other hand, you might get an elephant. Elephants seem to like peanuts. I know 'cause I've fed peanuts to elephants. I did try to feed a pumpkin to an alligator but it didn't appear interested in the pumpkin.
Wait... What was the subject again?
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And this is why pilots prefer boeing over airbus. Train the fucking pilots and let them fly the plane, don't try to design them out of the equation.
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I don't get this. The purpose of training is to be able to handle both known and unknown scenarios. It doesn't matter if the Airbus 320 was designed for this or that. There is always the possibility of something happening that aircraft makers where not anticipating, that is one of the reasons why we have humans in charge instead of just computers, because humans can solve unexpected problems.
If the pilots wheren't aduquately trained then their supervisors should be held responsible.
Re:Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:4, Insightful)
the manual provided by the plane's manufacturer said the aircraft, an Airbus 320, was designed to prevent it from becoming upset and therefore upset recovery training was unnecessary
This is patently false. Fly-by-wire planes have multiple levels of degraded flight envelope protections, predicated by degraded sensor inputs, lost redundancies, etc. All of this is in the fucking manuals, and don't let anyone tell you otherwise. Stalls that initiate at high altitudes and continue all the way to the ground are a recurring problem and the pilots are to be blamed. If you're in any sort of a plane and there's no reaction to prolonged stick-up input, you have to let go and figure out what the fuck is happening. A mental reset, if you will. Perhaps people who are too easily confused by flight automation shouldn't fly the damn planes.
Re: Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:2, Informative)
The pilot that was pulling back on the side stick all the way to the ground was a European. The Asian was trying to pitch down and recover but the opposing inputs from the pilots were averaged out by the flight computer.
Re:Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:5, Informative)
OK I have a few issues with your post:
a) you're being extremely racist
b) the copilot was actually French, and not Asian.
c) it was the copilot that pulled back on the stick, while the stall warnings were on
d) they were both pretty experienced- thousands of hours flying
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Sadly, there are a million things that can go wrong on any/every flight and it's impossible to train for all of them. Sooner or later a combination of events will occur that will be outside the envelope of the crew's training or their ability to respond effectively.
And, of course, sometimes it's just simple stupidity or poor training, or both.
I used to do a lot of flights to SE Asia, and if something happens way out over the water, you're just fucked, plain and simple.
I was always amazed at how reliable the
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> Sooner or later a combination of events will occur that will be outside the envelope of the crew's training or their ability to respond effectively.
Sure, but what kind of fucktard pulls back on the stick to a stall warning???
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Sadly, there are a million things that can go wrong on any/every flight and it's impossible to train for all of them.
Yep. See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
I don't think there was anything in the manual detailing how to deal with that particular series of events.
Sooner or later a combination of events will occur that will be outside the envelope of the crew's training or their ability to respond effectively.
The aircraft was landed safely, and not a single life was lost. If you're prepared to risk your l
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Re:Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:5, Interesting)
Air France certainly does train for it now. They didn't use to (and neither did other Airbus operators) because Airbus did not include it in the curriculum. They said their airplanes couldn't stall so it was pointless to train for it. The most we did was an "approach to stall" and recovery without actually stalling.
I'm sure Air Asia must have trained for it as well since Airbus has updated the curriculum after AF 447 and included stall recovery as a mandatory exercise, sending lots of communications about it to Airbus operators and requiring those exercises to be performed asap during recurrent training or even in separate, dedicated extra sessions.
But there's something weird going on here. The first officer apparently pulled his stick all the way back and made the plane climb at a rate of more than 10,000 ft/min before it stalled. That's a pretty insane maneuver and I can't find a rational explanation for it no matter what his training was. It's not an "inappropriate response" but rather a completely unprovoked action for no good reason whatsoever.
It might have been a technical malfunction in the flight control computers. There have been a few cases where Airbus pilots were accused of incorrect inputs in certain incidents where they luckily did live to tell, and where the pilots involved were adamant they did not give those inputs. Maybe there's a bug when the FAC circuit breakers are pulled. I remember one procedure that's sometimes performed on the ground, where such a reset also resets the stabilizer trim so it's vitally important to set the correct trim again. Maybe something like that goes on in the flight control computers during flight as well. Maybe the flight recorder confuses a flight control input with a trim input resulting from a FAC reset? Or maybe some integer overflowed?
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I am not a licensed pilot but I've flown a plane on numerous occasions, nothing big like this. Isn't up the exact opposite of the direction you want to go if the plane reaches stall speed? I'm not positive, specifically with jets and their intake, but it seems to me that up would be the wrong direction pretty much always. Pointing the nose down to take advantage of the speed and get the lift needed to recover seems to be a more likely solution but, again, I'm not a pilot even though I know a few and have ha
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Have they tightened things further, or do you suspect that somebody in the supply chain got tired of stocking ROHS and non-ROHS versions and Airbus, or the Air Asia maintenance people, didn't browbeat their supplies hard enough to get what they wanted?
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b) the copilot was actually French, and not Asian.
c) it was the copilot that pulled back on the stick, while the stall warnings were on
So it was AF447 again. Someone should teach the French pilots what to do in a stall.
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Re:Typical of those poorly trained... (Score:5, Informative)
During the interview with the Indonesia AirAsia management, one of the discussion topics was related to upset recovery training. The approved Operation Training Manual covers the upset recovery training in Chapter 8. The module consisted of ground and simulator training. The ground training provides the flight crew with the background, definition, cause of aircraft upset, aerodynamic and aircraft systems in relation with aircraft upset. Recovery methods consider various aircraft attitude and speed including post upset conditions.
The upset recovery training had not been implemented on Airbus A320 training, since it is not required according to the Flight Crew Training Manual and has not been mandated by the DGCA.
worse.......
The Airbus A320 QRH chapter Computer Reset stated that: In flight, as a general rule, the crew must restrict computer resets to those listed in the table, or to those in applicable TDUs or OEBs. Before taking any action on other computers, the flight crew must consider and fully understand the consequences. The consequences of resetting FAC CBs in flight are not described in Airbus documents. It requires good understanding of the aircraft system to be aware of the consequences.
So we have a case of...
1. Alarm keeps going off
2. Reboot computer, hoping it will shutoff pesky alarm, but instead we don't understand consequences and knock out autopilot.
3. Without autopilot plane rolls and stalls, both human pilots do opposite things and make condition uncoverable.
Training issue....
Planes break, computers fail, and humans spill coffee. Pilots need the training to respond with automaticity when bad things happen We see this time and time again.
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Aviation (and industrial, and marine) accidents are pretty much always an "accident chain" - and if any link in the chain is broken, the accident is prevented. This is why accident investigations don't just end at "Oh it was a cracked solder joint case closed", or "Oh the pilot stalled it what a dumbass case closed". This accident is no different - there will be a long chain of events, any one of them being stopped would break the accident chain and result in the aircraft reaching an airfield and being grou
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Not in China, but I can't speak for the rest of Asia. In China, drivers regularly back up to run over their crash victims again, to kill them and save money on victim compensation. Though I haven't seen any other examples that indicate life isn't valued. Rather, the other stories I've heard are all isolated incidents.
Re:always scapegoat the pilot (Score:5, Insightful)
as more and more planes fall out of the sky
Wrong [planecrashinfo.com].
they will continue to always scapegoat the pilot / train operator / whatever
Who is "they"? Anyway the investigation that took a year was performed by rather independent parties. Plus, Airbus interest is to put the blame on the airline / pilots (Air Asia), Air Asia interest is to blame the aircraft (Airbus)... So after a year when all of those people having conflicting interests come up with an agreed outcome, it's likely to be not far from the truth.
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If It Ain't Boeing I'm Not Going
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Why didn't they, after rebooting, re-engage the auto pilot?
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The pilots tried to reboot the computer system to clear the error. This caused the autopilot to turn off. They then didn't do anything, thinking the autopilot was flying. Only when the plane was going out of control did they start trying to fly it themselves.
You've never flown a plane, have you.
The Autopilot is fluff, like cruise control on a car. Turn it off and you just need to do more work, that's all. If a cruise control was wildly changing your speed you would just turn it off, wouldn't you. But not being able to recover from a stall for a pilot is like a driver who does not know how to brake strongly when required. Basic, 101 stuff.
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No, I have not flown a heavy. Have You? Or do you know something specific about what magic functions the "Autopilot" does?
There is the basic fly-by-wire system that controls the primary surfaces, and has some smarts e.g. about pulling too much G. Hopefully that is very hard to turn off otherwise very bad things will happen.
But on the old heavies autopilots had extra functions like managing a smooth descent, but nothing too special. I would think that landing without one would be very common simulator pr
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You should probably read up about just what the Airbus autopilots do. They're pretty damned advanced.
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Hmm... I think the A320 is a bit more advanced than that and Google indicates it is. It can do stuff like autoland and the likes. It's not just the basic autopilot of yore? You can find the training manual via Google. The search result was the first one on my quick search.
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The issue isn't that they couldn't fly without the autopilot, it's that they didn't realise they needed to because they thought it was on.
Well they realised, but too late.
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